Psychotherapeutic Work with Intergenerational Trauma

Multigenerational psychotraumatology: Symbiotic trauma and entanglements across generations

n this lecture, Franz Ruppert explores both the nature of trauma and its intergenerational transmission. Experiences of trauma, he suggests, lead to splits in the human psyche by which the intolerable feelings are suppressed in a range of survival strategies. In the process of bonding it is impossible for a mother or father to avoid passing on something of their own traumatic experiences to their children. Even when parents try to hide and neglect their own traumas, their children will sense these, primarily due to a lack of safe emotional contact. This normally results in the children experiencing vicarious or “symbiotic trauma” in which the child suffers from and identifies with the split-off traumatized feelings of their parents. An understanding of this process, he proposes, is the therapeutic key to stop this ongoing process of transferring trauma from one generation to the next, and he explains how Constellation of the Intention work can offer an effective therapeutic tool for breaking the family pattern.