Family Trauma

Abstract The burdens of war and humanitarian emergencies are often borne by the family. Besides the broader socioeconomic impact of war and violence, trauma’s psychological legacy is its pernicious after-effects on the person, family, and future generations. Survivors of mass trauma can re-experience the trauma in broad and derivative ways, sometimes for many decades after exposure. Chapter 8, “Family Trauma: The Psychological Legacy of War,” explores some pathways of trauma transmission within conflict-affected families, such as maternal posttraumatic stress, marital relations, child mental health, paternal posttraumatic stress, and parental psychopathology. Families are sites of shared emotions great complexity, bidirectionality, and variation in the expression of mental health problems in the postconflict family climate and how a family member’s mental health challenges can set in motion, either directly or indirectly, adverse mental health processes for other family members. Together, both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches to clinical research can elucidate different aspects of the sequelae of distress and family functioning in refugee families. The presence of posttraumatic stress in offspring underscores the importance of assessing direct and indirect pathways of both parents’ posttraumatic stress levels. A parent’s trajectory and struggles with posttraumatic stress can independently affect their offspring’s posttraumatic stress years later, and affect how their partner’s posttraumatic stress affects their offspring’s posttraumatic stress many years later. Family therapy can help to strengthen and extend support for vulnerable and displaced individuals at multiple levels by including home-based clinicians, school therapists, clinical supervisors, and cultural experts, thus helping to create sturdier families.