Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
contain some kind of secondary posttraumatic stress disorder, suggesting that since
many Holocaust survivors suffer from PTSD, their offspring will also suffer from such
a syndrome (Baranowsky, et al, 1998) … According to clinical experience and empirical
research, this clinical population, compared to other people with emotional problems,
seems to have specific disturbances more or less focused on difficulties in coping with
stress and a higher vulnerability to PTSD (2000:4-5).
Researchers use different terms to explain the process of the transmission of traumatic memories. Miller,
Stiff and Ellis (1988) call it emotional contagion. Dixon (1991) talks about peripheral victims. McCaan
and Pearlman (1990) discuss vicarious traumatization and Danieli (1982) describes trans-generational
effects of trauma. Other related concepts include secondary survivor effect, the ripple effect and trauma
infection (Remer and Elliot, 1988). Other researchers also make a distinction between primary and
secondary traumatic stress (Bolin, 1985).
According to Figley and Kleber, secondary traumatic stress refers to the behaviours and emotions resulting
from the knowledge of a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other of the actual victim of
the trauma: “For people who are in some way close to a victim, the exposure to this knowledge may also
be a confrontation with powerlessness and disruption … It is the stress resulting from hearing about the
event and/or from helping or attempting to help a traumatized or suffering person” (Figley and Kleber,
1995:78). In the understanding of this process, it is not necessary for a person to witness the trauma, as
it is enough to know about it. As mentioned before, Aboriginal cultures are orally-based. Once the
themes of trauma and suffering entered the cultural narrative and social story-telling, they simply stayed
there as cognitive categories or, as Vecsey calls them, “mythemes” that “point repeatedly to the problem
areas experienced by people, the situations where individuals and cultures feel uncertainty, ambiguity,
tension, and fear” (Vecsey, 1988:17).
To explain how traumatic memories of the past entered the present of the Aboriginal people of today,
an integrative view is proposed, similar to the one developed by Kellermann (2000), which stresses the
interplay among different levels of transgenerational transmission, including physical, cultural, social
and psychological factors, at the same time recognizing the fact that trauma is contagious. Kellermann
grounds his therapeutic work in recent (for some, very controversial) genetic research, which suggests
that parental traumatization may be transmitted in the same way as some hereditary diseases are passed
on from one generation to another. According to Kellermann’s (2000) recent research, genetic memory
codes of a traumatized parent may thus be transmitted to the child through electro-chemical processes
in the brain. The neural organization of various memory systems in the parent would lead to a similar
organization and constitution in the child. Since psychic trauma is assumed to have long-term effects
on the neuro-chemical responses to stress in traumatized parents (van der Kolk, et. al., 1996), it may
also lead to the same enduring characterological deficiencies and to a kind of biological vulnerability in
the child. Children of Holocaust survivors, who are born to severely traumatized Holocaust survivor
parents, would then be predisposed to PTSD (Kellermann, 2000).
Although the theory of a genetic memory code is still a contentious one and is included in this study as
food for thought, evidence for genetic transmission of trauma can also be found in reputable contemporary
physiological research. Yehuda and others (2000) found that low cortisol levels were significantly
associated with both PTSD in parents and lifetime PTSD in their offspring; whereas, having a current
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