Passing the Flame: Narrative Trajectories of Trauma

Trauma is ubiquitous and central to the human condition. Trauma experiences and their effects have a way of shadowing sufferers and arriving uninvited in the lives of one’s descendants. The popular awareness of intergenerational and historical trauma has grown over the past two decades. Scholars have also expanded our understanding. The growing recognition of these types of trauma results in part from what Ian Hacking called “looping effects”—a feedback process where the more popular certain categories become the more likely people will use them to frame their dysphoria and experiences, and generate narratives that confirm them. The increasing currency of intergenerational and historical trauma nar-

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ratives and their power as explanatory models make them important to think with.

Intergenerational trauma involves transmitting the burdens and effects of a traumatic experience from one generation to the next. How this happens is complex. It encompasses, in part, conveying narratives, memories, moral imperatives, relational models, and embodied modes of being-in-the-world to one’s descendants. Historical trauma is a broader concept that includes intergenerational transmission. It involves transmitting shared traumatic experiences resulting from histories of racism, genocide, persecution, dispossession, colonialism, and other collective losses and suffering. People’s recollections and responses to these events are passed to future generations. Additionally, the consequences of these unjust social and political structures continue to impinge on people’s lives—those affected by historical trauma often live in marginalized contexts, conditions of dispossession, and within forms of structural violence, which perpetuate the cycle. Historical events may also, as Valmık Volkan observes, become chosen traumas filled with symbolic meanings and narrative significance.

Intergenerational trauma often surfaces in my scholarship. As a child and family mental health counselor, it was impossible to not see intergenerational echoes in my clients. My first ethnographic research project identified historical trauma as a dominant motif in the intergenerational transmission of identity in a Native American family. The narrative and explanatory structure that intergenerational trauma offers recently provided a vantage into how my father’s experiences in the Vietnam War might have shaped my own idiosyncrasies. Culture and historical events, macro and personal in scale, shape our psyches in ways we might take for granted or not recognize.

The transmission of trauma is overdetermined. Its elusive, intersecting qualities limit empirical investigation into causation and its mechanisms of communication. Further research challenges arise when we see how each trauma can come with unique forms of loss, social and political-economic contexts, and cultural models that shape people’s emotional expression, memory, and response. These challenges do not trouble me; each is an important domain for further study and insight. I want to emphasize intergenerational trauma’s role as a public narrative. What can we learn by studying trauma narratives and their looping effects? Why do we probe our ancestors’ stories—both written and embodied—to explain our con-

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temporary varieties of dysphoria? Viewing these traumas through a narrative lens foregrounds their dynamic, cultural, and intersubjective elements.

Narratives give meaning to illness and suffering, reorienting the self. When people construct narratives, it helps them answer existential questions central to their experiences, such as why me, why now. The process of narrativization involves positioning the suffering in history. People link contemporary stressors to past events. This establishes a historical connection and offers a sense of continuity and meaning. People also use narratives of intergenerational trauma to index current pain and injustice, using it as an “idiom of distress.” Mark Nichter described how idioms of distress are a culturally resonant and convenient means of experiencing and communicating complex meanings and stressors, such as powerlessness and loss, to others (“Idioms of Distress Revisited,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 34, 2010).

My latest research examines the narratives and the meaningful life events of persons with younger onset dementia and their caregivers. In their stories, people often drew on trauma—their own and family experiences—to explain why they have dementia. A pattern emerged. People used trauma to not only explain their condition, such as its origins, but they also used it to organize and emplot their narratives. In these and other accounts, people use trauma (their own or their ancestors) as a stitch or quilting point to structure or hold the narrative together and stabilize fluctuations of meaning. Jacques Lacan described these as points de capiton (a “quilting” or “anchoring point”).

Trauma narratives are also malleable. My research on the transmission of historical trauma in a Native American family shows how narratives of past suffering and loss are a tool to emplot contemporary family members’ experiences of trauma in a resilient frame. Family members are instructed to listen to, and derive strength from, others’ contemporary and historical traumas because such stories teach one how to be strong and persevere in the face of enmity. Here historical trauma did not always result in pathology. They emplotted their experiences from a strength-based perspective, and their narration of events in relation to their ancestors’ traumas compressed time and enabled individuals to identify with, and locate themselves within, their rich historical and cultural system (“Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience,” Transcultural Psychiatry, 45 [3], 2008).

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Approaching intergenerational and historical trauma from a narrative perspective helps us frame the events and representations at hand. Attention to narratives, idioms of distress, and looping effects enable us to draw on psychocultural and psychohistorical intersections, facilitating a reorientation of how we think about context and agency. This perspective moves beyond causal variables to consider how the vicissitudes of trauma and its narrative emplotment shape our life-worlds. We write our lives with our history, and our history, culture, and the narratives we inhabit inevitably write us.

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