Healing intergenerational trauma: The need for safety and space
Part 2: In memoir, we need a strong narrative voice, we need to know who's speaking—who we are.
About a week ago, I attended the screening of Physician, Heal Thyself (2023), a documentary about the life of Dr. Gabor Maté, which was followed by a Q&A with the man himself (it was his first attendance to a public screening of the film). Gabor, as he preferred to be addressed, is an accomplished doctor most well known for his work and research in the space of childhood development, addiction and trauma, and how acknowledging their causal relationship may be our path toward healing. He was one of the first medical advocates to understand that pathologies, like ADHD, anxiety, depression, as well as addiction, are actually coping mechanisms. These pathologies are not genetic inheritances or necessary behavioral mutations, but rather, they are wounds that arise from harmful conditions.
What’s more is that we don’t simply have to manage them. These illnesses are treatable, if we get the chance to examine what caused them to begin with, acknowledge the pains we’ve suffered and heal those originating wounds.
But not all of us get the chance. Not all of us get the safe conditions required for this, or the privilege of distance and time from which to examine our traumas from a more neutral place, from a place where we can more objectively assess what’s going on, like a doctor examining a patient; it’s hard to tend to our own wounds if we are delirious and in pangs of pain. It’s no wonder so many people get seduced into toxic behaviours like addictions, or why some of us begin to exhibit dysfunctional reactions to our pain like the numbing dissociative effects of depression.
Thankfully, trauma and the effects of painful experiences are not something we have to live with forever, at least not from the perspective of time and lineage. Eventually—hopefully—there comes a time when for one of us in that painful chain of trauma, healing becomes possible.
As the documentary depicted, it took Gabor being raised in Canada, a Jew studying at UBC with the ability to freely express himself, for him to develop his ideas and come to see the disillusionment of Zionism. This was not available to his parents when they were living in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his mother a child of Zionists for whom Israel was such a beacon of hope that there could be no criticism against it.
For me, it’s also taken the privilege of distance and time to be able to look at the events of my own homeland and see things differently, to see the disillusionment of “Yugoslavism” but also of the many other stories I’ve inherited at whose core is unresolved trauma. So many people before me have had to carry the pain of unhealed wounds that have caused further trauma in future generations. But. It can stop with me. I really do believe it.
“Trauma is a wound. And under the right conditions, wounds heal.”
- Dr. Gabor Maté
To be continued…