In addition, many of the textbooks and materials counselor education programs use to teach students about trauma have a Western viewpoint and do not cover historical and generational trauma, she adds. There’s just no way a counseling program can cover everything fully, including the complexities of trauma, in a two-year master’s program, she says. Like Goodman, Petion feels there is sometimes a knowledge gap among counselors regarding generational trauma.
“Clients often report that it feels like sitting on their shoulders,” Petion agrees, “and they feel like they need to interrupt this and not pass it on.” “It can be very powerful for the client to have their experience acknowledged and framed as a ‘legitimate’ source of trauma, when often systemic or ‘nontraditional’ forms of trauma are ignored or excluded from mainstream assessment and practice.”
Counselors’ role “is to bring that into consciousness and work with the client to address it,” she says. Also complicating the issue is the disparity that exists for clients from minoritized cultures, who are more likely to experience generational trauma based on systemic oppression and related issues, she adds.įor some clients and counselors, societal oppression and historical/cultural erasure may keep them from linking presenting issues, such as trouble in relationships or problematic coping, to challenges or trauma that clients haven’t experienced themselves, but which affects their family and community, Goodman notes. Trauma, however, can take many forms it can be ongoing, vicarious, complex, generational and systemic, notes Goodman, the academic program co-coordinator and the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) liaison for the counseling program at George Mason University.īecause of this narrow definition, other types of trauma, including generational trauma, can be overlooked and outside the awareness of both clients and counselors, especially during the client assessment, diagnosis and treatment planning process, Goodman says. They are battling something bigger than them.” Taking a broader view of traumaĪ common - and perhaps deserved - critique of the definition of trauma traditionally held by mental health practitioners and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM) is that it is too narrow and doesn’t acknowledge the many different types of trauma, says Rachael Goodman, an LPC and associate professor at George Mason University whose area of specialty is trauma.Ĭounselors and society at large, including clients, may conceptualize trauma as the result of a single event or events that an individual has experienced personally. “It’s a collection of traumas that have been experienced by their ancestors, passed down, and it’s affecting them to this day. Generational trauma is complex, but counselors must remember that it doesn’t mean that there is “something inherently wrong with an individual ,” Petion stresses. This experience as a master’s intern sparked Petion’s interest in researching generational trauma, which eventually led to her doctoral dissertation and area of specialty as a counselor. “It’s part of their entire family and, in turn, their culture.”
Petion said she heard this over and over, and it made her realize that the challenges that her adolescent clients were facing were “bigger than the client who was sitting in front of me,” she says. Her young clients would often talk in sessions about challenges and friction at home, but whenever Petion looped the clients’ parents into the discussion, they said they were simply parenting their child in the same ways their own parents had done with them. Ashlei Petion, a licensed professional counselor (LPC) and assistant professor of clinical mental health counseling at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, noticed a common pattern in the counseling work she did with adolescents during her master’s internship.