ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the trauma of loss and abuse, in a context of uprootedness, seems to have been transmitted across generations. It describes one young woman's painful struggle to learn to trust her own experience, to come to terms with her parents' commitment to a family myth that obliterated her reality, and to recognize how she was in danger of repeating their defensive patterns, thereby perpetuating the trauma. Ms L was an attractive, articulate, engaging twenty-year-old college junior, who had taken a medical leave of absence because of her daily drinking, her inability to concentrate and function in the college setting, and her suicidal wish to jump in front of a train. The thread of trauma can be more easily traced in Ms L's father's family. His maternal grandparents lost many of their children, and the survivors might have had little capacity for experiencing loss, for managing violent feelings, and for nurturing the next generation.
