Clinical Implications of Intergenerational Trauma

This is a follow-up to an event that took place earlier this year, but attendance at the previous event is not required. You're more than welcome to join us even if you missed part one!

In the second part of her presentation about intergenerational transmission of parental/ancestral trauma, Irit Felsen, PhD will be focusing on clinical implications for working with individuals from trauma-exposed groups. Recent approaches increasingly recognize the importance of historical trauma and of intergenerational processes as these shape the content and expression of particular psychological themes, vulnerabilities and resiliencies in the descendants of trauma, and their responses to current traumatic experiences and reminders of ancestral trauma. Current wars and catastrophes, national and international political upheaval, and the erosion of democratic norms have intensely impacted patients and therapists in recent years and require the capacity to address in therapy the fear and anxiety in response to these national and international affairs, the impact of these experiences on the therapeutic dyad, and how both patient and therapist are influenced by legacies of historical trauma. A trauma-focused framework will be presented, addressing specific clinical factors and interventions for working with individuals whose presenting problems might also be rooted in intergenerationally transmitted traumatic experiences. Identifying, comprehending, and working with the reverberations of intergenerational transmission of trauma might be critical for adequate treatment, for symptom reduction and for enhancing patients’ resilience and well-being in trying times.

Irit Felsen, PhD is a clinical psychologist specializing in the effects of trauma and traumatic loss and intergenerational transmission of both trauma and resiliencies in families.

Dr. Felsen is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University and had been an assistant professor at Yeshiva University Graduate School of Psychology for 14 years. She obtained her MA in Clinical Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, her PhD the University of Hamburg, Germany, and her postdoctoral training at Yale University. Dr. Felsen worked in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric settings, and since 9/11, has served on a national emergency response team. Dr. Felsen is a Fellow of Division 56 (Trauma Division) in the APA, chair of the Trauma Working Group of the NGO on Mental Health in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations, a member of the National Center for Crisis Management and the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, and she was chair of the Work Group on Older Adults in the Interdivision APA Covid-19 Task Force.

Dr. Felsen’s research papers have been published in peer reviewed publications including American Journal of Orthopsychiatry; Psychoanalytic Psychology; Psychoanalysis, Self and Context; American Journal of Psychiatry; Psychotherapy Research; Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, Policy; American Psychology; and others. She has contributed multiple book chapters, among which a chapter in Charles Figley’s “Pandemic Providers” (2023), and a most recent one in “Routledge International Handbook of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Descendants of Holocaust Survivors” (2024). She maintains a private practice in Englewood, NJ. Dr.

Felsen’s art has been featured in art exhibitions in Hamburg, London, and was chosen as the emblem of the exhibition of the Arts Council of the Morris Area in 2010.

2 Continuing Education Credits.

An important note about CEs: ICP is an approved provider of continuing education credits for social workers, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, and psychoanalysts through the New York Department of Education. If your license is from a different state, please contact your state’s licensing board to find out if they will accept CE credits for New York State. If your license is from another state, please enter your license number with your state in parenthesis, ie 54321 (CA).

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