After working to prevent our inherited trauma from migrating down into the next generation, we see that our children will be suffering from a new event, one that will be remembered – consciously and on the cellular level – long after our own nightmares have ceased.On January 6, 2021, I held my not-yet-one year old daughter to my chest, arms securely wrapped around her, as I carried her from the parking lot to the door of our home in Washington, D.C.īehind us, by maybe 10 feet, were a group of men: one held a “Come Get ‘Em” flag with a picture of a gun on it that waved limply in the wind, one wore a gas mask and a black bandana over his hair, one wore a “Make America Great Again” hat on his head while his body was clad in camouflage- and another wore a “6 Million Wasn’t Enough” t-shirt and a black and yellow face mask. So people like me are confronting another one of our worst fears. “Forget everything you thought you knew or you learned about dealing with trauma, because this is different this is an ongoing event,” Israeli author and clinical psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen told CNN. It is an inciting event for people today and future generations of Palestinians and Jews. This war is not merely a triggering event for those of us already suffering. Gazans “feel as if their lives are this horrible movie that just gets rewound and started all over again,” former CNN foreign correspondent Arwa Damon told NPR. The intergenerational trauma is also affecting Palestinians, who have dealt with displacement, oppression and worse for decades – and, in Gaza, as they are being pummelled by Israeli air strikes. And which of our non-Jewish friends would hide us if it did come to that. This response has been extremely triggering for people like me, who have spent years imagining what it would have been like had we been born near the beginning of the last century instead of closer to the end. “The judgmental indifference of the onlookers.” Danieli, a clinical psychologist who works with Holocaust survivors and their children as well as other severely traumatized people around the world. “It’s what we call the trauma after the trauma,” says Dr. The antisemitic comments and atrocity denial, the open letters by students at TMU and other universities openly dismissing – and in many cases justifying – the barbarism committed by Hamas. The existential dread is exacerbated by what we’re seeing around us. But for a Jewish person, it is beyond chilling. That’s a terrible thing for anyone to imagine. Around the world – in Vancouver, too – we see people tearing down “Missing” posters meant to create awareness of the children who were abducted by Hamas.ĭiscussion with festival attendees often turned to how scary the world feels right now one person commented that this moment we are in feels like the early 1930s. In Toronto, pro-Palestinian protesters harassing patrons of a Jewish-owned restaurant. The vulnerability, the helplessness.”Īlso triggering has been much of the response to the Hamas massacre of Jewish people: synagogues vandalized and, in Tunisia, burned down. “The connections are absolutely unmistakable. “When the mind was groping to find what this horribleness was like … very quickly there was a total connection with the Holocaust,” says Yael Danieli, the founder of the International Center for the Study, Treatment and Prevention of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, told me this week by phone. It wasn’t just the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust – although that would be traumatizing enough – but the horrific way in which civilians including children and babies were murdered. But an event like an actual massacre of Jews – well, I had never experienced anything like it when I wrote those words.įor many people like me, these irrational fears have been severely triggered by the events of Oct. But as I wrote in my book about intergenerational trauma, this is where my brain goes, without fail. I know this imagination-leap sounds ridiculous.
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