Culture and Trauma Flashcards
Historical Trauma
Refers to a complex and collective trauma experienced over time and across generations by a group of people who share an identity, affiliation, or circumstance
Three elements to Historical Trauma
▪ A “trauma” or wounding
▪ The trauma is shared by a group of people
▪ Trauma spans multiple generations
Effects of Historical Trauma
▪ Groups who have histories of trauma are more vulnerable to diminished psychological health in later generations
▪ Historically experienced traumas may be reflected in heritable biological and epigenetic mechanisms of health risk and
illness
Post-traumatic slave syndrome
“a condition that exists when a population (such as African Americans) has
experienced multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery and continue to experience oppression and institutionalized racism today
Holocaust Survivor Effects
▪ Children of holocaust survivors showed a preponderance of insecure-ambivalent attachment and predisposition to anxiety-related disorders in later generations
▪ A meta-analysis showed that 2nd and 3rd generation offspring of Holocaust survivors displayed remarkable resilience and heightened post-traumatic stress symptom
Canadian First Nation Indigenous People Effects
Boarding schools & reservations→ stripped culture→ exposure to sexual violence, drugs, child welfare, trauma, and depressive symptoms ↑↑↑
Native American Effects
Thinking about losses → extreme distress, alcohol abuse, and source of stressors
Effects of Colonization on Native Americans
▪ Disrupted culture-based protective
factors, community systems, and parenting knowledge, thus leading to increased psychosocial risk, inadequate parenting, and health disparities in this population
▪ Government policies toward the Lakota people disrupted culture-based grieving processes, thus resulting in mass unresolved grief
Trauma as Narrative Representation
Historical trauma functions as a contemporary narrative with personal and public representations in the present
Allan Young demonstrated that psychological trauma relies on two levels of narrative.
▪ 1) an internal logic describing a cause-effect relationship between a past event and present
symptoms
▪ 2) memory as a constructed representation of a traumatic event
Thus, historical trauma operates through a layering of narrative turns.
▪ Trauma as a concept represented in stories
▪ History as socially endorsed memory
▪ An internal logic linking history to present suffering or resilienc
What are Narratives?
▪ Narratives are stories that string together events to construct meaning and establish
discourse
▪ Through shaping experience into coherent stories, narratives are the primary means by which people convey contemporary interpretations and aspirations
What are Personal Narratives?
They are stories told by an individual and are unique to that person, such as a personal account of surviving a car accident
What are Public Narratives?
▪They are expressed within public discourse.
▪indicative of intersubjective understanding and are common among a group of people.
▪Thus, they are the stories that shape collective memory through reliance on
narrative elements such as characters, actions, places, and time
What are Historical Narratives?
▪ History is, in part, collective memory, and like memory, is a highly malleable,
reconstructive process
▪ Memories of past traumatic events are constructed within social and cultural
contexts
▪ Dominant cultures often silence or diminish the value (and expression) of other
cultural groups’ narratives
▪ A narrative conceptualization does not deny the veracity of past traumatic event
The point of historical public narratives are
Conceptualizing historical trauma as public
narrative, we are focusing on narrative accounts that link past experiences of traumatization by a group or community to health outcomes over time
Example of historical loss being a contemporary stressor
For example, whereas the fact of boarding schools’ existence in the history of Native Americans is undisputed, a contemporary narrative explains that the forced removal of children from their families caused the loss of traditional parenting practices among many communities and families, thereby harming the parenting ability of subsequent generations, which partially explains behavioral health
disparities
