Survivors' Children

January 2014

Survivors’ children by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns,. PhD

      A man can’t sleep at night. He’s tired all day, sometimes dropping asleep in conversation, but when night comes he can’t lie down and relax. He’s all wound up. I knew his mother was German-born and his father was English. That’s all.  Some time later I met them both and learnt that his mother was Jewish and her father took the family to Crimea for safety, but not before three bombs landed in their house and didn’t go off. The sleepless man’s father, I discovered, had been sent alone to Australia before the rest of the family followed. Since he was still a child, he was taken to a children’s home in a city here. There he waited three years before his family came to collect him. Both mother and father of the sleepless man were children experiencing huge upheavals: one knowing of bombs not exploding and an escape to the Crimea, the other wrenched from family and sent to an children’s home in a foreign country, wondering, wondering when he would safe with his family again. 

      What have his parents’ experience got to do with the sleepless man? Before I respond to that, I’ll present another couple of  scenarios.

      A little girl is in boarding school in Russia. She and all the people around her are starving. Yes, her mind is fed with languages (she knew five), art, dance, theatre, science, discovery. Her stomach gnaws at her like the rat that chews at her shoes beside her bed. She is rescued by her step-mother and sent to Australia with her brother.  She meets and marries two men. One beats her, and she escapes from him. The other is charming, suave, a bit remote, but very intelligent. They have children. The youngest,  a girl, doesn’t want to eat, yet she feels always hungry. The daughter develops an eating disorder that she recovers from eventually, but the issue of food always looms large for her. 

      Some people dream the fears of their parents and grandparents. When I was a child a recurring dream was of a Zeppelin airship flying over the house.  My father would not have seen these, but he had uncles who died in the trenches in World War I when the German airship, the Zeppelin was around. I guess my father was very frightened of these when he was a child, a fear I picked up somehow or other.

     Intergenerational trauma is very real. The experiences of therapists and research neurobiologists are showing the way in which many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents and other relatives, at an almost cellular level. 

      A 2010  a Time magazine article describes how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms in second-generation survivors are being found in their behaviour and also their blood. Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol are found in the children of survivors, and the children’s children. Until recently, it was assumed that these symptoms were essentially learned. The idea was that if you grow up with parents who can’t sleep, suffer mood swings, hypervigilance, irritability and jumpiness (symptoms of PTSD) you’re likely to become stressed and hypervigilant yourself. There is more to it, though. Neurobiological research using the study of epigenetics, where environmental factors are seen to change genes in ways that can be passed to the next generation, is identifying actual changes to genetic material among subjects whose parents were traumatized previously.

      Most studies of survivors’ children have been done with the children of Holocaust survivors, and their children’s children. The uncertainty of life, the observation of death and extreme cruelty, and sometimes the disbelief that the survivors lived when the rest of their families died, deeply affected them, both positively and negatively. Positively, by instilling into their children a deep appreciation of life and an urgency to live that life meaningfully and fully. Negatively, by, as I’ve noted, creating a hypervigilance, a jumpiness, an irritability, and sleep disorders.

      How much parents tell their children of their own trauma is reflected in how the children experience that relationship they have with their parents. If the background story is not told, or surrounded by partial mystery, the child may feel drained and disconnected from their parents. If the story overflows with too much traumatic information, then the child is overwhelmed. These feelings of disconnection or overwhelm may extend into the way the child welcomes the rest of the world.

       Either way, a child whose family background story includes extreme trauma may experience some difficulty in their development, including problems at a social level. These may manifest in later life as sleep disorders, habitual smoking, under or over eating, alcoholism, and the like. At the same time, the child may gain some very essential coping skills. It really depends on how much support is given to the survivors from family, friends, and counsellors. Intergenerational transmission of trauma can be averted through the critical intervention of  counselling and clinical hypnotherapy. As a mentor said to me once, we always have a chance to heal ourselves and our families. Healing ourselves, heals our families.