Breaking Generational Trauma: Understanding & Advising Clients and Families

 

This guest post is courtesy of Autumn Miller, Regent Family Law student:

          Every client, even yourself, is a byproduct of hundreds and thousands of years’ worth of experience, history, and even trauma. Anything your ancestors may have done may still affect you (and your clients) today! This is called intergenerational trauma, more commonly known as generational trauma. Generational trauma is defined as “[t]he transmission of trauma or its legacy, in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth, from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations.” (APA Dictionary of Psychology) While traumas from the past include famine, war, and mass migrations, the traumas from Generation Z (1997-2012) and Alpha (2012-2024) could consist of 9/11, mass school shootings, polarized politics, and Covid-19. As an attorney, it is vital to understand the deep history every client comes to you with.

Understanding their trauma will allow you to advise them in a way that can help them heal and/or find a remedy for their problem that best fits them. The best way to illustrate generational trauma is the age-old story about how a family cuts off the wing tips of a turkey before putting it in the oven for Thanksgiving. The family has done this for decades until they finally ask the matriarch why she cut off the wing tips. Great-Grandma responds, “To make the turkey fit, my oven was tiny.” This story illustrates that the phenomenon affects not only the actions of a subsequent generation but can also affect an individual medically.

          Encouraging a client to consider family mediation or therapy to identify the weak points in their history is a helpful course of action. Once they can identify those points, the client can work within the family unit to solve the problem. Sometimes, generational trauma is not as terrible as surviving the Holocaust or the Potato Plague. It could even come in the form of corporal punishment parents inflicted on young children. Even adding family mediation to an attorney’s practice to help families break the bonds of generational trauma could be a step in the right direction.

 Your clients are people created in the image of God who have histories and experiences worthy of understanding. History teaches us to “step into” the shoes of an author of a historical document. This allows historians to understand the thoughts and decisions of the author best without passing judgment on them for those things. In many ways, the practice of law may benefit from this technique to help our clients. 

Take your client’s deep-rooted and often uncovered trauma and use it to heal a family in family mediation or advise a client executing a parent’s estate on dealing with their siblings. Everyone has trauma, and if they cannot break the cycle, they too, will doom the next generation with the same fate.