“I Can't Hug my Child”: A Case Study of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in China*

Background and aim: We illustrate a prototypical case study of the intergenerational transmission of trauma in a Chinese family. We used semi-structured interviewing with a volunteer family. Results: Grandmother (seventy-five years old) experienced the traumas of poverty and suicide of her mother when she was four years old, “So I seldom sensed a mother's love. I had no such thing. It was seldom for me to show the love to my own children, no hug or kiss.” Her husband was jailed during the chaotic years of the late 1960s: “You know that there was no time to be concerned with love or anything else.” The grandmother was only able to be proud of her children's achievements. She showed no emotional insight of the past or with her children. Her daughter, now a forty-eight-year-old mother, grew up enduring her mother's volatile outbursts of rage. This left her with a lingering sense of loneliness throughout her childhood, as well as unexplained feelings of grief and sorrow that often surfaced when she was alone. The mother was better able to make connections from the past, but was still unable to feel comfortable hugging her own child. The child (ten-and-a-half years old) was aggressive and fought to protect herself. She felt more emotionally connected to her nanny, and spent time with her parents only occasionally. Conclusion: They were all deprived of sufficient maternal care and failed to grieve their loss of mother love, and their adaptions and defences worked to transmit the traumas through the generations.