Welcome back to Healing Trauma.
This session is about intergenerational trauma.
Children need a safe,
Consistent,
Well-regulated environment in which to grow optimally.
When that doesn't happen,
For whatever reason,
Children experience developmental trauma.
The neural networks for connection develop as neural networks for protection.
When the atmosphere that a child experiences is unstable,
Where there is a lack of safety,
Children go into a survival response,
Just like adults do when we're scared.
Only children have a lot less agency.
A child can't go out and get a job to get a new place to live.
As children,
We are really dependent on our adults,
Our parents.
Our brain develops in a certain way.
We have developmental stages.
Some of that happens in utero.
Some of it happens in the first two or three years of our life before we're really verbal.
It happens throughout our childhood.
What neuroscientists now say is that the brain continues to develop until we're in our mid to late 20s.
When we think about the brain of a young child,
We can see that they are vulnerable,
That a lot of the development of linear thinking and reasoning takes time to develop.
This is not something that was known about 30 years ago,
50 years ago,
100 years ago,
And the living conditions that we're in are very different now than they were then.
In the late 1990s,
There was a big study done on ACEs,
Adverse Childhood Experiences.
It was undertaken by a big insurance company,
Kaiser Permanente,
And the Centers for Disease Control in the United States.
And since then,
The results have been replicated many times.
Before that study,
Doctors estimated that maybe one in 35 children had some adversity or abuse.
What the study found is that one in five have significant adverse childhood experiences.
They studied a group of adults and asked them questions about their childhood,
And they found that the more they answered yes to these 10 questions,
The more difficult their life was in the present.
It is helpful to understand the impact of trauma on our life.
We are not personally at fault.
Our brain and nervous system works in a certain way,
And maladaptive coping strategies arise as a result of trauma.
Some of the questions asked about a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swearing at you,
Insulting you,
Putting you down,
Or humiliating you,
Or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt.
Did they push,
Grab,
Slap,
Or throw something at you,
Hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured,
Touch or fondle you,
Or have you touched their body in a sexual way?
Did you feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special?
Emotional neglect,
That experience of feeling unloved,
Leads children to believe that they're fundamentally unworthy and unlovable.
There are some more obvious questions,
Like did you not have enough to eat?
Did you have to wear dirty clothes or had no one to protect you?
Maybe there was addiction in your house.
Parents separated or divorced?
Was there domestic violence?
Was anyone in the household depressed or mentally ill?
Did a household member go to prison?
When we consider the current statistics that indicate one in four girls and one in six boys have been sexually abused,
And then we add on all of the other forms of neglect and abuse,
It's clear that childhood trauma is common.
One of the elements here is intergenerational trauma.
Dr.
Gabor Maté is an expert in this area,
And he speaks about how it's not okay to shame ourselves for not being ideal parents.
Actually,
Our brains and our nervous systems are quite resilient.
Even one person in a child's life who believes in them,
Who sees them,
Who lets them know that they're not alone can make a big difference.
Some of the negative outcomes of people with higher ACEs scores,
Higher childhood adverse experiences,
Is that they have more illness,
More likely to have diabetes,
Obesity,
Cancer,
Asthma.
They're more likely to make less money throughout their lifetime,
Have more violence.
It's tough when we think of a child who's in a situation where there is addiction or violence in the home.
They have trouble sleeping,
They have stress,
They have a hard time concentrating in schools,
And the truth is that their parents might not be emotionally regulated enough themselves to provide a safe environment for their children.
Someone who grew up with adverse experiences might not have good boundaries in relationships or be vulnerable to difficult or abusive relationships.
When we don't have a regulated nervous system,
We're more likely to have chaos in our relationships.
If we're in a fight,
Flight,
Or freeze response a lot of the time,
Healthy relationships are not possible.
So here we are in the situations that we're in.
The systemic oppression and stress that many people experience makes it worse.
There are some things that cause stress in a family that aren't intergenerational trauma.
Perhaps one of the parents got sick and died,
Maybe a child was sick or hurt,
And that can throw the whole system into chaos.
There are also some larger groups of people where we can see this at work.
One of them is with Indigenous people in North America.
The effect of colonization was that many generations of Indigenous children were forcibly sent to residential schools.
The stated purpose of those schools was to take the Indian out of the child.
There was a lot of physical and sexual abuse in those schools.
The residential schools were run by churches,
A lot of them by the Catholic Church.
In addition to refusing to let them speak their own language,
Cutting their hair,
We ended up with generations of people who were lost.
Even when they came back into their communities,
They were dealing with the effect of being abused as children.
That set the stage for intergenerational abuse of their children and their grandchildren.
When a whole community has been systematically abused,
The effects of intergenerational trauma are very clear.
One thing that explained a lot about my life was the effect of emotional neglect,
Of not having anybody to turn to when things got hard.
My parents provided a very stable household,
Food security,
Housing security,
Nobody was addicted,
Nobody was yelling and screaming,
There was no violence.
And yet the lack of emotional connection led me to have the experience that nobody cared.
And yet when something went wrong,
As happened when I was 12,
I didn't feel I could ask for help.
I felt like I was on my own.
As we look back at the capacity and the nervous system and the brain development of a 12-year-old or a three-year-old or whatever age it was that this was happening,
We can really have some compassion for ourselves as children and for what we carried through into our adult lives as well.
Often when we have children and they have children,
We can see the through line of that.
One of the really important things here is to find a way to stop shaming ourselves for what we did when we were not sufficiently healed.
To stop shaming ourselves for the intergenerational trauma that was passed through our grandparents,
Our parents,
Our siblings,
To us and to our children.
We need to find ways to have some compassion and kindness at the same time as we hold ourselves responsible for healing.
I was fortunate enough to not be afraid of what was going to happen when I went to sleep.
There was no sexual or physical abuse in my home.
That gave me a stability and an experience of safety in my nervous system that many children don't have.
So if you have trouble going to sleep at night,
If you wake up anxious,
If you have trouble concentrating,
If you find that your relationships are difficult,
Consider that part of the issue might be childhood developmental trauma.
Take a look at the ACEs questions and consider how you might have been affected by adverse childhood experiences yourself.
Regulating our nervous system is a really important part of healing.
When we're more regulated,
We can then co-regulate with others,
Whether that's others in our family,
Our siblings or parents,
Somebody at work,
Our own children,
Our friends.
We can't blame ourselves for the development that did not happen when we were a child.
And we can take responsibility now for doing the best we can to heal,
To develop emotional stability,
To take a look at some of the relationships perhaps that aren't working,
To stop shaming ourselves.
In the next segment,
We're going to work with core deficiency beliefs.
One of the results of childhood trauma is that we believe that we are the problem,
That it happened because we're bad,
That there's something wrong with us.
That is not true.
As we learn about trauma and we work on healing our own nervous system,
We could stop shaming ourselves for the development of our own brain and nervous system and take responsibility now for healing and for offering ourselves and others,
Including our parents,
Compassion for the conditions that we were in.
