Corinne Sanchez, director of Tewa Women United, works to help people overcome intergenerational trauma. ‘There’s multiple ways that healing can happen. A lot of times, people think it’s just talk therapy, but what we’ve learned in our work [at Tewa Women United] is that healing can come through different modalities,’ she said.
Corrine Sanchez, current director of Tewa Women United, with her mother, Kathy Sanchez, former director and current program manager for the Environmental Health and Justice program.
Corinne Sanchez, director of Tewa Women United, works to help people overcome intergenerational trauma. ‘There’s multiple ways that healing can happen. A lot of times, people think it’s just talk therapy, but what we’ve learned in our work [at Tewa Women United] is that healing can come through different modalities,’ she said.
Courtesy photo
Corrine Sanchez, current director of Tewa Women United, with her mother, Kathy Sanchez, former director and current program manager for the Environmental Health and Justice program.
Even before knowing the term ‘intergenerational trauma,’ Corrine Sanchez felt its impacts in her life.
Growing up in San Ildefonso as a Native woman “means understanding the historical impacts of laws and legislation on our communities … surviving genocide and our communities fighting for our land, fighting for our existence,” the Tewa Women United director said.
For Sanchez and many others, problems facing the present generation started decades ago. This is the idea behind intergenerational trauma: when the effects of trauma experienced by an individual or community can be passed on to people who have not experienced the trauma themselves.
Cherri Loggains, a clinical social worker in private practice at Southwest Care Center, has seen the effects of intergenerational trauma. Many clients come in with symptoms they don’t understand; the only way to sort through their issues is to reflect on the past and face a larger context, she said.
“The physiology of trauma and when it becomes symptomatic is when there’s not a physiological completion of our survival mechanism,” Loggains said. “It’s when our fight or flight mechanism peaks up really high, it gets met with that freeze, there’s this huge amount of energy, and that gets tangled with our emotions. … When the danger is over, there’s supposed to be a release, a letting go, and we don’t.”
According to numerous studies, people who have faced trauma have varied cortisol levels, which they pass on to their offspring, making it more difficult for both the parent and child to express and deal with stress. This makes someone less equipped to deal with trauma and more likely to develop a mental illness or unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as substance abuse and self-harm.
“Patterns like poverty, diseases that are common in certain groups of people, nutritional patterns, sexual abuse, domestic violence to depression, anxiety, all forms of mental health issues, those are all symptoms of what has not been healed. … We see them, and sometimes we don’t understand where they even come from,” said Baran Nosratpour, Santa Fe Indian School’s health teacher. These same symptoms of intergenerational trauma can also be the causes, she added.
Loggains said New Mexico especially is affected by intergenerational trauma. In 2017, she pointed out, the state had the second-highest poverty rate and ranked 49th for education quality in the country.
Additionally, a study by the New Mexico Sentencing Commission shows that of the 220 teens held in detention in 2011, 100 percent of the girls and 96 percent of the boys grew up with two or more adverse childhood experiences. The study connected bad childhood experiences to behavioral issues and the creation of a harmful cycle.
Academy for Technology and the Classics senior Veroaylin Campos said she sees this interconnectedness in her peers.
“I know they wanna do so much more, but they don’t cause there’s that cycle they don’t get out of,” Campos said, noting they either don’t know how to break away from the trauma, or they don’t have the financial resources to do so.
Sanchez said this is why people must ask themselves: How do we heal?
She said for some, healing stems from activism or community-based organizing. For others, it might be making a decision to become sober or to participate in art.
“There’s multiple ways that healing can happen. A lot of times, people think it’s just talk therapy, but what we’ve learned in our work [at Tewa Women United] is that healing can come through different modalities,” Sanchez said.
Tewa Women United hosts information sessions to understand trauma and hosts programs that teach folks how to express their experiences in healthy ways, from food to yoga, she said.
One exercise explains trauma through a “trauma rock” over seven generations, in which each piece of unresolved trauma a person carried would transfer over to the next generation. This gives a visual and physical sense of how trauma is exponential if there is no intervention, Sanchez explained.
She also stressed that healing is not returning to the ways before trauma occurred. Instead, it’s undergoing transformation and learning to respond differently.
“We still have people who are dying, who are experiencing violence, but how I know healing has happened is because the response has changed,” Sanchez said. Swapping out unhealthy coping mechanisms for positive ones, changing your lifestyle, can impact the lives of the people around you and those that come after.
Ultimately, it’s a one-person-at-a-time process, as “healing the individual is healing the collective,” Sanchez said.
“It’s a journey, but you have to commit to the journey,” Sanchez said. “It’s the most powerful thing we can do, for ourselves and our communities.”
Seneca Johnson is a senior at the Santa Fe Indian School. You can contact her at
The Santa Fe New Mexican observes its 175th anniversary with a series highlighting some of the major stories and figures that have appeared in the paper's pages through its history.
