Today there is evidence that most minority groups in the United States suffer from symptoms related to intergenerational transmission of collective historical trauma. For those with additional mental health issues, treatment can become complicated unless underlying historical hostilities are addressed. This practical text, by David S. Derezotes, helps readers understand the causes and treatment of historical trauma at an individual, group, and community level and demonstrates how a participatory, strengths-based approach can work effectively in its treatment. The first to offer a combination of theory, literature review, and practice knowledge on dialogue, this book begins with a definition of historical trauma and transformation, includes the dialogue necessary to aid in transformation (such as self-care, self-awareness and professional self- development). The author proposes six key models of dialogue practice—psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, experiential, transpersonal, biological, and ecological—and shows how these models can be used to help transform sociohistorical trauma in clients. He then applies these six dialogue models to five common practice settings, including work with community divides, social justice work, peace and conflict work, dialogues with populations across the lifespan, and community therapy.

"Today there is evidence that most minority groups in the United States suffer from symptoms related to intergenerational transmission of collective historical trauma. For those with additional mental health issues, treatment can become complicated unless underlying historical hostilities are addressed. This practical text, by David S. Derezotes, helps readers understand the causes and treatment of historical trauma at an individual, group, and community level and demonstrates how a participatory, strengths-based approach can work effectively in its treatment."--Publisher's website.

The authors in this volume explore the interconnected issues of intergenerational trauma and traumatic memory in societies with a history of collective violence across the globe. Each chapter’s discussion offers a critical reflection on historical trauma and its repercussions, and how memory can be used as a basis for dialogue and transformation. The perspectives include, among others: the healing journey of three generations of a family of Holocaust survivors and their dialogue with third generation German students over time; traumatic memories of the British concentration camps in South Africa; reparations and reconciliation in the context of the historical trauma of Aboriginal Australians; and the use of the arts as a strategy of dialogue and transformation.

History, Trauma and Shame provides an in-depth examination of the sustained dialogue about the past between children of Holocaust survivors and descendants of families whose parents were either directly or indirectly involved in Nazi crimes. Taking an autobiographical narrative perspective, the chapters in the book explore the intersection of history, trauma and shame, and how change and transformation unfolds over time. The analyses of the encounters described in the book provides a close examination of the process of dialogue among members of The Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (PAKH), exploring how Holocaust trauma lives in the ‘everyday’ lives of descendants of survivors. It goes to the heart of the issues at the forefront of contemporary transnational debates about building relationships of trust and reconciliation in societies with a history of genocide and mass political violence. This book will be great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of social psychology, Holocaust or genocide studies, cultural studies, reconciliation studies, historical trauma and peacebuilding. It will also appeal to clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as upper-level undergraduate students interested in the above areas.

This book engages the globally pressing question of how to live and work with the haunting power of the past in the aftermath of mass violence. It brings together a collection of interdisciplinary contributions to reflect on the haunting of post-conflict memory from the perspective of diverse country case studies including South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland, North and South Korea, Palestine and Israel, America and Australia. Contributions offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights on the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing and repair that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom for dealing with the past. While this question has traditionally been explored through the lens of trauma studies in relation to the post-Holocaust experience, this book provides new understandings from a variety of different historical contexts and disciplinary perspectives. Its chapters draw on, challenge and expand the trauma concept to propose more contextually relevant frameworks for transforming haunted memory in the aftermath of historical trauma.

Central to a transformational approach to conflict is the idea that conflicts must be viewed as embedded within broader relational patterns, and social and discursive structures—and must be addressed as such. This implies the need for systemic change at generative levels, in order to create genuine transformation at the level of particular conflicts. Central, also, to this book is the idea that the origins of transformation can be momentary, or situational, small-scale or micro-level, as well as bigger and more systemic or macro-level. Micro-level changes involve shifts and meaningful changes in communication and related patterns that are created in communication between people. Such transformative changes can radiate out into more systemic levels, and systemic transformative changes can radiate inwards to more micro- levels. This book engages this transformative framework. Within this framework, this book pulls together current work that epitomizes, and highlights, the contribution of communication scholarship, and communication centered approaches to conflict transformation, in local/community, regional, environmental and global conflicts in various parts of the world. The resulting volume presents an engaging mix of scholarly chapters, think pieces, and experiences from the field of practice. The book embraces a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as transformative techniques and processes, including: narrative, dialogic, critical, cultural, linguistic, conversation analytic, discourse analytic, and rhetorical. This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing dialogue across and between disciplines and people on how to transform conflicts creatively, sustainably, and ethically.

How wounds from a previous generation may weigh on children and grandchildren contain much of interest. Yet if we unpack the ghostly, the eerie, and the spectral in transgenerational hauntings, if we allow for the suffering or the disturbed to forge social links, such contacts may enable breaking into reconnections and afterlives. … One only needs to think of the near epidemic of rape in South Africa to sense violent hypermasculinity erupting as madness, mediated by a history of brutal, racialised reduction. But it is also important to move beyond the brutalities and madness, to consider the individual and collective refigurations surfacing out of layers of catastrophe. Nancy Rose Hunt: Conference Keynote Address, “Beyond Trauma? Notes on a Word, a Frame, and a Diagnostic Category.” Historical Trauma and Memory: Living with the Haunting Power of the Past is based on essays presented at a conference with the same name which was held in Kigali, Rwanda in April 2019. The book gives readers front row seats as an interdisciplinary group of scholars from law, psychology, history, the arts, anthropology, theology, and philosophy address the complex matrix of the emotional legacies of historical trauma, cultural legacies, people interacting with their social and political environment, and the interplay of these factors in different post-conflict societies.