How do you cope with the trauma you didn't experience? | Leah Warshawski | TEDxTwinFalls

i've always known my grandmother is extraordinary she's 91 years old dresses like a diva always wanted to be a movie star leopard print every day and she's only four foot eight she also has a healthy obsession with high heel shoes i think she has more than 80 pairs in her closet and when i was younger i remember my sister and i used to try on all of her shoes my sister would dance around her house but my feet were always too big and i could never fit into her shoes and as i grew up so did my feet i still can't fit into sonya's shoes and now she's trying to give all of them away because she's looking for something a little bit more comfortable she's 91 after all thinking back on things i think i've actually always been larger than sonya but only in physical size because she is the biggest and toughest person i know and she has this uncanny ability to make everyone feel like they're the most important person in the world and that their kids are incredibly important as well but when it comes to her own family sonia never quite made me feel big enough my hair was too short or too long never had the right outfit didn't make enough money probably still don't make enough money i was too fat or too thin things were never just good enough little does she know this feeling of not being big enough has impacted every aspect of my life in ways that i'm just starting to understand but in order to understand me first we need to understand sonia and i know she might not look like a typical survivor but i promise you she is the ultimate survivor and a difficult shadow to live under when sonia was 13 the nazis invaded her hometown in poland her family hid under the floorboards eventually german shepherds sniffed them out her brother and father were shot and sonia never saw them again her sister escaped lived in the forest with the partisans and lives in israel now but sonya and her mom were put on a cattle train to some of the most notorious death camps during the war and one day sonia heard sirens ran over to a tiny peephole in the wall and she watched her mom go to the gas chamber sonia never saw her mother again and she spent the rest of the war alone surviving some of the worst of the worst and just as the war was ending after everything that she'd been through on liberation day sonia was shot through the chest the bullet missed her heart by less than an inch a soldier rushed in held her up and said if you're gonna die at least you should see your liberation day and miraculously sonja survived today she drives herself to work six days a week at her late husband's tailor shop in suburban kansas city even though she can barely see over the steering wheel the shop she goes to is the last shop standing in a dead dying mall in a tiny corner of a suburban mall in kansas city and it's highly entertaining to sit in the shop all day and just watch and listen to the multitudes of customers and people who come in just to be at the shop and they don't always bring their tailoring i think people come to sonya's shop for their own redemption i think they come because sonya makes people feel like they can get through whatever challenge they're going through one day my husband and i went to the shop early and sonia was holding court she was at her podium and there was a semi-circle of people around her it was a family and the mom was wearing a bathrobe so she'd either just come from home or from the hospital either way she was sick and you could tell that the family was just there to be in sonia's presence because this is the sonia effect she's kind of like the pope in that way she's highly functional she gets up she goes to work every day but sonja is a wounded healer and most people don't see sonja's own pain most people don't see her issues sonja cannot sit still she's always fidgeting with something she can't throw anything away even dead flowers she has a highly judgmental and complicated relationship with her kids she has aches and pains from all of the bruises and beatings that she endured during the war and sonia cares so much about her own appearance that she's been known to doctor some of her own photos with colored pencils or pens if she feels like her lips weren't full enough or her hair didn't look right and this is the sonia that most people don't see ironically it turns out that i have some of the same issues and the reason this is ironic is because we had a lot of laughing and joy growing up i felt like of course my parents protected me from everything that they could like any parent would and we had kind of a typical all-american life growing up we went on road trips we went to the drive-through tree we had a ping pong table in our basement we had a trampoline in the backyard and every day when we went to high school my dad would make us lunch and write a poem or a haiku on the outside of the lunch bag and whose dad does that right so on the outside everything looked just fine and somehow all of the pieces didn't really fit together i just felt like things weren't always okay because maybe they weren't and it was too painful to talk about growing up and so we knew that there was this looming trauma but as a third generation holocaust survivor i wasn't quite sure how any of this ever would affect me and i actually never saw my parents cry or i don't remember seeing them cry until i was 30 years old and we took a family trip to israel we went to the famous holocaust museum yad vashem and afterwards i remember asking my parents about some specifics their history and their parents history during the war and water works i had never experienced this kind of intense emotion from my parents before and so i made a mental note to not ask these kinds of emotional questions anymore because it was just too painful and nobody wants to see their parents cry well cut to six years ago when my personal life and my professional life as a filmmaker collided and my father gave me two pieces of advice i chose not to follow he said number one you should never make a documentary and number two you should absolutely never spend too much time with your grandmother and of course i didn't listen so six years later my husband and i just finished our own documentary about sonia we had thought initially we'll just make a funny short film more like a reality show and that didn't work so during production of the movie we had all kinds of very intense deep and emotional interviews with members of my family and we were talking about things that nobody was used to talking about and we were experiencing emotion in a way that none of us had ever experienced before certainly not with each other lots of vulnerability and tears and so maybe in a way the film was a blessing and a curse because all my life i've been thinking wait a minute i went to hebrew school i had a bat mitzvah i didn't live that close to any family members but i'm still third generation i'm not quite sure how all of this is affecting me maybe i'm off the hook right maybe i've defied genetics and then after spending six years with family that i was just really getting to know and after all of this intensity and vulnerability i started struggling about a year ago things came up for me that i didn't expect a lot of anxiety issues around body image and food and weight and never quite feeling like anything i did was good enough and striving to be perfect in a world that i know is imperfect and i wasn't used to any of these feelings and who am i to complain about anything right i even feel guilty talking about it and felt guilty thinking about it because i didn't survive the holocaust but somehow all of the traumas in my life all of the little traumas up until then were coming back to haunt me and i started seeing the connection between what my grandmother went through my grandmother's trauma and what i was going through and so maybe in a way her issues or my issues well thank god for therapy because sonia would say i have to stay busy to keep the dark parts away and i would have told you the exact same thing i stay busy with work and travel and i'm always going from airport to airport i don't sit still i stay busy with anything so that i don't have to think too much i stay busy so that i don't have to sit with myself and i know that some of you may be feeling the same way about yourself or somebody in your own family a lot of people are dealing with trauma that they didn't experience and being forced to cope with it and not always in healthy ways now we screen our film and grown adults will come up to us in tears afterwards and say thank you for saying what we couldn't say and they'll thank my family for being vulnerable on screen because that vulnerability makes the trauma relatable and universal and aren't we all surviving something or someone aren't we all trying to deal with some sort of trauma that we didn't experience on our own because we can't choose our parents we can't choose our grandparents we don't decide what happens to us along the way and this is all really heavy right especially for someone who didn't think that they had any trauma in the first place well it turns out there's a name for this kind of trauma the kind that sneaks up on you like it did for me intergenerational trauma the term intergenerational trauma has popped up more lately in scientific journals and in the media especially as it relates to generations of holocaust survivors i don't have all the answers i'm still trying to figure this all out i'm still taking things day by day but i do know that beginning to speak about it just a little bit relieves some of that anxiety and makes me feel just a little bit better and i do look at my family members differently now and people that i meet because i understand that we're all dealing with trauma that we didn't experience on our own i think i also have a little bit more compassion and understanding for new people that i meet because i understand that we're all a little bit damaged i still cope by staying busy but now i stay busy with things that make me feel good i try to engage in projects that fill my soul i save up i go on real vacations and i cope by taking a deep breath realizing that i'm actually proud of who i am and where i came from and celebrating all of the unique twists and turns that got me here speaking to you today and i still can't fit into sonja's shoes but you know what it doesn't matter and i'm not trying and she's still incredibly judgmental and critical of me but i realize now that that criticism comes from a place of love and from her own intergenerational trauma that was passed down from her own parents and so i try not to take it so personally i adore her tenacity and all of her quirks and i admire that she's still 91 and capable of learning and changing and i adore her badass fashion sense and ultimately i'm glad that there's just a little small part of her in me thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,899

Rating: 4.8056073 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Depression, Genetics, Pain, Self improvement

Id: OkAMHQhabkU

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017