[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

In The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “[t]he meaning of the word ‘trauma,’ in its Greek origin, is ‘wound.’ Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”¹

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, is clear that “trauma is NOT the story of what happened a long time ago; trauma is residue that’s living inside of you now…in horrible sensations, panic reactions, uptightness, explosions, and impulses.”² He reminds us that trauma is not limited to combat veterans, refugees, or victims of violent crimes or natural disasters. “Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors,” and it “affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.”³

Individual trauma can result from a one-time event or from exposure to repeated events like ongoing childhood abuse or neglect (known as complex trauma). Collective trauma impacts groups of people (war, slavery, genocide, natural disasters, etc.). Intergenerational (aka historical or transgenerational) trauma is carried forward through generations, biologically, experientially, and psychologically. Secondary trauma arises when one is exposed to the firsthand traumatic experiences of another. These are not mutually exclusive categories.

In varied iterations, trauma informs our national Shadow and is a core aspect of our history.

The subjugation of women still plays out in many ways, just one of which is the unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among our teenage daughters.⁴

The betrayal and slaughter of Native Americans still plays out in disproportionate unemployment, disease, and low life expectancy, especially on reservations.

The kidnapping, enslavement, and lynchings of Africans and African Americans still plays out in disproportionate susceptibility to specific diseases, mass incarceration, and less access to quality health care.

The effects of every war we’ve engaged in still plays out in the primary trauma of our combat veterans, the secondary trauma of their families, the collective trauma they share, and the intergenerational trauma that has been passed down for centuries.

We are all impacted, at varying levels, by our daily rituals of violent crime, our lack of equitable access to affordable health care, increasingly intense and more frequent natural disasters, “active shooter drills” and actual shooters for our school children, employees, shoppers, and others, and the global residuals of the COVID-19 pandemic. The list continues and it is long.

We are not suggesting here that the intergenerational trauma that is passed down to someone whose life seems otherwise okay carries with it the same immediate experience as the primary trauma of a combat veteran, a victim of violent crime or natural disaster, or those who have been abandoned or neglected. We are suggesting that Americans live in a country that remains an experiment, and that the experiment involves ongoing trauma.

We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others.

We were born through a bloodbath that pitted Brit against Brit on land stolen from indigenous peoples and developed by kidnapped Africans.

We were raised on enslavement, land and property theft, massacre, betrayal, and peasant labor.

We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover.

And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.

Without honest recognition of and intentional steps toward healing the individual, collective, and intergenerational traumas of America’s conception, birth, and rebirths, our efforts to re-vision⁵ our narratives and integrate our Shadow will be partial at best, and completely ineffective at worst.

1. Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, (Avery, 2022), 16.
2. Elissa Melaragno, “Trauma in the Body: An Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk,” Anchor Magazine, №4, Fall/Winter 2015, https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9m8efox1k4jcbu/Anchor_Issue%2004_Online.pdf?dl=0. Archived, and syndicated to: Daily Good, April 21, 2018, http://m.dailygood.org/story/1901/trauma-in-the-body-an-interview-with-dr-bessel-van-der-kolk-elissa-melaragno/ Accessed December 9, 2021.
3. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, (Penguin, 2014), 1.
4. Azeen Ghorayshi and Roni Caryn Rabin, “Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds,” New York Times, February 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html. See also Jean Twenge’s iGen, (Atria, 2017).
5. “Re-vision” simply means to “see again” with fresh eyes something we think we’re familiar with. This is consistent with, and deepens the more conventional use of “revision” to mean change.