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Grandmother’s hair – transgenerational trauma

Izabela Łucka1, Paweł Nowak2

Affiliacja i adres do korespondencji
PSYCHIATR. PSYCHOL. KLIN. 2014, 14 (2), p. 89–94
DOI: 10.15557/PiPK.2014.0011
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Streszczenie

Traumatic experiences of the World War II continuously affect interpersonal relations in Polish families as well as individual functioning of members of trauma – afflicted family. For persons displaced from former “Kresy” (“eastern borderlands”), also for native inhabitants of Pomerania, additional difficulty to cope with painful memories was obligation to keep silence. The reason was a great fear of persecutions of Stalinism era. Poland remained under Soviet influence for years. Grief over loss of closest relatives, harm related to forced displacement, loss of properties that belonged to previous generations, persecutions by Soviet soldiers and authorities were injuries that must had been kept secret even among closest family. Deeply hidden traumatic experiences of the grandparents, stigmatized parents, and still impress a stamp on the grandchildren. In this article authors report a case of a patient who presented various psychopathological symptoms, which – as primary expected – developed due to a sexual trauma. Long-term psychotherapeutic work, enriched by genogram interpretation, enabled discovery of transgenerational transmission that conditioned patient functioning, especially in relationships. Revelation of kept in secret family stories let the patient to initiate recovery. Patient identified with her role of granddaughter, daughter and woman. She found her place in the family tree. Before that she felt “rootless”, alien, separate from the family system.

Słowa kluczowe
transgenerational trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-war generations, parentification, case reports