Shocking rats intergenerational trauma
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We all wondered … would past events we had not even experienced (and, at times, had not even fully heard or known of) have the power to seep into our bones, our veins, and our collective unconscious or subconscious like some sort of “blood memory”? Would our children and grandchildren continue to feel the reverberations of a war two and three or more times removed from them? What about the younger generations of other families who have experienced war and/or mass trauma? Apparently this concern and phenomenon has a name: It is known as intergenerational or transgenerational trauma. Unknowingly, she would pass much of this heightened caution and fear onto us – her children - and we, in turn, would wonder if we would continue to inadvertently pass it on to our own broods. She remembers being perpetually unsafe, and then just numb, even as a young girl. Apparently my mother inherited more than just grandmother’s feistiness and figure it was almost as if she absorbed all of her own mother’s fears about a far too dangerous world. Significantly, much of this trauma seemed exponential on my mother’s side, given the disappearance of my grandfather, a Vietnamese soldier, and my maternal grandmother’s brushes with civil unrest and hostile occupation even before my mother was born. While mother, father and sister had all directly experienced war-related traumas, the rest of the family had not and yet, we did not remain unaffected by the war. My older sister, in the frantic, disorganized course of events that often accompanies war, was left behind and later reunited with our family stateside. To help one put this memory into context, let me explain that my father was a Vietnam Vet my mother was his war bride who fled with her family from rural Vietnam to the city to escape the ravages of war her village was attacked during the Tet Offensive. We were alone in our struggle to figure out what was going on, as these episodes only served to exasperate our parents, who either did not understand them or viewed them as the overdramatized reminder of events that they would have rather forgotten. Hold her hand, get the dog, tell her everything was going to be alright and wait for the spell to pass. At the time, I could only do what my 5-year old self thought was best. Following another humid South Carolina rain, I sat beside my 6-year old sister, Trinh, who was having a “spell” – what we now know was some type of re-experiencing or panic attack - likely related to her boat escape from Vietnam just 10 days following the fall of Saigon.