This is my first blog in a series of blogs where I will start to talk about intergenerational trauma via historical loss that many communities face and apply it to my own re-creation of loss as a child of parents who faced ethnic cleansing and were driven out of their homeland during the partition of India and the killings that they witnessed. This was a historical loss where PTSD has hardly been applied.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying event that overwhelms the individual who has experienced it. These experiences are not simple out of the ordinary experience, which almost everyone goes though while growing up. These include parental over strictness, beating, ragging or bullying in school. At first people have trouble adjusting and coping, but with good self-care, they get better. If, however, the symptoms get worse, and lasts for months or even years, and interfere with day-to-day functioning, it called it termed PTSD.
What happens in PTSD?
Trauma is caused by a sudden influx of physical and/or emotional painful stimulus that the brain cannot process and goes into a state of shock. A traumatic event creates an irreversible gap between what life was before and what it is after the event.
Symptoms
Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms may start within one month of a traumatic event, but sometimes symptoms may not appear until years after the event. These symptoms cause significant problems in social or work situations and in relationships. They can also interfere with your ability to go about your normal daily tasks. PTSD symptoms can vary over time or vary from person to person. PTSD symptoms can vary in intensity over time. You may have more PTSD symptoms when you’re stressed in general, or when you come across reminders of what you went through.
1. Recurrent and Intrusive Memories
- Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event
- Reliving/re-experiencing the trauma as if it was happening again (flashbacks)
- Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event
- Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event
- Anniversary reactions and other conditioned responses
2. High avoidance symptoms
- Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event
- ‘Forgetting’ the trauma
- Avoiding places, activities or people that remind you of the traumatic event
- Absence of dreams in acute phase
- Psychogenic amnesia
- Apathy and loss of interest
- Estrangement from others
- Restricted range of affect
- Sense of doom
3. High arousal symptoms
- High anxiety, high disorders, panic attacks, phobias
- Difficulty in falling or staying asleep
- Irritability or outbursts of anger
- Difficulty in concentrating
- Hypervigilance, exaggerated and startled response
- Physiological reactions to events that resemble an aspect of the assault
4. Negative changes in thinking and mood
- Negative thoughts about yourself, other people or the world
- Hopelessness about the future
- Memory problems, including not remembering important aspects of the traumatic event
- Difficulty maintaining close relationships
- Feeling detached from family and friends
- Lack of interest in activities you once enjoyed
- Difficulty experiencing positive emotions
- Feeling emotionally numb
5. Changes in physical and emotional reactions
- Being easily startled or frightened
- Always being on guard for danger
- Self-destructive behaviour, such as drinking too much or driving too fast
- Trouble sleeping
- Trouble concentrating
- Irritability, angry outbursts or aggressive behaviour
- Overwhelming guilt or shame
For children 6 years old and younger, signs and symptoms may also include:
- Re-enacting the traumatic event or aspects of the traumatic event through play
- Frightening dreams that may or may not include aspects of the traumatic event
In the next few blogs we will extend the idea of PTSD to include inter generation trauma of a race. I will end this with one example from the Native American tribes.
Here is an example of when the historical loss is not spoke about how it creates intergeneration trauma. This quotation from Native Americans is important because it bears some resemblance to the partition story of India, the brutality, killing, ethnic cleansing, and loss of land and lives:
“To explain why some Native American individuals are subjected to substantial difficulties, Brave Heart and Debruyn (1998) utilized the literature on Jewish Holocaust survivors and their decedents and pioneered the concept of historical trauma. The current problems facing the Native American people may be the result of “a legacy of chronic trauma and unresolved grief across generations” enacted on them by the European dominant culture (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998, p. 60). The primary feature of historical trauma is that the trauma is transferred to subsequent generations through biological, psychological, environmental, and social means, resulting in a cross-generational cycle of trauma (Sotero, 2006). The theory of historical trauma has been considered clinically applicable to Native American individuals by counsellors, psychologists, and psychiatrists (Brave Heart, Chase, Elkins, & Altschul, 2011; Goodkind, LaNoue, Lee, Freeland, & Freund, 2012; Myhra, 2011).“
