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As we are currently going through a Collective War Trauma it is important to raise our awareness of the intergenerational effects of collective war traumas in our family history and how to set ourselves free of these patterns of learned survival strategies.  Every family carries the injustices of what previous family members experienced.

Collective Trauma refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event or events that affect an entire society.  Collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors through the learned lessons or scripts derived from the event.  It is an intergenerational phenomenon.  Collective trauma undermines a fundamental sense of security with long standing effects on 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th generations and promotes heightened vigilance to new threats.

What is important to name at the beginning is that in collective traumas such as war, enforced emigration, famines etc. there are no divisions between victims and perpetrators.  There is always a collective sense of unresolved grief and a shared inability to speak of the unspeakable as it is too terrible to utter aloud.

So when we recognise that the collective past our history, is alive in the present, we also recognise the need to remember our past.  As George Santanya writes “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Whether individual or collective trauma, it fragments and fractures our ability to narrate it.  It silences us and creates denial and forgetting and unintegrated experience.

Remembering the collective traumas that have shaped our Family History, such as War, Immigration, Famine means we can begin to transcend and heal them by speaking and verbalising them.  In turn it make us more aware and develop more self-compassion towards our own psychological responses and brings healing to the whole family system.