Insidious Trauma Research Articles

Assessing transgenerational trauma transmission: development and psychometric properties of the Historical Intergenerational Trauma Transmission Questionnaire (HITT-Q)

ABSTRACT Objective/Background: Despite increasing attention on transgenerational trauma, currently no comprehensive model and measure exists to be applied on various populations. This study represents the first step in the validation of such a model and a related scale. The Historical Intergenerational Trauma Questionnaire (HITT-Q) assesses family and offspring self-reported vulnerability and resilience, as well as offspring historical moral injury and current levels of insidious trauma. Method: We developed the HITT-Q based on the cross-population model (HITT model; [Starrs, C. & Békés, V. (2024). Historical and transgenerational trauma: A conceptual framework. Traumatology. In Press]) which incorporates key findings in existing population specific studies. For initial validation of the model and its measurement, Holocaust survivors’ offspring (N = 1104) completed the HITT-Q, measures of current mental health symptoms (PTSD, C-PTSD, anxiety, and depression), and a resilience scale. Results: In line with the HITT model, confirmatory factor analyses supported a 12-factor solution with the following factors under theorized dimensions: I. Family Vulnerability: (1) Dysregulated and Trauma-related Communication; (2)Trauma-influenced Parenting, (3) Fear; (4) Distress; II. (5) Family Resilience, III. Offspring Vulnerability: (6) Escape; (7) Heightened Responsibility; (8) Trauma-related distress; IV. Offspring Resilience: (9) Coping; (10) Belonging; (11) Values; V. (12) Historical Moral injury. The 12-factor model showed acceptable to good internal validity, and comparison with an existing measure of transgenerational Holocaust trauma indicated good concurrent validity. Finally, the HITT-Q demonstrated predictive validity for mental health symptoms and current resilience. Conclusions: The current study represents the first step in validating the HITT-Q as a comprehensive measure of historical intergenerational vulnerability and resilience. Our findings provide strong support for the underlying model, and suggest that the HITT-Q represents a valuable scale for both research and historical trauma-informed care.

Embodied interreligious engagement: Female gendered bodies, reconciliation, and sport in Djibouti

Foreign Christian women in Muslim-majority countries may experience gendered culture shock and various forms of insidious trauma. This is rarely addressed by organizations or individuals yet has a significant impact on women, their communities, and their work by causing a rupture in their concept of self, community, and God. This article argues that participation in sports as intentional embodied interreligious engagement offers potential for Christian and Muslim women to mutually discover valuable resources for reconciling what trauma ruptures, namely their relationship with their own bodies and their communities. The article first establishes the experience of gendered culture shock, sexual harassment, and insidious trauma, and reasons Christians may downplay their impact. It then develops the concept of an incarnational ministry of reconciliation. This is followed by looking at how intentional interreligious engagement must begin on neutral ground and identifies sports as one possibility for embodiment in interreligious engagement. The article concludes with suggestions for further research and ideas for further embodied interaction, moving toward deeper and more intentional interreligious engagement.

Memory, Insidious trauma, and Refugee crisis in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)

This article argues that refugee crises include complex forms of insidious and latent trauma, insufficiently engaged in dominant discourses of trauma studies which largely draw on Western models and cultural experiences, often overlooking various aspects of postcolonial trauma, trauma due to casual violence and racism, and other forms of everyday marginalization which are interstitial, experiential, and quotidian in quality. Through a historical examination of the America-Vietnam War and its subsequent diasporic subject-formations, we aim to offer an original reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) using a complex framework of memory studies that highlights an interplay of nostalgia, spectrality, and posttraumatic stress manifestations. The study argues how trauma may be examined as a quotidian and experiential phenomenon of slow disintegration emerging from a profoundly political context, and how the medium of fiction offers a unique cognitive, affective, and focal framework to articulate and empathize with the same.

“This Ain’t the Way It’s S’posed to Be”: Negotiating Trauma Through Postmemory and Implication in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the negotiation of the traumas of slavery and its legacies in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) deviates from traditional trauma literature in terms of its form and content. Gyasi’s novel is shown to be structured as a postmemorial family saga, allowing it to highlight the transgenerational and transtemporal effects of trauma in a way that differs markedly from the modernist aesthetics prescribed by traditional trauma theory. Homegoing features a confrontational approach, as it represents trauma directly and explicitly, whilst positioning the reader and several characters as implicated subjects. The novel moreover shows itself attuned to the complexities of trauma by featuring cases of insidious trauma and emphasising how traumas may be rooted in structural issues.

Insidious Trauma: A Literature Review

Despite the promising development of trauma studies as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, the notion of insidious trauma is often relegated to its margins. As a theory with its roots in feminist psychotherapeutic practices of scholars such as Maria Root and Laura Brown, the paradigm of insidious trauma provides scope to discuss mundane and everyday experientialities of trauma that result from socially marginalized positions. The central aim of this paper is to aver that there is a need to expand the category of insidious trauma to explore the quotidian traumas of marginalized groups. For this, the paper presents analogous feminist and masculinist understandings of trauma experienced due to individuals’ complex entanglement with the patriarchal discourse. In exploring the notion of insidious trauma through a feminist lens, the paper connects it to the theories of coercive control, patriarchal terrorism, and betrayal trauma. The paper also discusses paradigms of male trauma that concur with the theory of insidious trauma. In this course, the paper presents the historical failure of the diagnosis of male hysteria. It discusses how narrow understandings of masculinity in a patriarchal culture have generated emotionally stunted development in men and foreclosed their avenues to seek help for domestic violence. The paper then posits that expanding Michael Rothberg’s category of the implicated subject provides a way to throw light on how the entire patriarchal social structure is complicit in generating male and female victims of its ideology.

Facing the Other: Representations of Postcolonial Childhood Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Recent developments in the fields of postcolonial and trauma studies have focused on how there can be a significant interrelationship in the frameworks deployed to investigate the formation of identities in postcolonial subjects. The emphasis on anxiety and fractured subjectivities that inform discussions of postcolonial identity can also be conceptualized in terms of traumatic interventions at crucial moments in the development of selfhood. This paper will contend that though childhood is one of the most crucial times when the formative influences for the development of personality are inscribed onto the psyche of the individual, very little attention has been paid to children as a separate group in theorizations of postcolonial identity. This paper will attempt to use notions such as ‘insidious trauma’ inflicted by entanglements with British culture and education as a critical lens for the study of the formation of identity in the lives of the protagonists of two novels by two Indian authors. It will also engage with the personal trauma inflicted on these children by political upheavals as well as by the trauma caused by adult figures in their Anglophile families. This paper will therefore show that the complex and multilayered trauma suffered by postcolonial children has a profound impact on their adult lives, leaving them permanently scarred and that any attempts at resistance by the victims of such trauma are failures or at best only partially successful. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 136-147

Toward Feeling Fragments: Melancholic Migrants and Other Affect Aliens in the Philippian and Corinthian Assemblies

Abstract Grief and trauma mark both the ancient past and the present, while melancholia reflects the possibilities for holding on in both contexts. In order to vary and multiply our approaches to people and places touched by loss, biblical scholars could get a different feel for the potentials of melancholia as examined in affect, queer, and critical race theories. While Pauline letters often aim to convert grief away from pain and trauma, the pre-Pauline materials within them (specifically, the slogans in 1 Corinthians and the Christ-hymn in Philippians) index a communal melancholia, refusals to “get over it” or relinquish the other and/as lost object(s). Though the other affect aliens in the assembly communities are moving within colonized contexts shaped by layered sediments of insidious trauma, their slogans and hymns assemble contingent and temporary fragments, modes of negotiating difficult conditions, of loss and death, enslavement and exploitation, unwanted touch and ongoing suffering – without forgetting.

Links between Childhood Abuse, Insidious Trauma, and Methamphetamine Use across the Lifespan among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Qualitative Analysis

ABSTRACT Developmental and lifespan examinations of methamphetamine use among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) remain limited. We used a feminist trauma framework to examine potential links between childhood trauma, trauma-related stressors, and methamphetamine use among GBM. From June 2018 to October 2018, semi-structured interviews (N = 33) were conducted with GBM across British Columbia. Interviews focused on sexual experiences, support services, and methamphetamine use. Using thematic analysis, two overarching trauma-related themes were identified: developmental and insidious trauma and coping with trauma-related stressors. GBM’s methamphetamine use co-occurred with childhood experiences of family- and peer-perpetrated heterosexism, childhood sexual abuse, and intersecting forms of oppression/marginalization. These experiences manifested as internalized shame, interpersonal anxiety, and low self-esteem. In adulthood, participants reported difficulty managing emotions, low self-confidence, and loneliness. GBM reported using methamphetamine to manage negative emotions, life stressors, and overcome barriers to interpersonal connection. Findings indicate a need for trauma-informed interventions that address underlying issues and help GBM cultivate supportive relationships.

Songs of Famine and War: Irish Famine Memory in the Music of the US Civil War

This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

Laura Westengard. Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma

Laura Westengard. <i>Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma</i>

Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems

&#x0D; Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems&#x0D; &#x0D; The title of the book of poems published in 1941, The Double Man, defines much of W.H. Auden’s life, constantly driven by a sense of duality and paradox. The double functions as a complex, subtle phenomenon in Auden’s case: It highlights an unresolvable tension between his private and public persona. The search for a compromise between personal wishes and social duties is a recurring theme in Auden’s later works but appears with particular intensity in the poems of his youth, resulting in a complex entanglement in which the poet’s identity is often (traumatically) negotiated. Since Auden’s life extended throughout most of the 20th-century—he was born in 1907, in York, and died in Vienna in 1973—his work provides a useful lens through which to examine some of the events that would change the world in unprecedented ways. For much of his career, he was worried about the impact his homosexuality would have on his attempt to fashion himself as a public poet, as the risk of public scandal and even imprisonment was high in Britain and the US until the late 1960s, and the issue of his homosexuality remains one of the most significant contexts for the study of Auden and of the ways he imagined himself. The impossibility of coming out in the 1920s, when he was an adolescent, posed a heavy burden on him and determined to a great extent his future identity and thus his way of life as a whole. Until now, however, the question of how Auden’s earlier poetic output, that is the 1922-1927 poems, has been “marked and structured and indeed necessitated and propelled by the historical shapes of homophobia, for instance, by the contingencies and geographies of the highly permeable closet” (Sedgwick 165), has remained largely overlooked, and much uncertainty still exists about the extent to which the poet’s “coming out” experience circulated in the vicinity of trauma and was marked by it.

Insidious Trauma – Between the Political and the Psychoanalytical

The article attempts to understand the affliction known as insidious trauma and its link to social and political situations. The medical establishment finds itself hard pressed to provide an adequate response to traumas of social and political origin, rooted in oppressive regimes or environments. To the best of our knowledge the psycho-political model of recovery should take into account active resistance on the part of the individual suffering from insidious trauma. Subjectivity that is exposed to insidious trauma, but is not at the same time exposed to representations of resistance, remains external to the discourse. By assigning a name, a language and a voice to insidious trauma, the discourse is shifted from intrapsychic psychopathology to social psychopathology, thereby imparting to it both a social and a political context.

A “Phantom Pain”: The Insidious Trauma of Migration in Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma

ABSTRACT This article reads Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007) as a narrative of insidious trauma. The text’s oscillation between a violent past and a confusing present, and the mournful disposition of the narrative perspective invite questions about the role of memory in the aftermath of violence, and the link between migration and psychic trauma. And while it is not difficult to understand the protagonist’s post-traumatic response to her pre-migration history of violence and cruelty, her confused reaction to the demands of the experience of migration does not fit in with classical, event-based models of trauma, which revolve around the notion of a singular, catastrophic event. Salma’s experience as an immigrant, I would suggest, is best understood in light of recent postcolonial revisions of major creeds of trauma theory, particularly the idea that minor, quotidian acts of violence on the psyche could trigger a post-traumatic response.

Moving beyond Weiss and Springer’sRepatriation and Erasing the Past:Indigenous values, relationships, and research

AbstractThis commentary debunks the poor scholarship inRepatriation and Erasing the Pastby Elizabeth Weiss and James Springer. We show that modern bioarchaeological practice with Indigenous remains places ethics, partnership, and collaboration at the fore and that the authors’ misconstructed dichotomous fallacy between “objective science” and Indigenous knowledge and repatriation hinders the very argument they are espousing. We demonstrate that bioarchaeology, when conducted in collaboration with stakeholders, enriches research, with concepts and methodologies brought forward to address common questions, and builds a richer historical and archaeological context. As anthropologists, we need to acknowledge anti-Indigenous (and anti-Black) ideology and the insidious trauma and civil rights violations that have been afflicted and re-afflicted through Indigenous remains being illegally or unethically obtained, curated, transferred, and used for research and teaching in museums and universities. If we could go so far as to say that anything good has come out of this book, it has been the stimulation in countering these beliefs and developing and strengthening ethical approaches and standards in our field.

Reading Trauma Narratives: Insidious Trauma in the Story of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29-30) and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

This article investigates the notion of insidious trauma as a helpful means of interpreting the story of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah as told in Genesis 29-30 that has found its way into the haunting trauma narrative of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In the first instance, this article outlines the category of insidious trauma as it is situated in terms of the broader field of trauma hermeneutics, as well as the way in which it relates to the related disciplines of feminist and womanist biblical interpretation. This article will then continue to show how insidious trauma features in two very different, though intrinsically connected trauma narratives, i.e., the world imagined by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, and the biblical narrative regarding the four women through whose reproductive efforts the house of Israel had been built that served as the inspiration for Atwood’s novel. This article argues that these trauma narratives, on the one hand, reflect the ongoing effects of systemic violation in terms of gender, race and class, but also how, embedded in these narratives there are signs of resistance that serve as the basis of survival of the self and also of others. https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2020/v33n1a3

Anti-bisexual discrimination as insidious trauma and impacts on mental and physical health.

Anti-bisexual discrimination as insidious trauma and impacts on mental and physical health.

LGBTQ+ based discrimination is associated with ptsd symptoms, dissociation, emotion dysregulation, and attachment insecurity among LGBTQ+ adults who have experienced Trauma

ABSTRACTObjectives: LGBTQ+ based discrimination is a form of insidious trauma and minority stress, and is associated with poor mental health. However, there is a dearth of research on the impact of discrimination on the psychological functioning of LGBTQ+ individuals who have experienced trauma. The current study seeks to remedy this gap. It was hypothesized that: (1) LGBTQ+ adults who perceived their experience of trauma as related to LGBTQ+ based discrimination would have greater attachment insecurity, emotion dysregulation, PTSD symptoms, and dissociative symptoms; (2) experiences of LGBTQ+ based discrimination would be associated with greater attachment insecurity, emotion dysregulation, PTSD symptoms, and dissociative symptoms; (3) transgender congruence (i.e., the extent to which one feels authentic and comfortable with their gender identity and appearance) would be negatively associated with attachment insecurity, emotion dysregulation, PTSD symptoms, and dissociative symptoms. Methods: Participants were 157 LGBTQ+ adults who had experienced trauma, and who completed questionnaires on discrimination and psychological functioning. Results: Compared to participants who did not experience their trauma as related to discrimination, those who did were higher in attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, emotion dysregulation, PTSD, and dissociative symptoms. Biphobia was positively associated with attachment anxiety, emotion dysregulation, PTSD, and dissociative symptoms. Homophobia was positively associated with emotion dysregulation, PTSD, and dissociative symptoms. Transphobia was positively associated with PTSD and dissociative symptoms. Appearance congruence was negatively associated with emotion dysregulation, PTSD, and dissociative symptoms. Conclusions: When working with LGBTQ+ clients who have experienced trauma, clinicians should be mindful of the effects of discrimination on wellbeing.

Lost Children: Hearing the Past in the Silence of an Empty House

This article analyses Maggie Gee’s novel Lost Children (1994) from the combined perspectives of feminist and trauma theories. It contends that the sudden disappearance of the protagonist’s teenage daughter triggers a psychological quest for the recovery of her voice and self, shattered by a traumatic experience she had in her childhood. My analysis, which pays especial attention to narratological issues —since this barely perceptible, insidious trauma is expressed both formally and thematically— shows that Alma’s behaviour is representative of the worries, expectations and impositions that contemporary children and women are subject to in western society, still imbued by patriarchal models and rules of behaviour.

The influence of multiple oppressions on women of color's experiences with insidious trauma.

In this study, we examined the relations between multiple forms of oppressive experiences (i.e., racism, sexism, and sexual objectification) and trauma symptoms among Women of Color (WOC). In addition, self-esteem was explored as a partial mediating variable in these links, and ethnic identity strength was proposed to buffer the negative relationship between multiple forms of oppression and self-esteem, and the positive relationship between oppressive experiences and trauma symptoms. Results suggested that self-esteem partially mediated the positive relationship between racist experiences and trauma symptoms, such that racism was related to lower self-esteem, which was then related to more trauma symptoms. Sexism and sexual objectification were directly linked with trauma symptoms. Moreover, average and high levels of ethnic identity strength buffered the positive link between racism and trauma symptoms. Consistent with an additive intersectionality framework, results demonstrate the importance of attending to multiple forms of oppression as they relate to trauma symptoms among WOC. (PsycINFO Database Record

Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of Conquest in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Eileen Chang’s “Lust, Caution”

This article contrasts two visions of trauma: a symbolic imaginary on film where women’s violated bodies stand in for philosophical ideas about sex, violence, and politics; and a more complex literary imaginary using what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of trauma.” The starting point for discussion is troubling representations of women on film; The Lover (1992, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud) and Lust , Caution (2007, dir. Ang Lee) both portray their heroines falling in love with their abusers, men whose shame and vulnerability are expressed through a symbolic rape. Rather than dwelling on this dubious aspect of the films, the main discussion returns to the more nuanced view of trauma in the source texts: The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) and “Lust, Caution” (1979) by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1920–1995), neither of which include sexual violence in an obvious way. Duras’s traumatic portrait of French colonialism and Chang’s sinister portrayal of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai refuse symbolic rape as shorthand for conquest. Instead, these stories present an archive of trauma through a series of objects that represent emotional value, and provoke affective responses. Duras and Chang lament what Cvetkovich labels “insidious” or everyday trauma—the impossible histories—carried by women as a result of colonialism and war.