Transcending Trauma

Survival, Resilience, and Clinical Implications in Survivor Families

Bea Hollander-Goldfein, Nancy Isserman, Jennifer Goldenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415882866
• eBook ISBN: 9781136935169
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Based on twenty years of intense qualitative research, Transcending Trauma presents an integrated model of coping and adaptation after trauma that incorporates the best of recent work in the field with the expanded insights offered by Holocaust survivors. In the book's vignettes and interview transcripts, survivors of a broad range of traumas will recognize their own challenges, and mental-health professionals will gain invaluable insight into the dominant themes both of Holocaust survivors and of trauma survivors more generally. Together, the authors and contributors Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen, Hannah Kliger, Lucy Raizman, Juliet Spitzer and Emilie Scherz Passow have transformed qualitative narrative analysis and framed for us a new and profound understanding of survivorship. Their study has illuminated universal aspects of the recovery from trauma, and Transcending Trauma makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how survivors find meaning after traumatic events.

Accompanying Transcending Trauma are downloadable resources of full-text life histories that documents the survivor experience. In seven comprehensive interviews, survivors paint a picture of life before and after war and trauma: their own feelings, beliefs, and personalities as well as those of their family; their struggles to deal with loss and suffering; and the ways in which their family relationships were able, in some cases, to mediate the transmission of trauma across generations and help the survivors transcend the trauma of their experiences.

PART I

The Transcending Trauma Project

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Transcending Trauma Project

JENNIFER GOLDENBERG, NANCY ISSERMAN, and BEA HOLLANDER-GOLDFEIN

The Transcending Trauma Project (TTP) is a research project dedicated to identifying the coping strategies that have enabled Holocaust survivors to love and to work in the aftermath of the horror they endured. This book, however, is not solely devoted to the Holocaust, although that has been the ostensible focus of our work over many years. In our analysis of survivor interviews,¹ and of the interviews of their family members, we concentrated on understanding the long-term impacts of trauma—specifically genocide. Survivors taught us much about what it was like for them to travel to the abyss and back. Their family members’ interviews contributed greatly to our understanding of the process of recovery and the intergenerational impacts of both trauma and resilience.

As we conducted this research into a difficult and painful chapter of our history, we realized that our findings had clinical implications well beyond survivors of genocide—that they could be applied to our own work as mental health professionals with our own traumatized clients. The TTP interviews illuminate the process of recovery in survivors’ and their family members’ own words. Their strengths and struggles inspire us and motivate us to continue to work to heal suffering and fight injustice—whether it is domestic violence and sexual abuse within individual homes inside our own borders or ongoing ethnic conflicts and genocides in far-flung regions of the globe.

In 1986, the Marriage Council of Philadelphia (now Council for Relationships) convened the first conference on Holocaust survivors that was sponsored by a mental health agency rather than a Jewish or Holocaust organization. Titled “Shattered Promises and Broken Dreams,” the conference drew several attendees who were both children of survivors (COS) and mental health practitioners. They realized that the image of the survivor as portrayed in the existing research literature was that of a mostly damaged, traumatized individual, and that the damage had been purported to have been visited on the second generation (COSs or 2Gs). This image in the literature provided neither an accurate representation of their own family members nor of the dynamics of other survivor families within their communities. Damage and negative impacts surely existed. But, what about the resilient aspects of these survivors?

The conference in Philadelphia motivated these COSs, in addition to other mental health professionals and those from related fields, to create a study group to examine the existing literature on Holocaust survivors and their families in more depth. The group confirmed that research prior to the late 1980s had focused almost exclusively on the negative impacts of the Holocaust on survivors, without examining the adaptive, more resilient long-term functioning of these individuals or focusing on the processes of coping, adaptation, and resilience after such extreme trauma as genocide.

Their work led to the development in 1990 of a pilot project that conducted interviews with survivors and their children (N = 10). The working hypothesis of the pilot project reflected the original hunch of the study group members: that many Holocaust survivors and their children are high functioning, have adapted to the long-term impacts of their traumatic experiences, and have been able to create new families and productive lives.

After reviewing the results of the pilot study interviews, the group formed the nucleus of a research team comprised of mental health practitioners and researchers from other social science disciplines, such as anthropology, communications, and political science. The team, which called itself the Transcending Trauma Project (TTP), was committed to exploring the gaps they found between how the survivors were portrayed in the trauma and Holocaust studies literatures and the more resilient aspects of survivors’ lives as they knew them. The TTP team sought to provide a more complete and balanced, in-depth understanding of survivors and their families: how they coped and adapted after liberation; how they rebuilt their lives and families in a new environment; and how the survivors and their family members themselves understood the process of their long-term adaptation after the Holocaust.

Over several decades, the field of traumatic stress studies has progressed from the almost-exclusive focus on the negative sequelae of traumatic experiences to a multidimensional understanding of the impact of trauma on its victims. With the introduction in 1980 of the diagnosis posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), society finally came to terms with the phenomenological reality of the suffering of individuals exposed to extreme life circumstances. This marked a paradigm shift in the field and promoted the investigation of the full range of responses to trauma, including both the negative impacts and the capacity to recover, heal, and rebuild after devastating events. The ongoing work of the TTP has coincided with this shift in focus. In Part 1, we establish the foundation for the TTP through a review of the literatures on Holocaust and trauma studies and provide an explanation of the qualitative methodology we used. Chapter 2, “Resilience After Prolonged Trauma: An Integrated Framework,” by Jennifer Goldenberg and Bea Hollander-Goldfein, explores the relevant literature to date and places the research of the TTP within the context of the large bodies of literature that address traumatic stress, coping, adaptation and understanding of resilience.

The grounded theory approach of our qualitative research project prioritized the phenomenological investigation of extreme trauma and its long-term impacts, including the intergenerational transmission of both trauma and resilience. What is, we believe, a contribution to the field is our analysis of survivors’ accounts of their prewar and postwar lives and the connections between the two in posttraumatic coping and adaptation. We examined the war years in our analysis, of course—the years of prolonged suffering and multiple losses. However, we recognized that survivors were not tabulae rasae going into the Holocaust; rather, we saw them—as indeed they saw themselves—as people who had lives before the war, children, adolescents, and young adults who had significant attachment figures: relationships with adults who imparted meaningful values they had assimilated. They also carried into the war individual strengths that helped shape them and helped them cope with the long-term impacts of what they endured. Similarly, for those of us who are mental health professionals working with clients who have endured traumatic events, there is a need to recognize that many of these individuals had positive relationships with a caring adult before the trauma, as well as values and strengths developed early on that serve them well in the process of recovery. The clinical implications of linking Holocaust survivors’ prewar lives with postwar coping strategies are, we hope, demonstrated in the clinical applications and case studies that are presented throughout this volume.

Also, the inclusion of survivors’ family members to this qualitative inquiry added a crucial component to the data we analyzed. By interviewing survivors’ spouses, children, and grandchildren, we were better able to understand the intergenerational transmission of the impacts of trauma—both positive and negative. Family members provided “other pieces of the puzzle” to help us more fully comprehend the survivor’s experience, as well as “the experience of the survivor” in the eyes of his or her family members.

Our large qualitative data set consists of 275 comprehensive life interviews of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, their spouses, children, and grandchildren, representing 50 intergenerational survivor families. In Chapter 3, “Making the Unmanageable Manageable: Innovative Tools for Analyzing a Large Qualitative Dataset,” Nancy Isserman provides an in-depth discussion of the acquisition of the sample and the process by which these interviews were analyzed and then compared within and across families to identify themes and patterns. Meaningful patterns of functioning in individuals and families revealed multidimensional processes of coping and resilience. The methodology required creative approaches designed specifically for the qualitative analysis of this large dataset that would reveal a continuum of psychological processes related to the impact and recovery of trauma.

Three instruments—the semistructured interview guide, the protocol of analysis, and the synopsis—made it possible to assess the large number of variables found within the expansive life histories. Two processes, the analysis triad and charting, focused the analysis and provided a means by which the researchers could track patterns of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral phenomena. By employing these instruments and processes, the TTP compared data within individual interviews and within the intergenerational families to focus on the study of coping and adaptation after extreme trauma.

Part 2 focuses on the survivors. The chapters in this section explore their prewar lives and provide an examination of the factors that helped or hindered their postwar adjustments.

In Chapter 4, “‘The Biggest Star Is Your Mother’: Prewar Coping Strategies of 18 Adolescent Survivors,” Jennifer Goldenberg discusses the many prewar risk and protective factors revealed in the interviews of survivors who were adolescents during the Holocaust years. These include secure attachments with at least one caring adult in their environments and strong ethical and moral values that they were able to draw on for coping after the war. They also contain messages from parents about the importance of human dignity and integrity and, for those survivors who were raised in religious homes, the importance of faith and Jewish ritual practice. In fact, stories of faith were often embedded in secure attachment relationships. Stories of strength—narratives regarding adolescents’ prewar courage or self-efficacy—were also able to be drawn on after the war as coping strategies. Goldenberg’s analysis revealed that prewar losses of major attachment figures and the larger environment of pervasive and brutal anti-Semitism may have provided “stress inoculation” (Meichenbaum, 2009) for some survivors that helped them through the war years.

These findings speak to the challenges of all individuals who have suffered trauma and loss—whether in wars, natural disasters, or at the hands of perpetrators within their own families. The reconstruction of a life after trauma may be aided by invoking memories of lost loved ones, by calling on the values and positive messages that were imparted to them, and by remembering their own strength, courage, and self-efficacy.

In Chapter 5, “The Hows and Whys of Survival: Causal Attributions and the Search for Meaning,” Jennifer Goldenberg found that survivors commonly give multiple attributions for survival, sometimes choosing different attributions for each “moment of crisis” and often mixing internal and external attributions. The interviews identified such external attributions as the help of others, luck, fate, and God. These external attributions were somewhat more common than internal attributions, suggesting that external attributions may have been more adaptive for survivors in coping with survivor guilt—surviving when so many of their family members did not.

In addition, Goldenberg found that some survivors were eventually able to find meaning in their own survival during the postwar years, whether it was to rebuild the Jewish people by starting families of their own or to remember the dead by telling about what happened. The meaning they found played an adaptive role in their postwar coping. Yet, Goldenberg stresses that there is strength to be found in the search for meaning after trauma—whether or not that meaning is ever found. For those of us who are mental health professionals, we often enter the story of our clients’ lives when they are still struggling for meaning. We would do well to remember that the search for meaning after trauma is indeed a process, and that not everyone will find meaning in it. Still, while they may not find the “why” of their own survival, perhaps we can help them find strength in the “how.”

In Chapter 6, “‘If Somebody Throws a Rock on You, You Throw Back Bread’: The Impact of Family Dynamics on Tolerance and Intolerance in Survivors of Genocide,” Nancy Isserman explores the ways in which the quality of family relationships were found to be influential in creating tolerance in survivors toward both perpetrators and other groups in society. The instrument that she used for her analysis was the TTP’s quality of family dynamics paradigm, a five-factor continuum of behavior between the caregivers and the child that described the nature of the caregiver–child relationship. This five-factor rating grew out of the grounded theory work of the TTP. The paradigm (Hollander-Goldfein & Isserman, 1999) described five sets of patterns of interaction/attachment between the parent/caregiver and the child that directly influenced political beliefs in adulthood. The five factors are closeness-distance, empathy-self-centeredness, validation-criticalness, expressive of positive emotion-expressive of negative emotion, and open communication–closed communication. When the relationships between the survivor and the family of origin members clustered on the negative end of the paradigm—evidencing distant, critical, self-centered, or negative ties between the survivors and their parents—intolerant attitudes predominated in the survivors. When the relationships between the survivors and their families of origin clustered on the positive end of the paradigm—demonstrated by close, validating, empathic, and positively expressed emotions—psychological security needs were met, and attitudes of tolerance predominated in the survivors.

Isserman found many reasons provided by survivors to justify their tolerant or intolerant attitudes, but the connection to positive and negative family relationships was an unexpected finding that adds a new dimension to the study of attitude formation and group relations. Finally, Isserman found that some tolerant survivors reported receiving messages from close family members—often parents, but sometimes a sibling or grandparent—that functioned as a guide for their future tolerant attitudes.

In Chapter 7, “A Minyan of Trees: The Role of Faith and Ritual in Postwar Coping and Its Relevance to Working With Trauma Survivors,” Jennifer Goldenberg indicates that faith or ritual practice became important long-term strategies used by the majority of the TTP survivor respondents to cope with the massive losses suffered in the war. Descriptions of faith and ritual practice were often embedded within the narratives of important attachment relationships, demonstrating again the importance of the analysis of attachment relationships for providing an understanding of the survivor. Using faith as a coping strategy appeared to be relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• About the Authors and Contributors
• Part I The Transcending Trauma Project
• Part II The Survivors and the Impact of Prewar Family Dynamics on Their Postwar Lives
• Part III Parenting Patterns
• Part IV Intergenerational Transmission to the Children of Survivors
• Appendix 1: Demographics of the TTP Dataset
• Appendix 2: Characteristics of Coping Based on Life Histories
• Index