How To Recognize And Understand Intergenerational Trauma
Updated: Mar 16, 2025
Written by: Lauren Anders Brown, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month or AAPI Month. It recognizes the contributions and influences people from Asia and the Pacific Islands bring to American culture. It is also a month that the severe racial discrimination and disparities of AAPI people are brought to the surface, one of them being intergenerational trauma.
What is it?
Intergenerational trauma, is when trauma experienced in one generation affects the health and well-being of descendants of future generations. Southeast Asian refugees have experienced two unique forms of stress that differ from traditional immigrants: experiences of living in refugee camps and refugee assimilation and adaptation to a host country at war in the refugee’s native lands. These two forms of stress present unique psychological challenges for these individuals and lead to an increased risk of poor mental health for their descendants.
Where did this begin for the AAPI community?
Vietnamese Boat People refer to the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat following the end of the Vietnam War. The Indochina Refugee Crisis was the large outflow of people from the former French colonies of Indochina, comprising Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos after communist governments were established in 1975. Over the next 25 years, over three million people would undertake the dangerous journey to become refugees in other countries that often rejected them. This migration and humanitarian crisis peaked in 1978-1979 but continued through the early 1990s. About 250,000 Vietnamese refugees had perished at sea by 1986. More than 2.5 million Indochinese were resettled, mostly in North America, Australia, and Europe.
What are the effects of intergenerational trauma?
Among refugees, traumatic exposure before and during migration is strongly linked to mental health problems and psychological distress. Evidence indicates these challenges among first-generation refugees-immigrants can persist years after resettlement. In my most recent audio documentary ‘The War Less Travelled, I interviewed Ron Haeberle, the US Army photographer who photographed the My Lai Massacre and published the photographs in Life Magazine.
“I think it [the photographs] did have an impact, especially when we were published in Life magazine. And that more and more soldiers started talking about what happened during the war because there were many, many other massacres in Vietnam that you've been able to read about, in, you know, the history books and different publications. People started realising that something's, you know, wrong over there.” While American soldiers returning home from Vietnam often faced scorn as the war they had fought in became increasingly unpopular, Vietnamese Americans faced a double disadvantage as they belong to a marginalised refugee-immigrant community of color. This double burden experienced by Vietnamese Americans continued to perpetuate poor mental health and intergenerational trauma.
How can we offer a better understanding?
As someone who is not an Asian American, Ron has continued to share his experiences since his days in the army to recognise the pain and loss felt by so many. In 2011, he received an email from a person in Germany, a son photographer who's doing your story on the two children on the trail. Ron had assumed the children did not survive the massacre because his fellow American soldiers were shooting anything that moved. But the email revealed they were alive.
He invited one of the now-grown children Tran Van Duc to the United States to stay with him, travel a bit, and make amends. Later that year, Ron then flew to Vietnam for the first time since the war to spend time with him, meet his sister who was in the photograph he took with him, and developed a friendship that has lasted throughout the years. “He has my camera now. Yes, I gave that to him when I traveled to Saigon because that's the camera that took a picture of his mother. And that's the last image he has of his mother how sad it is.”
While we can’t all offer such significant amends, Dr Tung Nguyen whom I also spoke with for the documentary offers some much-needed further insight from the perspective of the Vietnamese. “People think of healing as oh, yeah it’s fixed. And that’s not what it is. It is a dynamic process to me. It’s some days you’ll feel good about this and some days you won’t and some days things will happen that will make you feel good and some things will happen that we’ll go, well we haven’t fully worked that through. All of this happens to me all the time. I think I am not pushing for healing, I am pushing for dialogue. I am pushing for understanding. I am pushing for empathy. And those things are all possible but it does often require both of the people in that relationship to be engaged somewhat.”
Learn more about intergenerational trauma by listening to the full audio documentary, The War Less Travelled, now available.
Lauren Anders Brown, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lauren Anders Brown is an award-winning documentary storyteller who uses film, photography, audio, and her writing to focus on issues of global health and human rights. She has captured content in over forty countries, including conflict zones, in order to amplify the voices of others and especially women. She produces work through her own production company colLABorate: ideas and images, works as a consultant for the United Nations, and is Creative Director of the e-learning startup Gamoteca. She is a true artivist: an artist who uses any and all of her available platforms to creatively advocate for human rights.
