Healing Generational and Ancestral Trauma
The podcast ‘Healing Generational and Ancestral Trauma’, features Linda Thai, a Vietnamese-Australian therapist who talks about growing up in Australia as a child of refugee parents. She shared that, growing up, there was a big gulf between her and her parents, and that she struggled with mental health issues and addiction.
Linda shared that she was looking for a trauma to pin her early experiences to, and was looking for traumas or abuse that didn’t appear to exist. She later learned about the refugee trauma her and her parents experienced, and came to understand that she experienced benign neglect.
“Benign neglect refers to a situation where a person’s emotional and psychological needs are not adequately met, resulting in feelings of being unseen or unheard, which can impact their sense of self and overall well-being, even without overt trauma or abuse.”
She also spoke about racialised trauma, sharing that it happens within a context, and that context happens over time. Kenneth Hardy, a Professor of family therapy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania calls it the invisible wounds of racialised trauma. It is described as:
An assault of sense of self
Internalised devaluation
Learned voicelessness
Psychological homelessness
Complex and ambiguous grief and loss
Rage
Survival orientation
Here are 10 other key takeaways from the podcast:
Linda’s work in addiction recovery brought to light that people numb their feelings of shame, which gets in the way of authenticity and authentic belonging.
Racism is not about belonging, its not about fitting in, its about DIGNITY. Where are the spaces where we can experience psychological safety and agency.
When you combine physical safety and psychological safety with agency, there is then the capacity for authentic self-expression, for taking up space, for the dignity of mattering. And a byproduct of that dignity, is belonging.
When we inhabit a body that is racialised by society, we often find ourselves constantly defending our sense of self, leaving little room for self-definition. The focus becomes defining ourselves based on what we are not, rather than who we truly are. This leads to others trying to compartmentalise and categorise us, perpetuating stereotypes. Stereotypes may have a basis, and we all embody aspects of them.
Rage is a natural byproduct of living a life of degradation and marginalisation.
White proximity and male proximity becomes a survival strategy, as individuals internalise the qualities associated with whiteness and maleness while rejecting aspects of their own cultural identity. This often involves sacrificing parts of oneself in order to navigate and thrive in society.
There is complex grief in acknowledging that we gave up parts of our identity, culture, language, food and heritage that we never got the chance to fully inhabit as a result of the forced displacement of being the child of a former refugee.
By assimilating ourselves in the hopes of getting closer to whiteness, we not only distance ourselves from our culture and our heritage, we also distance ourselves from other black and brown bodies, while at the same time, not ever being white.
We live in a very concrete society, where grief is seen as ‘we had something and now its gone’. And when it comes to these unnameable losses, it’s a grief over something she never got.
You cannot be a person for whom society deems almost exclusively through negative characterisations and not internalise those negative characterisations. And if you’re exposed to them long enough, you don’t need white people to tell you you’re less than, you start believing it and you start operating from that frame. So devaluation is huge.
“Grief for the inner child, what we didn’t get, and the pervasive weight and the vastness of that emptiness and the loneliness, across all forms of attachment disruption is loneliness. ”