Intergenerational Trauma Work

A circle for women doing the long work of intergenerational trauma. Therapy work, family-of-origin work, and the slow practice of not passing forward what was passed down. This is not a quick process. The members in this room are at many different points in it, and we hold each other across the range.

Membership includes women just starting in therapy and women twenty years into a healing practice. Women whose trauma is explicitly named in their family history (slavery, colonization, displacement, war, refugee experience). Women whose trauma is in more recent family events (a parent's mental illness, a grandparent's untreated alcoholism, the unspoken loss of a sibling). Women whose trauma is structural (housing instability across generations, financial precarity across generations, the incarceration of family members). Women whose trauma is direct (childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence in a prior relationship, community violence). Most of us are in some combination.

What we share. The therapy work. The modalities that have helped members: cognitive behavioral therapy for the early skill-building, EMDR for trauma processing, somatic experiencing for the body-level work, internal family systems for the parts work, dialectical behavior therapy for the emotional-regulation skills, narrative therapy for the meaning-making across generations. We do not prescribe; we share what has worked for whom and at what stage.

The therapist search. The work of finding clinicians who understand cultural context — not as a checkbox but as a competence. The Black women therapists in members' regions. The non-Black therapists who have done the work to serve Black women well. The directories and search tools members have used. The financial planning around therapy costs. The insurance fights.

The medication conversation. The decision to start. The psychiatrists who have been good and the ones who have not. The medications that have helped and the side effects that did not. The cultural pressure (from family, from community, from ourselves) against medication and the slow work of holding our own ground.

The family-of-origin work. The parents who did the best they could with what they had and the parents whose worst was real and damaging. The siblings who are healing alongside us, the siblings who are not, and the differential paths of recovery in a single family. The estrangement decisions — full estrangement, low-contact, structured-contact. The reconciliation work, where it has been possible. The decisions about funerals when there has been long estrangement.

The intergenerational reading. Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands and the racialized somatic-trauma framework. Joy DeGruy's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Mark Epstein's psychoanalytic writing on trauma. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. The contemporary writing from Black women therapists and psychologists on family-of-origin trauma. We read carefully and we discuss what we are reading.

The cultural specifics. The way trauma narratives have been received in our families. The cultural pressure to keep family matters inside the family. The cultural pressure to honor elders regardless of their behavior toward us. The slow theological work for members whose family-of-origin trauma includes church or mosque settings. The decisions about what to tell extended family about our therapy and what to keep private.

The parenting work. The way we have noticed our own patterns showing up in our parenting, and the work of catching ourselves. The decisions about how much to tell our children about our own childhoods, and at what ages. The work of letting our children have a different experience than we had, without overcorrecting into anxious parenting that creates its own problems.

The relationship work. The way our trauma has shown up in romantic partnerships. The partners who have done the work alongside us. The relationships that have ended because the trauma response was not survivable for either of us. The relationships that have endured. The slow work of intimate trust-building when trust was not modeled to us in childhood.

The body work. The chronic-health implications of long-term stress dysregulation. The somatic practices members have incorporated. The yoga, dance, martial arts, hiking, swimming, and movement practices that have helped. The bodywork — massage, acupuncture, craniosacral — that some members have used. The honest acknowledgement that body practices are useful and not sufficient and that the talk work and the medical work and the community work all run alongside.

Cadence: a slower forum. Threads stay open and unhurried. A weekly check-in for members who want it. A monthly long-form thread on one theme. A monthly virtual circle. Optional smaller pods of three or four members who hold each other through more active phases. Quarterly virtual sessions with guest clinicians on specific topics.

Rules. Confidentiality, strictly. We do not share each other's family-of-origin material outside the circle. We do not diagnose each other. We do not advise each other in ways that substitute for clinical care. We move at our own pace. We skip the meetings we cannot attend.

What we are not: a substitute for therapy. A crisis-response service. A diagnostic forum.

What we are: a long-arc community for the slow work of intergenerational trauma. We pace ourselves. We honor where each member is in the work. We do not push each other faster than we are ready. We hold each other for as long as it takes.