Author and teacher Elizabeth Rosner discusses the importance of naming and acknowledging intergenerational trauma before moving towards healing.
Elizabeth touches on the cultural understanding of intergenerational trauma, the limitations of scientific understanding, the importance of personal and collective histories, and more.
About Elizabeth Rosner
Elizabeth Rosner is an author and teacher whose work focuses on the redemptive power of storytelling and deep listening. Her six books have been translated into twelve languages and have received literary prizes in the US and abroad. Her most recent book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, blends personal stories of growing up in a multilingual household with multidisciplinary research about sound and silence in the natural world. Her previous book, Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and was named among the best books of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Elizabeth travels widely to lecture and lead workshops internationally; her teaching carries forward a message of perseverance and tenacious optimism.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Validate the Biological Reality of Transferred Trauma: Intergenerational trauma is a concrete transmission where an ancestral injury, atrocity, or structural attack creates psychological consequences and genetic adaptations passed down to children and grandchildren. Knowing this science validates that you are not crazy for carrying fear from events that occurred before you were born.
- Reclaim the Ancient Wisdom of Lineage: While Western science is just beginning to understand the explicit mechanisms of epigenetics, indigenous cultures have always held the ancient understanding that we must look backward seven generations and forward seven generations when navigating our life purpose and actions.
- Embrace the Power of Deep Naming: True emotional and ancestral transformation cannot happen if we rush past the pain to reach a forced state of healing. We must dedicate time, energy, and meticulous attention to looking at, acknowledging, and naming our personal and collective histories to break the grip of secrecy and denial.
- Uncover the Multi-Generational Gifts of Resilience: Your ancestral inheritance is not solely defined by anguish and trauma loops; it also carries beautiful, luminous gifts. Reclaiming your lineage means actively identifying and savoring the creative talents, love of beauty, multilingual voices, and fierce courage passed down by those who came before you.
- Exercise Your Sovereign Capacity to Change: Although we possess no control over the exact traumatic history or genetic blueprint we are given, we hold absolute sovereignty over what we choose to do with it. By practicing deep listening and meeting ourselves honestly, we can actively rewrite our biological programming and choose our own changes
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The episode art is a pre-WWII photograph of the Zeidshnur family, who are Elizabeth’s mother and grandparents. Left to right are Grandpa Zelman, Mother Fryda, and Grandma Judith.
Theme music written and performed by Carter Penny.
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