Therapy For Intergenerational Trauma & Grief

You seek decolonization through body, mind, heart, and spirit from the harm of internalized oppression.

You want to explore, unpack, and process the effects of the Model Minority myth.

You are a child of refugees who survived war, violence, genocide, and forced migration.

You are a child of immigrants who came to the United States and experienced racism, poverty, discrimination, and trauma.

You are a child of emotionally immature parents who were uninvolved, over involved, distant, rejecting, and denied your experiences. Boundaries were non existent and passive aggressive communication was the norm.

You are a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, and childhood emotional neglect. Shame, guilt, fear, sadness, anger, and worry were common feelings growing up.

You take on the role as cultural brokers and translators for family members. You’ve acculturated into American culture, yet feel the cultural pull of their upbringing as a child of the diaspora. You feel the pressure of fitting in due to religion and/or strict unspoken cultural rules.

You are successful in your own right, but struggle with feelings of perfectionism, anxiety, depression, “stuckness”, and uncertainty.

You want to belong, love yourself, and come home to yourself, but unsure how.

What is Intergenerational Trauma?

• Intergenerational trauma (or historical trauma) describes how historical and cultural traumatic experiences affect survivors’ and their children for generations.

• Because of this, survivors and their children experience a higher rate of health issues, mental health issues, substance use, addiction issues, and a disconnection from their cultural knowledge, wisdom, and practices.

• The legacy of trauma lives in today through policies of colonization, imperialism, war, and genocide.

• Indigenous people have experienced trauma as a result of colonization, including the associated violence and loss of culture and land, as well as subsequent policies such as the forced removal of children.

• People of the African diasporas have experienced trauma as a result of enslavement, racist government explicit policies such as Redlining as well as implicit and more subtle violent and oppressive methods.

• Refugees have experienced trauma as a result of war, genocide, and displacement from their homes.

• Survivors of trauma often pass down their survival strategies to their children and loved ones.

Intergenerational Trauma Examples

Forced relocation, migration, and resettlement

• Loss of cultural wisdom, knowledges, and histories

• Loss of cultural language(s)

• Loss of identity, role, status, meaning

• Loss of land

• Assimilation and acculturation

• Ethnic cleansing and genocide (e.g. The Holocaust, Armenian Massacres, Rwandan genocide, Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia)

• Centuries of violent colonization: imperialism, war, conflict, and land grabbing

• Forced assimilation and family separation (e.g. Native American boarding schools)

• Structural oppression including: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia

• Silence about traumas and learning to internalize this silence

• Childhood trauma survivors who have their own children without doing their own ongoing healing

• Sexual abuse and survivors of incest

• Physical violence and survivors of domestic abuse/intimate partner violence, particularly of children and women

• Emotional abuse and neglect and survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

• Enslavement and American slavery

• Police violence and systemic incarceration of BIPOC;

• Internment of Japanese Americans

• Religious Trauma Syndrome: Physical, emotional, and psychological damage after leaving an authoritarian indoctrination

• Poverty, inequity, inequality, and lack of access to basic needs (e.g. healthy food, healthcare, mental health services, education, housing, clean water, clean air)

Therapy Can Help You

✔️ Make meaning out of your experiences through language, validation, and affirmation

✔️Connect to your culture, rituals, spirituality, religion, and ceremonies as a way of honoring your losses

✔️ Process and feel grief. Naming and expressing your feelings through letter writing, art, and talking;

✔️ Re-frame your coping tools and skills as methods of survival

✔️ Understand the complexities of your many roles, pressures, expectations with grace and patience

✔️ Deconstruct how colonization, imperialism, war, genocide, and oppression has shaped you, your families, and your culture;

✔️ Empower critical consciousness: Exploring ways to heal from systemic and internalized oppression through re-writing incomplete and false narratives;

✔️De-stigmatize and decolonize mental health in our therapeutic relationship by co-creating a space of what therapy can be and who therapy is for;

✔️De-center individualistic values and expanding notions of wellness to include your ancestral and cultural wisdoms; and

✔️Guiding you toward self-love, self-acceptance, self-compassion, and ultimately a stronger sense of self for all parts of you.

Healing Is Possible

As a child of refugees who was born in Vietnam, I’ve processed, unpacked, and expanded my complex experiences of grief, trauma, loss, and acculturation.

This road has been marked with pain, suffering, humiliation as well as joy, love, and peace. I am now creating my own stories, speaking my multiple truths, and am also able to honor my family’s unique stories and experiences.

My clients acknowledge having someone who “gets them” in some shared identity is helpful in their own healing journey.

I also understand my stories will be different than yours in many ways. I actively work to understand my self, my intersecting identities, my limitations and implicit biases so that you you have a space to unpack, process, and explore all parts of you and your stories.

You can heal from the wounds from the past and have a life of joy. 

Reach out today to schedule a consultation.