Childhood trauma M7 D

Experiences of genocide, racial violence, forced migration, and other traumatic events can have lasting effects, not just on the individuals who endured the traumas, but on their ancestors. Learn more about historical and generational trauma by watching the following short videos before posting to the discussion area:

What Is Historical Trauma? (5 minutes in length, captioned)
How Do People Experience Historical Trauma? (6 minutes in length, captioned, 7 sec)
What Is Cultural Healing? (5 minutes in length, captioned)
After you have viewed the videos, post a response to each of the questions:
In your own words, explain historical trauma. Reflect on what it means to you.
How might historical trauma impact a relationship between an elder (parent, grandparent, etc.) and a child and/or effect child-raising practices in general?
Describe a racial microaggression that you have witnessed in a social interaction, human service practice setting, or educational setting. How did you feel about the microaggression and how did you respond? If a child or teen experienced microaggressions on a daily or weekly basis, what do you think the cumulative impact might be?
How might you implement culturally-responsive strategies in working with people who have experienced historical trauma? If you are unsure, what resources (including people) could you draw upon to help you?

ANSWER

Childhood Trauma M7 D

Historical trauma is considered a multigenerational trauma encountered by particular racial, cultural, and ethnic sets. This is linked to key occasions that burdened a certain group of individuals due to their oppressed standing, such as forced migration, slavery, and the Holocaust. Most groups with historical trauma express depression, low self-esteem, aggressive behavior, self-destructive behavior, substance abuse, high levels of suicide, and cardiovascular complications (Frie and Frie, 2018). Therefore, historical trauma can be experienced by anyone living in families or groups of people marked by severe conditions of poverty, war, dislocation, and trauma and might still be suffering as a result of the past experiences. The psychological wounds and cumulative emotional encounters can be carried across generations leading to emotional harm.

Cultural healing plays a major role in eliminating or reducing historical trauma. Ideally, cultural healing allows people to reconnect with the vibrant strengths of their culture and ancestry, helping them process the past grief and create a new historical history that can have healing impacts on those experiencing historical trauma. For instance, people can readily speak and identify with their traumas as a cultural and personal experience with a common understanding and sense of belonging, which greatly helps heal from the historical traumas.

Historical trauma changes family structure, relationships, and child-raising practices. Historical trauma affects a child-parent relationship since a parent experiencing trauma cannot sensitively respond to the child, thus impacting the development of attachment and relationship with their child. This results from denial, disconnection, distance, detachment, and impaired self-esteem that influence the relationship between the parent and child.

Racial micro aggression entails daily behavioral, verbal, and environmental indignities, whether unintentional or intentional, that communicate negative racial slights, hostility, and insults to a target group (Williams, 2021). I experienced racial ethnic-based micro aggression in a classroom when a teacher made a malicious comment about being unusual for someone of my race to be that intelligent. The malicious statement was inappropriate, which led me to express my feeling and ask for more clarifications about the statement. Daily encounters of micro racial aggression among teens are linked to low physical and psychological well-being, which may lead to achievement gaps, punitive discipline, and racial tensions.

Culturally response strategies recognize the predominance of the trauma and focus on integrating cultural beliefs, values, and practices in the intervention. For instance, raising awareness about historical traumatic experiences can bring hope and healing to communities (Chioneso et al., 2020). Working with communities and families to establish cultural healing helps engage in mindfulness practices that strengthen the individual cultural identity.

References

Chioneso, N. A., Hunter, C. D., Gobin, R. L., McNeil Smith, S., Mendenhall, R., & Neville, H. A. (2020). Community healing and resistance through storytelling: A framework to address racial trauma in Africana communities. Journal of Black Psychology, 46(2-3), 95-121.

Frie, R., & Frie, R. (2018). Historical trauma and lived experience. History flows through us: Germany, the Holocaust, and the importance of empathy, 1-14.

Williams, M. T. (2021). Racial Microaggressions: Critical questions, state of the science, and new directions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(5), 880-885.