How to Embrace Elective (not Mandatory) Forgiveness After Trauma

Do I need to forgive my abusive mother to let go of the past? This is the question I found myself grappling with when I started to recover from the pain of childhood neglect. For most of my childhood, I did not have access to a consistent adult who valued me. As a result, I […]

The Partition of 1947 and Intergenerational Trauma

Intergenerational trauma has become a buzzword over the last several years. It was first explored in the research of Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Rakoff and her colleagues in 1966. They found higher levels of distress among descendants of Holocaust survivors. This important finding helped provide a foundational understanding of this phenomenon. Studies in the 2000s examined […]

Personality vs. Trauma Coping: A Misunderstood Distinction

The difference between someone’s personality and their trauma coping and survival strategies is often misunderstood, leading to increasingly pernicious misjudgments about individuals’ character, intentions, or behavior. While personality refers to enduring, largely context-independent traits, trauma-coping and survival strategies and behaviors developed in response to (mostly unhealed) traumatic events. For the most part, trauma-coping and survival […]