These traumas also find their way to influence subsequent generations to come.

Trauma can occur in response to exposure to family violence, sexual assault, child abuse and neglect, substance misuse and other forms of experience that can harm an individual’s sense of self and wellbeing. This unresolved trauma is not limited to the forcible removal of children from their families. Using Canadian elder, Vera Martin’s, reference to it as ‘blood memory’, he explains: ‘It is a collective memory of what has happened and what has not happened’. Gregory Phillips also speaks of trauma that is handed down spiritually. Professor Judy Atkinson has worked on the intergenerational and transgenerational transmission of trauma arguing that many of the problems in Indigenous communities, be it alcohol abuse, mental health problems, family violence or criminal behaviour, are symptomatic of the effects of this unresolved trauma reaching into the present day. In Australia, Indigenous researchers have also demonstrated the connections between the historical experiences of colonisation and the forcible removal of children to the disadvantage of today’s Indigenous peoples and communities. continuously being acted out and recreated in contemporary Aboriginal culture’. Essentially, the devastating trauma of genocide, loss of culture, and forcible removal from family and communities are all unresolved and become a sort of ‘psychological baggage. The concept of historic trauma was initially developed in the 1980s by First Nations and Aboriginal peoples in Canada to explain the seeming unending cycle of trauma and despair in their communities. 'Individual trauma reverberates across communities but also across the generations. Deliberately inflicted trauma is much harder to recover from as it undermines the cohesion and strengths of individuals and communities.' Social Justice Report, 2008 deliberately inflicted trauma creates victimisation as well as all the associated emotional, psychological, cultural and spiritual harm. Research has shown that the impacts of trauma are even more pronounced when the trauma has been deliberately inflicted rather than a result of natural circumstances. Importantly he notes that for Indigenous peoples who have experienced trauma as a result of colonisation, dispossession and dislocation, as well as the trauma of on-going racism, family violence and other events, often all three forms of trauma are applicable. For example, if you want to heal children and youth, you have to heal yourself as well to break the cycle. Inter-generational trauma – if trauma is not dealt with adequately in one generation, it often gets passed down unwittingly in our behaviours and in our thought systems.Cumulative trauma - it is subtle and the feelings build over time, for example racism.Situational trauma - trauma that occurs as a result of a specific or discrete event, for example from a car accident, murder or being taken away.Gregory Phillips talks about three areas of trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples: Healing from the wounds of such an experience requires a restitution of order and meaning in one’s life. In contrast, trauma represents destruction of the basic organising principles by which we come to know self, others and the environment traumas wound deeply in a way that challenges the meaning of life. These experiences are eventually relieved with the resolution of the stressor. Leave an individual feeling ‘put out’, inconvenienced and stressed. 'Trauma is qualitatively different from other negative life stressors as it fundamentally shifts perceptions of reality. While the victim of a single acute trauma may feel after the event that she is ‘not herself’, the victim of chronic trauma may feel herself changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all. 'People subjected to prolonged, repeated trauma develop an insidious progressive form of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the personality. Psychological trauma represents an emotional state of discomfort and stress resulting from memories of an extraordinary, catastrophic experience which shattered the survivor’s sense of invulnerability to harm.

Intergenerational trauma aboriginal