Slide 1: How to work through transgenerational transmission of trauma?
My presentation will focus on the psychobiography of an ordinary person, as Paul Elovitz would say, that is myself.
The idea is to share what I have seen so far of my family inheritance’s influence on my own path of life.
I will discuss the integrating power of awareness in my life experience and then share broader reflections on the way we can work out painful legacies and not pass them on to our own children.
I was supported in this process by my late wife Sylvie Vermeulen, a path-breaking therapist who developed new tools to work through our traumas.
For this presentation, I would like to return to the notions of imprint and define a new concept, that is a family problematics.
Slide 2: "What is a imprint?"
So what is an imprint?
It’s as a set of perceptions recorded, from before birth and through childhood, by the sensitivity of the child, in her interactions with her mother, relatives, and then with her family and social environment.
It is a consequence of the confrontation of the child’s sensitivity with the emotional state of her parents, with the whole history of a family line.
Intuitively, the child recognizes any emotional distress, any projection that, by definition, denies her intuitive awareness.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s has confirmed that capacity.
We might say that the child’s ability to perceive emotional dissonances in her close environment is an expression of her consciousness—of our consciousness as human beings.
What we call suffering is the result of the denial of such natural sensitivity.
Our sufferings find their origin in the education of repression, based on violence and humiliations—that is in the childrearing process.
But a resolution is always possible.
Traumatic memory is an emotional container of dissonances and sufferings.
From a physiological point of view, neurobiologists locate it in the cerebral amygdala.
When the traumatic event occurred, the emotional charge could not be processed by the hippocampus and associative cortex because of its intensity.
The child’s brain was then in survival mode and dissociated.
But we cannot limit dissociation to the neurological dimension alone—nor to severe traumas.
It involves the whole being who will gradually take charge of a possible resolution, through a process that is also natural—a process of realization.
Slide 3: "What about a problematics?"
So what is a problematics?
It is a dynamic structure consisting of all the imprints internalized by an individual, a family or a group.
It shows the importance of gradually become aware of this for ourselves, but also in our relationships and for the world.
The classical Greek authors had a certain intuition of this, which they transmitted through their tragedies—think about Sophocles and his Oedipus King.
From the moment of conception, the child is seized by the problematics of her parents.
She adapts to it, and then conforms to the role she is assigned.
The role is the set of attitudes adopted by a child to meet parental, family and social demands.
As adults, we are identified with the role we have been assigned in the family.
On the collective level, the family role is transferred into a social role assumed by the representatives of power.
We find the decorum, the staging, the role carried by the group in this photograph of former French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
A second aspect of our problematics is repetition.
Repetition is a tropism by which we re-enact life circumstances with the ultimate goal of freeing ourselves from them.
It is often thanks to repetition compulsion that we ask ourselves questions, that we perhaps become aware that “something is just not right”.
And finally, the restaging.
Restaging involves more than just re-enactments.
It is a transmission mechanism of the family problematics.
This mechanism affects the child’s development, the relation with her relatives and, beyond that, the whole of a given group.
Collective restagings confine humans in the belief that it is necessary to structure a hierarchy of power and common values.
Restagings are expressions of the repressed emotions that saturates our traumatic memories, as individuals or as groups.
Slide 4: “Extract”
Before moving on to my personal problematics, here is a quote from my wife’s book Genius of the Self:
“When awareness is achieved, it allows for the release of traumatic agitation because the link between the initial trauma, its circumstances and its consequences is then recognized.”
Let’s see how these notions can be articulated
Slide 5: Like pieces of a puzzle...
I offer this metaphor of the puzzle because it can be applied to the work we are about to do.
A patient reconstitution of pieces of memory, dissociated by the effect of repression.
First with this photo, taken in September 1960.
My sister in the arms of our great-grandmother and myself at age two and a half.
How important is her maternal grandmother in my mother’s life?
Why the fear in my 11-month-old sister’s eyes?
And this malicious smile of mine?
It all makes sense, it will take me a few years to realize it...
I will start by addressing the beginnings of existence and the notion of imprint. How can we go back to these decisive moments?
We'll look at some of my mother’s biography and how it affects my own life, especially a secret that was revealed late in life.
I will talk about its impact on some of my life choices, in other words, how the past interferes with the present.
We will look at my father's lineage to discover, there too, the weight of silence and its consequences on my own existence.
We will see how individual destinies sometimes intersect with the great moments of history—and the importance of realizing this.
Finally, I will conclude with the impact of these realizations on my own path of life.
We’ll then have fifteen minutes for your questions.
Slide 6: The beginning of life...
So let’s start with this first illustration, a welcome watercolor received by my parents and found in my childhood album.
Flawa was a brand of hydrophilic cotton and the artist wanted to make a tender play on words with our name: Cotton.
C. O, two T’s, O, N - I often had to specify "Cotton, with two T’s!"
Originally, it is an Italian surname Cotone, which had only one T.
The watercolor suggests the softness, the unconditional welcome necessary for these first moments of life... But here is what my mother wrote:
“We don’t think Marc-André will be raised in 'cotton'.”
I read this sentence when I started to work on my childrearing, some twenty-five years ago, and it did not make sense.
What did she mean by that?
I was dissociated from this early experience and unable to think anything about it.
As a result of repression, I was forbidden to access my feelings.
Other comments were eloquent:
“Mommy is proud because baby has just inaugurated his vase. Just think, at 11 days old!”
“With Marc's screams, you need strong eardrums.”
So here is a mother, struggling with her firstborn, who doesn’t know how to meet his needs. And this mother is mine!
This is the first piece of my puzzle.
Which reminds us that infants have needs that cannot be ignored without lasting emotional consequences: skin-to-skin contact from birth, breastfeeding on demand over time, awareness of their emotional needs…
I hadn’t had all that and was dissociated from such painful imprint.
Instead, I had to respond to educational demands, as shown by the well-educated little boy in the previous photo.
As a result, I was left with emotional deficiencies that I was to restage throughout my life.
Here are my parents in September 1958. At the time of my birth, my father was undertaking engineering studies that would make him unavailable.
“I didn’t know how to deal with children”, he said later.
He was born in Geneva and grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the shores of the lake.
His father was a basket maker, as was his grandfather, who came from Southern France—we’ll talk about him later.
My father is the oldest of two boys.
My mother is also the eldest of four daughters, or so she thought until she discovered an older half-brother.
She was born in Geneva too, but grew up in the rural canton of Fribourg. Her parents ran a well-known delicatessen there.
In 1949, they emigrated to one of Geneva’s poorest suburb under circumstances that I will explain.
So here I am, surrounded by them, at a key moment of my existence, since these are the first months of life.
What were their concerns? What was the basis of their relationship? What loyalties did they have to their own parents?
All this would influence the destiny of a child: the famous “fairies” of popular tales bending over her crib.
In psychological terms, this is what we call an imprint.
To understand the workings of transgenerational transmission, it is important to uncover this family environment before and around birth.
To look back on this period by questioning our loved ones, by trying to accept our experience as children: what did it mean to be born of my parents?
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll sum it up in two words: demands and projects.
My parents were busy with my father’s studies and were not much available.
My mother worked—sometimes at night—and entrusted me here and there.
In our small apartment, I had to meet their demands and take up as little space as possible.
The maternal bond could not fully blossom.
I had to be at my parents’ disposal, to facilitate their project.
Later, I came to realize that these two words—demands and projects—determined many choices in my own life.
Slide 7: The weight of maternal history...
To understand my mother, we have to go back to her childhood in Bulle, canton Fribourg.
The daughter of a butcher, she attended The Holy Cross boarding school for young girls, a school run by nuns, as seen on this postcard.
It was a very strict institution and—although a good student—my mother has some bitter memories of it.
“There was discipline... There was a sister we called a dragon...”
It was also a monument of the local culture, as well as the religion that gave rhythm to the daily life of this very Catholic canton of French-speaking Switzerland.
In consulting the archives, I noted that 80 children made their First Communion in 1943 in the small town of Bulle, including my mother.
For her, religion was a source of consolation that allowed her to deal with her sufferings by turning to God.
So, it was a way of managing that she passed on to her children, as we attended church until we were sixteen.
Our parish was called The Holy Cross, like the boarding school my mother had attended.
As an adult, I deconstructed this religious heritage to see how it had permeated my upbringing and it came as a surprise.
So here is the second piece of our puzzle.
What was my mother trying to keep at bay through her religious practice? Was it family violence, which was very common at the time, attachment anxieties or other tragedies?
We understand better the importance of exploring the past of our parents to feel the constraints in which they lived.
To break free, we must put their schemes of behavior in their place, in their historical context.
A context that is itself the product of other believes, from previous generations.
In order to understand our parents, it is therefore also important to look at the experiences of their own parents.
Slide 8: One secret can hide another...
In this case, this is my mother’s father in his younger years, dressed as a butcher.
Canton Fribourg lived mainly on livestock and cheese production—the famous Gruyère.
During the war, there was clandestine slaughter.
A riot broke out in 1944, when federal inspectors came to search a butcher suspected of selling on the black market.
There was a trial in the Federal Criminal Court.
My grandfather was also fined.
Here are the minutes of the trial, known as the “butchers’ trial”.
At that time, whole cars left for the bigger cities loaded with smuggled meat. My grandfather killed some pigs.
I learned that someone close to him had betrayed him—someone my mother knew well.
I noticed feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal that I could relate to circumstances in my own life.
The fear of being caught and condemned far beyond what the present would justify.
And here we have a clue. We are sometimes invaded by feelings that our parents and grandparents have repressed.
The events I am talking about are not unrelated to the fact that the family left their hometown and ended up in canton Geneva, in much more precarious conditions.
A kind of distancing, followed by a social downgrading.
This Geneva suburb was at that time inhabited by immigrants, poor Italians despised by the Swiss.
In the rooms above the store in this 1960 photograph, there was no running water, no heat, and the toilet was outside.
This is what my mother said about it:
“In Bulle, we were fine, we had a young woman who came to make our clothes for Sunday, a seamstress. We were in good average society. My father was esteemed... And here we are, in a hole like this, ah that was hard, but well, we ended up getting used to it...”
She would get used to this social decline... but with consequences, especially in the way she would look at her children.
In her eyes, in comparison, we were always “lucky”…
This is an example of how repressed experience is passed on to the next generation.
Indeed, the child suffers the denial of her own emotional needs.
Here is a third piece of the puzzle, the enigmatic figure of my maternal grandfather.
He himself was holding a secret, probably the feeling of having to atone for a fault.
In this picture from 1937, he is with his two daughters, including my mother on the left.
He shows no joy and instead gives the impression of carrying the world on his shoulders.
Slide 9: The irruption of the past into the present...
I made this drawing when I was about twelve years old—my grandfather was sixty-six at the time.
By sketching this sad and tortured face, I was expressing a feeling that the adults around me could have confirmed, if there had been any freedom of speech in the family.
Two years later, he died of a stroke, and it was at his funeral that his secret was made public.
He had a natural son, whom my grandfather had always presented to his daughters as their cousin—and who made his coming out on this occasion.
In an authoritarian way, my grandfather had managed to impose silence on the whole family.
One can imagine the impact of this secret on my grandfather’s life, as he became frustrated with a legitimate heir.
We can understand the guilt he felt.
But what was the impact on the following generations?
My mother made a point of planning her pregnancies. We were all “desired children”—as she said.
However, my first daughter was conceived out of wedlock...
I did better than my grandfather because with my daughter’s mother, we started a family.
But as this photo shows, I was young and unprepared for fatherhood.
I had a “role” and had staged it in my own life.
Here is the fourth piece of the puzzle.
It reminds us that children “feel” far beyond what we can imagine.
That they are bound to manifest in their own lives what their parents and grandparents did not resolve.
Free speech should flow naturally between generations.
But when a tragedy occurs that cannot be put into words, consciousness finds other ways through restagings.
This shows that we lack a language to talk about our inner world, that it is important to acquire such a language.
Slide 10: The ghosts of the paternal line...
It’s time to move on to my father’s family, who you see here surrounded by his father, grandmother, fiancée—my future mother—and his brother.
One day, while still young, he received a phone call: “Hello, we found a cross in the mountains with your last name on it, is it someone from your home?”
My uncle was puzzled, since the first and last names were those of his brother—my future father—who was alive and well.
After a few questions, the parents pulled out a newspaper article from the 1920s.
My grandfather’s older brother did die accidentally in 1922, during a ski race in the Jura mountains (Switzerland), at the age of eighteen. Only one portrait remained of him.
Many years later, visiting the site with my father, I realized that a veil of silence had covered the memory of this tragedy that I had never heard of.
Here again, the lack of words to express the grief, the loss, to bear witness to an inner experience that had remained unspoken since.
Why did my grandparents give their first son the same name? What kind of loyalty did this imply?
And is this tragic death just “bad luck”?
I decided to go to the cantonal archives to find out more.
One of the first documents I came across was not about my grandfather, but about his own father.
He had fought in the First World War in the French army and deserted in April 1916!
I have here the minutes of the Geneva administration, which date from 1922. So, he waited six years to regularize his situation.
Even my father didn’t know—another heavy secret... and more questions.
My grandfather spoke of his father as a drunk, but never mentioned his military background.
What traumas was he drowning in alcohol?
Was there any connection with the accidental death of his son, who got lost in the fog and apparently froze to death?
How did this heavy secret weigh on his children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren—my generation?
With a few steps, the documents found allowed me to know more about my great-grandfather: previous homes, military assignments, family situation...
Little by little I was piecing together the enigma of this mysterious ancester, whose first name was Louis.
With this first photo which probably dates from the year 1914.
Originating from Southern France, Louis answered the call to mobilize and left his family in August 1914.
Standing on the left, my grandfather, in the center, his brother who died in that fatal accident eight years later.
Their mother is not at the party. She’ll take care of the business in her husband’s absence.
Here it is, a few years later.
At the beginning of the last century, Louis established himself as a basket maker in Geneva and it is probably his eldest son who is on his right.
When he died accidentally in 1922, the second son took his place—my grandfather.
Who remained the only man in the family when Louis died two years later. My grandfather was then nineteen years old.
Here are two men who disappeared prematurely and whose absence would weigh on several generations, but how?
For my grandfather, hard work was the key to survival.
He worked as a basket maker in a cannery, then took over his mother’s shop.
He has made countless glass jug baskets, fishing baskets, hoods, and baker’s racks, not to mention repairs of all kinds.
The only way out was to get up early and work.
My father helped him and imagined becoming a basket maker himself. As a teenager, I also worked with him.
I feel this injunction living in me, as I felt it living in my grandfather.
He had an expression: "Work, work; bistro, bistro."
First work, then... work! Because going out for a drink wasn’t an option.
Angry at his alcoholic father, he never went to the bar.
What would have happened if he had stopped for a drink? His pain would have surfaced.
Perhaps the depressing ghost of Louis or the distress of having lost his older brother, then his father two years later...
A whole traumatic experience that he never talked about.
We can therefore think that his relationship to work was a way of dealing with this trauma...
There is another thing for Louis: the shame of being a deserter.
Here was a man who’s residence in Geneva was only tolerated—he was living meagerly on the product of his basketry.
“A bohemian’s job”, my grandfather used to say.
With his desertion came the humiliation of not being able to return to his country, France, which he had served.
This feeling of shame has largely blocked expression of emotions in the family. They had to keep quiet, to keep themselves small for fear of being caught up with the past.
Let’s remember that at the time, refusal to serve was punishable by death.
What was the impact on the next generation?
My grandfather’s relationship with the social sphere was problematic because of the shame his father carried.
He had no social ambitions, but in reality he carried that shame too.
He passed this lack of social legitimacy on to his children, and my generation also inherited that fate.
Slide 11: The big story through the small door...
So, I took a closer look at this period of the First World War.
I asked the departmental archives for my great-grandfather’s service record and reconstructed his military career between August 1914 and April 1916.
What you see here, in very small print, are his postings.
On the French website Fighting men’s memories you can find the diaries of the marches and operations of all the fighting units.
So, I read the ones about him.
Given his age—he was 37 at mobilization—Louis was incorporated into a territorial infantry regiment.
They were engaged in the battle to dig trenches, supply the front lines, collect the dead bodies...
In September 1915, Louis transferred to Verdun, known for its horrid battle that lasted ten months.
We went there with my wife and walked in Louis’s footsteps.
A collector allowed me to scan some illustrations from that time, including the ones I show you here.
The facts recorded in the Journal of Marches and Operations of his regiment gave me an idea of what he went through, with what trauma he returned to Geneva in April 1916.
What matters is not the facts themselves, but the traumatic memory that each of these men has retained.
At the time, the notion of war trauma was only referred to as “concussion”.
War traumatized people—not to mention deserters—were held in suspicion as malingerers trying to escape combat.
In the absence of a diary that Louis did not keep, I found the medical report of his regiment’s medical officer, dated May 8, 1916, two days after his desertion. Here are some excerpts:
“The state of men is detestable [...]. The most striking fact is the great fatigue. Since May 8, 1915, the date of its arrival at the Verdun front, the regiment has not ceased a single day to occupy the frontline trenches [...] in sectors exposed to heavy shelling. [...] In addition, during that winter, protection from cold and bad weather [...] was poor. [...] There is loss of weight and in some a sickly appearance.”
This gives a idea of the physical state in which Louis returned.
As for his mental state, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and never stopped drinking.
In early 1919, during the Spanish flu epidemic, the family was hospitalized for many weeks.
All this shows the psychological suffering in which my grandfather lived his adolescence.
The absence of a fatherly support for him translated into a form of sacrifice in work, as we have seen.
For his older brother, there was the sacrifice of his life, lost accidentally a few years later.
I think there is a connection between Louis’s traumatic experience of the war—which he probably never talked about—and the death of his elder son.
His son was exhausted by the effort and was “buried by the snow”, according to the newspaper account, in conditions reminiscent of the trenches of Verdun: cold, stupor, asphyxiation...
Is this death a tragic manifestation of this undisclosed past?
I think so—and the fact that my father had the same first name as his deceased uncle implied that I was also connected to that trauma.
But in what way?
How was this traumatic memory transmitted from one generation to the next?
Slide 12: A path of awareness...
I spoke earlier about the notion of “role” when I recalled my mother’s memories of being a first daughter who is kept in the dark about her older half-brother—and is therefore frustrated by her status as an elder.
I am that elder boy lucky to be recognized as such, but who also reactivates her frustration and anger when expressing simple emotional needs.
Now, in my father’s lineage, the “role” of elder takes on an added value—since Louis’s elder son died tragically.
A suppressed elder in the first case, a sacrificed elder in the second.
When my parents were telling me I was “a big boy”, they also told me that I was lucky to be here and had to take that role.
In the top picture, I was sitting at thirteen months old in front of a chair being repaired—the work that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather did.
The legend says, “In apprenticeship!”
The role assigned to the child is reflected in every gesture of the parent—even a glance.
I played this “big boy” role with my little sister—and throughout my adult life with the feeling that I could never do enough.
I have in mind certain symptoms: backaches, migraines, feeling of exhaustion...
I could not stop and had to hold on...
Back to Louis. He, too, had to hold on so as not to falter—it was a matter of survival.
His son probably died of exhaustion in that snow trench.
A few months before I went to Verdun, I started to experience symptoms: anxiety, difficulty breathing, palpitation and chest pains.
Fearful of a heart attack, I went to see a doctor who didn’t detect anything wrong.
And then I thought about our small apartment, back in that despised suburb of Geneva.
Due to lack of space and to be able to study, my father had installed a device that isolated my crib from the light with a blanket.
Here is a drawing he made.
I fell asleep under there for the first two years of my life, from about eight to ten o'clock—after which my parents would take the blanket off and go to bed.
I think they were convinced that they had found a way to make the best use of our small space.
But they didn’t realize that I was running out of air!
I did some calculation and concluded that after an hour, the air I was breathing had a carbon dioxide concentration of 5%, instead of the usual 0.03%.
The gas was accumulating in the bottom of the crib.
According to a study I consulted, it’s a high enough concentration to cause hot flushes, palpitations, chest pain and anxiety.
At higher doses, carbon dioxide poisoning can cause sudden infant death syndrome.
Now, isn’t such setting remindful of the trenches of Verdun, the snowdrift under which my great-uncle was buried and the moist atmosphere of my grandfather’s basket workshop?
The sensations are there: anxiety, suffocation, palpitations, fear of dying...
I suggest this as a personal example of how trauma is passed from one generation to another, through restaging.
This is the seventh and final piece of my puzzle.
Without knowing it, parents impose roles onto their children through expectations, injunctions, unacknowledged fantasies.
These roles can lead to various types of somatic manifestations—even to other restaging.
They are transmitted because something has not been recognized: a traumatic experience has not been integrated into consciousness.
Uncovering certain key moments of our lives can help us in this process of realization.
Slide 13: To conclude...
This working through trauma had an unexpected effect on me, as I realized that I had literally been living under an invisible dome.
The imprint of the blanket has been felt throughout my life, like a veil placed between me and the world.
I had been like those people I took picture of under the dome of a stifling greenhouse.
I had to put this puzzle together to realize it and gradually free myself from it. The physical symptoms soon disappeared.
In doing this work, I realized the power of the projections that parents impose onto their children and the impact of these projections on their lives.
But also, the infinite sensitivity of the child who grasps the unspoken messages and unconsciously puts them back on stage.
It is a painful realization.
But at the same time, it is an extraordinary opening because in our lives, everything fits together!
We just have to realize it!
Slide 14: Thank you!
We have fifteen minutes now, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
End
*Marc-André Cotton, M.Econ., M.Geog., M.Ed., is a psychohistorian; independent researcher and consultant; currently teaching at the Geneva College. He is a co-founder, with his late wife therapist Sylvie Vermeulen, of the Conscious Perspective (regardconscient.net) on childhood trauma, parenting and psychotherapy. He regularly writes for the French quarterly PEPS, a magazine dedicated to young parents who want to implement benevolent parenting in the family and facilitates training for coaching parents in France. Marc-Andre is International Vice-president of the International Psychohistorical Association, where he also serves as a founding member of the Parenting and Transgenerational Trauma Working Groups.
