Episode 4

What is intergenerational trauma?

Daljeet: This podcast contains themes that some listeners may find upsetting - listener discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Spoken Truth to Power, funded by Arts Council England. I'm your host, Daljeet, and today I’ll be speaking with Dr Rima Lamba who is a qualified counselling psychologist chartered with the British Psychological Society and registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).

She has developed her skills and knowledge by working in a variety of different settings, including the NHS, voluntary and charity sector, higher education and private practice, treating patients who have both common and more complex mental health difficulties. Rima is the Clinical Director and Founder of Blue River Psychology which as a service is geared towards empowering women by focusing on perinatal and reproductive psychology, as well as culture and race. She's particularly experienced in providing support around south Asian women's mental health due to her intimate understanding about the cultural systems that shape and impact south Asian women's identity, autonomy, relationships, and overall wellbeing. Being a British south Asian woman has made her interested in how culture, ethnicity and racial identity shapes us as individuals, but she's particularly interested in how these concepts might coincide with the challenges of being a woman or mother, and this is why I was so excited to have Rima on.

Rima works closely with south Asian women and mothers to help explore their early experiences which were internalized; the narratives that shaped them. The key thing which we are going to focus on is, she also explores intergenerational stories which are running across generations and which are also impacting women at an embodied level in the here and now.

Hello Rima! A long introduction, but thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me today.

Rima: That is absolutely fine!

Daljeet: I wanted to spend a little bit of time just talking about the current mental health crisis that we’re experiencing.

Rima: Obviously we're here with a particular focus to think about intergenerational stories and intergenerational pain, often described as, in the therapy world, in the clinical world, as intergenerational trauma. So that of course, as you mentioned, is our focus, but I agree, it feels really important to think about what is going on in the here and now. For our country as well as kind of at an international level, because it is a pandemic, it's affecting everyone across the globe. COVID is not something that's going to be locked in time. It is not going to be an issue that is related to just 2020 and 2021. It is a collective trauma and one of the things that's already been established is that it's considered to have led to the worst mental health crisis since World War Two.

The impact of it, of this disease, will not be locked in time, but it will have rippling effects across time. Even after the immediate issues of COVID sort of come to an end, you know, with the vaccine and everyone being inoculated and so on. I mean, you and I are born in sort of the technological era. We can utilize Zoom - and we're on Zoom now! - we can utilize Zoom, we've got all sorts of technological know-how and skills under our belt, but one of the things that’s come out through COVID is that there were so many that have been isolated because actually they weren't born in the technological era.

You know, so particularly for older people, it's been really, really hard because for many people they can at least find a way to connect through technology, but what happens if actually you haven't been brought up in that world? So all of these things have been having quite difficult effects on people's lives and all of these things are going to be struggles that we're going to have to work through, they really are.

Daljeet: For many, many years, I'd imagine. I've got an article here which was published on the 27th December 2020 in The Guardian. The headline, and many headlines are like this, ‘COVID poses greatest threat to mental health since Second World War’ by a gentleman called Ian Sample. The figures which are quoted here are staggering, they're saying that in the UK as many as 10 million people will have new or additional mental health support as a result of the pandemic. About 1.3 million people who have not had mental health problems before are expected to need treatment for moderate to severe anxiety, and 1.8 million people for moderate to severe depression. Then they've added, you know, the numbers may rise as the full impact on black and Asian minority ethnic communities, care homes, and people with disabilities become clear. This exactly what you're saying, isn't it? That it's a combination of the disease, the social consequences, the economic fallout, and the bit that we're going to be discussing, which isn't really discussed, is that intergenerational impact. That is also a factor that has an effect on people's immunity, so it's just such a deep rooted issue and I just hope there's treatment available for, there's just going to be such a flood of people needing help.

Rima: There really is. This is exactly what concerns me and people who are in this profession, in that these inequalities, they've been there for a long time. It's not that these are new instances or new issues or anything like that, they've been there. But I think one of the things that's happened is they’ve been masked because we've had certain members of society really, really prosper and do very, very well, and so people who've been living on the fringes of society, have been dealing with the kind of issues around inequality. They’ve almost been silenced and kept out of the limelight, if you like. And in addition what we've got is, we have had some chronic underfunding of public money; in the NHS, that's in the educational system, it's multiple systems, public services that have been really, really impacted by austerity-based cuts by this government. But there's a lot to work through and I think it needs good leadership, it needs effective leadership, it needs compassionate leadership.

Daljeet: Absolutely. I think fundamentally, I mean, there are people like yourselves, you've got your own company, Blue River Psychology. You're doing an amazing job! There are charities and all of that, but fundamentally for me, it's about the NHS. And I mean, if listeners are listening from outside of the UK, the NHS is our National Health Service, it is publicly funded. And for me, that needs to be up and ready to provide adequate culturally appropriate treatment.

And I, you know, having worked on this now for a few months, and I have come across people like Saiqa Naz who are people working in the NHS - she’s a CBT therapist in Sheffield Health and Social Care - and people like that are pushing for more funding, for culturally relevant services, and everybody has a place and a space to do their work. You've got your company, but you can't treat everybody, you know, it needs to be spread out.

Rima: And that’s the thing, you know, there is so much demand out there and there needs to be a collective duty and a collective sense of trying to work through this. I mean, I get, you know, countless calls from women who look like you and me, so from south Asian heritage, and unfortunately there is a sentiment that they don't want to go to NHS services for support with emotional struggles that they're going through, or transitions that they're going through, or the depression or anxiety they're going through because, you know, they just have a sense that it's not going to be culturally appropriate.

This is the difficulty we've ended up with that by leaving out culture when considering mental health. I mean, it is a recipe for disaster.

Daljeet: Absolutely. I feel that as somebody who, if I've considered getting treatment at some point in my life, that's the one barrier I can say as an individual has stopped me because I'm somebody who has experienced racism in various forms. So therefore it makes you a little bit less confident then to go into a system and seek treatment, especially when you are pretty sure they're not going to understand some of the cultural aspects of your issues, you know?

So this kind of brings me on to, I've jotted down a question here and it's just my curiosity in general - how can mental health practitioners or psychologists be connected to the social realities of their patients from minority backgrounds when the narrative generally being pushed out by the structures of the country as a whole, whether it's through education, whether it's through the way the history is told, through the ongoing culture wars on social media and beyond, when all of these systems don't encourage open and honest conversations about the political and social realities on which our lives are built?

Rima: You know, on the back of what happened last year with George Floyd, who was just awfully tragically murdered, and then the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent sort of anti-racism movement that's taken over, people were having conversations around race and culture and racism specifically, but so much had been silenced and so much had gone unheard. What we've got now is a massive movement in multiple industries and multiple sectors to decolonize, and psychology is not exempt from that. We are also going through our own decolonizing in the profession. And it's interesting because psychology is then split up into, you've got clinical psychology, you've got counselling psychology - which is my profession - then you’ve got health psychology, educational psychology and so on.

So we're all sort of split as professionals as well, but I think there is a movement of decolonizing across these splits within the professional groups. I think there's something about it's now come bursting out, and so we are actually having conversations now and albeit it's an infancy. Of course we should have been having these conversations fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, you know, we could have been having these conversations yesterday, basically, but it's taken really, really tragic things to happen for us to start coming together and start having these really, really difficult conversations around how there are colonial roots to, you know, what people are going through from black and Asian minority ethnic communities. How there's institutional racism in multiple institutions that is impacting, and disproportionately impacting, black and Asian people. These are conversations that are happening now and albeit they feel very, very late, but they are happening, and I do hold hope for that, Daljeet. I really, really do. I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know whether we can predict that, but I think the starting point is this. The movement is happening and we’ve got to keep on top of it.

I think that's the big thing - through COVID, once it's kind of, you know, in quotation marks ‘over’, because like I said, I don't think it really will be over, once the memory of George Floyd fades back into the background, my worry is that we could become complacent. That’s important to hold in mind, that we must not become complacent and that this has to be across the board. It can't just be mental health professionals, or it can't just be Asian people, or black people. It has to be a collective duty to keep this on the map.

Daljeet: Yep. Definitely. I completely agree. I mean, for me, I think the reason why these fields need to be decolonized is because, I'm going to read a quote I found, and this is, I was interested in comparing this to the UK because it's all applicable. So this is an article from the Indian Express, it’s actually about Dalit mental health, so it’s why Dalits and the underprivileged in India have built-in barriers to accessing mental health care. It's by Dr Sylvia Karpagam and Senthalir S, and was published last October, 2020. So they raised a really good point here which I'll read, and they've said, ‘in the absence of cultural, religious, social, economic understanding of mental health, healthcare providers can become more of a problem than a solution. So the potential to abuse the positions of power that doctors hold is enormous. The religious, caste, gender divide between the healthcare provider and the patient if premised on discriminatory behaviour can lead to immense damage to a person's mental wellbeing, more so if the person is already in a vulnerable mental state’.

When I read that, I thought, well, ‘if there are any opponents of why things should be decolonized that is, for me, why it needs to be’, because potentially you have people who, for example, after COVID will be very vulnerable and there might be a massive gap in understanding them. Discrimination sadly does exist. I'm not pointing fingers at medical professionals, but everybody's drawn from the same system, and there is evidence of discrimination to black, Asian minority ethnic patients, right?

Rima: This is the thing, we need to start looking inwards, all of us. We need to start exploring our own biases, unconscious or conscious. We need to start exploring our own prejudices that we hold in the silence of our own minds and the silent corners of our own homes even. We need to start exploring where those prejudices and those biases around certain groups, where they stem from. We need to start looking at the systems we are part of which encourage those biases and those prejudicial attitudes. So it is a, like we said earlier, multi-dimensional journey.

Often one of the things that doesn't get talked about is that thoughts around kind of marginalizing certain groups being against certain groups, whole prejudicial values against certain groups, othering certain groups, regarding ourselves as better than certain groups, creating that split, that divide, that superiority versus inferiority dynamic, it often does start in the home. And that's where we have trouble, because what goes on in the home is our attachment to our families, our bond, our connection to our families, our love for our families, and often that can be the breeding ground for where prejudicial attitudes start forming. And we can get into a real tussle there in that, you know, especially when we're younger, we're growing up and we are absorbing so many values, and so many attitudes and beliefs, mainly from our family system, you know, the parental system and the whole family system that we're part of, and when there are values that are all centered on othering human beings, then we can't escape that we're going to internalize some of those values.

And this is where, we can get into a real conflict in that as we then develop and grow up and our world broadens, and we, you know, we go to school, we go to college, you might go to university or we go straight to work, as I said, our world broadens, we develop friendships. So our relational world broadens beyond just our parental system and our first family system, and here we may discover a whole host of different beliefs to the ones that we formed through our families. So, our world opens up as well, and we might realize there's this thing called prejudice that isn't good, that harms people, that is destructive, that can be played out unconsciously, that there's such a thing as institutional racism, there there's such a thing as casteism that is actually harmful to so many lives, to so many people's mental health, to the access they have to certain privileges, to certain aspects of society.

So for example, one of the things we hear about often in India particularly is people from certain castes are just marginalized in terms of jobs, even if the rights are established, actually you're often working with people who have very, very strong values around caste. That casteism plays out in work relationships and multiple social relationships as well.

So we develop, our world broadens, and we realize that actually we're meant to be treating people equally, but then if you go back to the family system, they might have very, very entrenched values. And so here is the tussle in that you've got this attachment to your family, but you're developing very, very different values, potentially. It's that push-pull that can happen, and this is one of the things that I often talk about, that attachment is beautiful and, you know, we’re all driven to connect and bond with other human beings. It's part of our evolutionary makeup. It can hold us in a way that can also be quite destructive in that we may wish to deny, you know, the impacts of our own family system’s values around racism. We may want to deny that our families are struggling with issues around casteism. I mean, casteism is huge, even in England, even in the UK.

Daljeet: Absolutely, it is, definitely. That’s why this whole tag of south Asian is so, yeah, it's sometimes not very useful because it captures so many different experiences and caste is one aspect of that, isn't it? I'm glad it's being talked about because It's a massively, massively important issue to address as well. It's equally as important as racial divisions, so I'm glad you've raised that.

I just want you to also bring another point in which I'm interested in exploring, which is kind of tying into the point we’ve just made about people having that low expectation from the NHS or from people that they can seek support from because of this massive gap in cultural understanding. So I've spoken to a few other people and they've mentioned that communities from black, Asian minority ethnic communities may have low expectations from the mental health services available through, I’m going to say the NHS because that’s accessible to everybody, despite, you know, it’s not something you pay for. That makes me feel concerned.

So, especially south Asian women from a particular generation, they will probably see it as normal that they're being treated a certain way. It's just normalized. They have an expectation - have you noticed something like that? 

Rima: Yeah, I sort of see it and, you know, even in our generation as well in that I think one of the difficulties that we have is the NHS is geared around nice guidelines, and it utilizes a treatment model pathway to certain difficulties. So it sees things as, ‘oh, okay, there's depression here, so there's a treatment pathway for this’ and ‘there's anxiety here, so there's a treatment pathway for this’, but actually what isn't held are the cultural issues that are going on, the systemic inequality issues that are going on, the sorts of family dynamics that permeate the lives of south Asian people; that doesn't always get held in mind. I think this whole treatment pathway style of approach, it just doesn't always foster something that's going to feel as though it's going to meet needs. I often hear low expectations, which is really, really sad because I think many south Asian women in particular feel as though, I mean, we're British citizens. We have a right to access services. We pay taxes. We pay for that. We pay for the NHS and yet there's a sentiment that it won't be able to meet our needs. Or that we are going to have to navigate a really, really different system. Or that if you're standing in front of a therapist who is not of a similar heritage, you’re going to have to explain and teach around the culture, around the cultural narratives, around the family systems, around what it means to be a south Asian woman, and there is often a lot of fear around betraying your community by talking about them in this way. There’s fear of the racism that can take over, the racial lens that's used to see our difficulties and our problems, you know, especially if we come from patriarchal cultures, like as south Asian women we really do, the last thing we need is racism on top of that. 

Daljeet: Absolutely. And I just want to bring attention to something which I read again interesting in the Eastern Eye, a gentleman called Barnie Choudhury, who you might know of. He used to run an organization called Avaaz which was a mental health organization. So he's written an article in the Eastern Eye, Barnie Choudhury, and it's called ‘Tailored help key to tackling mental health among Asians’. This is a June 2020 article. So he writes after 25 years of championing mental health advice, assisting and campaigning for Avaaz, that he chaired for a decade, is now closing. He’s saying that since he became chair in 2010, clinical commissioning groups, local authorities and governments have systematically made it more difficult for smaller organizations like ours to survive. The money is being siphoned to bigger organizations who say they provide culturally appropriate, culturally sensitive and culturally competent services to the black, Asian, and ethnic minority users. The truth is that they'll hire one or two BAME staff and when they realise that they cannot deliver, they're turned to organizations like Avaaz. He continues, if COVID has shown us one thing, it is that these mainstream white led organizations rarely understand the needs of ethnic minorities.

And he also elaborates on the point you're making, which is that the British Medical Association has evidence that black and Asian workers in the NHS are too scared to make a fuss in case they are labelled as troublemakers and lose their job or any hope of promotion. This is no excuse but the NHS, he says, is simply battling too many fronts and seemingly it cannot afford the time to dig into data and ask obvious questions about health inequalities. I mean, if after COVID we're not asking questions about health inequalities, then I'm really not sure when we're going to be asking questions about health inequalities. 

Rima: This is one of the really difficult issues and you can see how complicated and how entrenched it is at a systemic level because, you know, there is this assumption that a company or an organization such as the NHS, they need to hire black and Asian minority ethnic members. They need to hire professionals who are culturally representative and somehow that creates the image of safety because it's sort of like, ‘oh, we've got these people, they're in these professions’, you know, and the NHS has got lots of people from black and Asian minority ethnic communities.

So, you know, what's the problem? Actually, in those same systems, what gets forgotten is health professionals are facing the same levels of structural inequality, the same levels of systemic racism, that exists in the rest of society. So there is a culture of, so many of the professionals of BAME heritage - and just to throw in, and I don’t think we'll have time to talk about this today, but the term BAME, for goodness sake, it's hugely controversial but now it's become a way to communicate - as much as you're fighting for your patients and your clients and your service users, you are in a system that is enacting its own white privilege.

Daljeet: Absolutely. And I think on the point of systems, I think what Barnie Choudhury is also pointing out quite clearly is that this has happened, this has got worse since 2010, since austerity. I mean, I come from the background of theatre and education, I've worked with schools, I started my work in 2009 and by 2015, I had to leave because I saw with my own eyes what happened to local authorities; how many people left, how the structure changed. If that is the case, then it makes me question how much hope we have in the mental health treatment system. 

Again, it's so connected, the past and the present are so connected.

Rima: The British powers that be have never allowed themselves to engage with their own colonial history. We have been denied teachings of real British history. I mean, when I was at school, and I don't know what your experience was like, but when I was in school, I was just taught about the World War - and of course that's important, I'm not hear to say that that's not what we should be taught, of course we should be taught that.

But I think that that sort of teaching, you know, those parts of history, continues the glorification of Britain. It doesn't hold any room for how actually the British Empire also caused a lot of harm, so we don't have a total picture, they only showed one side of it. There's an agenda here in British culture.

As I said, if our education system that we’re part of hasn't taught us about colonialism, hasn't taught us about the impact of imperial harm, then we've not been in the know of some really, truly, important pieces of our own heritage. We've been separated from that. People who say to me, ‘oh, I know some certain things about the impact of the British Raj’ and so on, they’ve gone and done that reading off their own back in later life. If they've done it, it's not been part of that early education at all. 

I think something really, really complex happens to us when we hold a British identity and yet we also hold an Indian identity where we know the country we live in, the country we're born in, the land we walk on, had a role in the harm of people we share ethnic roots with. Something quite fragmented happens there in our psyche. 

Daljeet: Absolutely. I think the two messages, it’s ironic, because if you're British and you're south Asian, there's two messages and they kind of intersect with each other and they perfectly kind of keep things as they are. The ‘keep calm and carry on’ narrative actually fits in perfectly with that kind of silence and shame issues. So when those two things are combined together, it just is all of those things, which you're talking about; internalization, dismissal, not talking about things and the stories not being passed down.

And the other interesting thing which I found, and I'm referring to the book, ‘The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India’, Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin. So they've said here partition had, this narrative of madness was created by the British at the time, and they also say that by calling the violence and brutality as ‘madness’ one could ignore its treatment and resolution much as the madmen had been ignored for centuries by the British at the time.

I thought that was really interesting because it's kind of like, because they see Indian bodies to be Indian bodies, they saw as similar to others, the authors again say, ‘but the Indian mind was somehow construed as being different’. It’s so interesting how narratives, if you unpick it, how they’re being formed. 

Rima: I think the other thing to hold in mind is that it's deeply reductionist. You know, to label something that's as just ‘mad’ is to create another narrative of helplessness. It’s a form of othering just in that kind of thinking, I suppose, these people, they can’t be helped. And I think one of the things we have to also hold in mind is, I mean, first of all, it's not a trauma informed approach at all, is it? To describe it as, ‘oh, it’s just madness’. It’s dehumanising. It’s a refusal to take responsibility that the trauma had actually been caused by colonial harm. It's othering. It's not taking any kind of cultural informity in mind at all. And the other thing to hold in mind in regards to trauma, is that when we’ve got kind of that systemic denial, as I say, in the British culture and European culture at large, that also collides with something that is called ‘speechless terror’. So the whole issue of how we don’t talk about it and it’s been silenced, and then we’ve internalised the systemic silence and the systemic denial. That just dovetails with the neuroscience of trauma as well, in that trauma, when it’s happening, it literally shuts the speech centre down. It also shuts the prefrontal cortex down in the moment; the part that does all the thinking and reasoning and perceptive work. So trauma quite literally creates an experience of being lost for words, particularly during periods of threat and danger, and the brain pathways for remembering that are also hindered.

So when one is reliving a traumatic incident or experience, the frontal lobes of our brain are affected so they literally cannot think or speak. So we've got it at a neuroscience level where we don't talk about it, and then we've got it at a systemic level where there's very clear denial and very clear neglect of this topic. Very clear denial of any harm that was caused. 

So we are literally holding this denialism and the silencing, we're holding it at multiple levels. And then if you mix it in with, at a cultural system level, specifically in south Asian culture, we hold cultural values around maintaining honour, not shaming the family name, maintaining an image of doing and keeping well as part of appearing respectable in society. So that means we've adopted a further layer of silence in our struggles and pain, and that's been part of our survivalism as well. 

Daljeet: It's such a good point. It's such a good point because what you've just described is essentially something which was created by the colonial powers, which we've then, you know, which we've upheld in various ways, shapes and forms.

Hence we're at the point where we are, where it's taken, I don't know, 72 to 73 years to even go, ‘oh, actually my great-grandmother experienced this, maybe that's why there are problems with women and the kind of things they're experiencing in their family? Maybe that's why there's a pattern of behaviour? Maybe that's why my grandmother is not emotionally available to my dad? Maybe that's why my dad was a certain way to my mum?’. You know, it's just like, it does root back to lots of things. And if we're talking, it’s so layered.

Rima: It's layered and it's across generations because it might've started out at one point in one particular time, but each generation has felt the impact of this because one of the things we know is, particularly this type of trauma, where a civil war, displacement, forced migration, those are quite large scale socially catastrophic issues. So they are deeply traumatizing, but then once that incident passes, you're left with the after effects of it, you're left with the shock, the loss, the powerlessness, the sort of speechless terror, the unsafety is what you're left with. And in the midst of this we’re meant to, you know, so many people in partition as well as when, for example, when the Ugandan Asian expulsion happened, it's not like babies stopped being born in the middle of these chaotic situations. It's not like parenting had to stop.

Daljeet: Absolutely. And do you know what? You may not even know that something is a historic event, it could be partition, it could be anything. You know, south Asia has got a huge history and I’m very ignorant about a lot of it, but I’m just saying that it could be absolutely anything. But when you find out a story, like, for example, there's that programme, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ and you have these people that go on a journey and find their past, and when they discover something about their past, from that point onwards their life has changed.

I was really fascinated when I first read about intergenerational trauma. I read about it a few years back in The Guardian, a couple of articles, and I was like, ‘oh my God, I never, I knew there was something from our past that affects us in the present, but I didn't understand there was a scientific explanation for it’. I know you’ve explained when we spoke earlier that this is quite a new field, but I just want you to introduce our listeners to that word; intergenerational trauma and epigenetics, that's it. Could you explain what exactly is intergenerational trauma and the way it's passed on through this epigenetic thing?

Rima: So, intergenerational trauma, I won’t go into anything too complex on it, but at a very basic level, it is trauma that is passed down through the generational line. Sometimes it’s also called transgenerational trauma, it means the same thing. So it’s around what our ancestors experienced and how that same trauma gets enacted or reenacted and passed through the family system. It can be passed on through biology, the genetics, but it can also pass through relationally. This is where it gets a bit complicated and we won’t get too science-y with this because it’s not, you know, I hold this knowledge obviously from a psychology perspective! So, epigenetics is very specifically the study of how our behaviours and our environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work, so the way our genes are expressed specifically. So certain things can be switched on or off in our gene expression by our environment, by certain stresses and by trauma.

The major pioneer in this field has been Professor Rachel Yehuda - she's a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, and she has led a lot of research in this field, examining historical trauma, particularly within the Jewish community after the Holocaust. Her research in the field of epigenetics has been instrumental in our understanding of intergenerational trauma. It’s shown how genes play an important role in our health, but so does that behaviour and our environment. So things like what we eat matters, how physically active we are matters, how safe our community and our country is, all of that matters, okay?

Epigenetics research has really defined that intergenerational trauma is a thing. It is something that exists. Interestingly, the research in this field is also connected to something called ‘The Three Generations Theory’ which is fascinating because it basically shows that the history was shared with our family because it begins far before we're conceived.

If we think about it in our earliest biological form, as an unfertilized egg, we end up sharing a cellular environment with our mother and grandmother. So for example, when my grandmother was five months pregnant with my mother, the precursor cell of that, of the egg I developed from, was already present in my mother's ovaries. This goes for everyone really. We, the three of us, we’re all in the same body sharing the same biological environment.

Daljeet: Oh, that's so interesting. Okay, when you explain it like that, that's so fascinating. 

Rima: You get The Three Generations Theory now. So, in my own history, what my grandmother was going through when she was carrying my mother, through that my mother was carrying me because I’m an unfertilised egg at that point inside. We will have them from the beginning of our life because that's formed, you know, in utero. So, that’s fascinating!

Daljeet: That’s so fascinating, isn’t it? That explains it, doesn't it, in some ways why there's so much interest in this generation of people my age now talking about their grandparents’ experience, and the histories that they're tied to, and the events that they went through. It makes so much sense because of all that curiosity around it, trying to understand something a bit more about yourself through understanding their journey. 

So there’s a couple of articles that I read. There was one in The Quint and it’s a mental health one; ‘Why are we having the wrong conversations again?’. It’s about the Dalit community, but there’s a lady here called Divya Malhari who’s a Dalit activist, and she says that trauma is not a one-sided narrative. She talks of her maternal grandmother singing her lullabies of Dr Ambedkar and how they stayed with her. 

Then in another article, by Bibi van der Zee in The Guardian again, she's also pointed out that some research has ended up in an entirely different place, finding that trauma in a parent's life can actually lead to higher resilience in children. So can we just spend a few minutes talking about that? Like what are your thoughts about that resilience learning from your ancestors’ struggles?

Rima: Well, I mean, this is also important that not all trauma, you know, we want to be careful about the narrative and we don't want to set one up which says that trauma just leads to continuous mental health casualties because of course it doesn't, you know? Through the legacies of our ancestors, we can also take in their resilience.

So, resilience can also be passed down intergenerationally, strength can also be passed down intergenerationally - if trauma can, then so can these things. I think one of the difficulties is that if we haven’t had resilience passed down intergenerationally to our own mind, and in our own story, then actually we need to work on developing that.

It can't just be, resilience isn't just this separate, split away concept out here, abstract. We need to do quite a lot of deep work with intergenerational trauma. Resilience can form part of that, and that's the important aspect of that sort of work, the kind of work I do, the kind of work my colleagues do, and so on.I don't know whether I've answered your question there or if I’ve gone off on a tangent!

Daljeet: You have, you have answered the question and it actually ties in really well with what Sarah Ansari and I spoke about yesterday. So she says from a history point of view, it's important to remember the other side of history too. The stories of coexisting, you know, the peaceful, the peace that there was in communities before events like partition or before any event in history, there was obviously a time that was hopefully better. So there are good stories to take away, there were friendships that we should remember, there are those stories that we should dig out too, because there's the hope I think lies in there. So I think that's a nice message to leave our listeners with today. 

Rima, thank you so much. Before we go I just wanted to say to our listeners, if you're affected by any of the issues discussed today, because we've been talking about trauma and intergenerational pain and the current mental health crisis, if you're affected by any of the issues discussed today, you can contact Samaritans on 116123 or Mind on 03001233393. There’s a Shout Crisis line which is a text line, so that’s Shout TEXT 85258. And in addition, if you are south Asian person listening to this who wants to reach out to therapists, there is a black, African and Asian therapy network, BAATN. There’s a directory of therapists from minority backgrounds and that’s on www.baatn.org.uk. And finally, there is a global directory of therapists of south Asian heritage at www.southasiantherapists.org. I hope those resources are useful for you all.

Thank you so much, Rima, for your time today. 

Rima: No problem. It was a pleasure, pleasure talking to you. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I just wanted to say I'm absolutely honored that you invited me to speak on the topic. I hope it's been a useful conversation. I hope the listeners find it helpful as well.

Daljeet: Please like, share and subscribe to listen to our bonus episode featuring poet Adrian Earle, also known as Think/Write/Fly. Adrian will be sharing some tips about how to write poetry. Support Spoken Truth to Power by visiting the website spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and click 'support us'.

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Spoken Truth to Power is created by me at Culture Studio. Music, sound design and post-production is by Elliot Bulley. Artwork is by Amrit Singh, podcast consultancy by Chhavi Sachdev and marketing support by Katie Bevan. Promotional support was provided by Bobby Friction and Kommune.

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