Often, culture is a source of both pride and pain. In the case of Constance and Renee, effective treatment should be informed by their cultural ideals and customs. With the Seed Tree Diagram as a guide, therapists can use the following four strategies to help heal the pain caused by intergenerational trauma. When implemented, the Seed Tree Diagram orchestrates a roadmap for therapists and families to track the patterns rooted in intergenerational trauma, including unmet primal needs. Therapists trained by The Family Trauma Institute often use the Seed Tree Diagram, an FST | Family Systems Trauma technique, to uncover the seeds of parental and family trauma. Treating Intergenerational Family Traumaįamily therapists who work with children experiencing the impact of intergenerational trauma often find client success when using a family systems approach to treating trauma that is designed to assess, intervene, and resolve patterns that perpetuate trauma. Recalling the impact of Constance’s childhood, her daughter, Renee Schimmel, explains that Constance was sad when she was away from her home but was also miserable at home.Ī 2005 study found that many Alaskan Natives suffered from an identity crisis and struggled when they had children of their own because they lacked connection to their elders and to their native cultural customs. This assault on a sense of self-created a generation of traumatized children that did not understand their identity or their place in the world.Ĭonstance Oozebaseuk, a Native Alaskan, was one of the children who involuntarily left her native village to attend a boarding over a thousand miles away from her community. Through consistent and pervasive messages, students learned that their culture was “wrong,” including their foods, their clothes, and their languages. Īs recent as the 1960s, young Native Alaskan children were sent hundreds of miles from their families and communities. Designed to assimilate Native Americans and remove all of the “Indian” out of the person, young Native Alaskan children were taken from their villages and sent to boarding schools. Much like the families who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Native American and Alaskan Native populations show the suffering of systemic cultural attacks.ĭuring the 1870’s, the United States government installed mandatory boarding school programs that took young Native Americans away from their families, tribes, and traditions. These symptoms reveal that the trauma experiences of parents and grandparents have far-reaching and long-lasting effects on those who did not experience the original trauma firsthand. Several studies show that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors suffer anxiety, generalized fear, behavioral problems, and depression. Left unhealed, the wounds of traumatic events cause pain and produce ongoing, devastating generational family marks. Cultural attacks like the Holocaust or even 9-11.This legacy of pain, coined Intergenerational trauma (IGT) after World War II, results from a family member’s personal trauma, such as: Pain, while often ignored or even denied, can be passed down from generation to generation. But often joy is only part of the family story. When we think of creating family legacies and preserving family traditions, we focus on positive connections and joyous occasions.
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