Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 3
a background of violence, you are sometimes unable to give your growing child what he
needs. You unintentionally involve your child in what you yourself have experienced.
In this way a second-generation problem can occur (Foundation Centrum ’45, 2003:1).
The clinicians at the centre offer many healing modalities to help people who have experienced trauma;
among them, insight-giving psycho-therapy, behavioural therapy, group therapy, relationship and family
therapy (Foundation Centrum ’45, 2003). All these modalities have been proven effective in helping
people who experience learned helplessness and possess an external locus of control. These healing
modalities can successfully be re-worked to deal with socially transmitted, albeit muted, memories of
trauma and despair. They can successfully be adapted to heal communities and their members, as long
as the healers remember to address the whole spectrum of conditions associated with the responses to
trauma.
In designing any program intended to help people deconstruct the terrible legacy of the past, one must
pay close attention to the dialectical interplay between what happened to people and how they (non-)
interpret it. Together, these two factors will determine the parameters of Aboriginal people’s freedom,
resilience and life span development in the present, and in the days and years to come. Praxis is thus a
matter of negotiating a path between the past and the future. For Aboriginal people, this path is now.
The ultimate goal of any healing modality, to be employed in these cases, is to restructure the past and
to reconnect people to the present, to empower, to incorporate and, in the end, to help people recover
from fear and despair. As Herman says:
[T]he survivor who has accomplished her recovery faces life with few illusions but often
with gratitude. Her view of life may be tragic, but for that very reason she has learned
to cherish laughter. She has a clear sense of what is important and what is not. Having
encountered evil, she knows how to cling to what is good. Having encountered the fear
of death, she knows how to celebrate life (1997:213).
The only way to address the healing needs of Aboriginal people is to open culturally-appropriate avenues
for producing change in existing memory structures and belief systems that will allow Aboriginal people
to regain their collective strength. Recently, a lot of work has been done in the field of psychological
study called human strength. According to Aspinwall and Staudinger (2003), to understand the microgenesis
and ontogenesis of human strength, one must take under consideration the situations and
experiences that promote or reduce it.
This study looked at how the situations and experiences that shaped Aboriginal people’s lives were
inter-connected and how they worked against the development of Indigenous people’s communal and
individual strength. Many operational definitions were used, such as areas of impact, stages of
colonization, etc. These are ways of punctuating the Aboriginal historical reality in order to find and
define circular causality. Other definitions could be used to convey the same message; such as, in order
to initiate the process of re-telling the story of Indigenous historic trauma with the intent to decolonize
the Aboriginal story of loss and absence, one must analyze the interactive effects of the historical and
the cultural, at the same time using multiple vantage points for assessing change. Recent research, for
example, has demonstrated that the advent of losses often promotes growth or that some growth may
only be possible because of losses (Baltes, Lindenberg and Staudinger, 1998). It is certainly true that, as
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