Can Therapy Help Heal Generational Trauma
Mental Health
I write this piece for my fellow Armenians, but it is also for anyone with generational trauma from genocide or ethnic cleansing.
As I write this, it is April 24, the 110th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide. On this day in 1915, the Turkish government arrested over 200 Armenian leaders. One of them was a relative. Most of the 200 were murdered, including my relative. More murders of Armenian men occurred. Within weeks, deportations of women and children to the Syrian desert started. By 1923, three out of four of all Western Armenians (present-day Eastern Turkey) lost their lives and lands.
I used to think that the trauma passed on to me as a descendant of Armenian genocide victims and survivors couldn’t be healed because the perpetrating country continues denying it happened. Last night, I had an EMDR session (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) about generational trauma. I experienced intense despair and sadness midway through the session. The thought, “All is lost,” circled in my mind.
I knew the despair and sense of loss came from my great-grandparents. From the age of 10, I felt sadness about the genocide. However, I didn’t realize just how much despair and loss I inherited. The good news is that the despair that came up was gone by the end of the session. The sense of loss and sadness is still there. My ancestors lost most of their families and their homeland.
I’m not naive. I know that there is still much more despair, but I can deal with it in therapy. There may always be some sadness, and I will always carry the loss. What’s different now is that I can regulate my emotions. I am no longer dysregulated. When sadness and loss come up, I can sit with them. I am not terrified of those feelings any longer.
Today is a Mack truck reminder of the loss we carry as Armenians. We can’t take away the loss. However, we can relieve the pain that holds me down. We have all learned to live with the pain. It feels normal because it is our normal. We can process it and let it go through the hard work of trauma recovery. And make no mistake, genocide is a trauma giant.
Once we process the pain, we can learn to sit with the grief when it arises. That gets complicated when we are also childhood trauma survivors. Our pain and the pain passed down to us swirl together. That is why I highly recommend seeing a therapist trained in trauma modalities like EMDR for your trauma and generational trauma. We can’t heal this alone.
Through trauma recovery, we can shift from reactionaries to impassioned activists. When we face triggers, we can sit with the emotions instead of letting them spew out of us. The hard truth is that spewing our emotions usually means we hurt ourselves and others. It’s ineffective.
Those of us who heal from generational trauma caused by genocide or ethnic cleansing are like ripples in a pond. As we heal, we cause the water to shift. We can’t erase the past, but we can heal from its pain.
Will you shift the water?
