Looking around my office at people whose stories I know, I see sexually abused people, war refugees, children of war refugees, people who grew up under communism, someone who is coping with a degenerative illness (multiple sclerosis), and on and on and on. Yet these are all functional people, holding down professional jobs.
The interesting part isn't that you can trace your problems back to trauma, but rather how you might some day manage to not have to. Because the more that people successfully do that, the better the world we can build for our mutual future.
This sidesteps the issue of scale and omnipresence. It's not limited to someone you hold kinship with, or you, or your direct parents, it's the very idea of you. There are few things that personal... and it happened to millions; it's that long "history of trauma" extended from kin to kind.
I'm ethnically Armenian and I've seen children who've never been exposed to any of the gruesome photos, or even set foot in the country, burst out into tears on Red Sunday. The concentration of generational transference is on a different order of magnitude. From there, if you add the wrinkle of knowing what gruesomely and specifically happen to the people closest to you, experiencing trauma like it happened first hand becomes a much more understandable occurrence.
TLDR: Large scale communal lose shift the starting point, personal trauma pushes things over the edge.
I like to visualize it as a shock wave, propagating in the future, hitting generations as it advances. I can very clearly see it on my family.
Family history sure does have influence, but tracing (and blaming) personal issues to postgenerational trauma sounds like a cheap excuse. Unless you just use it to understand where you came from and move on from there. But I doubt focussing on historic traumas are helpful to overcome "issues".
Yes I believe I agreed with that. I just gave my input that I would not focus on the past too much.
"Unless you just use it to understand where you came from and move on from there. "