ABSTRACT
Historical trauma has a profound impact on the psychological functioning of individuals and, like interpersonal trauma, gets transmitted from generation to generation. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart (2010) defines historical trauma as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma” (p. 2). Traumatic historical events with long-term psychological consequences include collective catastrophes such as war, famine, and forced colonization as well as intracountry genocide in the absence of war (e.g., Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s). Racial, gender, and religious oppression may also lead to historical trauma, as evidenced, for example, by the legacies of slavery, the Holocaust, massacres of Native Americans, the removal of Native American children from their families and communities for placement in boarding schools, and culturally or politically sanctioned discriminatory practices such as female infant abandonment (Brave Heart, 1999, 2010; Johnson, 1996). Tracing current individual and interpersonal conflicts to their possible roots in historical trauma can have significant beneficial effects, creating understanding and compassion in the parent generation for the grandparent generation and freeing the parent generation from the mindless repetition of the past in the present with the child. The impact of historical trauma across generations is particularly relevant when its effects filter down from the broader social-culturalpolitical arena into the lives of young children and their parents. In early childhood, a traumatic stressor can be defined as an unpredictable, uncontrollable external event that threatens the physical or psychological
integrity of the child and induces overwhelming fear, horror, or helplessness (Zero to Three, 2005). Exposure to a traumatic event, whether direct (as in physical or sexual abuse) or indirect (as a witness to violence, war, or natural disaster), puts a young child at risk of serious mental health problems, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), conduct disorder, anxiety, and depression, and may disrupt not only the child’s developmental momentum but also the safety and security of the child-parent relationship (Lieberman & Van Horn, 2005). In the moment of trauma, children are flooded with negative affect so intense that it often exceeds their developmental capacity to self-regulate (Schore, 2013). If the parent is unable to protect the child from this overwhelming distress, the traumatic event shatters the child’s internal working model of the parent as a secure base and protective shield (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Freud, 1920/1959). It also changes the child’s worldview. Before the trauma, the child may view the world as a sufficiently predictable, sufficiently benevolent place and people as generally trustworthy. Afterward, negative attributions and mental representations may consistently displace the child’s previous expectations of care and safety (Janoff-Bulmann, 1992). Although any trauma in early childhood may interfere with normal biopsychosocial development, complex forms such as historical trauma and other chronic types of victimization disrupt development more than an isolated traumatic event (Lieberman, Chu, Van Horn, & Harris, 2011). The child’s functioning may be impaired across multiple domains, affecting attachment, self-concept, cognition, and regulation of affect and behavior (Cook et al., 2005). Because infants and young children depend on their primary caregivers for safety and co-regulation of physical and emotional states, the risk of developmental disturbances increases when a caregiver is also the source of danger (Freud, 1926/1959; Main & Hesse, 1990). Trauma in early childhood not only may alter the child’s general beliefs about self and the world, but more specifically may damage the relationship between a securely attached child and an attuned parent. The parent may form distorted negative attributions of the child, and the child and parent may develop mutual adverse expectations of each other (Pynoos, 1997). If before the trauma the quality of attachment was insecure and parental attunement intermittent, the relationship may deteriorate further under the stress of the traumatic event, leading to internalizing problems such as anxiety, depression, avoidance, somatization, and emotional withdrawal and/or to externalizing problems in the form of aggressive or
self-endangering behaviors. The child may also lose trust in bodily sensations, leading to increased arousal in the form of sleep problems, nightmares, hypervigilance, and distractibility. He or she may regress to an earlier stage of development, losing skills that had been mastered. When the parent has also experienced trauma – as is often the case with historical trauma, which affects entire communities and societies – the child’s problems are compounded by the parent’s impaired affect regulation, negative attributions, and confusion about what is safe and what is dangerous. These effects may persist long after the traumatic event ends, particularly when either member of the dyad is triggered by a traumatic reminder or secondary adversity. Often parent and child become traumatic reminders for each other (Pynoos, 1997). Therefore, in addition to broad-based interventions designed to help entire societies recover from traumatic historical events, it is crucial to provide therapeutic assistance to the individual children and families whose most basic relationships (e.g., the parent-child dyad) have been altered by historical trauma.
