Unpacking Trauma
Internalized Oppression and Intergenerational Trauma
About Trauma
Each cluster of words on this map houses various narratives rooted in trauma. There are several ways to think about trauma when approaching this work. Trauma includes the impact of a singular experience that deeply affects our sense of self and our relationship to safety, to our body, and the bodies of those around us. We also conceive of trauma as a series of experiences that impact our trust, our faith, and our understanding of who we are and of our positionality in the world. Trauma is also the impact of an ongoing set of conditions that an individual or a group of people endure that comes to characterize our entire world.
Although a traumatic event, or series of events, may or may not be a direct result of our bodies interfacing with systems of oppression, these events are often deeply informed by the context in which they take place and, in our society, this context is often characterized by oppression.
While the impact of trauma on individuals may vary significantly, the impact of trauma on a group of people with a shared history of navigating systemic oppression can often be tracked collectively. We can refer to this as collective trauma.
Through epigenetics and by directly witnessing those around us, we also inherit the unconscious, learned responses of our ancestors. These patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior were often developed in response to life-threatening events or conditions. Thus, we inherit them as instruments for our own protection. We can refer to these patterns as ancestral trauma or intergenerational trauma.
Internalized Oppression
Internalized oppression (I.O.) is a term often used to describe the ways that oppression is observed, absorbed, and accepted into the minds and practices of those of us targeted by oppression, assuming the role of the oppressor from the inside.
I.O. includes the false negative messages that people targeted by oppression come to believe, expect, and assume about ourselves and our People and the ways that we act in the world— towards ourselves and one another—when we believe these things to be true.
The term internalized oppression can be used to address several points of impact: the trauma we hold in our bodies from our individual experiences with oppression, the impact of systemic oppression on the collective body and collective consciousness, and the legacy of our ancestral lineages. And I use the term patterns to include ways of being, feeling, thinking, behaving, ways we physically hold our bodies, and the quick, unconscious choices we make.
Ancestrally Proven Best Practices
It can be a profound awakening to recognize the depth to which our thoughts, emotions, and actions are impacted by our lived and inherited experiences with trauma and oppression. We can think about these patterns as embodied acts of survival and resistance to legacies of oppression.
Originally, these behaviors were brilliantly adaptive responses; acute, refined, definitive attempts at securing the survival of our People. They were often the very tactic that kept us alive, that kept our People alive. We can call them ancestrally proven best practices.
Example: During the Pogroms in Eastern Europe, many Jews left their villages and towns in search of safety. As a result of this collective response, hundreds of thousands of Jews managed to escape the violence and survive the Shoah (Nazi Holocaust). Many of us with ancestors from the Jewish ghettos and shtetls of Eastern Europe are here today BECAUSE of this collective response. It saved our lives.
The violence, paired with anti-Semitic messages that permeated Eastern Europe — that Jews weren’t wanted, didn’t belong, weren’t desirable, and that Jewish safety and survival didn’t matter — activated a felt sense in the body which served as a radar, alerting families to the presence of looming danger and keeping them vigilant, ready to make life or death decisions. And as people fled, these messages traveled with them as emotional wounding, as internalized oppression.
I have learned that these patterns deserve to be honored. We honor the ways they kept us protected, defended, and ready. We honor the skill of our ancestors in developing them and the ferocity and determination in which they were passed down. We honor ourselves for inheriting them and our communities for embodying them.
At the same time, we can recognize that, taken out of their original context, patterns our People once relied on for survival can now work against us, degrading our sense of worth and desirability, our sense of agency and connection, our capacity for self-acceptance and belonging. In our movement work, these patterns can undermine our trust and sabotage our solidarity.
Back to our example: Bringing any ancestrally proven best practice from historical conditions into the context of today's reality, a response that once saved the lives of our ancestors can now impede and hinder us.
The inherited pattern of vigilance paired with a sustained readiness to leave at any moment impacts my current capacity to stay put. For example, I notice in myself a reluctance to commit to romantic relationships and close friendships. I pay close attention to and catalogue all the ways I feel unmet. I might feel committed to a relationship for now but, consciously or unconsciously, I’m always preparing to leave. I also notice that it’s hard to feel settled in any community I’m part of. The place I live, my work, or my community are almost always “just for now.” And in political organizing, I might not invest in relationships or in campaigns with the depth that real trust requires because deep down inside I can’t fully imagine staying.
Pattern Discernment
How can we tell if it’s safe to let go of these patterns? If these patterns kept us alive in the past, might we need them again? Our personal and inherited trauma, paired with the current realities of anti-Semitism, make these questions very challenging. I believe that our task is not to purge ourselves of our patterns entirely. Rather our task is to build our understanding of these patterns, to build our awareness of our own body’s use of these patterns, and to strengthen our sense of agency, individually and in community. As we do this, we increase our capacity to discern if and when to employ these behaviors as tactics, rather than unconsciously allowing the patterns to employ us.
This increased consciousness — paired with sustained, loving support — creates the conditions necessary for us to learn and to practice new ways of being that are responsive to our current conditions and aligned with our present desires.
This is healing work. It’s important that we not expect ourselves to do it all at once or to do it alone. Some may choose to be guided by a healing practitioner like a therapist, an energy worker, or a bodyworker. Others may choose to work in chavrutah, study partnership, with close friends, or in community with fellow congregants or political comrades. Regardless of how we approach this work, when we choose to engage deeply, with solid support, we can harvest the wisdom of our personal and ancestral survival history and respond to the current calls for solidarity with compassion and dignity.
Intersections of Internalized Anti-Semitism and White Superiority
Exploring the content of this map in parallel with patterns of internalized white superiority can assist white Ashkenazi Jews in noticing, naming, and interrupting the ways we participate in, and perpetuate, both racism and anti-Semitism within Jewish community and beyond.
Over many decades, in various countries, and very actively here in the U.S., Ashkenazi Jews of European descent, carrying deep ruptures of loss and trauma, collectively abandoned fields of language, music, plant medicine, folk magic, and spiritual and religious expression for the safety and security that assimilation into white Christian hegemony promised.
Reaching for safety, our People efforted to assume a place within a culture organized to maintain the superiority of white minds, white ideology, white bodies, and the preservation of white lineage. By doing so, we assumed a mentality of superiority over marginalized groups deemed threatening or disposable, which included learning to despise and disregard the unassimilated Jews around us and the unassimilated Jew within us.
Because our American Jewish organizations and institutions, including those on the Left are often led by majority assimilated white Ashkenazim, our Jewish institutions are dominated by the collective trauma patterning of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews woven with patterns of internalized white superiority.
The intersections of these patterns make it hard for white Jews to work together, to see one another clearly, to trust one another, to trust non-Jews, and to reclaim or maintain the heart of authentic, unassimilated Ashkenazi culture. These patterns may also impel white Jews to marginalize, tokenize, deny, and erase the identities, cultures, and experiences of Jewish People of Color, Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Indigenous Jews.
Undoing these patterns entails honoring the wounds of our ancestral trauma and reckoning with the collective costs of assimilation. It involves acknowledging the racism our People have perpetuated and addressing the harm we currently cause. It means healing our heartbreak and realigning our relationships.
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The following examples of the intersections of internalized anti-Semitism and internalized patterns of white superiority are taken from a collaboration between Dove Kent, Aurora Levins Morales, Cherie Brown, Yocheved Angelique Arroyo, and myself. Each of these examples highlights some of the ways in which the feelings of internalized anti-Semitism play out in behaviors that collude with racism. These examples illuminate the need to simultaneously hold compassion for our trauma and accountability for our actions.
We white Jews (often unconsciously) feel like we have to know the answer. We have to be ahead of the game, we have to be the ones who are thinking of everything, we have to be right. When working with non-Jewish people of color, this is experienced as racism.
To satisfy our (sometimes unconscious) deep sense of urgency and fear, we white Jews often feel the need to be in constant action. This can be experienced by Jewish or non-Jewish people of color as us pushing through an agenda that they may or may not be comfortable with, as white people bulldozing through and not listening.
We white Jews (often unconsciously) carry a deep fear of being less desirable and dispensable. We often find ways to help other people as a way of managing this fear. This need to be needed, or “helping,” can have the impact of white people degrading the capability and integrity of people of color or implementing decisions about the lives of people of color without consent.
Our sense of urgency can keep us white Jews from trusting people who are not working with the same urgency. If a coworker, who is a person of color, is moving slower than we are, we are likely to micro-manage them, which can have the impact of a white person controlling people of colors’ actions and behavior.
Many white Jews raised in Jewish households feel protective of our Jewish identity, having grown up defending our religious practices, our history, our peoplehood, and our right to exist in the face of white Christian hegemony. This protectiveness, paired with internalized white superiority and the benefits of white privilege, have us assuming the authority to decide who is “authentically” a Jew and who belongs to Jewish community —undermining and denying the Jewish identity of many JPOCISM, multi-racial and multi-ethnic Jews, and Jews who chose their Judaism — and then making decisions that allocate resources based on this authority.