Carrying Trauma That Is Not My Own
One of the common misconceptions about marriage and family therapists is that we only treat couples and families. While we do have training in working with couples and families and hundreds of clinical hours required to apply for licensure as LMFT’s, the title is really more about our conceptualization of cases than the number of people in the room.
One of the things that most drew me to this sector of the profession was the emphasis on systems vs individual pathology. The idea is that each individual person has a complex internal system within themselves; we hold all kinds of beliefs, emotions, memories, sensations for our life experiences. We then were influenced by our family system which is in context of a larger social system including influences from race, public policy, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigration status, as well as the stressors and triumphs of our ancestors. What I appreciate about this approach to therapy is that it is not about pathologizing the individual but rather about understanding how their symptoms make so much sense in the context of their story.
Over the last several decades there has been a growing body of research indicating the impact of trauma on brain development. Studies on epigenetics also help us understand how trauma in one generation leaves an imprint on the next generation even if those stories were never told. Dr. Atlas describes in her book “Emotional Inheritance” that a study done by Dr. Yehunda at Mount Sinai Hospital found descendants of individuals who survived atrocities such as war, being enslaved, the Holocaust or exposure to significant trauma had a higher likelihood of developing PTSD and other anxiety disorders when exposed to trauma themselves compared to peers who did not have such a family legacy.
Trauma lives in our bodies and affects development in ways that are not always obvious to us. It can be helpful to get curious about our experiences and the experience of people we love from a place of compassion vs shame and learn to honor and release the legacy of those that came before us.
