What We Inherit When No One Talks About the Trauma

Hi,

This week’s conversation made me think deeply about something we often misunderstand about intergenerational trauma: children do not need to know the details of what happened in order to feel its presence.

My guest, Sally Wolfe, grew up as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia. Both of her parents survived multiple concentration camps.

They were loving parents. They also rarely spoke about what they had endured.

As a child, Sally knew her family was different before she fully understood why. She did not have grandparents. There were relatives who simply were not there. Her mother woke from nightmares screaming, could not comfortably sleep alone later in life, and reacted intensely to reminders such as German Shepherds.

Sally remembers developing a rule without anyone ever sitting her down and teaching it to her: keep your feelings inside.

That distinction is important. Children learn from much more than what parents explicitly tell them. They learn from what is discussed, what is avoided, what creates fear in the room, and which emotions seem safe enough to express.

As Sally grew older, she began wondering whether other children of Holocaust survivors had developed their own versions of these patterns. She started interviewing members of the second generation, and that work became her book, The Survivor’s Legacy.

The stories were different, but a common question ran through them: what happens to trauma after the person who originally experienced it survives?

Sometimes the answer is silence. Sometimes it is hypervigilance, overprotection, anxiety, anger, or an enormous pressure to keep moving forward no matter what hurts.

Sally’s own opportunity to interrupt that pattern came through terrible loss.

Her first husband died suddenly when her sons were 10 and 16. Sally’s immediate instinct was familiar: I cannot cry in front of my children. I cannot let them see how sad I am.

Then she caught herself.

If she hid her grief, what would she be teaching them?

So Sally made a choice that sounds simple but was extraordinarily difficult for her. She let her sons see that their mother was grieving. She talked to them about their feelings and tried to give them permission to experience something she had spent much of her own life containing.

As a hospice grief counselor, this part of our conversation was especially meaningful to me. Children do not need adults to pretend that death does not hurt. They need to see that sadness can be expressed and survived. We can cry and still be safe. We can grieve and still remain their parent. We can allow them to grieve differently from us.

Sally still describes emotional openness as work. Decades of protection do not disappear because we intellectually understand where they came from.

That brought us to the Traitor Within.

I described Sally’s emotional wall as a protective part. At one time, holding things inside may have helped her manage a family history that was simply too enormous for a child to process. The wall was trying to protect her from pain.

The difficulty comes when the wall remains long after we want something different.

I encouraged Sally to imagine lowering it gradually. She does not have to tear it down overnight. She can remind that protective part: I am an adult now. I can handle this feeling. I have people I trust. You do not have to protect me in exactly the same way anymore.

That, to me, is what breaking an intergenerational cycle can look like.

We do not have to condemn our parents to recognize what we inherited from them. Sally speaks with tremendous love for hers and tremendous respect for what they survived. She can honor their survival while also choosing to give the next generation something they were not able to give her.

I hope you will listen to our full conversation on Your Traitor Within.

You can learn more about Sally and order The Survivor’s Legacy here:

https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Legacy-Holocaust-Shaped-Generations-ebook/dp/B08T7Q3T8S

Instagram: @sallylefton
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sally.lefton

And before I go, this conversation also reminded me why I chose to tell the story of the Traitor Within through fiction.

My debut novel, Traitor Within: How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself, follows Casandra as she begins to understand how protective patterns formed early in life continue directing her adult relationships. The circumstances are very different from Sally’s story, but the underlying question is similar: what do we do when something that once helped us survive begins preventing us from living the life we actually want?

Traitor Within releases September 22 and is available for preorder now. As a thank-you for preordering, you will receive a full year of guided Your Traitor Within journaling prompts.

Preorder here:
https://www.jessicaannepressler.com/the-books

With love,

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW