069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma
22nd July 2018 • Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive • Jen Lumanlan
00:00:00
00:57:16
Shownotes
Ever get red-hot angry at your child for no reason, or out of proportion to the incident that provoked it? Have you wondered why this happens?
The way we were parented has a profound impact on us – it’s pretty easy to ‘fall into’ parenting the way you were parented yourself unless you specifically examine your relationship with your parent(s) and how it impacts the way you parent your own child. This can be great if you have a positive relationship with your parents, but for those of us with less-than-amazing relationships with our parents, trauma can impact more of our parenting that we might like.
Join me for a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Babcock-Fenerci from Stonehill College in Massachusetts, who researches the cognitive and interpersonal consequences of child maltreatment, with the goal of understanding factors that can increase risk for or protect against the transmission of abuse and neglect from parents to their children.
Even if you were not abused or neglected as a child, you may find that aspects of the way you were parented have left you with unresolved trauma that you could pass on to your child if it remains unaddressed. Dr. Fenerci helps us to examine some of the ways we can recognize the impact of this trauma on ourselves, and reduce the possibility that we will transmit it to our child.
Babcock, R.L., & DePrince, A.P. (2013). Factors contributing to ongoing intimate partner abuse: Childhood betrayal trauma and dependence on one’s perpetrator. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28(7), 1385-1402.
Berthelot, N., Ensink, K., Bernazzani, O., Normandin, L., Fonagy, P., & Luyten, P. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of attachment in abused and neglected mothers: The role of trauma-specific reflective functioning. Infant Mental Health Journal 36(2), 200-212.
Cross, D., Vance, L.A., Kim, Y.J., Ruchard, A.L., Fox, N., Jovanovic, T., & Bradley, B. (2017). Trauma exposure, PTSD, and parenting in a community sample of low-income, predominantly African American mothers and children. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Psychological Trauma 10(3), 327-335.
Dias, B.G., & Ressler, K.J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience 17, 89-96.
Fenerci, R.L.B., & DePrince, A.P. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma: Maternal trauma-related cognitions and toddler symptoms. Child Maltreatment 23(2), 126-136.
Fenerci, R.L.B., & DePrince, A.P. (2017). Shame and alienation related to child maltreatment: Links to symptoms across generations. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1037/tra0000332
Fenerci, R.L.B. & DePrince, A.P. (2016). Intergenerational transmission of trauma-related distress: Maternal betrayal trauma, parenting attitudes, and behaviors. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 25(4), 382-399.
Kellerman, N.P.F. (2013). Epigentic transmission of Holocaust trauma: Can nightmares be inherited? Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50(1), 33-39.
Nagata, D.K. (1998). Intergenerational effects of the Japanese American internment. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp.125-139). New York, NY: Plenum.
Oliver, J.E. (1993). Intergenerational transmission of child abuse: Rates, research, and clinical implications. American Journal of Psychiatry 150, 1315-1324.
Riva, M.A. (2017). Epigenetic signatures of early life adversities in animal models: A role for psychopathology vulnerability. European Psychiatry 415, S29.
Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N.P., Bierer, L.M., Bader, H.N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E.B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry 80, 372-380.
Taming Your Triggers
If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open for enrollment soon. We’ll help you to:- Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them
- Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs
- Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered
Babcock, R.L., & DePrince, A.P. (2013). Factors contributing to ongoing intimate partner abuse: Childhood betrayal trauma and dependence on one’s perpetrator. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 28(7), 1385-1402.
Berthelot, N., Ensink, K., Bernazzani, O., Normandin, L., Fonagy, P., & Luyten, P. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of attachment in abused and neglected mothers: The role of trauma-specific reflective functioning. Infant Mental Health Journal 36(2), 200-212.
Cross, D., Vance, L.A., Kim, Y.J., Ruchard, A.L., Fox, N., Jovanovic, T., & Bradley, B. (2017). Trauma exposure, PTSD, and parenting in a community sample of low-income, predominantly African American mothers and children. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Psychological Trauma 10(3), 327-335.
Dias, B.G., & Ressler, K.J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience 17, 89-96.
Fenerci, R.L.B., & DePrince, A.P. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma: Maternal trauma-related cognitions and toddler symptoms. Child Maltreatment 23(2), 126-136.
Fenerci, R.L.B., & DePrince, A.P. (2017). Shame and alienation related to child maltreatment: Links to symptoms across generations. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1037/tra0000332
Fenerci, R.L.B. & DePrince, A.P. (2016). Intergenerational transmission of trauma-related distress: Maternal betrayal trauma, parenting attitudes, and behaviors. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 25(4), 382-399.
Kellerman, N.P.F. (2013). Epigentic transmission of Holocaust trauma: Can nightmares be inherited? Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50(1), 33-39.
Nagata, D.K. (1998). Intergenerational effects of the Japanese American internment. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp.125-139). New York, NY: Plenum.
Oliver, J.E. (1993). Intergenerational transmission of child abuse: Rates, research, and clinical implications. American Journal of Psychiatry 150, 1315-1324.
Riva, M.A. (2017). Epigenetic signatures of early life adversities in animal models: A role for psychopathology vulnerability. European Psychiatry 415, S29.
Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N.P., Bierer, L.M., Bader, H.N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E.B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry 80, 372-380.
Read Full Transcript
Transcript Jen: [00:37] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Today we’re going to discuss a topic that I first learned about through a piece that I heard on NPR a few months ago, which is called Intergenerational Trauma. The piece described a Vietnamese woman whose parents had escaped Vietnam during the war. Her mother had had to leave one of her daughters behind and her father’s first wife and son died because their boat sank when they tried to follow him to the US. Her parents didn’t talk much about their experiences, but she remembers clearly how incredibly angry they were when she was young. She went onto say that she learned how to suppress her own anger and frustration so that she wouldn’t set her parents off, but then she now finds herself getting angry over very tiny things just like her parents did when she was young. I had never realized this intergenerational trauma was a ‘thing’ before hearing that piece and I immediately knew that I had to do an episode on it and here with us today to discuss her work on intergenerational trauma resulting from family-based trauma is Rebecca Babcock Fenerci of Stone Hill College in Massachusetts. Professor Fenerci is a licensed clinical psychologist who received her doctoral degree from the University of Denver. Her research focuses on the cognitive and interpersonal consequences of child maltreatment with a goal of understanding factors that can increase risk for or protect against the transmission of abuse and neglect from parents to their children. Specifically, she investigates how trauma related cognition’s, for example, post-trauma appraisals, traumatic memory and interpersonal schemers can affect parenting behavior and/or the parent child relationship amongst survivors of maltreatment. When I was preparing for this episode, I reached out to the listeners who are subscribed to this show on YourParentingMojo.com And who get my newsletter and if you want to get that newsletter, go ahead and subscribe at your parenting Mojo Dot com and I asked them to share their experiences of intergenerational trauma with me so I can ask Dr Fenerci questions that would really help you as much as possible. So we’re going to discuss some of those today as well. Welcome Dr. Fenerci and thanks for working through this with us. Dr. Fenerci: [02:34] Thank you so much for having me. Jen: [02:36] So I wonder if you could just briefly define intergenerational trauma forest please. What is it and how does it affect people? Dr. Fenerci: [02:43] Definitely. So when we think initially about intergenerational trauma, we may think about trauma essentially being perpetuated across generations. So our parents experienced some type of trauma, whether being in a victim of child maltreatment having been involved in a war or some other type of traumatic event, and therefore their child also experiences that same type of traumatic event. And that is what the research is referring to when we’re talking about intergenerational trauma. So often we think about the cycle of violence. So if a parent was abused themselves, they are neglected as a child, their child somehow experiences the same type of abuse or neglect that they experienced. However, intergenerational trauma…also the definition goes above and beyond the increased risk that children have. Parent trauma survivors have for being either maltreated or experiencing trauma themselves. It also talks about the increased risk these children have essentially having the consequences of that trauma such as posttraumatic stress disorder, other mood, behavioral problems, increased risk that these children may have to experience those type of experiences that may not be the trauma itself, but also the consequences of it. And so a few examples of this would be a child whose parent has survived, let’s say, physical abuse growing up. That child may be at risk when we consider this intergenerational trauma if that child also experienced physical abuse. However, if the child is also, was that an increased risk for a certain mood disorders or behavior problems or disrupted attachment, altered cortisol or hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access functioning, that’s our stress-response system. So we see these different types of alterations and transmitted across generations in various different forms. Jen: [04:41] Okay. So it seems to me as though there are two different ways that this trauma can occur in the first place is either trauma that occurs within the family and trauma that occurs outside of the family because of something that somebody else is doing to inflict trauma on a person. And I don’t want to minimize the second one because I actually think it’s so important that we’re going to do another episode on that, but today we’re going to concentrate more on the kind of trauma that originates in families today. So that’s your expertise, right? Dr. Fenerci: [05:10] Yes. That is very much my expertise and that sounds great. Jen: [05:13] Okay, super. So having said that, now my next question talks about the Holocaust. So because that’s where a lot of this research originated is from Holocaust survivors. And so as I was reading through some of these meta-analyses of the literature on intergenerational trauma resulting from the Holocaust and also from children whose fathers were soldiers in the Vietnam War, I was so surprised that the impact even on the immediate survivors was really uneven and in a way the impact on the children was even more uneven. So some survivors are absolutely massively impacted and find it very difficult to function in their daily lives and others seem to come out with barely a scratch, and the same goes for their children. And when I think about the Holocaust, I think about a whole generation of people who have had similar experiences and have had maybe similar impacts on them. But it seems like that’s not the case. Why do you think that is? Dr. Fenerci: [06:09] So as humans we are very diverse in our experiences and also our reactions to our environment. So if we look at the development of psychopathology, let’s say risk for depression, so to speak, the model, the diathesis stress model talks about there being a combination of both genetic predisposition and also environmental stressors that can impact and potentially results in depression. And so if you’re thinking about the results of trauma and its consequences, whether it’s increased results in psychopathology or developments of mental illness or posttraumatic stress disorder or other negative consequences, it really depends a lot on certain risk factors that may run in a particular family, and this could be genetics, but there’s also what is called epigenetics, which means that our experience can actually change which genes are turned on or off. So it’s an ongoing interaction between genetics which may result in a certain predisposition or personality. Often siblings, even though they grew up in the same family and share half of their genes are very different and can have very different outcomes. I think we see that a lot… Jen: [07:28] So parents do for sure. Dr. Fenerci: [07:31] So it’s an interaction between these environmental factors, trauma being one of them, and genetic risk and also personality. Other life events or stressors that may have happened, let’s say before the Holocaust, all that kind of comes into play because humans are…we’re pretty complex creatures, right? So that’s kind of how I view that and I do think that the more chronic or severe the trauma such as the Holocaust, that’s an exceptionally severe, exceptionally chronic, the more likely it is that the trauma is going to have an impact on a large percent of the population that has endured that. So if like everybody has just a bad enough experience. It’s less likely that some people will come out completely untethered, if that makes sense. Jen: [08:18] Yeah. Okay. So then if it’s not correct to say that everyone who has gone through a traumatic event is going to come out of this with trauma, but it may be to more or less extent. And so I’m wondering what are some of the ways that people process that trauma? Dr. Fenerci: [08:33] So there’s a lot of variability in this quite a bit as well. And so in terms of how the brain processes trauma – trauma is processed differently in the brain than kind of regular memories for a few reasons. So first of all, it it our sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight response system is activated. Second of all, our endocrine system that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal or HPA access is activated; floods our body with cortisol and that’s actually adaptive in the moments to help us survive. So however, as a result, especially in the case of family and family trauma or abuse or maltreatment that happens in the family, this system may become over-activated at the time and what results is either can often be a kind of really intense, vivid memory or flashbulb memory. We’re looking at flashbacks, intrusive memories. A lot of the symptoms of PTSD you’ll see through that or what we can see is some forgetting of the trauma itself, whether it’s through, usually through the process of dissociation. Dr. Fenerci: [09:45] So because our limbic system is so activated because our body has trained us, fight, flight, or flee from the US to try to save us from this threat in our environment, our higher level cortex or our frontal lobe, which gives us our thinking and our meaning. Making an organization of our events in our life is shut down in the moment, which is a survival mechanism. However, because a lot of times trauma isn’t talked about, especially trauma in the family, what happens is the survivors never really able to process or make meaning of, or organize these events that could be disorganized or very vivid but distressing in one brain. Jen: [10:29] Yeah. That actually gets to a question the listener emailed over. And so I wonder if we can kind of jump ahead to that a little bit. And so we did an episode on family storytelling recently and we learned about how telling stories as a family can be a really cathartic activity and it also helps the family members bond with each other. But when I put out a call for questions on this, one of my listeners wrote in and I’ll call her Jane just to make the story easier to tell. And she said that her grandfather was very abusive to her grandmother and to their children to the point where he lined them all up at gunpoint and planned to shoot them all and then himself. But Jane’s mom came out of the bathroom right then and yelled for him to stop, and he just dropped the gun and the grandmother snuck all the children out of the house late that night with basically nothing other than the clothes they wore. Jen: [11:18] And the four older girls had a variety of addiction issues throughout their life. Although Jane’s mom has actually been happily married for 40 years and Jane said that none of them had ever had counseling, but every time they would get together as a family, they would rehash all of their memories of the abuse in absolutely excruciating detail. And she says that she grew up very fearful in an otherwise very loving home and just couldn’t really understand why. And so when I was thinking about that, I was...
Transcript Jen: [00:37] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Today we’re going to discuss a topic that I first learned about through a piece that I heard on NPR a few months ago, which is called Intergenerational Trauma. The piece described a Vietnamese woman whose parents had escaped Vietnam during the war. Her mother had had to leave one of her daughters behind and her father’s first wife and son died because their boat sank when they tried to follow him to the US. Her parents didn’t talk much about their experiences, but she remembers clearly how incredibly angry they were when she was young. She went onto say that she learned how to suppress her own anger and frustration so that she wouldn’t set her parents off, but then she now finds herself getting angry over very tiny things just like her parents did when she was young. I had never realized this intergenerational trauma was a ‘thing’ before hearing that piece and I immediately knew that I had to do an episode on it and here with us today to discuss her work on intergenerational trauma resulting from family-based trauma is Rebecca Babcock Fenerci of Stone Hill College in Massachusetts. Professor Fenerci is a licensed clinical psychologist who received her doctoral degree from the University of Denver. Her research focuses on the cognitive and interpersonal consequences of child maltreatment with a goal of understanding factors that can increase risk for or protect against the transmission of abuse and neglect from parents to their children. Specifically, she investigates how trauma related cognition’s, for example, post-trauma appraisals, traumatic memory and interpersonal schemers can affect parenting behavior and/or the parent child relationship amongst survivors of maltreatment. When I was preparing for this episode, I reached out to the listeners who are subscribed to this show on YourParentingMojo.com And who get my newsletter and if you want to get that newsletter, go ahead and subscribe at your parenting Mojo Dot com and I asked them to share their experiences of intergenerational trauma with me so I can ask Dr Fenerci questions that would really help you as much as possible. So we’re going to discuss some of those today as well. Welcome Dr. Fenerci and thanks for working through this with us. Dr. Fenerci: [02:34] Thank you so much for having me. Jen: [02:36] So I wonder if you could just briefly define intergenerational trauma forest please. What is it and how does it affect people? Dr. Fenerci: [02:43] Definitely. So when we think initially about intergenerational trauma, we may think about trauma essentially being perpetuated across generations. So our parents experienced some type of trauma, whether being in a victim of child maltreatment having been involved in a war or some other type of traumatic event, and therefore their child also experiences that same type of traumatic event. And that is what the research is referring to when we’re talking about intergenerational trauma. So often we think about the cycle of violence. So if a parent was abused themselves, they are neglected as a child, their child somehow experiences the same type of abuse or neglect that they experienced. However, intergenerational trauma…also the definition goes above and beyond the increased risk that children have. Parent trauma survivors have for being either maltreated or experiencing trauma themselves. It also talks about the increased risk these children have essentially having the consequences of that trauma such as posttraumatic stress disorder, other mood, behavioral problems, increased risk that these children may have to experience those type of experiences that may not be the trauma itself, but also the consequences of it. And so a few examples of this would be a child whose parent has survived, let’s say, physical abuse growing up. That child may be at risk when we consider this intergenerational trauma if that child also experienced physical abuse. However, if the child is also, was that an increased risk for a certain mood disorders or behavior problems or disrupted attachment, altered cortisol or hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access functioning, that’s our stress-response system. So we see these different types of alterations and transmitted across generations in various different forms. Jen: [04:41] Okay. So it seems to me as though there are two different ways that this trauma can occur in the first place is either trauma that occurs within the family and trauma that occurs outside of the family because of something that somebody else is doing to inflict trauma on a person. And I don’t want to minimize the second one because I actually think it’s so important that we’re going to do another episode on that, but today we’re going to concentrate more on the kind of trauma that originates in families today. So that’s your expertise, right? Dr. Fenerci: [05:10] Yes. That is very much my expertise and that sounds great. Jen: [05:13] Okay, super. So having said that, now my next question talks about the Holocaust. So because that’s where a lot of this research originated is from Holocaust survivors. And so as I was reading through some of these meta-analyses of the literature on intergenerational trauma resulting from the Holocaust and also from children whose fathers were soldiers in the Vietnam War, I was so surprised that the impact even on the immediate survivors was really uneven and in a way the impact on the children was even more uneven. So some survivors are absolutely massively impacted and find it very difficult to function in their daily lives and others seem to come out with barely a scratch, and the same goes for their children. And when I think about the Holocaust, I think about a whole generation of people who have had similar experiences and have had maybe similar impacts on them. But it seems like that’s not the case. Why do you think that is? Dr. Fenerci: [06:09] So as humans we are very diverse in our experiences and also our reactions to our environment. So if we look at the development of psychopathology, let’s say risk for depression, so to speak, the model, the diathesis stress model talks about there being a combination of both genetic predisposition and also environmental stressors that can impact and potentially results in depression. And so if you’re thinking about the results of trauma and its consequences, whether it’s increased results in psychopathology or developments of mental illness or posttraumatic stress disorder or other negative consequences, it really depends a lot on certain risk factors that may run in a particular family, and this could be genetics, but there’s also what is called epigenetics, which means that our experience can actually change which genes are turned on or off. So it’s an ongoing interaction between genetics which may result in a certain predisposition or personality. Often siblings, even though they grew up in the same family and share half of their genes are very different and can have very different outcomes. I think we see that a lot… Jen: [07:28] So parents do for sure. Dr. Fenerci: [07:31] So it’s an interaction between these environmental factors, trauma being one of them, and genetic risk and also personality. Other life events or stressors that may have happened, let’s say before the Holocaust, all that kind of comes into play because humans are…we’re pretty complex creatures, right? So that’s kind of how I view that and I do think that the more chronic or severe the trauma such as the Holocaust, that’s an exceptionally severe, exceptionally chronic, the more likely it is that the trauma is going to have an impact on a large percent of the population that has endured that. So if like everybody has just a bad enough experience. It’s less likely that some people will come out completely untethered, if that makes sense. Jen: [08:18] Yeah. Okay. So then if it’s not correct to say that everyone who has gone through a traumatic event is going to come out of this with trauma, but it may be to more or less extent. And so I’m wondering what are some of the ways that people process that trauma? Dr. Fenerci: [08:33] So there’s a lot of variability in this quite a bit as well. And so in terms of how the brain processes trauma – trauma is processed differently in the brain than kind of regular memories for a few reasons. So first of all, it it our sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight response system is activated. Second of all, our endocrine system that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal or HPA access is activated; floods our body with cortisol and that’s actually adaptive in the moments to help us survive. So however, as a result, especially in the case of family and family trauma or abuse or maltreatment that happens in the family, this system may become over-activated at the time and what results is either can often be a kind of really intense, vivid memory or flashbulb memory. We’re looking at flashbacks, intrusive memories. A lot of the symptoms of PTSD you’ll see through that or what we can see is some forgetting of the trauma itself, whether it’s through, usually through the process of dissociation. Dr. Fenerci: [09:45] So because our limbic system is so activated because our body has trained us, fight, flight, or flee from the US to try to save us from this threat in our environment, our higher level cortex or our frontal lobe, which gives us our thinking and our meaning. Making an organization of our events in our life is shut down in the moment, which is a survival mechanism. However, because a lot of times trauma isn’t talked about, especially trauma in the family, what happens is the survivors never really able to process or make meaning of, or organize these events that could be disorganized or very vivid but distressing in one brain. Jen: [10:29] Yeah. That actually gets to a question the listener emailed over. And so I wonder if we can kind of jump ahead to that a little bit. And so we did an episode on family storytelling recently and we learned about how telling stories as a family can be a really cathartic activity and it also helps the family members bond with each other. But when I put out a call for questions on this, one of my listeners wrote in and I’ll call her Jane just to make the story easier to tell. And she said that her grandfather was very abusive to her grandmother and to their children to the point where he lined them all up at gunpoint and planned to shoot them all and then himself. But Jane’s mom came out of the bathroom right then and yelled for him to stop, and he just dropped the gun and the grandmother snuck all the children out of the house late that night with basically nothing other than the clothes they wore. Jen: [11:18] And the four older girls had a variety of addiction issues throughout their life. Although Jane’s mom has actually been happily married for 40 years and Jane said that none of them had ever had counseling, but every time they would get together as a family, they would rehash all of their memories of the abuse in absolutely excruciating detail. And she says that she grew up very fearful in an otherwise very loving home and just couldn’t really understand why. And so when I was thinking about that, I was...