"My-Linh Le grew up watching her parents explode over tiny mistakes. When she forgot her backpack in first grade, her mother kicked it across the room so hard it hit the wall. When her sister messed up dinner, her father threw dishes. The house stayed filled with unpredictable rage that left Le awake at night, worried about what she might do wrong the next day."
"As a child, Le thought all Vietnamese families acted this way. But years later, during a phone call with her boyfriend, when he didn't do something she expected, rage "just suddenly came out of nowhere". She wanted to throw the phone across the room. "It was this really depressing moment of realizing that I'm just like my mother," she said."
"Her parents had experienced profound losses. Her father's first wife and son had drowned when their boat sank trying to reach America. Her mother had left a daughter behind in Vietnam, too afraid that the girl's kicking and screaming would mean their escape would be discovered. These losses - never discussed, barely acknowledged - had shaped a family's emotional landscape and passed their effects to the next generation."
Trauma experienced by parents can affect children who never directly experienced the original events. Early exposure to unpredictable parental rage shapes children's emotional responses, sleep, and behavior. Unprocessed losses and secrets contribute to a family's emotional landscape and can lead descendants to reenact similar reactions. Parental trauma can permanently alter children's stress-response systems, producing heightened anger or anxiety in unrelated situations. Both complete silence about traumatic events and relentless focus on them can harm the next generation. Intergenerational effects can appear unexpectedly, influencing relationships, behavior, and physiology across multiple generations.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]