Rebecca Saunders (00:03.864)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR.
My name is Dr Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline.
Lloyd coming to you from Wurundjeri land. I'd like to extend my respect to the Elders past, present and emerging and I'd like to start by wishing you all a very happy festive season. I hope you've all had a great end to the year and that you get a little bit of a break over the holidays.
So with the holidays coming up, many of us tend to spend more time with our extended family. And I've been ruminating about families and generations recently. So I thought I would talk about intergenerational trauma, because of course trauma is my favorite topic to talk about, as you might know by now. Intergenerational trauma is a big topic and I just want to...
preempt any expectations and say that today I am not going to delve into the epigenetic side of intergenerational trauma. Epigenetics is the effect of trauma on gene expression, which is actually a really fascinating topic and has certainly proven in animal studies to have a lasting effect on the biology of animals from adverse events between two and even up to six generations.
Rebecca Saunders (01:56.202)
So it really is a fascinating area, but we have no evidence of the epigenetic inheritance of trauma in humans because these studies are a little bit tricky to do. But we can talk about the non-genetic side of it, for example, the behaviour on the societal and the psychological effects of trauma.
So intergenerational trauma refers to one generation of transmission of trauma and transgenerational trauma refers to multi-generational transmission of the effects of trauma. The effects of intergenerational trauma can be very pervasive ranging from depression and anxiety, negative self-concept like
I'm unworthy, I'm bad, I'm not safe, the world is not safe. Maybe even that certain races or groups of people are not safe or they're wicked or they're bad. Sometimes we see difficulties with self-concept around over-identification or fused identity with parents, which is kind of a blurring of boundaries between a person and their parent, like
A feeling of my parents history actually happened to me. I carry their sadness and their shame or anger or depression. Maybe it might look like comparison of the next generation's experience with the parents experience. And indeed, who hasn't heard that statement? You young people have it all so easy.
I think that's something that every generation hears from their parents, but this is different to intergenerational trauma. If you can imagine that concept on steroids, like very exaggerated, that can cause the next generation to have poor self-esteem and believe that their experiences are invalid or unimportant.
Rebecca Saunders (03:55.789)
because there's a comparison to what happened to the previous generation. And that smallness of self is really a difficult thing to live with. All the small T traumas of growing up with and living with someone who has PTSD or CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, from war or abuse, all
add up to difficulties with self-regulation, maybe nightmares, hypervigilance, negative cognitions, anxiety, depression and so on. So the effects of our parents' trauma is very real. Many people who come to me state very clearly with passion and conviction, I am not going to let my family's intergenerational trauma keep on perpetuating this cycle in my life. It needs to stop with me.
I will not traumatize my kids the way I was traumatized. I will do a better job with my children than I received as a child. And I love to hear this. It is such a declaration of determination. Often they've been trying to heal on their own. They've been listening to every available podcast on parenting. They've been watching every YouTube video or they've been working with the help of a talk therapist.
and they've come to realise that it's not enough, that they need to heal the trauma with trauma-focused strategies and that EMDR is one of the best ways to do this. Intergenerational trauma can come in many forms. War, poverty, racism, childhood sexual abuse, substance abuse, stolen generations, immigration.
The effects of all of these massive events have a huge impact on the parents. The parents are unable to regulate themselves and provide enough emotional safety for the children. And the children grow up with a sense of fear, a sense of the world being a bad place or I am bad, I'm not safe, I'm not lovable, I'm worth nothing. All the stories of the parents form the history of the child.
Rebecca Saunders (06:11.727)
And the child grows up surrounded by the stories of the parents and they hold the distress of these stories, this history, and they carry it with them into their lives. It's a heavy burden to carry the distress at one's parents. I've utilised EMDR with many adults who are children of Holocaust survivors.
And some of the targets that we might choose to work on are not their own experience in their own life, but the family history of distress. So we might work on, for example, a mother's memory of her experience of war, of surviving by being hidden in a horrible place or witnessing murder or other horrible things.
as told to and therefore as experienced by that child that then grows up to be an adult. So in a practical sense, when we are using EMDR, the image that we use as a target will be an imagined image that the grown child has, that they've formed from the parent's story of trauma. EMDR works really well to shift that memory and image.
and relieve that distress. So we know that the history is still there. We still know that it was terrible, but it takes the distress away from that memory and that image of someone else's trauma. And we can use a similar strategy with working with, say for example, adoptees who carry the intergenerational trauma of the history of their own birth.
or the imagined experience of their birth mother, which they might glean from, maybe the scant details which they see on the adoption papers, or maybe the stories of the experience of their adopted mother and the story of the experience of themselves as a baby. So all of these imagined or created stories can be tremendously painful and we can resolve some of this trauma with EMDR.
Rebecca Saunders (08:25.505)
In episode 16, in my Imagination Memory episode, I talked a little bit more about details about the following. That we know that trauma was real. We know that it happened, but it is currently not happening right now. So it exists only in memory. And also what we do know is that memory is malleable. And what we are aiming to do is change how the memory
affects the person in the current time. We can't change what happened and we might not be able to remember what happened. Maybe it affects us only as the remembered past or the story of our parents. They've told us a sad, sad story of our past and we feel that story in our body, in our muscles and in our bones and it plays out in our responses to current situations. It plays out in our thoughts and our beliefs about ourselves.
Let me give you a little bit of an example. Say for example, a belief of I'm disgusting can arise from a mother's memory of being treated badly by her husband when the baby was born, of being rejected. And she's told us a story, her story, a family heirloom of oral history.
of being thrown out of the house because the baby looked ugly or didn't resemble the father or something similar to that. So we have a visual picture of what happened to our mother and we have a feeling of despair or shame or sadness and that cognition or that belief of I'm disgusting and that is what we will be targeting with EMDR. So in a different way, the family narrative can look like an internalized view of us
ourselves in terms of our position or our role in the family. For example, our whole family is sad, but Caroline is the entertainer in the family. Or Caroline is the helper. Caroline is the fixer. Caroline is the one who will always listen when you need to drama dump. Or a different narrative. Caroline is the black sheep of the family. So when she was born, she looked like the spitting image of her no-hoper uncle. She will never amount to anything.
Rebecca Saunders (10:41.283)
These are not true, by the way. This is not my family narrative. I'm just using me as an example.
So these generalizations are just stories. There's somebody else's interpretation of events, but they can stick like glue and they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If my family think that I'm the black sheep, why should I try? Why should I bother trying to impress or achieve or communicate my needs or desires or ambitions? It won't change the family's perspective. They will never love me for who I am. And that
label on the black sheep becomes a prescription for behaviour and the direction of our life follows on from this. Of course sometimes the family narrative can be a positive one. Caroline is a hard worker but these are not the problems that present themselves in my therapy room.
except perhaps if I internalize that identity to the exclusion of other aspects of myself and become so hard working that I burn myself out, which kind of right now just before Christmas feels like it's sort of happening. But that's a whole other story which I won't burden you with. And yes, it's OK. I'm looking after myself. I have two weeks of beautiful holidays to look forward to, so I'm OK.
So getting back to the topic. So in terms of other people's response to someone's family history, so often I hear that people have been gaslit by friends or by well-meaning therapists even, or by family telling them that the past doesn't matter, it's in the past, no need to consider it, just put it away, don't take any notice. And then...
Rebecca Saunders (12:30.349)
My clients can't understand why they can't do that. Why they can't just let it go. That phrase that we so love to just flippantly say, just let it go. If only it were that easy to put our memories away, like putting an old book on the shelf and not letting it influence our lives. Lots of people try to do this without success.
Putting memories away without going through the process of resolving them is just denial. So we need to work on them with an effective trauma therapy like EMDR. There are other effective trauma therapies as well. But if we work on them with an effective trauma therapy, then we are able to put that history book on the shelf and not have to carry it with us wherever we go.
So if we do do the work on those intergenerational trauma stories that we've learned about ourselves or the intergenerational trauma memories that we have, what might things look like? Well, possible results could be improved relationships with our parents or extended family members, less needing to take care of them, less feeling of their feelings.
not having to be drawn into their sadness or their despair or their anger. More space to be able to create one's own separate identity. It might be easier to self-regulate, less intense emotional experiences as the parents' emotional experiences feel a little further away. Less need to cope with the substance use or medication overuse.
easier relationships with our own children or even sometimes being able to consider having children where previously that idea of perpetrating the intergenerational trauma was so horrible that having children was not even on the table as an option.
Rebecca Saunders (14:35.64)
So we may feel a greater sense of self-worth, self-agency, of being able to live one's own life and hope for and choose one's own path once we have put down that trauma burden of the intergenerational stories or memories. I guess the conclusion that I would like to leave you with is that sometimes with intergenerational traumas, the memories that we work on are actually not our own, but our parents' memories that we've absorbed and carry and that we work on these just
as successfully as working on our own memories. So I hope this has been a little bit helpful in understanding how trauma pervades from one generation to the next. A little bit of a serious topic so close to Christmas so I apologize about that and I do wish you all the very best for the holiday season. I hope you can take care of yourself and get a little bit of peace and joy over the next few weeks.
whilst everything calms down a bit after the craziness of the last month or so. I will be taking a little bit of a break from the podcast just for a couple of weeks and I'll be coming back early in the new year all rested and refreshed. So happy holidays. I will talk to you soon. Bye for now.
