By Avigayil Kadesh
Could it be that the children of trauma victims are less dramatically affected by trauma in their own lives?
Yes, says Israeli clinical psychologist Sharon Dekel. Her two studies examined both the negative effects (post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) and positive effects (post-traumatic growth, or PTG) of living through a difficult ordeal.
Though PTSD is a widely studied phenomenon, not much is known about PTG, and Dekel is among the world’s pioneers in looking at how some trauma survivors develop new priorities, closer relationships, increased appreciation of life, greater personal strength and heightened spirituality.
"Post-traumatic growth can be defined as a workable coping mechanism, a way of making and finding meaning involved in the building of a more positive self-image and the perception of personal strength," says Dekel, now an instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.
"We were interested in studying the effect of the Holocaust on the second generation's propensity for this kind of growth. If we can identify verifiably positive implications of trauma, we will be able to incorporate them into treatment and teach people how to grow after terrible experiences."
Working with Prof. Zahava Solomon of Tel Aviv University's Bob Shapell School of Social Work as a junior investigator, Dekel focused on individuals whose parents survived the Holocaust and who also experienced their own trauma on the battlefield in wartime.
The study, published in July 2013 in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, showed some surprising results: Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, second-generation Holocaust survivors had consistently lower post-traumatic growth levels, across time, than did peers who were not children of survivors.
Apparently, conditioned by their parents' experience, they did not feel the trauma severely enough to trigger post-trauma growth.
Examining trauma over time
In 2012, Dekel and Solomon published a study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research showing that veterans of Israel's 1973 Yom Kippur War who were also second-generation Holocaust survivors were less likely to experience PTSD and related conditions many years after combat. They theorized that perhaps children of trauma survivors acquired coping mechanisms from their parents that helped protect them from the effect of trauma in their own lives.
With this theory in mind, they returned to combat veterans of the Yom Kippur War for the newest study, funded in part by the Narsad Young Investigator Grant that Dekel received from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.
Dekel emphasizes that, in the immediate aftermath of the war, this population did experience common PTSD symptoms, such as depression and anxiety. However, over time they were doing better than the non-second generation group.
“You need to examine the outcomes of trauma over time,” she says. “It would be hard to say they are always by far better, but in the long term this is what we found. Eventually, you can generalize -- especially among those experiencing extreme trauma, where ordinarily symptoms become worse over time.”
The daughter of Holocaust survivors herself, Dekel is now studying the hormones involved in PTSD. She suspects that both psychological and biological factors are responsible for the differences her studies uncovered. “I feel I have a mission to study this, especially because the generation of Holocaust survivors is passing away. We need to understand the implications of this horrible experience.”
Understanding post-traumatic growth
Dekel and Solomon offer several explanations why second-generation Holocaust survivors who fought in the Yom Kippur War do not show higher rates of PTG to match their lower rates of PTSD. If their parents did not discuss their trauma, this could have inhibited PTG. Or they could have inherited their parents' guilt for having survived the Holocaust, making it difficult for them to associate trauma with growth and causing them to underreport PTG in their questionnaires.
Another proposed explanation is that second-generation Holocaust survivors grew up constantly exposed to their parents' trauma, making war less stressful for them and lessening their PTG, which is understood as the result of struggle with the trauma.
From a brain science perspective, Dekel surmises that perhaps in second-generation survivors, the amygdala – the brain’s seat of fear recognition – does not get overactivated by trauma because this generation’s immersion in their parents’ trauma made them more resilient when approaching a trauma of their own.
“Psychology and psychiatry are moving toward finding objective methods to study the psychological implications of trauma,” Dekel says.
“We found in the long term that there is some transmission between the first and second generations, but what is the mechanism in charge of this transmission? Perhaps it’s epigenetic. We see over time that the second generation is more adaptive than non-second generation. We can only speculate why this is so.”
She also wants to see if the findings would be different among non-Israeli second-generation survivors, although she guesses they’d be the same.
“What we have now are preliminary results, and there are a lot of possible interpretations of these results,” she says. However, one thing seems sure: “If you don’t perceive an event as traumatic, you cannot grow from it.”