When sophomore Uyen Chanthery, a Vietnamese-American, was eight, her mother revealed what it was like growing up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with a father who was incarcerated in a labor and re-education camp. Chanthery’s family are victims of post-war trauma. On April 30, 1975, after the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam surrendered and the Northern Vietnamese Army renamed the capital to Ho Chi Minh City.

“When I was eight, my mom told me that she saw floating dead bodies of refugees who tried to escape to America on the beach when she was younger,” Chanthery said. “I can’t even imagine how my mom felt. My ông ngo?i (grandfather) was a South Vietnamese soldier who spent eight years captured and was sent to camp. As a result, my mom didn’t
see her father until she was seven.”

Chanthery is among many individuals living with the burden of intergenerational trauma, which occurs when the effects of a traumatic experience are passed from one generation to the next. Specifically, she is a victim of epigenetic trauma — a form of toxic stress during childhood that can affect an individual’s mood, reactions, health and susceptibility to conditions by switching genes “on” or “off,” according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This can manifest in various ways, including cultural trauma, where collective historical events like colonization, war or displacement can affect the identity and behavior of an entire community.

Growing up in the Bay Area with three generations under one roof, Chanthery didn’t think much of the effects of her family’s political refugee history. As a younger child, she didn’t understand that she was a victim of epigenetic trauma. Instead, she attributed her mother’s intense focus on education, her grandfather’s stoic character and her difficult
childhood as the experience of a typical second-generation daughter of a refugee parent.

“For them, education is the way to a better life,” she said. “Especially when you’re a refugee, (education) is the ticket to your future. When I was younger, it really affected me. I was an active student but lost many of my friends from my old school in the process. I felt like they didn’t really understand me.”

Chanthery’s experience constitutes a common analogy of intergenerational trauma, as described by the mental health organization, Sandstone Care. That is, just as a tree “remembers” the cut of an ax and grows with the cut mark, future generations can carry the scars of generational trauma even if they did not experience it firsthand, explained psychology teacher Warren Collier.

“Even if someone hasn’t experienced the initial blowback of trauma first-hand, they may be more prone to emotional struggles because of them being predisposed to it through things like DNA,” he said.

Root causes

According to the National Institute of Health’s research in February, more than two out of three adolescents in the nation experience trauma by the age of 16. Exposure to trauma in early life is linked to a range of negative mental health outcomes, including intergenerational trauma.

The origin of intergenerational trauma effects was introduced through behavioral descriptions — such as worry that parental traumas would be repeated, traumatic nightmares and hypervigilance — of Holocaust survivors’ children and later Vietnam War veterans’ children. Studies have now broadened to the history of other ethnic groups.

For history teacher and Social Emotional Learning and Functionality Program Coordinator Laurel Howard, understanding intergenerational trauma requires not only acknowledging the historical injustices faced by marginalized groups but also recognizing their cultural resistance.

“If you’re trying to understand a group that has been dehumanized, you have to understand the bad things that
happened to them and what they did in response,” she said. “There are still many American Indian languages that are being revitalized over time. But we can look at the American Indian story where there was literal food deprivation that
happened, which could affect how the body carries trauma and keeps score, (including) the digestive system, the hormonal system for reproduction and the stress levels.”

Although research on intergenerational trauma concentrated initially on the survivors of the Holocaust and Japanese American internment camps, the focus now includes other demographics. These groups include those whose
families were impacted by slavery and structural racism on Black populations, as well as those with historical trauma
such as the American Indian communities, the families oF Vietnam War veterans and others, explained by Executive Behavioral Health Medical Director Dr. Tiffany Ho, who works for the County of Santa Clara Health System.

NIH defines this type of trauma as the transmission of psychological trauma and the post-traumatic state across generations. This phenomenon can occur when stressors such as injury, oppression, poverty and other adverse experiences faced by previous generations are passed down to their descendants.

“Mass trauma is created by humans,” Ho said. “It’s just so much more painful and harder to recover from when you feel like somebody else is creating these situations and circumstances.”

NIH research reveals that traumatic experiences disproportionately affect minority youths. Despite the higher incidence of trauma exposure, minority youths are less likely to access medical and mental healthcare. These conditions are compounded with other structural inequities and the need for more public education on intergenerational trauma.

The emotional experience

The impacts of this form of psychological trauma can range from physical and mental health problems to social and emotional difficulties. Collier explains that the severity of effects from trauma varies. However, certain behaviors may not feel like a product of trauma. Still, behaviors such as emotional avoidance, hypervigilance or perfectionism often
create patterns that continue in the family. If left unaddressed, these patterns can negatively shape family dynamics and parenting styles across generations.

“(For example), some parents suffer through famine in their home country,” he said. “They grow up in a situation where food is very scarce. They may develop a habit of ‘We need to gather and hoard resources as often as possible and save food.’ This becomes a pattern in how they raise their children like ‘Don’t waste your food.’ This stressor becomes
a habit or culture with the way those children (will) interact with resources and purchases (in the future).”

Ho explains that intergenerational trauma can feel different across demographics, individuals and generations. It can make a person have a hard time trusting others, feel very hopeless about the future, or cause them to experience feelings of anxiety and depression. For older generations, acknowledging and addressing trauma has often been met with reluctance.

Ho is working to shift this by confronting the “rigidity and lack of creativity” that often accompany traditional views on mental health.

“When there are mental health issues from trauma, (older generations) may lose their confidence, faith and the ability to take care of their family,” she said. “They feel powerless with other people in the mainstream community. Sometimes, they get angry and take it out on their own family members. I think that what they don’t realize is the intangible impact it may have on their kids and their grandkids to seek therapy.”

Although more Bay Area schools now offer counselors specializing in mental health, students in high-stress environments often struggle to access these resources in between coursework and classes. For many, the challenges extend beyond the classroom and into their homes.

“When students return home, they face parents who are dealing with trauma themselves, making it hard to receive the emotional support they need,” she said. “It’s like the oxygen mask (on an airplane) analogy — parents need to first care for themselves before they can fully support their children.”

Ho stresses that mental health challenges are common across all communities, regardless of income or status.

“It’s not shameful to seek help,” she said. “Just like you’d seek medical treatment for a broken leg, it’s essential to address mental health needs. Evidence-based practices being implemented in school districts and healthcare settings are helping make it easier for families to seek support, ultimately healing trauma across generations.”

Besides one traumatic event, generational trauma can also happen in families who display a pattern of abuse or have experienced prolonged, complex trauma from situations of economic instability or domestic conflict.

Healing in Santa Clara County

Healing trauma survivors and their children can be approached with trauma-informed education and careful self-reflection. For Howard, teaching history has always been a part of her work as an educator, but it also includes a social-emotional learning component. She structures the curriculum to explore the personal and collective legacies
that shape her students’ identities.

“As a history teacher, I try to bring the voices of people into the classroom,” she said. “There will be moments where I’m not the expert (of) what it means to live in that identity. Rather than a lecture, I try to bring in the primary sources from people because, with intergenerational trauma, their voices were often suppressed by government policy or
social understandings. From an SEL perspective, it’s helpful to think about the patterns in our family, and what is helping us and what may not be serving us.”

Though Chanthery doesn’t have all of the answers, her road to recovery is to ensure that her refugee family is recognizing their horrific and heroic journey to the U.S., learning from the past, building on the present and wholeheartedly moving forward.

“My main outlet is being a teacher’s assistant at a Vietnamese school and teaching Vietnamese,” she said. “For my grandparents, they find some sort of healing from me doing this. It’s like a form of resilience to keep teaching the language and to keep teaching the history. Their story is heard, and they feel like they came here (to the U.S.) when there’s progress and purpose because there’s a whole entire community built on a singular event that affected a lot of people.”