Category: Multicultural/Diversity

A Path Towards Healing Generational Trauma

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

Jaza is a client who suffers from generational trauma rooted in the genocide of Native American people, ancestral trauma from theft of their land and livelihood, and the ongoing cumulative impacts of Indian Residential schooling. Colonization, the active process of settling and taking control over the indigenous people, reverberates as ancestral trauma in Jaza’s day-to-day life. She has used her therapy time with me to examine messages passed down to her from family about the way she should live and breathe as a descendant and recipient of these experiences. She asked an important question when we were talking about ancestral resilience and wisdom as an antidote to ancestral trauma: “Is it really ‘resilience’ if so many of my people are still suffering?”

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Historical trauma is a cumulative experience. It doesn’t simply disappear because the event or events have passed. I have seen the impact of slavery on Black clients, the residual, multigenerational effects on Asian clients of the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment camps, and the destructive legacy of Holocaust concentration camps on Jews, the Roma, and those with disabilities. In therapy sessions with Jaza, we acknowledge the trauma, hurt, pain, and suffering her family has experienced and work to heal her wounds from the genocide of Indigenous people.

We reframe the harmful messages that have been passed down to her which include:
“You look like your great-grandmother with your hair styled that way. Don’t wear it like that to work. It’s unprofessional!”
“We don’t speak our native languages anymore. We should write in proper English and not reveal our roots.”
“You look too Indian in that—you are more likely to get in trouble with the law.”

For ancestral, cumulative, and generational trauma with Jaza and clients with similar legacies, I have used narrative building to reframe harmful histories and messages passed on through lineage and reorganize them within the client’s mental schema as survival techniques from living in oppression. Why did your grandmother pass on that message to you? What was she trying to protect you from? How does it hurt you today? Can we acknowledge her attempts at survival in colonization, and can we release them? These messages are meant to help but have caused pain and confusion for Jaza.

We spend time processing and then releasing the messages. We don’t talk about it as redemptive resilience, but more like expired wisdom. Wisdom that is necessary for her to have in her mind, but then packed up and stored away only to be revisited when she wants to reconnect to her ancestry. It does not apply to her current time period and life experience. There are occasions in which we celebrate the passed-down wisdoms and look for ways to incorporate them into present day life. There are other moments in which we look to reduce the impact of the messages and the memories associated with them.

As a clinician, it is important for me to remember that this type of resilience is not like that of a plant growing despite difficult weather conditions. Instead, it is akin to a plant’s maintaining and struggling to survive despite pesticides and unnecessary attempts to kill it while nearby plants perish. This is resilience in spite of the historical trauma. It is watching family members and friends succumb to colonization. It is a reaction to forced assimilation, assimilation for survival, and assimilation for respectability. This is about the need to have assimilated to a colonizer’s dominant culture and about keeping wisdom in a box, being grateful for a little more freedom than her ancestors had, and reconnecting to her roots with intentionality. This reconnection can be healing.

As Jaza puts some of those messages in storage, she learns more about how this historical trauma impacts her day to day. She learns about rituals her family developed over time and incorporates them into her life. Jaza learns about the foods her family ate, the scents they valued, the seeds they planted, all in an attempt to reduce the colonization she experiences to this day, and in so doing, feel more connected to her ancestors.

***

Jaza has taught me that a redemptive story can be a strategy a descendant holds onto as they begin to heal the painful and enduring wounds of ancestral trauma. The question of resilience in and its relationship to oppression is an examination I have to do continuously for my own ancestral history. My birth country of Haiti is often deemed a resilient nation after incessant political disasters and catastrophic climate impacts. I look at the historical facts, the systems of oppression, the harmful messages my lineage shared with me, and treasure the wisdom and resilience I can bring into my life with intention. 

Chocolate, Jalape

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

On those two nights after leaving school following back-to-back, eye-opening and unsettling experiences in my graduate counseling classes, I had a strange feeling that I had arrived at the intersection of possible culture blindness, social discomfort and the questioning of my own clinical supervisory competence.

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I reflected back on two absolutely unrelated but clearly convergent events in two separate graduate counseling classes on back-to-back nights—ethics and psychopathology. As it was to turn out, challenging, unanticipated and enriching lessons in diversity were in the making.

Scenario one: My back was to the class as I was about to write down their responses to a question I had posed. One of my students, located in the far back right corner of the classroom had offered a verbal response, and as I turned to make eye contact I wasn’t quite sure where the voice had originated. My eyes landed on one particular African-American woman who I thought had made the comment, but quickly the student sitting next to her, also African-American, quipped “it was me, but there is a lot of chocolate in the room.”

Instantly embarrassed, I did my best to conceal the painful feeling of embarrassment and the deeper thought that, in that moment of failed echo-location, I had conveyed the message that the voices of all black people sound alike. Or, had I?

Scenario two: Occasionally, I joke with students about the snacks they bring to class. A Latina student in the back of the room offered up a bag of potato chips, across the front of which was a green elliptical design that on quick glance I thought was meant to be a jalapeño. I thanked her and said, “I don’t eat jalapeños.” Just as quickly as in the first scenario, this student shot back, partly in humor but also likely in defense, “did you assume these are jalapeño-flavored chips because you know I’m Mexican?”

Still reeling from the chocolate event of the previous night, I was once again embarrassed, thinking that I had somehow awkwardly fumbled insensitively across a cultural divide, falling flat on my face in the process.

I knew that these were learning opportunities in the making, both for myself and my counseling students, who had each taken our program’s multicultural course with Judi Bachay, an international scholar and diversity expert here at St. Thomas. But, there is nothing quite like a live-action, and as Irvin Yalom puts it¹, “here-and-now experience,” for conveying an important concept. And while I made a nominal attempt to address my concerns in class each time, I could tell that the two students were equally uncomfortable.
Was it my cultural insensitivity that provoked their humor-cloaked defensive comments, or over-sensitivity to their own racial/cultural positioning in my class…in society? In either event, I believed that as their (white) teacher, I needed to do my best to find out, for them, for myself and for the class.

I was indeed able to speak in private with each of these two students on separate occasions and discovered the following. The formative educational years of the student in the first scenario was spent alongside white peers, where a sense of racial discomfort led to concern that she would be judged primarily by her skin color, rather than the qualities of her character. Racial invisibility as Darrick Tovar-Murray suggests², was in a sense, a psychological survival strategy. During her transition to college, the student in the second scenario attended classes in a less-Latinx environment compared to earlier years. She became less comfortable with her Mexican roots, often trying to conceal her accent—a different, but no less poignant form of invisibility. She lived with the fear of being called a chola.

I felt sadness for each of these students who grew up believing they had to trade elements of their racial and cultural origin for the security, or perhaps false security, that invisibility falsely promises. I have never felt that pressure—part of my privilege, I guess. I shared with each of them the guilt I felt, perhaps white guilt, and my concern that I had contributed unknowingly to their experience of invisibility. But in retrospect, perhaps their respective protestations were statements of visibility, and refusals to remain hidden. Lessons were learned on both sides of the divide those nights.

References

(1) Yalom, I. (2017). The gift of therapy: An open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients. New York: Harper Perennial.

(2) Tovar-Murray, D., & Tovar-Murray, M. (2012). A phenomenological analysis of the invisibility syndrome. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 40(1), 24-36.