Historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, institutionalized trauma (such as white-body supremacy, gender discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, etc.), and personal trauma (including any trauma we inherit from our families genetically, or through the way they treat us, or both) often interact. As these traumas compound each other, or as each new or recent traumatic experience triggers the energy of older experiences, they can create ever-increasing damage to human lives and human bodies.
Figure 1. How Trauma Compounds
(Based partly on a figure used in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.)
So far, we’ve looked at trauma that happens to us. But there are other kinds of trauma that are even more common: trauma from watching or experiencing someone else get traumatized. Witnesses to murder, rape, torture, and other acts of physical violence often have their own trauma responses. They may help the victim, or fight the perpetrator, or flee the scene, or freeze in place. Someone who witnesses a flood, a fire, a terrorist attack, an armed robbery, or someone’s public humiliation may respond similarly. These types of trauma are called secondary trauma or vicarious trauma. Almost every human being holds some of this trauma in his or her body.
A particularly poisonous form of secondary trauma involves not only witnessing the harming of another human being, but inflicting that harm. Often, the perpetrator tries to avoid this trauma by dissociating (a form of flight) during the event, and then, immediately afterward, overriding any impulse to process the trauma or discharge its energy from his or her body. Such attempts to flee from trauma only deepen it—and create an extreme form of dirty pain. Because the perpetrator knows he or she has committed a moral transgression, his or her actions also create profound shame. Therapists call this a moral injury.
In their work, many police officers experience moral injury or have witnessed it in their coworkers. Unfortunately, very few manage to metabolize this shame and trauma; few are even aware of it, let alone of what they need to do to metabolize it; and still fewer receive encouragement or support from their coworkers, superiors, or organizational structures.
What do you think happens when a police officer who recently experienced a moral injury returns to duty with the unhealed trauma still stuck in his or her body? How might this affect his or her job performance? His or her family? His or her health? The people in the community or neighborhood he or she serves?
It’s easy to see how white-body supremacy has created soul wounds for many millions of African American bodies over the past three centuries. It’s less obvious what the inflicting of that trauma has done to white bodies.
When I lead workshops on trauma for people in service professions, I often show them a clip from 12 Years a Slave, the film based on the memoir of Solomon Northrup, a free African American from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into enslavement in 1853. In the clip, we see slave trader Theophilus Freeman (played by Paul Giamatti) coldly check the health, strength, and muscle tone of his human merchandise. As buyers come by to make purchases, Freeman orders one young African man to run and jump in place for a potential customer. Freeman tells the customer, “You see how fit the boy is. Like ripe fruit. He will grow into a fine beast.”
In the same scene, Eliza, a young Black mother, pleads with Freeman to have mercy and not separate her from her daughter. William Ford, a white customer and plantation owner, is moved by her pleas. He asks Freeman, “For God’s sake, are you not sentimental in the least?” Freeman ignores them both, breaks up the family, and says to Ford, “My sentimentality stretches the length of a coin.”
Also in that scene, Freeman commands Northrup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) to stand and approach him. When Northrup doesn’t respond, Freeman slaps him hard—and loudly—across the face. The clip ends here.
At that point I turn to my audience and say, “Now I want to ask you a few questions.” I pause, letting the participants imagine what I am about to ask. Then I say, “What do you think is going on inside the slave trader’s body? Do you think he experiences settling, relaxation, and resilience? Or do you think he experiences constriction and discomfort?”
I continue, “And what do you think is happening in the bodies of the other white folks in the room? Do you think they’re relaxed and settled? What do you imagine a white body has to do in order to be settled in that situation? What got passed down to those white bodies for them to tolerate that level of cultural brutality? What happened to those bodies in the past that causes them to not react when they watch other people being traumatized? Where in their bodies do you think some of these white people might be experiencing constriction?”
After another pause, “Why is William Ford the only person who speaks up on behalf of any of the Black bodies? What do you think is stopping the white bodies from doing something to help?”
Finally, “What are you experiencing right now in your body?”
Now ask yourself this same question. Notice what your own body wants to do. Take notice of whatever sensations and thoughts arise. Notice if you want to fight, or run, or freeze in place. Just notice.
Now I’d like you to explore how intergenerational trauma may have affected your life and body. You can do this by reflecting briefly on four events in the lives of your ancestors.
Find a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone and undistracted for at least fifteen minutes. Now consider these questions.
1. When did your ancestors settle in America?24 Did they come here voluntarily, or were they refugees, servants, or enslaved people? Were they fleeing brutality, oppression, plague, war, or poverty? Did they come here in search of a better life? How old were they? How healthy were they? Was there a community or a group of relatives here to welcome and assist them?
Did your ancestors speak English when they got here? What other language or languages did they speak? What possessions and skills did they bring with them? To the best of your knowledge, were they hopeful or desperate? Prosperous or poor?
As far as you know, did any of your ancestors ever talk about the Native people who arrived on this continent many centuries earlier? If so, what did they say?
If you are an immigrant to America yourself, please respond to this question by reflecting on your own experience.
2. What traumatic events directly affected your mother? Your father? How did each event affect them at the time? How did it affect the choices they made later? How did it affect the way they raised you?
3. What traumatic events directly affected your grandparents? How did each event affect them at the time? How did it affect the choices they made later? How did it affect the way they raised your father or mother?
4. When your mother was pregnant with you, was the pregnancy easy or difficult for her? Was she generally healthy or ill? Happy or unhappy? Hopeful or unhopeful? What challenges did she face during her pregnancy? What else was going on for her and the family?
Besides trauma, there is something else human beings routinely
