How do the ripple effects of historical trauma reverberate through time and impact communities today with the same intensity as they did generations ago? We sit down with Ingrid Cockhren to discuss how the pain of the past shapes our present and impedes our collective future, including policy making and scientific racism, and we highlight the importance of equity-focused solutions to drive systemic change.
Welcome to episode six in our series Unveiling Trauma's Impact: Navigating the Hidden Costs. In this episode, we uncover the hidden costs of historical trauma. This isn't a history lesson; it's a look at the enduring societal wounds, the financial toll, and the barriers to healing that communities of color face every day.
We discuss the layers of systemic discrimination, particularly on indigenous and African-American populations, and the challenges these communities withstand--including economic, mental, and physical health disparities--and how these have been mistaken for cultural issues. Join us for this critical exploration into our past and the actions needed to write a better chapter for our future.
Also, listen to episode 62, where we talked with Ingrid about the hidden costs of unaddressed trauma in the education system.
Ingrid Cockhren, M.Ed is a child sexual abuse survivor and knows first-hand how impactful trauma and toxic stress can be for children and families. She has dedicated her professional life to investigating and educating the public about the link between early trauma, early adversity, Adverse Childhood experiences (ACEs) and possible negative outcomes across the lifespan. Her experience ranges from juvenile justice, family counseling, early childhood education, professional development, consulting, and community education. She is currently an adjunct professor specializing in Black psychology, developmental psychology, abnormal psychology & personality theory at Tennessee State University and the CEO of PACEs Connection, a social network dedicated to rising awareness of adverse childhood experiences.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
How do the ripple effects of historical trauma reverberate through time and impact communities today with the same intensity as they did generations ago? We sit down with Ingrid Cockhren to discuss how the pain of the past shapes our present and impedes our collective future, including policy making and scientific racism, and we highlight the importance of equity-focused solutions to drive systemic change.
Welcome to episode six in our series Unveiling Trauma's Impact: Navigating the Hidden Costs. In this episode, we uncover the hidden costs of historical trauma. This isn't a history lesson; it's a look at the enduring societal wounds, the financial toll, and the barriers to healing that communities of color face every day.
We discuss the layers of systemic discrimination, particularly on indigenous and African-American populations, and the challenges these communities withstand--including economic, mental, and physical health disparities--and how these have been mistaken for cultural issues. Join us for this critical exploration into our past and the actions needed to write a better chapter for our future.
Also, listen to episode 62, where we talked with Ingrid about the hidden costs of unaddressed trauma in the education system.
Ingrid Cockhren, M.Ed is a child sexual abuse survivor and knows first-hand how impactful trauma and toxic stress can be for children and families. She has dedicated her professional life to investigating and educating the public about the link between early trauma, early adversity, Adverse Childhood experiences (ACEs) and possible negative outcomes across the lifespan. Her experience ranges from juvenile justice, family counseling, early childhood education, professional development, consulting, and community education. She is currently an adjunct professor specializing in Black psychology, developmental psychology, abnormal psychology & personality theory at Tennessee State University and the CEO of PACEs Connection, a social network dedicated to rising awareness of adverse childhood experiences.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
Uncovering history is one of the ways that I think we can have impact. I believe having a clear understanding of equity we have after the civil rights movement, which benefited many groups, there was this push for equality. Equality is essentially saying that we've been able to bring everyone to the same point and now we can move forward in equality, and that's not true. We have so much that we need to do to bring everyone to the same point. As long as we are not focused on equity, we will have disparity.
Manya Chylinski:
Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski, and today we have another episode in the series Unveiling Trauma's Impact Navigating the Hidden Costs. And today our topic is historical trauma with Ingrid Cockhren. She is the CEO of PACE's Connection and is a professor at Tennessee State University, and if her name sounds familiar it's because she did another episode earlier in this series talking about the cost of hidden trauma in the education system. And today we had an amazing conversation about what is historical trauma, what's the relationship between historical trauma and culture and how can we really get down to addressing the challenges of historical trauma on our current society and what it is really costing us.
Manya Chylinski:
I think you're going to learn so much in this episode. Thank you for listening, ingrid. Thank you for coming back on the podcast a second time to talk to me about these hidden costs of trauma. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation from a couple of weeks ago and I know our listeners will have enjoyed it as well. Now, before we dig in, I want to ask you that same question we asked you last time about having dinner with a historical figure. Who would it be and why? Do you have anything to add to your previous answer?
Ingrid Cockhren:
No, it's still Zora Neale Hurston. I think that she was just a really interesting woman for the time that she was in so Harlem Renaissance writer, and she was just very refreshing. She obviously lived during a dark time in history for African American women. So her mindset and ability and her ability to write in a way that was kind of not sad, yes, interesting to me. So I would like to you know I would definitely want to have dinner with her. Excellent, all right.
Manya Chylinski:
I wish I could make that happen. So thank you for sharing again. And today we are. It's a continuation, I think, of our conversation and we're talking about the cost of hidden trauma, and today we're talking about historical trauma and the hidden costs of that, and whether that is actually financial costs or opportunity costs or societal burdens. So just to get us started, can you, so we define our terms, can you tell us what we mean when we say historical trauma?
Ingrid Cockhren:
So historical trauma is pretty much the same as intergenerational transmission of trauma, but within the larger societal landscape. So if you have trauma that passes through generations within a family this is this is very common we are able to kind of wrap our heads around that If you have a mother who has experienced trauma let's say she experienced sexual violence that's going to impact the way that she raises her daughters or maybe the way she raises her sons right, and so you will have kind of this transmission of trauma through generations. And it happens in a couple of different ways. It can be through the environment, parenting practices, social learning, also genetics, and so when we think about historical trauma, it's not families per se, it's groups of people. Those groups could be by racial group, it could be ethnicity, it could be geography, it could be things like gender expression and sexual orientation All of these groups that have kind of the social groupings that then experience large scale traumatic issues throughout generations.
Manya Chylinski:
Wow, this is already seeming like this is a tremendous number of people who are dealing with this. Yeah, and now I know that this is a broad topic and there's not one thing that everybody has experienced and there's not one way that everybody has experienced that it's impacting their lives. But what would you say are some of the most significant costs for our society because of this unaddressed historical trauma?
Ingrid Cockhren:
Sure. So if we're talking about the United States specifically because historical trauma is kind of global issue if we talk about the United States specifically, then we're talking about a great deal of loss. The groups within our society, within our country they have the highest impact when it comes to historical trauma are going to be indigenous peoples and African-Americans or descendants of African slaves, and so these two groups have experienced genocide, enslavement and also ongoing racial discrimination and isolation. And so when we look at kind of the landscape of that, I would also include other specific groups, but I'm talking about the most impact, and when I gauge most impact, I'm talking about a cluster of issues so economic stability, mental health outcomes, physical health outcomes, so impact to life expectancy and quality of life and other things like educational outcomes, these kind of social determinants of health. We can see that these groups are greatly impacted by their outcomes. And so when we are thinking about what it looks like to be historically traumatized, it is a large-scale, widespread event in the past that has impacted the way that you see yourself, that you see others, the way that you raise your children, the way that you cook your food, all aspects of what we would call culture, so much so that we kind of we mistake historical trauma for culture often, and so the hidden costs there are tremendous.
Ingrid Cockhren:
The obviously potential right, individual capacity and potential Right. If people say things like what if the cure for cancer is in African-American boys head, what's the likelihood that we're gonna get that child's full potential in America? Or what if the cure for diabetes? I mean, we're getting a lot of things cure ladies, so that's good, but what if that is in the mind of a Mexican girl in America who's undocumented? So these are the things that historically have been extreme barriers for people to live their full potential.
Ingrid Cockhren:
So there's data.
Ingrid Cockhren:
Great deal is just lots of hidden potential. But there's also the likelihood, as we move forward and we contend with our collective past, we're gonna have to really reckon with the issues of reparations and how we are equitable and give back into pockets of our society that have long been treated poorly, that cost us as a collective. And then, of course, when we come to the physical health outcomes, when I talked about African-Americans and indigenous people, both of those groups have such hostile environments historically and currently, that their life expectancy is lower than their other, the racial counterparts, and so we're talking about four to six years difference in life expectancy based on race, and so and we tend to conflate the two it's not that it's because a person has a certain skin color. If they're gonna be more likely to get a chronic disease like diabetes or heart disease, it is actually the treatment that they experience, as well as the treatment that their ancestors experience, that has an impact on their health, making it more likely for them to have early death, and so just the healthcare costs are exponential.
Manya Chylinski:
Absolutely. And, as you are going to say, cataloging this list of costs to society, the lost potential is one that we have no way of even of counting. That, and it's heartbreaking to think of the things that we are not going to get as a society, yes, from these amazing minds that we're not giving a chance to shine, and it's very clear at this point when we think, historically the United States in the past has been a forerunner in many different aspects.
Ingrid Cockhren:
When we, when compared to other countries and as we move forward, you know we're not number one in in education anymore and this is largely due to our, you know, kind of cutting off our nose to spite our face as we have different policies and procedures and kind of these unwritten rules put in place about who prospers and who doesn't in our society. We are stifling our own collective innovation ingenuity, yeah, and because of that then it impacts us, you know, in our world standing, but you know, again that potential, that lack of innovation. We are getting to a point where we can't even solve problems that other countries have solved because we're so divided around politics and and race and other issues that again we kind of say that their culture. But it's really symptoms of historically traumatic events that are still impacting us today.
Manya Chylinski:
And we're talking about systemic or structural issue here. What are the barriers, you know, in the system, in the structure that's preventing us from making these changes and addressing these incredible costs?
Ingrid Cockhren:
One thing about historical trauma that I kind of alluded to before was that we mistake it for culture. When it comes to historical trauma, we've essentially created different factions within our society and we have no idea the level of how different we are. We are essentially living in different worlds. A good example of that is, let's say, we both look at or you know, you get a couple different people together and they look at a video of police brutality and one is going to say, well, why didn't they just comply? And the other one is going to say, well, this is obviously an abuse of power and they're being too forceful, and they're both looking at the same video. And so the reason why they will look at the same video and have very different opinions or perceptions of the video is because of their background. And so if my background is that the police are not to be trusted, that they are an enemy to those who look like me, then I'm going to see various, you know ways that the police officer is is the enemy in that visual. And so one of my background is that I respect the police and they're there to help me and you know, it's kind of like your friendly neighborhood police officers, you know, is what you're given as a child and throughout life. Then, when you have those encounters, you're going to say well, the police officer can't be in the wrong, because they're here to help. This other person must be the hold on quote criminal and they must have done something to deserve this treatment. And that's a good example of how our historical landscape in this country has very much impacted our perception of the world, how we see ourselves and how we see others, driven by the stories that we've been told through generations, the things your grandmother told you, the values of your ancestors and what they've gained through the American experience and what they pass along. And this leads to having a very, very different perception of your environment. One may be those of comfort and safety and the other may be of identity, threats and assaults that are constant. And this makes for, again, we're living in different worlds. Because of this and because it's passed on through generations, you're getting this information from trusted sources Again grandparents, parents, teachers and so you are going to believe those, especially in your childhood, and then, as you get older, you may question and push back what, for the most part, people tend to be heavily influenced by those early experiences and their close relatives. Yes, and this is another way to really think about it Historical trauma doesn't have anything to do with race.
Ingrid Cockhren:
We happen to be in a race focused society, so much of our historical trauma is around race. But I often talk about historical trauma from the African-American experience mainly because slavery was extremely traumatic, very well documented. We have slave narratives, things of that nature, and everyone can kind of get behind like, yeah, this would be a traumatic incident. So I use that as a tool to educate. But everyone has historical trauma.
Ingrid Cockhren:
Even if we flip it right and we think about white people during the settler times and their interactions with indigenous people and slaves, we have to acknowledge that there were at all pivots within our society. There were white children being indoctrinated into that racist system their parents, their fathers, their mothers when they would see things like violence against indigenous peoples or lynchings, they were there and I'm sure that they ask questions like why are we doing this or why is this okay? And those answers were that these people are not like us, they are savages, they're not to be trusted, they don't have souls. There's many things that they were told. This then leading to historical trauma that's being passed along through white communities, leading to a lack of empathy that we can see present today. So it's not so much about race as it is about this transfer of trauma and beliefs, values that go along with being traumatized through generations, and also definitely the physical implications of being in a toxicly stressful environment that would change one's DNA.
Manya Chylinski:
Absolutely. Given that this problem runs so deep, and just hearing you talk about how it transfers down through generations, how can we foster a greater understanding of the costs of this and what steps can we as individuals or as a society be doing to make some real movement here?
Ingrid Cockhren:
Yeah, we have a bit of an understanding of the cost, especially as we think about the symptoms of historical trauma. So the symptoms of historical trauma are relationship issues, behavioral issues, addiction and substance issues, higher rates of incarceration, lower educational attainment and poor physical health outcomes, and so in each one of those kind of sectors we can estimate the cost that are associated with that we also are just aware of. You know, if you think about the cost for corporations to implement DEI programs, you know that's billions. It's a billion dollar industry to implement DEI. The reason why we have to have it is because of the historical trauma of the past.
Manya Chylinski:
Right.
Ingrid Cockhren:
All of the you know, when we think about affirmative action and other policies that require implementation within our society, that are attempting to create a more equitable society, those have costs. We can wrap our head around the cost of those, of those kind of things that we didn't do it in the past and now we have to go back and address it as so that we can become again a more equitable society. One thing that I find is is that we just need to know more about our history and this will be a way to kind of determine what's needed. When I engage in historical trauma consultations, I look at the past from a certain either, you know, geographical so I've done historical trauma within a specific state or a specific county and I look back and I go as far back as the 1400s what was going on in this area that we're in right now during, you know, settler times and exploration. But I can also look at it from a societal standpoint. So when we look at the plight of women in our society, when we think about the cost of homophobia, and then you can also do it by sector, so I can look back and go through policies that were racist or exclusionary within the field of medicine all the way back to the 1600s to today, and so this will help us to kind of look at. You know, this is how we got here, and what does it mean to kind of reverse engineer and address these issues based on root cause? Not so much, because this is one of the issues that we talked about last time was scientific racism and scientific colonialism. We have built our society around kind of white male dominance and white male point of view. So, you know, when white male elites educational elites or academic elites decided that race was a thing and they categorized people by race and they said some people were superior and some people were savages and didn't have culture or didn't have civilization, this was their worldview that was encoded into textbooks and into industry and into sectors. And so if we think about, you know, we're deeply embedded within this system in any different ways, and so being able to reverse engineer that means that you even need to know how this happens, right? Yeah, how did we get here?
Ingrid Cockhren:
You know, even in the smaller things, like I was reading about a medical device that was created for lung capacity, and I think it's kind of like, you know, you have to blow in it to it and you can determine lung capacity of the individual and they have different scales. For Asian and African people, descent, right, and so you know, okay, the thought at the time was that black and Asian people had lower capacity, lower lung capacity, and so their scales were different, their measurements were different. Okay, but if we think about the time and we think about the environments that people were subjected to, it may not have anything to do with any type of genetic race. Right, this is scientific racism, right, it may be that white people at the time were in more areas that had less pollution. They may have been generally healthier, they might have been subject to such intense labor.
Ingrid Cockhren:
I mean, there's many other factors there. Not because, you know, some people decided in the 1700s that race existed and that we were fundamentally different because of our skin color. Now we have a tool that's being used to measure lung capacity that's based on skin color, and then we get to today and that tool is less accurate. It's leading to higher rates of people not getting the diagnosis that they need or the treatments that they need because of skin color. So it's like even you need to know how we got here. Yeah, and so race, scientific racism, scientific colonialism has invaded all of our sciences.
Manya Chylinski:
Wow, it is such important work that you're doing, helping us think about historical racism and all the work that I know you're doing to address these, because it's such a multi-pronged problem and it requires a multi-pronged approach. What are some promising practices or approaches that are you seeing to addressing this these days?
Ingrid Cockhren:
The big piece that we need to start with is education, which makes this whole pushback on history or critical race theory. It's not great and the timing is very obvious. So we need to know our history. We need to know the ways in which we made the wrong decision or we went wrong in the past so that we can correct that. So I think uncovering history is one of the ways that I think we can really have impact.
Ingrid Cockhren:
I believe having a clear understanding of equity we have after the civil rights movement, which benefited many groups, there was this push for equality. Equality is essentially saying that we've been able to bring everyone to the same point and now we can move forward in equality, and that's not true. We have so much that we need to do to bring everyone to the same point. As long as we are not focused on equity, we will have disparity, and so equity means really pouring into some groups, and that is not equal. It's not the same piece of the pie.
Ingrid Cockhren:
There's a great deal of pushback on that. We need to have a working definition within sectors around historical trauma, especially medical, because and I've done a lot of consulting for hospitals but we still have these terms of genetically predisposed for diabetes or heart disease. And what we know now is if race is not an actual physical thing, it's more of a social construct and we're talking about environmental factors, and those environmental factors are historical in range, and so the impact to my ancestors physical health is still prevalent today, but that's not because I'm black. It's because of slavery and Jim Crow and the reconstruction era and all of the racial violence that my ancestors went through that impacted them, not only just their DNA because there is that which makes it more likely for them to experience chronic disease and cognitive issues but also the warping of their culture. So the food that they eat is wrapped up in slavery and what they could eat, and wrapped up in slavery and poverty, the way that they cook it.
Ingrid Cockhren:
This impacts my health. If back then I don't have access to fresh foods because only white people get fresh meats and everybody else gets what's left over after that's older, then that means I need to salt it more to get rid of the taste or I need to salt it to preserve it. These kinds of things passed on through generations is a warping of someone's culture due to the impact of the environment. It's a normal human behavior. That's what we all do. However, the environment is not exactly normal. It changes the way that we our marriage, the way that we get together romantically or in relationship. It impacts the way that we parent our children. So all of these different ways that culture is impacted also impacts our health as well.
Manya Chylinski:
Wow, ingrid, thank you for sharing this. You've opened my eyes in terms of thinking about culture. I hadn't made that connection and it's so clear when you say it how tied together culture is in all of us to historical trauma and how even I have thought about culture. So thank you for sharing. I mean, this is a problem that was many years in the making and hopefully it will not be that many years in the unmaking thanks to the kind of work that you're doing. So we have to end now, but tell our listeners how can they reach you and learn more about the amazing work that you're doing.
Ingrid Cockhren:
Sure. So I'm CEO of Paces Connection, so that's Paces pacesconnection. com. There's a wealth of resources there as well. I'm also college professor at Tennessee State University and I run a consulting company called Cockhren Consulting, and I can be found online at AceIngrid on LinkedIn and Twitter. Oh X.
Manya Chylinski:
I know I still can't call it X. That's great. I'm going to put links to all of those things in the show now so we can make sure that people know how to find you. Ingrid, thank you again. This was a wonderful conversation and I hope it helps in moving the needle on this issue. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to our listeners as well. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. So if you'd like to learn more about me, Manya Chylinski, I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences, and I do this through talks and consulting. I'm a survivor of mass violence and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency, compassion and trauma-sensitive leadership to build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil. If this is something you want to learn more about, visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com, or manya@manyachylinski. com me at , or stop by my social media on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks so much.
