Psychotherapeutic Work with Intergenerational Trauma

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome in the Afro-Caribbean Community

In this interview Lennox Thomas talks to Jane Ryan about post-slavery syndrome as a psychological vulnerability running from generation to generation through the Afro-Caribbean population. The syndrome is marked by high levels of anxiety and low self-esteem that is embedded in many families, and reinforced by current societal conditions. While many Afro-Caribbean patients come to therapy for relationship and family issues in the normal way, Thomas suggests they also have to process actual racial prejudice – or their expectation of it – as a thwarting and threatening condition of their daily lives resulting in a sense of being at risk. This anxiety is not simply contained within the psyche of the patient; it has descended through their ancestors and parental experience of white people from slavery onwards. Thomas suggests that despite these challenging external conditions, therapy can support black patients in building their resilience and self-confidence, and many discover a much greater sense of agency and confidence as a result. He also discusses the importance of understanding negative relational issues – for example, the difficulty black men often experience in securely attaching to their children – as behavioral patterns that were originally established by plantation economics; in grasping the origin of such behavior, it becomes possible to alter that pattern to engender greater family resilience and more secure attachments in future generations. The video is accompanied by two papers: Caribbean Attachment and Parenting Roles and Black Men by Lennox Thomas.