6. Immigration as Trauma
The Importance of a Transgenerational
Perspective in American Psychotherapy
The Transgenerational
Transmission of Trauma
The Unthought Known
The Goals of Transgenerational Treatment
7. Identify traumatic events in a
patient’s family history
Understand the impact of these
events on family relationships
Transform persistent traumatic
patterns that shape current
relationships
8.
9. 1 minute
o Do you conduct individual, group or couples
psychotherapy?
o
o Are you an immigrant? If not, are you first,
second or third generation in this country?
o Do you know your family’s immigration story?
o Are you aware of any traumatic events besides
immigration that occurred in the lives of your
parents or grandparents?
17. European life was dominated by
religiously and politically inspired
violence
The Voyage, aboard crowded and
primitive vessels, took many weeks
The New World was a “hideous and
desolate wilderness…full of wild beasts
and wild men.”
Only about one in seven survived.
18.
19. oA million, dead in Ireland from
famine or disease
o Tens of thousands more died on
―coffin ships‖ on the way to the
U.S.
o Poverty, ethnic and religious
discrimination and violence in
the U.S
20. o 17 million, mostly teenagers,
kidnapped
o7 million died en route or in
―seasoning camps‖
o Stripped of culture and language
o Tortured, raped, enslaved
21. o 20 – 30 million massacred during
the Tai-Ping Rebellion
o Legislation and taxation in U.S.
aimed at excluding them from the
mines
o Ultimately, an ethnic cleansing
22. Thousands killed in the Mexican-American
War
Size of Mexico reduced by half
Economic discrimination and racial prejudice
confined the Mexicans to barrios
Mob violence and lynching
23. o Persecuted in Russia from ancient times
o Massacred
o Sold into captivity
o Confined to the Pale of Settlement where most
lived in poverty
o Pogroms (1881-1921)
o Anti-Semitism in the U.S.
o Privation and exclusion
o U.S. turned away thousands of Jews fleeing the
Holocaust
27. o Depression
o Anxiety
o Low Self-Esteem
o Hypervigilance
o Suicidal ideation
o Dissociation
And…..
28.
29. o Behavioral repetitions
o Traumatic perspectives
o Traumatic affects
30.
31. Believes the evidence for
TTT is so strong that there
should be a new DSM
category that designates it
as a mental disorder.
32.
33.
34. o Immigrants are preoccupied with survival
o They are disinclined to examine or disclose
their trauma stories
o Those around them resist “knowing” the
stories as well
35. A “conspiracy of silence”
develops around most experiences
of collective disaster
36.
37. o Social Modeling
o Insecure, disorganized patterns of
attachment
o Projective Identification
o Depositing persecutory or victimized
contents into children
o Creating a persecutory-victim dynamic
with them
38.
39. The Shadow of
the Object:
Psychoanalysis
of the
Unthought
Known
40. That body of "knowledge" that is
incapable of conscious recapitulation
yet which forms the ground of our
every action (Wolfreys)
41. All the thoughts you
never see
From their song: The Unthought
Known
54. Begin with your family of origin
and move up.
You are the IP—index person, not
identified patient!
If you are a man, draw a square. If
you are a woman, draw a circle.
indicated by a circle
55.
56. Draw an ―X‖ through a figure to indicate
that the person is no longer living. (See
Figure 1)
Maritalseparation is indicated by a single
slash along the connecting line. A divorce
is indicated by two slashes.
57. For our purposes, choose only your mother or
father’s side of the family to diagram.
Grandparents are connected and diagrammed
above the parents (vertically ). Connecting lines
extend from the grandparent’s line to the parent.
(See Sample Traumagram in Figure 5.)
63. Exposureto war or other forms of
violence
Psychiatricdisorders
Extreme poverty
Immigration
Emotional abuse
Premature deaths
Other massive losses
The Shadow of our Immigrant Ancestors: The Importance of a transgenerational perspective in American Psychotherapy. I have been accused by a close colleague, Lorraine Wodiska, of having the longest, most complex titles in the history of the world, so I come today, prepared to express my ideas more simply and directly than usual. So here is my alternate title for today's workshop!
And, though I have quite a bit to say today, I'm going to put my summary statement right up front!And, though I have quite a bit to say today, I'm going to put my summary statement right up front!And, though I have quite a bit to say today, I'm going to put my summary statement right up front!And, though I have quite a bit to say today, I'm going to put my summary statement right up front!2
Indeed, Lily’s observation is my ultimate rationale for the importance of a transgenerational perspective in psychotherapy.As she reminds us, the unremembered, unprocessed and ungrievedpast is always coming forward; Always. It is recapitulated, somehow, not only in psychotherapy, but in all of our important relationships. And if we can understand more clearly what occurred in the past, that is now being re-enacted, we are in a far better position to intervene and help clients transform the traumatic patterns that repeat endlessly across generations. I’m so reticent to say this…but I believe that if we don’t understand the past, ultimately we are ineffectual. And, I'll let William Faulkner say it one more time, in yet another way, because I’m always trying to make this point about memory more…
William Faulkner, who said it a bit differently.
Today, I’d like to present some conceptual material, and then give you the opportunity to “remember” a bit of your own family history.
Here are the important concepts I hope to cover today.
And then we’ll go on to learn about and begin to construct our personal traumagrams. The traumagram is a tool I’ve developed and used to identify traumatic events in a clients’ family history and to understand the impact of these events on family relationships across generations. Again, I believe that if we can understand the nature of these patterns, we’re in a much better position to transform persistent traumatic that have distorted family relationships across multiple generations
. I developed an interest in genealogy after finding this photograph in a box of unopened documents that my husband had received from his mother’s estate. The name on the back of the photo was John Thompson Ray. I googled John, and only meant to spend a minute or two on Ancestry.Com, once I saw that there was information about him (For FREE) on the Ancestry website. In fact I actually spent the several years researching the Rays and the Bonds, and, and then my own far more disturbing family story on all of the not-so-free databases at Ancestry. But I think I began to make connections between my hobby and my work, right here, at the Counseling Center in a case conference meeting. I began to speculate, aloud, about the impact of the immigration experience on the client we were discussing—how it might have affected her parents, who came to America after an experience of collective disaster in China; and how their unprocessed trauma may have impacted their parenting. Someone in that meeting was really interested in this idea, and REALLY interested in going to APA that year, as it was being held in Hawaii. One or the other of us concocted a scheme to develop a presentation about the long-lasting effects of unprocessed immigration trauma. And we did, and it was accepted.
Beyond that…I am a psychologist in private practice in Bethesda. I do individual psychotherapy, some couples work, and I conduct a group with my close colleague, Dr. Lorraine Wodiska. I am a 3rd generation American on my mother’s side. And I know that her grandfather came from…
I do know my immigration story. It begins in Kovno, Lithuania.
We are accustomed to thinking of the United States as a nation of immigrants. When we say this though, we are obscuring some crucial and disturbing facts. It is far closer to the truth to say that we are a nation of refugees.
In the New World, the colonists faced diseases, privation and conflict with the indigenous peoples
1/27/2011Economically and racially motivated Anti Chinese legislation taxation and legislation aimed at excluding them from the minesActs of discrimination, intimidation, deportation and murder so widespread that the acquired the dimensions and quality of an ethnic cleansing
Land was confiscated. Promised rights were revoked. In the barrios, there was poverty, disease and a high rate of crime. Danger as great as for Blacks in the American SouthTexas Rangers colluded with the mob violence (state-sanctioned terrorism
This is my mother’s extended family. Her dad is notably absent from the picture…He and his father were at such odds that he was intermittently estranged from the family.
Unfinished psychological tasks
Research indicates descendants of those who survive collective disasters experience many post-traumatic effects themselves.
Behavioral repetitions including the establishment of persecutory relationships with people and entitiesTraumatic perspectives (suspiciousness, anticipation of catastrophe)Traumatic affects such as rage, hopelessness and fear
Collectively, I think of this cluster of behavioral, affective and cognitive impacts of trauma as Traumatic Energy. It’s useful to think of survivors of primary, secondary and tertiary trauma as carrying this energy with them wherever they go and being affected by it, at some level, in all of their daily business. Certain important triggers may lead to an explosion of this energy.
Holocaust scholar and Editor of the International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma……
I’d like us all to think for a moment about this observation by Danieli. I think it helps us to grasp the inevitability of the transgenerational transmission of trauma.
But how does trauma get transmitted from one generation to another?
First of all those who are directly affected by the collective disasters that precipitate most immigration never get a chance to process trauma or grieve losses.
For these reasons (and others)….(This is Danieli’s term, by the way)
So again…
Of course, they are different parents than they would have been if they had not been persecuted, terrified, starved, or brutalized.
Here’s a concept that may capture it all
Bollas suggested that we all learn important lessons about being and relating during our early exposure to the holding environment. For example, we are probably all familiar with patients who had profoundly depressed caregivers. As a result they remain emotionally isolated, unable to ask for love or assistance from others. They are so isolated and alone because they KNOW, with every fiber of their being that love and care are not there for them. This kind of unthought information is very powerful and typically destructive. Remember that patient with the depressed parents? That’s the person that so often withdraws from social interaction, goes unnoticed by others, feels rejected by them and affirmed in their belief that the world is an unloving place. They withdraw further. Unfortunately, unconscious knowing represents the most typical position for many of us.
Auerhan and Laub explained that there are at least ten "forms" of “knowing” about trauma—each representing a “consciously deeper and more integrated level of knowing…” about catastrophic events”
The most primitive forms of “knowing” are "not knowing" and "screen memories" while the most advanced and integrative forms are "witnessed narratives", "trauma as metaphor" and “action knowledge”. As traumatic experiences become more integrated, affected individuals remember, but distance and prospective are "retained by an observing ego”The memory is very vivid but not immediate"
At best people with a traumatic history have action knowledge know the facts surrounding their trauma, how it impacts them, what their traumatic triggers are and how to manage themselves when they are triggered. Having action knowledge is a position in which you have fully integrated knowledge of yourself –knowledge that is accessible when you are under stress. You can feel AND think your way through to a constructive response most of the time, in relatively short order, even when you have powerful feelings.
How do we get from a position of “Not Knowing” to “Action Knowledge”?
As a patient of mine put it so beautifully in a poem she wrote about her efforts to understand the impact of long-past familial trauma on her own life….
This might seem obvious, but, since we all have some hard-wired resistance to “knowing”, in a deep way, it’s easy to skip this part. B&B story. So…your patients are probably not going to volunteer remote history. So you’ll have to resolve not to be a part of the conspiracy of silence around collective disaster. To help them remember what they do not know, you’ll have to ask a few questions.
And that’s where the traumagram comes in.
Okay, so it’s a younger me.
It can sometimes be more helpful to work on the traumagram a little bit at a time. Let’s choose one parent and one set of grandparents to begin with.
You don’t need to put in the ages. But the dad goes on the left and the mom on the right and the oldest child is farthest left.
Ask yourself about the nature of the relationships between people on your genogram
One of my favorite combinations
It might feel like a lot’s going on.
Traumatic relational patterns include those that are characterized by violence or extreme experiences of fusion or disconnectedness. You can indicate a traumatic relational pattern by adding color to the process symbol. ; Orange indicates emotional abuse. red indicates physical violence
Once you’ve come this far you can further specify the nature of traumatic events by making a few notes on your Traumagram. For example, you might make a note of a suicide, or a specific psychiatric disorder or type of substance abuse problem. Once you’ve come this far you can further specify the nature of traumatic events by making a few notes on your Traumagram. For example, you might make a note of a suicide, or a specific psychiatric disorder or type of substance abuse problem. Once you’ve come this far you can further specify the nature of traumatic events by making a few notes on your Traumagram. For example, you might make a note of a suicide, or a specific psychiatric disorder or type of substance abuse problem. Once you’ve come this far you can further specify the nature of traumatic events by making a few notes on your Traumagram. For example, you might make a note of a suicide, or a specific psychiatric disorder or type of substance abuse problem.
This might seem obvious, but, since we all have some hard-wired resistance to “knowing”, in a deep way, it’s easy to skip this part. B&B story. So…your patients are probably not going to volunteer remote history. So you’ll have to resolve not to be a part of the conspiracy of silence around collective disaster. To help them remember what they do not know, you’ll have to ask a few questions.
