A Note About Historical Trauma

This term, historical trauma, has very deep meaning for me; it has come up a lot for me recently so I feel the need to share the definition.

An elder once told me I had this (in that oblique sort of way Indian elders usually have), and was very patient with my rantings and ravings because of it.  He didn’t explain what it was, but let the others know (whom I had just blasted in a reactionary e-mail).  I settled down, apologized for being a twit, and tried to figure out what the hell he meant.

Months later, a different elder explained it to me.  She is a nurse-PhD and that day she talked a little bit about her dissertation.  She explained about a Hmong family she was trying to help in order to get them access to medical care.  Part of the issue with getting them the help they needed for a rare, genetic disorder was getting them to trust the help from the “outside.”  This lack of trust stemmed from their treatment by others (outside their cultural identity), but the scars from that bloody, past treatment carried forward into the present.  The abuse of old transferred from generation to generation.  It wasn’t present today (not as directly, not as strongly--the world had grown a little in that time), but the ghost of it haunted and jeered at them and defined their entire experience.

Here is the shocking part.  What she learned in this process, was that it takes 5 generations for these old historical wounds to have any chance of healing.  No matter how carefully this elder and her colleagues treated the situation, no matter how they demonstrated trustworthiness and sympathy, only into the 5^th generation did their efforts make any headway—and only after active attempts and strides toward that healing.  She has seen the pattern repeated in others that she has helped.

Wounds like this are passed from generation to generation, cut deeply and are often not acknowledged for what they are.  As a result, individuals often do more harm than good toward the wounded person’s healing process by belittling them, shrugging off their expression of old wounds as silliness, craziness or irate rants.
 

Naming the "thing" that makes me SO angry (blind rage is actually a better term) has done a lot toward my own healing process.  I am still angry, and I still actively seek justice for all.  The difference is that now I understand that some of that anger isn't mine.  It is my grandmother's and great-grandmother's and my aunt's.  I realize now that I don't have to scream at the top of my lungs to be heard, but that I should give my ancestors the coherent voice they have always deserve to heal their lingering pain.  I will not help them or myself by hurling insults into the darkness--as much as they might be deserved, or feel deserved.  I just end up feeling more broken from my anger.  Hope that helps some find their own path to healing--or helps others to understand the ghosts that still haunt those of us in pain.  Suffering of this kind is a hell I do not wish on anyone, and hope that we all may be free of it one day.