Intergenerational Trauma

How can something that happened in past generations impact us now and affect the way we parent? Join our conversation with Beth Tyson, a childhood trauma consultant and former family-based trauma therapist. She is the author of the children’s books A Grandfamily for Sullivan and Sullivan Goes to See Mama.

In this episode, we cover:

• What is intergenerational trauma? In essence, intergenerational trauma is the passing of the emotional pain of one generation to another.
• What are some other names it goes by? (generational trauma, historical trauma, or multigenerational trauma)
• What types of events can cause intergenerational trauma? (personal and more widespread events)
• How can trauma that happened 100 years ago impact us now?
• What are the symptoms of intergenerational trauma that we might see in future generations?
• How to recognize behavior that is triggering intergenerational trauma?
• Researchers are also looking into the possible role of “epigenetic changes.” 
• How do we know if what we are doing or how we are responding is the result of intergenerational trauma? Questions to ask ourselves about us or our relatives.
• ACEs Adverse Childhood Adversity study.
• How to heal from this type of trauma?
  • Recognize that it exists.
  • Basic background info can be used in understanding trauma.
  • Become a detective of your past.
  • What brings up big emotions in you from your child’s behavior?
  • Apologize when we make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistake.
  • Positive childhood experiences.
  • Children need to be “claimed.” They need to belong and have one person who is committed to them.
  • Traditions.
  • Connecting to their history—cultural, religious, family. 
  • Put as many of their family connections in their life as is possible.
  • Resiliency through moderate and predictable stressors. Ex. sports. 
• Practical tips that can help you when you’re in the heat of the moment.
  • Somatic stimulation.
  • Recognize the arc of the behavior.
  • Have mantras to help you cope. “My child is a good child who is having a hard time. I’m a good parent who is having a hard time.”
• For kinship families (although it can be applicable to all families), how do you deal with guilt that you potentially passed on your trauma to your child, and now the child you are raising is suffering as a result?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
This is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. Welcome back to our regular listeners. We are so happy that you have been a part of our journey all along, and it is because of you that we are where we're at now, and we really do appreciate it. But also a shout out to our new listeners. You're going to help us get to where we want to go, and we also are appreciative of you. I am Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show and the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org Today, we're going to be talking about intergenerational trauma, and make sure you stay around to the end, because we're going to be giving you practical tips on how to heal from intergenerational trauma. We will be talking with Beth Tyson. She is a childhood trauma consultant, a Three Times best selling author, a CASA volunteer and the Pennsylvania Child Abuse Prevention Team co chair before becoming a consultant and a facilitator. Beth was a family based trauma therapist who helped stabilize mental health crises in Foster, adoption and kinship homes. Welcome Beth to creating a family.

Speaker 1  1:10  
Thank you. I'm honored to be here with all of you. So most of us have

Dawn Davenport  1:13  
an idea what trauma is, and we've even begun to grasp the idea that trauma comes in many different forms, and doesn't have to result in a broken bone or rape or or something that is outwardly dramatic, but here we're talking about intergenerational trauma, and that feels like something different altogether. So what is intergenerational trauma?

Speaker 1  1:37  
Sure, it's a great question, and it was a term that when I learned about kind of blew my mind, you know, I was like, wow, wait a minute. This is fascinating to learn about. But basically what it is is trauma that can be passed down through generations. So things that have happened in the past leave markers, chemical markers, on our biology, and epigenetic changes take place in our bodies, and that can be passed down to our offspring. And research from Doctor Rachel Yehuda in 2018 backed up this finding, and it was just, it's It's groundbreaking, and

Dawn Davenport  2:18  
we're going to go more into what we mean by epigenetic changes in just a bit. Are there some other names that people may have heard intergenerational trauma called?

Speaker 1  2:28  
Oh, yes. So some people call it transgenerational trauma. Others call it historical trauma, collective trauma, ancestral trauma. Have I missed any? I think there's. There's a handful of them, yeah,

Dawn Davenport  2:40  
there are generational trauma, which is generational, right? Yes, it goes by a lot of different names that we might hear, yep. So what type of events can cause intergenerational trauma? Sure,

Speaker 1  2:54  
it can be anything from large scale natural disasters that happen throughout history to political strife, to racism and oppression to family dynamics that were traumatic for children and families and family members. So it really kind of runs the gamut. There's all different types of situations that can create this epigenetic change in our bodies. And so yeah, there's a wide variety of events and circumstances.

Dawn Davenport  3:22  
Would it include being raised in an abusive home or by an alcoholic parent, or a parent who struggle with mental health issues or that mundane? Okay?

Speaker 1  3:32  
Yes, absolutely. And so it's passed down, not only through this thing called epigenetics, but it's also passed down behaviorally, so we're picking up on different behaviors and stories and narratives from our ancestors that get passed down through families and learned behavior. So it's kind of both a behavioral and a biological change.

Dawn Davenport  3:58  
Okay, so let's talk. We'll separate those two you have mentioned epigenetics, so let's dive into that. So let's talk about what we mean by the possible role that epigenetic changes could have, where as something could happen historically to a member, let's say our grandmother, and yet it is actually biologically affecting the generation her grandchildren's generation. So what do we mean by that, epigenetic changes? Yeah,

Speaker 1  4:25  
so basically, it's complex, and we're not even fully sure how exactly it happened scientifically. Much more research is needed in this area. But what we do know is that it's not necessarily a genetic inheritance, but it's an epigenetic inheritance, which means that there are changes that happen in markers that are placed on our DNA that can be expressed in future generations. So it's an expression of the gene in a different way than if the trauma had not happened. It's almost like a triggering event. That makes a mark on our biology that then plays out in our genes and in our relationships and in our family roles and on and on and on

Dawn Davenport  5:12  
as I've understood it, it's that it can affect it in a couple of ways. And tell me if this is correct, that it can change the way your body reads the D we all have DNA, and it's not changing the fundamentals of the DNA, but it changes the way the body reads the DNA. Or some people think that it activates dormant genes, that a gene that was dormant now becomes active because of these changes,

Speaker 1  5:37  
right, right? Which is why we see mental health issues tend to run in families, so there's a connection between depression and intergenerational trauma and anxiety and intergenerational trauma, and we think that maybe what is happening is the trauma is leaving this marker on our genes to either turn on or turn off certain gene expressions that then result in mental health problems that maybe wouldn't have taken place if the historical trauma hadn't been there

Dawn Davenport  6:07  
genes that prime us for things like fight, flight, freeze or fawn, those responses can be activated in different ways that would help us in future generations, in a good way, help them avoid dangerous situations. But if it was a traumatic event that over activated the fight, flight or freeze, that can also then in future generations, impact their abilities because of the changes in our genetics, the changes that happened generations before us,

Speaker 1  6:33  
right? So we're all here today on this planet because our ancestors had that system. They develop that ability to recognize danger and threat and remove themselves, fight for themselves, or freeze to protect themselves, or even appease other tribes and other members of their community to not be a threat. So those trauma responses are there for a reason. We developed them for a reason, they protect us. Their survival mechanisms. However, when there's extreme adversity, especially in early life, we can become stuck in these responses. Our brain kind of gets a little bit stuck. Our body feels stuck in a trauma response, or is easily activated into a trauma response from, you know, just even innocuous things in our environment. And so that's, you know, initially a survival mechanism that we all needed in order to be here today, but it can get set into overdrive where it's almost like an overprotective system, and that's when it becomes problematic for everyday life and functioning.

Dawn Davenport  7:38  
It seems like it would be hard to tease out you mentioned behavioral, inherited behavioral responses from epigenetic responses. It seems like the two have got to be tight, because I could certainly see how behavior if I had been raised in an alcoholic environment by an parent that was an alcoholic, and so I learned to avoid conflict. Then in my parenting, I might be avoiding conflict and then training my children to avoid conflict. That's a behavior that's passed down whether or not it actually impacted my genes in any way. Is that how you see it as well?

Speaker 1  8:14  
Yes, it is hard to discern. It's hard to tease those two things out, right? And so it becomes complicated when it when it all you know, plays out, but yes, that the both of those things can happen simultaneously or independent from one another.

Dawn Davenport  8:31  
Let me pause here to remind you that we want to your questions. Please send us any questions you have in the area of being a foster parent, an adoptive parent or a kinship parent, and we answer these questions on our weekend wisdom podcast, we've been getting some really good questions. Some of them are challenging and they require a lot of thought on our part to answer, and some are just fun. So send me your questions. You can send them to info at creating a family.org and we really appreciate them, and they make weekend wisdom a whole lot more fun. And now let's get back to the interview with Beth. How do we recognize behavior that is triggering intergenerational trauma?

Speaker 1  9:18  
So typically, triggers come from our environment, our sensory systems and our ability to seek out or to fend off threats. And so when we are triggered, or I like to use the word activated, into a trauma response, we are usually picking up information either internally in our bodies, like certain feelings that we're feeling internally or something externally, like a smell, a sound, a touch, and those five senses, so when we are activated into a trauma response, it's because of some information that's coming into our brain and our nervous system that says, danger, danger, danger. Something here reminds me of a. Previous harm or something dangerous, and so it sets off all the chemical reactions in our body to protect ourselves, to run, to fight, or if there's no option to run or fight, then we'll often freeze, and that is when you see people take more of a dissociative or sort of a checked out, zoned out almost like very low, low hypo arousal in order to protect themselves. And we see this in animals too. A lot of the trauma experts and specialists have shared stories on other podcasts about how animals actually when they are feeling under threat or in danger, they go through a process where they freeze if they think they're going to be eaten, and then as they're coming out of the freeze response, they shake. Their whole bodies shake and quiver. And there's some science to suggest that that shaking and quivering acts as a mitigator for the trauma that the animal has just experienced, so that they don't actually go on to have the PTSD type struggles that humans have, and so, you know, that's why one of the biggest interventions of our decade is the somatic interventions, where people are really doing body work and are doing things to help them sort of work out and process the trauma out of their bodies, Instead of holding it all in and holding on to it in their nervous system, and as

Dawn Davenport  11:25  
far as being able to determine whether we are being activated by intergenerational trauma or trauma that happened to us, is it important that we know the distinction we as parents are caregivers, how do We know whether, okay, is this something that I'm reacting to because it's something that's happened to me, or is this something that I have brought down through the generations and is causing me to react in this way that, let's assume it's not a positive way to react, right?

Speaker 1  11:54  
Well, I think it's really healing, and it is part of the process of healing the intergenerational trauma is to become a detective about your past and become curious about your ancestors and what they endured. If you can't talk directly with them and get actual stories from their lives, you can look into history and say, Okay, what are some of the big events that my grandparents lived through? Were they in the Holocaust? Were they in a war? Were they involved in some sort of natural disaster? Were they in a pandemic, like all of us you know, which is leaving enormous amounts of trauma and loss and grief that's unresolved on children and adults. So looking back through time, if you don't have access to those actual ancestors, and trying to figure out what they went through, because we are all holding it right now. Most generations before us weren't aware of trauma and how it impacts our brain and our bodies. This is new, I think, for you know, in the last, what, 30 years, maybe, and so we are the first ones who are actually recognizing it and trying to address it and, like, really let go of it, and we're just holding an enormous amount of weight and despair from the past. Now you ask the question like, does it matter if you can recognize that it's intergenerational or not? I think it does matter for me, for example, really was healing for me. I've struggled with my own anxiety and panic attacks throughout my life, and I really couldn't figure out where they were coming from, and that caused me a lot of distress, because I would blame myself, and I would feel very shameful about it, like I was a weak person. There must be something wrong with me. I'm I'm ill, you know, all of these, these labels that we put on ourselves, and the more I learned about my family history. And the more I learned about my early childhood, I was like, oh, wait a minute, I've been through some things, and my ancestors have been through some things. And although I don't come from, you know, like looking at me, you might think I'm, you know, just a white American that doesn't really have any history of oppression. But it turns out that my grandmother was an orphan and was adopted into a Catholic family, but she was actually Jewish, and so her mother died during the Great Depression when my grandmother was in her teens, we think like maybe 13 ish, the middle of the Great Depression, and her father couldn't care for her and her siblings, so they were sent to a girl's home, and so she was an orphan, and so we don't have a lot of information about her family. And when I thought about that level of trauma for her, it all started to make sense why I might have a little anxiety in my system. You know? I was like, Oh, wow, I don't have to carry all the blame for this pain that I'm I'm feeling and and that was very liberating for myself, and I think it can be liberating for others as well. And then you have people from historically oppressed communities, our bipoc communities, LGBTQ, plus communities who have faced oppression. And racism and bigotry and all of the things and that is also passed down. So recognizing what we're holding in the levels of pain and despair that are in our nervous systems, I think, can help us have respect for ourselves instead of shame, and to look back and say, Wow, my lineage endured all that, and I'm still here. You know, I think that gives me power

Dawn Davenport  15:29  
approaching ourselves with grace and compassion, yeah, for our struggles. And I think the good news is that these behavioral changes, and even the epigenetic changes, as I understand it, they can be reversed, and thus it's possible for us to not pass on to the next generation the trauma that our ancestors and ourselves have carried.

Speaker 1  15:53  
Yeah, absolutely. So some of your listeners may have heard of the ACEs study, which is the Adverse Childhood Experiences studied. But if you haven't, I encourage you to look it up. There's lots of good information out there on the ACEs study, and that studied what adversity does to young children and how it plays out over the lifespan. But recently, there's new research on the pces, the positive childhood experiences and how they buffer and mitigate the impacts of early life trauma. And so there's both these adverse experiences we can have, but then there's these protective experiences that we can have, that we can then pass down to our offspring. So it's not all doom and gloom. There is hope, and we do have neuroplasticity in our brains until the end of life, although it does weaken over time, we do have the ability to change and to grow and develop and learn new ways of relating to one another and to learn how to have safe and secure, trusting relationships, but that has to happen most often in relation with safe others. So if you're not able to find safety and you don't have support around you, it's going to be really difficult to overcome this intergenerational trauma, as well as any type of present psychological trauma that's taking place in your life. And

Dawn Davenport  17:17  
so many of us are raising children who have experienced their own trauma, and it's so important for us to look inward and say, What are we bringing to the equation? And that can be our own trauma. Yeah, and what's a fascinating aspect of this discussion is that we could also be bringing to the table traumas that our ancestors have had and their responses, as well as their epigenetic changes. Their epigenetics are influencing how we respond to the children that we are raising, who have their own trauma so but they're the kids, and we can't expect for them to make these changes. It's incumbent upon us, that's our role as their parents and caregivers.

Speaker 1  18:02  
Yeah, and I think it's it's a heavy responsibility, but if you have the knowledge and you have the wherewithal and the support to be able to make these changes in your own behavior, it's unprecedented the the progress that you can make, and of course, not everything can be healed. And then there's people too. As I was preparing for this conversation, I had a talk with a colleague who feels that, you know, putting the weight of historical trauma on an individual to heal, to sort of be the cycle breaker of that trauma, is too much to expect from one person, right? We didn't, we didn't know what we were coming into right as humans, we can't put all the responsibility on the individuals to heal this and break these patterns. We need community support. We need collective care. We need systems change and recognition for the harms and the suffering that we've caused one another. And so it's It can't just be an individual thing that we take on ourselves. I personally believe that we have to do it together.

Dawn Davenport  19:08  
I am such a believer in the power of support, and peer support in particular, well professional support as well, obviously, but peer support can go a long way. Let me interrupt to let you know about a prenatal substance exposure workshop that is being offered by creating a family. You can get more information about it at Bitly slash prenatal dash exposure dash training. We are offering it a couple of times a year, and you can check it out. It is a four and a half hour to three sessions, and we cover different ages, we cover practical tips, we cover explanation. It is a terrific resource. Again, you can get it at Bitly slash prenatal dash exposure, dash training. So now let. Let's move to talking about, how do we heal from this type of trauma? And it seems like the first step is recognizing that this could be part of what's at play, even recognizing that it exists, seems like the very first step.

Speaker 1  20:14  
Yeah, I think we're having a hard time even getting people to realize that they themselves have trauma in their own lifetime, and now we're asking them to acknowledge trauma, you know, from generations past, and it's like, oh, man, this can just seem like an avalanche, right? Just a cascade of trauma that we can't sort of ever get out from under. But the research shows that change can take place in a generation, and that's the hopeful part. And so one of the ways to help recognize it, other than, you know, researching your history and things like that, is to notice what brings up big emotions in you that your children or child does. So say you have a child who has trouble with crying too much. This is a common problem that I had so my daughter, you know, they cry, babies cry, toddlers cry, young children cry. And for me, it was a visceral like lightning bolt of anxiety that would go through me every time she cried. And and I knew that something major was there, right? Like I knew that something beyond what was normal or typical for a mom to feel was kind of happening in me. And so I had to ask myself, What is this hitting on in me? What What need was not met for me as a child, that's bringing out this strong reaction for me, what need was not met for my ancestors, that is coming out in me now and is being expressed in me now. And so one of the ways that I sort of find clarity in the moment when I'm feeling really frustrated with a child, or my, you know, with my own child, is to ask myself, like, why is this behavior bringing out such a strong emotion in me? What's underneath this? Because the child is just being a child. They're doing childlike things, you know, they're frustrating. They're asserting their independence. They're being hyper or unable to settle their nervous systems, and they need our help. And if we are dysregulated and we're all fired up, it's going to be really difficult to help that child to find their way back to equilibrium. And so we need to be aware of sort of what activations are we experiencing from the children in our care? And then how do we find a moment to just breathe and, you know, maybe splash some cold water on our face, or maybe walk into the other room and shut the door for a minute, if it's safe, just so we can kind of get grounded and then say, Okay, this isn't about the child. This is something in me, you know, this something that's hitting a nerve in my past, and then move forward, responding to the child from that place instead of, Oh, my God, this kid is driving me nuts.

Dawn Davenport  22:52  
Well, you know, we often say this kid is pushing my buttons, but I often think, yes, but it probably helps us to recognize which of our buttons are a little raised. Which of our buttons stand out? Which of our buttons are we wearing on our shoulders? So it's really easy to press, yeah, and why are we wearing those buttons in the forefront? Yeah, it's hard to look at ourselves. Because, honestly, it's easier to focus on the kids and say, this kid is, this kid's this kid's a lot, or this kid, you know, hopefully we're not saying this kid's bad, but this is just a rotten kid. We hope we're not doing that, but we can this kid's a lot, and we often do that with kids that we're raising, because they have experienced a lot, and sometimes they do have big behaviors. But how do we respond to those and which ones get under our skin the most? Yes,

Speaker 1  23:39  
exactly. And you know, we're not going to get it right every time. I certainly don't, you know, I still have moments where I can't stay calm, and I, you know, lose my patience. And I think that we put so much pressure on ourselves sometimes to be perfect as caregivers. We're so fearful of hurting or harming our children that we're so tightly wound. You know, it's like, we gotta give ourselves some grace too, that if we were perfect parents, that also wouldn't be great for our child either, because they would have no example of what it means to make mistakes and pick themselves back up again and move forward. So although we want to try and, you know, limit the really harmful stuff. You know, we are going to make mistakes as parents, and they're learning something valuable from that too.

Dawn Davenport  24:26  
Yeah, yeah, that humans make mistakes, and how we repair mistakes is hugely valuable. So another tip would be, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that when we make mistakes, which we're going to do, ask for forgiveness, admit your mistakes, try to repair any damage that you may have caused. And honestly, just acknowledging that this wasn't my finest hour, I was doing the best I could, but it wasn't very good, and I'm sorry.

Speaker 1  24:55  
Oh yeah, that is huge. You took the words right out of my mouth. I. Yeah, you hit it right on the head. Yeah. I mean, again, that was not something that was done in generations past. It was seen as, Oh my gosh, you don't apologize to a child that shows them that you were wrong, and they can't ever think that we do anything wrong. We got to keep our power here. But that is actually not what is best for a child's emotional development. You know, they need to hear apologies. They deserve apologies, and it repairs the relationship, because we're always going to have those ruptures, right? We're always going to have something that goes wrong between us. We're humans. But if we can circle back and say, hey, you know this, I really messed up. I really am not proud of the way I acted yesterday, and I want you to know that I'm sorry. Am going to do better next time, and then making the effort to do better next time, whether it's getting into your own therapy, whether it's, you know, reading and learning different coping skills and different parenting skills to help you improve, but we actually have to not just say the words, but put the effort behind it as well. You

Dawn Davenport  26:06  
talked about positive childhood experiences can providing positive childhood experiences help heal some of the trauma caused intergenerationally?

Speaker 1  26:16  
Yes. So the research shows that, you know, it's not like one for one. It's not like if you have this one trauma and this one protective thing, then they cancel out the any child no longer has trauma, right? It's not like that, black and white. I just like to say that to be clear, so there's no misunderstanding. Good point, yeah. But what the research shows is that even for children with three or more ACEs, when they have three or more protective or positive childhood experiences, there's much more significant less risk for the long term negative mental health outcomes. I'll say that again, because it kind of got choppy. But even if a child has several aces, if they also have several positive childhood experiences, it reduces the risks for negative, long term mental health outcomes.

Dawn Davenport  27:07  
And one of the biggest positives is having one caring adult in their lives. So if nothing else, if you are that one caring adult who is committed to this child and is going to hang in there with this child. That's a huge positive.

Speaker 1  27:25  
Oh, yeah, children need to be claimed, as my friend and colleague Allison Maxon, says. She wrote the book seven core issues and adoption, and she just has a new workbook out too. And she always used that phrase when I was working with her on a on a PowerPoint presentation last year, and she said, you know, children need to be claimed. They need to feel like they belong somewhere, that they have a committed person in their life, even if it's just one person that claims them, they need to know that they belong. And that's a very powerful thing. And in fact, all of the PCs, you can look them up, if you just Google positive childhood experiences, it'll come right up. If you look at them, they all have something in common. And what they have in common is connection. So the more connection, the more support, the more friends, family, neighbors, coaches, teachers, you know, the more people in a child's life that care for them, who are committed and consistently showing up for them, the better the long term outcomes for their mental health.

Dawn Davenport  28:31  
Absolutely. Give us an example of a couple of the positive childhood experiences that we are seeking for our children.

Speaker 1  28:39  
Yeah. So one that I find interesting is at least two people outside the home who are supportive. So adds to the potential long term positive outcomes. Others are belonging in the community. So like having traditions and rituals within the community, whether it's like attending a church service or a synagogue or some type of other religious community event, or whether it's belonging to some other type of group. So that always helps, having someone at home they feel they can tell the truth to, you know, someone that hears them, someone they can turn to with their problems, and a couple of other ones. I'm trying to think off the top of my head what the other ones were, but they're kind of all in that same thread of like,

Dawn Davenport  29:24  
having someone feeling stood by during difficult times.

Unknown Speaker  29:28  
Yes, thank you. I'm

Dawn Davenport  29:29  
just trying to Yeah. I'm naughty. I'm just seven. Yeah, friends, obviously you mentioned that. Yeah, being able to talk about your feelings, both the positive and the negative, with somebody in your family, Yep, yeah, all of those. And I can't help but add in community traditions, tribal traditions, cultural traditions are also just so important for humans in general, but especially for children,

Speaker 1  29:56  
yeah, and we've lost a lot of that, you know, the rituals. And rituals bond people together. They create a sense of structure and things that children can expect and look forward to, so including rituals of any kind, whether it's religious, cultural, even just for fun, you know, something that's in your family that you like to

Dawn Davenport  30:15  
do your family ritual? Yeah, every Tuesday is Taco Tuesday, and we get ice cream that night. Once a month, we have family movie night, and we rotate who chooses the movie things like that. It doesn't have to be particularly grand or expensive. Yes,

Speaker 1  30:33  
exactly. And then another way to sort of help heal for children that have experienced trauma is finding ways to connect them back to their history. If they can't be in relationship with immediate family members for safety reasons or just because of abandonment or death or whatever the reason might be, finding any type of connection to their history, you know, their cultural history, their religious history, their family history, is going to help them feel grounded and move them through the healing process faster if they have these connections. So it's not only about the people, children in foster care and adoptive or kinship homes. You know, they lose their people, they lose their connections, and yes, we want to put as many of those connections around them as we can, but if for some reason, we can't, we can also connect them to their history. So maybe it's finding out something about their family through research. Maybe it's visiting a place that was important to the child or the family. Maybe it's making a certain food or dessert that was really important to the child or their family, you know, so that they can hold on to something of their identity and say, This is where I came from, and these are the type of people I was from, because even if they've learned that their immediate family members can't be trusted, there's somebody in that family line that was good. I believe that, you know, there's goodness in everyone, regardless of what happens. But what I mean is like, just because they may not have had parents that were able to step up and do the right thing, probably because of their own trauma, there's other people and role models to look to within their family tree. So always encourage that as well.

Dawn Davenport  32:19  
Some of the talk now. A lot of the talk now and the professional community is on resiliency. Would some of the things that we encourage, some of what we've already mentioned, but as there are additional ones to help our kids be resilient. Is resiliency or encouraging resiliency? Building resiliency is that another way to heal from intergenerational trauma.

Speaker 1  32:47  
The tricky word, right? It's really popular right now. I have mixed feelings about it myself, but I found a definition from Dr Bruce Perry, who's one of my favorite trauma experts, and I learned a lot from he says, resiliency is formed through moderate and predictable stressors, and so anything that is moderate and predictable now, trauma falls outside of that window of moderate and predictable. Right? Things that are traumatic are usually extreme on the or on the severe side, or they are very unpredictable, very unexpected. Prize, shocking things, right? But things like sports, he uses as an example. So playing a sport is moderate and predictable stress. The child has to sort of put themselves out there, and there's pressure on them to perform, and there's expectations, and there's things to learn and grow from, but it's predictable and that it happens every week at the same time, and they know when practices, and they know when the games are, and that's all scheduled out, and you know it's planned. And so that type of stress is called you stress for most people, and that's a good type of stress that helps fortify us and strengthen us against the adversity in life, but anything that falls out of side of that moderate and predictable type of stress is not building resilience. And so that's why you know, it's it's nuanced. It's not quite straightforward, as people think. And then children aren't necessarily born with resiliency. They have to learn it through these experiences of overcoming and overcoming and overcoming, you know, these moderate stressors. I

Dawn Davenport  34:27  
think some temperaments, I've seen some, I've seen discussion on this, but I've also seen it personally. Some temperaments are just fairly resilient. I mean, I think there is something inborn about some people, they just seem to be able to bounce back, but that's not something that we can control. That is something that is inborn. But others of us, who, perhaps temperamentally, are not as resilient, can also build our resilience. The Well of our resilience May. Be quite as deep, but we can certainly learn to plumb that depth whatever it is.

Speaker 1  35:05  
Yeah. I mean, for me, I think resilience is dependent on these circumstances around the child's life. So if there may be a child who's more resilient, is it because they have more support? Is it because they don't have a history of, you know, any type of trauma? Is it? Because they don't have a lot of trauma in their ancestry, what is it that's leading this child to be more of a dandelion than an orchid? You know, that

Dawn Davenport  35:29  
was a book, by the way of I think it's called dandelion and orchids. I think we've interviewed the author of that book. Great.

Speaker 1  35:37  
Yeah. I like that, because you're right. It does seem like some are, you know, a little more hearty than others. And I think what's happened around the child can make them more resilient or not. You know, has this child battled some sort of relational trauma already? Have they had medical illnesses or emergencies in their young life? You know, what is it that's taken place that's made it harder for this child to cope with everyday stressors on top of, you know, whatever sort of temperament they might have been born with

Dawn Davenport  36:09  
this show, as well as all the resources provided by creating a family probably wouldn't happen without the support of the jockey being family foundation, it's through their support that we have been able to bring you our free courses. There are one hour courses. They are self paced. You take them on your own. They come with a certificate of completion if you need that, and you can get them at Bitly slash JBf. Support, that's B, i, t, dot, l, y slash J B, F, support, and now back to the show. So we've talked about things that one can do which take time recognize that intergenerational trauma is real. Become a detective of your own background, trying to understand what has happened. Focus inward. Why are we so activated by this particular behavior claiming our children, things such as that, but in the heat of the moment when we are being triggered, when our kid is driving us crazy, perhaps that's not exactly the time to say, Well, I wonder if I'm reacting this way because my mother's mother was very distant and never showed any warmth and didn't ever hug her, not probably the most effective use of our time right then, when we really seeing red because of our kids behavior. So any thoughts on what we can do as the stop gap? Okay, I just got to deal with this right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go back and I'll go back and be that detective. I'll go back and do all this, but right now, just help me, because I'm going bananas with this kid. Yeah, any thoughts there? Yeah,

Speaker 1  37:49  
I think a lot of it is preemptive that we have to do right? A lot of the work that we need to do is preventative. So, like, we need to be working on ourselves and our own stuff, so that we don't get to that boiling point so quickly with the child. So it is long term work. There aren't any really quick fixes, especially when it comes to raising children with trauma. But I do think that there are coping strategies in the moment that we can use. You know, one of them being that sort of taking a break and knowing that okay, as long as the child is safe, to step away for a moment and kind of gather ourselves. Cold water can be a very fast way to send some signals of safety to your nervous system. So that might be drinking a glass of ice water, or running your hands under cold water, or even splashing your face with cold water, doing some of those somatic exercises that I talked about earlier. So maybe you know, you take a minute and you do some bilateral stimulation. And if you haven't learned what that is, I encourage you to look that one up too. Maybe we can put some links in the notes and really recognizing that children typically have an arc for their, you know, meltdowns or tantrums or emotional outbursts, trauma responses, whatever we want to call them, that they typically do have sort of a beginning and a middle and an end. And children with trauma will have a longer arc, but it does usually start to settle down, you know, somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. And so part of just knowing that like this is going to end, and having some mantras as you're going through the process. One that I've learned from Dr Becky, if you know who she is, is my child is a good child having a hard time. I am a good parent having a hard time. So like it's just kind of centering yourself, and like we're not battling against each other, like we're both having a hard time and we're going to get through this and reminders of, like, Okay, I just have to let them sort of feel this out. Now, for me, I really struggled with this, especially when my child was younger and would have a lot of meltdowns or tantrums. But I had, I had to give up trying to stop it. You know, it's like, the more we try to stop it, like, the harder it gets. It's and so I had to accept that there was nothing wrong with her crying or getting upset as long as she was safe. And so I stopped trying to stop it. I realized that she really needed to let it out, like some kids have valid rage that they just need to express with these big emotions and the tears and the crying. And so I started getting comfortable with just allowing it, being present, being there and not I'm not saying, like, let them cry it out for hours and hours and hours, but I mean, if they're in a tantrum for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes, it seems like hours and hours and hours, but I would remind myself, like, this will end. I'll stay here. Remind them that she is safe, remind myself that this is going to pass, and kind of really keep my eye on the fact that this isn't the end of the world. This is what children do. They have to express it. And I started to notice that the more I let her cry, instead of trying to soothe, soothe, soothe right away and distract her with things that she would be like much calmer throughout the rest of the day, because she had gotten out all these big emotions. So yes, sometimes kids just have to cry, you know, and we need to be there their soft place to land and to sort of hold all those tears. And so those are some things that have helped me sort of in the moment, to reframe what's going on, and also to try and like, calm my nervous system.

Dawn Davenport  41:23  
So how do we deal with the guilt that we potentially passed on our trauma to our child and now the child you are raising is suffering as a result, and we see this particularly can happen and in families, but we do see this in kinship families, where grandparents in particular, are raising their grandchild, and they realize that some of what they did as parents, sometimes there is no contribution. It's just that their child is struggling very often with substance abuse disorder, and that happens regardless of of what type of parenting you did. But other times, you can say, if you look back, you can recognize that there were things that I did that resulted in my child not being as good a parent as I had hoped that they would be, and now I am raising my grandchild, and this grandchild is suffering as a result. That's a really hard thing. Sometimes it's unfair to dump that on ourselves, but sometimes it is fair. So thoughts on how to deal with that.

Speaker 1  42:27  
Yeah, it's really hard, and there is, I'm sure, a tremendous amount of guilt that comes along with kinship families. I've worked specifically with kinship families. They were about half of my caseload when I was working in homes, tremendous amount of guilt there, and oftentimes an inability even to recognize that they may have caused any harm to their children or overlooked harm that was happening to their child, you know. So I saw that more often, but as we're becoming more sort of knowledgeable about trauma and how it's become more of the conversation just in the last few years because of pandemic. I think people are probably starting to feel the weight of that guilt, and I heard a term recently called presentism. Presentism. Have you heard of this before?

Dawn Davenport  43:12  
I haven't, but I like it. If it's what I think it is, I like it. Go ahead and tell me what

Speaker 1  43:17  
it is. So my understanding, and I don't know a whole lot about it, but presentism is when we sort of take for granted what we know now, and we sort of forget that in the past we didn't know this information, and that wasn't our fault. Yes, you know, it just was the times that we were living in and we were probably surviving in survival mode and didn't even have the bandwidth to learn about mental health or psychology or any of that. And so there's this presentism that can come in between generations, where the generation of today is saying, Well, I'm so hurt by how my parents raised me, and they should have known better, and they should have done the work, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, you're basing that off of what we know today. In 2024 you're not basing that off of what they knew in 1974

Dawn Davenport  44:12  
are the cultural norms that are in 2024 that were not there. The My father was never around. He worked till eight o'clock every night. No, don't mean me personally, but I mean that you could say, Well, my dad was never around. He was a totally absent father, and that may well be the case, but if you talked with the father, the father may have said, Yeah, I wish I had been more around, but back then, when I was doing that, that was what was considered being a good father, yes, was making sure that I could that I would get raises, that I would be promoted, or we moved all the time. Well, yes, we moved all the time because that's what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I was going to get paid more. I was going to so it's taking what the expectations are now and applying them to the past

Speaker 1  44:57  
exactly you nailed it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. And I that really was helpful for me in my own sort of healing. Because I think when we look back, we're all gonna have even my child is gonna look back and wish that I had done things differently, right? I look back and wish my parents had done things differently. I'm sure they look back and wish their parents, but we have to put that lens on first before we look back and say, Wait a minute, what did they know back then? What were the norms back then? What were the stressors back then? What was it like to live back then? We don't really know, because we weren't there.

Dawn Davenport  45:30  
The kinship parents may have been, you know, these grandparents may have been back there. But there's also a certain amount of saying, if you can say, I did the best I could with where I was at in the support I had. That's helpful too, to be able to say that and then sometimes acknowledging that I wasn't the best. But I have grown and I have learned. And yeah, I if I had to do over again, I would do things differently. But this is my do over now. I am raising these children now, this is the do over, so all I can do is do the best I can with these kids. Yes,

Speaker 1  46:07  
exactly, and that is the honest truth. Yeah, no, we can't go back in time, and we can't redo that, but we can make different choices now. And that's that old saying, no better. Do better. You know, from Maya, Maya, who I love, and that's not the whole quote, but you know, when we know better, we do better, and that's our responsibility. So I encourage anyone who is struggling with that not to just leave it with that. You recognize it, but go back and try to repair some of that. You know, it's it's never too late. It's never too late. I don't think if anyone came to me at any age and said, you know, Hey, I didn't do things the best I could have done them 30 years ago. I'm sorry that would have a profound and lasting effect on me. So, you know, maybe where you can, if possible, try to make those conversations and those repairs happen.

Dawn Davenport  47:03  
Yeah. Also know you're not alone, because there is no single parent, none that hasn't made mistakes. It's just part of being human. It's part of raising children, you know, so you aren't alone in having made mistakes. And maybe that will, that will help. I

Speaker 1  47:21  
think that's where the peer support can be really helpful for kinship families. I've had the pleasure of working with several different support groups for kinship families, and they find a lot of help from each other, and just that, like me too, feeling of like, Yes, I I've been in your shoes too, and I feel how you felt, and maybe here's some things that helped me, or just to know you're not alone, is incredibly powerful. Let

Dawn Davenport  47:48  
me throw out that creating a family, we have some in person kinship support groups, where we also have an online kinship support group. So if you are looking for support, peer support, please reach out to us at info, at creating a family.org. Thank you so much Beth Tyson for being with us today to talk about intergenerational trauma. In addition to being a consultant for childhood trauma, Beth is also the author of two children's books for grandfamilies or for kinship caregivers. One is a grand family for Sullivan, and the second one is Sullivan. Goes to see mama, ask your independent bookstore to buy them. Or, of course, you can buy them on Amazon. We will be listing them on our suggested Books page so you can find them there at creating a family.org hovering over the word kinship and clicking on suggested books, and you can find them there. Thank you so much. Beth,

Speaker 1  48:47  
thank you. It's been a pleasure to share this time with you, and I hope it was helpful for your audience. You

Transcribed by https://otter.ai