Traumatic legacies, intergenerational reconciliation
In late autumn in Seoul, ginkgo leaves fall like a golden rain. Standing in the courtyard of a traditional Korean house, Nila watched a man in his late 90s carefully polish a photo frame. The photo, a young couple in traditional Korean clothing, smiled warmly. It was his wedding picture from 1949.
"They say time heals all," said the elder, Jin Zhongzhe, in a heartbreakingly calm voice. "But for seventy years, I've heard my mother crying in my dreams every night. The pain, like groundwater, flows quietly in our family's blood."
Mr. Kim is a descendant of Korean "comfort women" survivors. His mother never spoke of her experience, but her trauma seeped into every corner of their family life in various ways: she would wake up in the middle of the night, overreact to any sudden noise, and protect the female members of the family with an almost harsh approach, even forbidding Mr. Kim from working in any job related to Japanese people.
Silent pain is often more contagious than spoken pain. It is like a seed, quietly taking root and sprouting in the soil of a family.
This case is not an isolated one. The foundation's "Intergenerational Trauma" research team has uncovered alarming patterns around the world:
In Rwanda, third-generation children of genocide survivors display unusual wariness and difficulty trusting, even though they were born in peacetime;
In Bosnia, the trauma left by the war runs through families in the form of anxiety and depression;
In North American Native communities, the historical trauma of cultural genocide still impacts the identity of contemporary adolescents;
Even seemingly distant historical events, such as the Holocaust of the Jews and the history of slavery among African Americans, are affecting the mental health of future generations in subtle and profound ways.
"This isn't a biological inheritance," Li Xiaoyu explained to the global team during a video conference to kick off the project. "It's a psychological imprint passed down silently through family upbringing, emotional atmosphere, behavioral patterns, and non-verbal communication. It's like a melody without lyrics, yet it can be sung over and over again across generations."
The project's first challenge was how to access these deeply buried wounds. In many traditional cultures, discussing family trauma is considered taboo and disrespectful to ancestors. At her first workshop in Seoul, when Nila invited participants to share their family stories, she was met with a long, suffocating silence.
"We Koreans are used to keeping our pain buried deep inside," a middle-aged woman murmured. "Opening the wounds will only cause more pain."
The turning point came from an unexpected discovery: Cheng Han's technical team developed an application called "Family Map," which analyzes family photos, letters, diaries, and even recipes to identify possible patterns of trauma transmission.
"Look at this four-generation family portrait of Mr. Jin," Cheng Han explained, pointing to a digitized photo during a demonstration. "From his great-grandmother onward, the women in his family always stand at the very edge of the photo, their bodies slightly tilted to the side. This body language pattern is also seen in his mother, wife, and even daughter. It's not a coincidence."
Meanwhile, Kadir achieved a breakthrough in his work in Africa, drawing on the tribal tradition of "collective storytelling" to allow descendants of Rwandan genocide survivors to jointly create a giant mural to tell their family history.
"When we paint our pain," one participant choked up during the sharing session, "it's no longer just a weight on my heart. Looking at this painting, I understand where my fear comes from and that I don't have to live in it forever."
Pain that is shared loses its power to control the heart. When darkness is brought into the sunlight, it is forced to loosen its tightly grasped hands.
However, the most profound insight came from Nila's work with a Mongolian shaman. On the vast Mongolian steppe, the elderly shaman sat cross-legged in his yurt and told her:
"We believe that unresolved pain, like a lost soul, wanders through the family, searching for a resting place. The way to heal is not to banish it, but to light a light to guide it home."
This remark, like a revelation, inspired the foundation's three-phase "Trauma Reconciliation" program. Rather than erasing or forgetting history, the program helps families come to terms with the past through the following steps:
Acknowledge and visualize: Make invisible trauma visible through art, writing, music, or ritual. Participants can create sculptures representing family trauma, write letters that have never been spoken, or create paintings that express heavy emotions.
Understanding and Contextualization: Placing trauma within a specific historical, social, and cultural context helps family members understand the root causes of the trauma and reduce self-blame, shame, and unnecessary guilt. Invite historians and sociologists to participate in the workshop to provide a broader perspective.
Transformation and Integration: Find ways to transform traumatic experiences into wisdom and strength for life. This can include drawing strength from the resilience of our ancestors, transforming traumatic memories into a desire for peace, or transforming anger at historical injustice into action to promote social justice.
In his workshop in Seoul, Mr. Kim used traditional Korean paper crafts to tell his family story. He spent a full week meticulously crafting an exquisite Korean paper lamp. Using the colorful silk thread left by his mother, he embroidered a fragmented, irregular pattern onto the flexible Korean paper lampshade. He then meticulously patched each crack with gold thread, creating a unique "kintsugi" effect.
"These black cracks represent the pain my mother endured," he said calmly during the lamp-lighting ceremony, "and these golden repairs represent the different ways I've chosen to live my life—acknowledging the scars, but not being defined by them."
As warm light filtered through golden cracks and filled the room in the twilight, many participants wept. In that moment, pain ceased to be a heavy burden; it became a bridge connecting the past and the present, a unique light illuminating the path forward.
True reconciliation is not about forgetting history, but about establishing a new relationship with it. It requires us to both honestly face the darkness of the past and bravely believe in the possibilities of the future.
Six months into the project, a surprising shift occurred. The children of the participants—mostly in their twenties and thirties—began to organize themselves and create "New Generation Dialogue" groups. Free from the heavy historical baggage of their parents, they approached the project with a more open and creative attitude to explore how to break the cycle of trauma.
"We don't want to forget what our ancestors went through," one young organizer said during a video conference. "But we want to remember it in a different way—not as eternal victims, but as survivors of life, as witnesses of history, and as creators of the future."
What moved Nila most was the transformation of Mr. Jin. For the final workshop, he brought his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Min-ya. She generously showed her drawing of a family tree: the roots were dark, representing her grandmother's pain, but the trunk stood tall, its branches lush and verdant, and the treetops were painted with birds and the sun.
"My great-grandmother's story made me sad," the girl said in a clear voice, "but it also made me appreciate the peace we have today even more. I want to paint this cherishment into my life and pass it on to my children in the future."
In the final project report, Nila wrote the following:
"Healing intergenerational trauma never requires us to forget the past. Quite the contrary, it invites us to remember more deeply and completely—remembering the pain, but also the resilience; remembering the darkness, but also the brilliance of humanity that remains even within it; remembering the loss, but also the cherishment we learned from it. When we are able to remember in this way, we break the curse of trauma and transform it into a legacy of wisdom."
When Seoul welcomed its first snow, Mr. Jin sent Nila a photo. Amidst the white courtyard, the golden Korean paper lantern still burned in the porch, its warm glow filtering through the dancing snowflakes, appearing remarkably tranquil and resolute in the night.
He wrote in the email:
"My mother's lifelong silence has finally found an echo in my own. But this echo is no longer a cry, but the tranquility that comes from understanding, the compassion that comes from grief. Thank you for giving our family story a new way to tell it, and for allowing the pain to blossom into golden flowers."
Nila stood at the window of her Seoul office, gazing at the lights of the myriad homes in this thousand-year-old city. She knew that behind every window lay a family reconciling with their history, a family story being re-told. The legacy of trauma is not a choice, but how to carry it forward, how to give it new meaning, is a choice each generation can make. And each such choice adds a touch of warmth to the collective landscape of humanity.
As the night deepened and snowflakes quietly fell, the light of hope in Nila's heart shone brighter than ever. She knew the work was far from over, but every trauma transformed, every cycle broken, made the world a more whole and compassionate place.
The wounds of history will not disappear, but we can choose not to let them become hereditary pain.
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