Culture  

Suspicion Travels With the Language and the Food: How Trust Patterns Are Inherited

If you grew up in a Hazara household shaped by what our parents and grandparents survived, you know the feeling even if no one ever named it. A wariness about people you have not known a long time. A second-guessing of strangers' motives. A particular way of reading a room before you settle into it. A reluctance to trust the new face at the community gathering, even when that face is from your own community.

That wariness was not invented in you. It was inherited. Suspicion was, for the generation that lived through Taliban-era violence, displacement from Hazarajat, the long pressure on Hazaras in Quetta and Mashhad, and the precarious passage to Sydney or Toronto, a useful and sometimes life-saving signal. It told them who to keep at distance, which offers to refuse, which knock on the door not to answer. It does not switch off when the immediate danger recedes. And it gets transmitted, along with the language and the food, to children and grandchildren who never lived through the original event.

This article is about that transmission. It tries to look at it honestly, without pathologizing the people who carried it to us. Our parents were not paranoid. They were correctly calibrated for the world they survived. The cost is that the calibration outlives the world that produced it - and shapes how those of us born outside Afghanistan, or born after the worst years inside it, relate to others, including others within our own community.

This is also the third thread in a longer conversation. An earlier piece on this site looked at why internal divisions persist among Hazaras. A companion piece proposed how a unifying institution might actually be built. Both pieces named, briefly, the role of inherited trust patterns. This piece sits with that thread on its own, because it is too important to leave at one paragraph.

What Inherited Trauma Actually Means

The phrase "intergenerational trauma" gets used loosely. It is worth being precise about what is and is not being claimed.

The careful version of the claim is this: the experience of severe and sustained trauma in one generation changes the physical, emotional, and relational environment that the next generation grows up in, and those changes shape the next generation's nervous system, attachment patterns, and default assumptions about other people. The trauma is not transmitted as a memory of the original event. It is transmitted as the parenting style, household climate, communication patterns, and emotional signalling of caregivers who carry the original event in their bodies and minds.

Several bodies of research converge on this picture, from different angles.

The clinical psychiatrist Judith Herman, in her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, established what is now the core framework for understanding complex trauma - trauma that is repeated, prolonged, and embedded in relationships rather than caused by a single event. Herman's central observation, that survivors of complex trauma develop persistent alterations in their capacity to trust, in their sense of safety, and in their relationships with others, became the language the field still uses. Children of those survivors, raised by parents whose capacity to trust has been altered, learn the altered pattern as the default.

Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score (2014), pulled together decades of research showing that trauma lodges in the body and the nervous system, not only in conscious memory. A parent whose body is on quiet alert for danger - whose startle response is faster, whose face reads strangers more quickly for threat, whose tone shifts the moment the doorbell rings unexpectedly - is teaching their child, every day, what the world is like. The child is not being told. The child is being shown. The body of the parent becomes the curriculum.

The psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda, working primarily with Holocaust survivors and their children at Mount Sinai in New York, has produced the most cited research on the biological end of this transmission. Her work has shown measurable differences in stress hormone regulation in the children of trauma survivors, not only in the survivors themselves. The exact mechanism - whether epigenetic in the strictest sense, or mediated through prenatal environment, or through early caregiving, or all three at once - is still being worked out and the field debates the details. The broader point her work makes is settled enough: a parent's trauma history shows up, biologically and behaviourally, in the next generation's stress response.

The Turkish-American psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan brought a different angle in Bloodlines (1997) and a series of later papers. Volkan worked on what he called "chosen trauma": a defining injury in a community's history that gets passed down across generations as a marker of identity itself. The next generation does not remember the event, but the wound around the event - the suspicion, the readiness to expect betrayal from particular outsiders, the sense that the world is dangerous in specific patterned ways - becomes part of who they understand themselves to be. The Hazara reader will recognise the shape of this immediately. The 1890s campaigns of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the destruction of the Buddhas, the persecutions in Quetta, the Taliban's violence against Hazaras - these are not only historical events. They are reference points the community lives with.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, run by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente from the late 1990s onward, established at population scale that the long shadow of childhood adversity shows up decades later in physical and mental health, in relationship patterns, and in how people read the safety of new situations. The original ACE work focused on direct childhood experience. Subsequent work has extended it to the parent-to-child link: parental ACE scores predict child outcomes even when the child's own direct adversity is low.

And from a different tradition again, the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment, going back to the 1950s and 1960s, established that children's foundational sense of whether the world is safe and people are reliable is built in the first few years of life, in the patterned interactions with primary caregivers. A caregiver whose own attachment history is shaped by loss, separation, and untrustworthy authority transmits a different baseline to the child than a caregiver whose own world has been steady. Not because they want to. Because that is what attachment is.

You do not have to accept every claim in every one of those literatures to take the basic point. The basic point is robust across all of them: what one generation lives through shapes how the next generation relates to other people and that shaping happens whether anyone in the family ever talks about the original event or not.

Suspicion as Inheritance

Now bring that back to a Hazara household.

Imagine a parent who left Afghanistan in the late 1990s after the Taliban's first sweep through Mazar-e-Sharif and the killings of Hazaras there. Or a grandparent who left Hazarajat after the Soviet war, made it to Quetta, and watched the bombings of Hazara neighbourhoods there continue across the 2000s and 2010s. Or a parent who was a child in Behsud or Jaghori when the road was not safe, when the school year was shaped by which districts you could and could not move through. Or a family that landed in Iran as undocumented refugees and lived for fifteen years under the constant pressure of deportation and exclusion.

Now ask what would have been adaptive in those settings.

A finely tuned suspicion of strangers would have been adaptive. It would have helped you avoid the wrong neighbour who reported the wrong thing, the wrong contact who promised papers and delivered nothing, the wrong kind hand. A reluctance to disclose family details to people you had not known a long time would have been adaptive. A habit of reading new faces carefully, checking who they came in with, asking quietly about their family before deciding how to treat them, would have been adaptive. A reflex to pull resources and trust inward, to the smallest verifiable circle - close family first, then extended family, then perhaps your village or sub-group - would have been adaptive. Wider trust, the kind that lets you fund a community institution run by people you do not personally know, was a luxury of conditions that did not exist.

Those reflexes did not come out of nowhere. They were learned, reinforced, and necessary. They saved lives.

What happens when the family then arrives in Virginia, in Sydney, in San Diego, in Hamburg, and the children are born and raised there?

The reflexes do not switch off. There is no internal signal that tells the body the danger has passed. The parent who is now safe, in legal terms, in a Toronto suburb is still the same person whose nervous system was shaped by a different setting. They greet new people with the same caution. They ask the same kinds of questions about a stranger's background. They warn their children about people in the same patterned ways. They teach, by what they do and what they pay attention to, that the world contains particular risks and particular reasons to keep distance.

The child grows up in that household. They absorb the pattern. They may never be told the specific story behind it - many parents from that generation do not narrate the worst of what they lived through - but they learn the shape of it. The wariness is in how their parent enters a room. It is in who their parent invites home and who their parent avoids. It is in the silences around certain topics. It is in the way the family responds to bad news from Afghanistan or from Quetta, with a quiet that is not surprise but recognition.

Then the child grows up and walks into a community gathering in their adopted city. A new face. A Hazara face, but not one they recognise. From a sub-group they do not know. With a story they have not heard. Their reaction is not neutral. They have been trained, without anyone meaning to train them, to read that face slowly and carefully. The training was correct for a different setting. It is, by default, the training they apply here.

That is the inheritance. It is what gets transmitted along with the language and the food.

Why It Specifically Costs Us at the Community Level

You can see, then, why this matters for the question the earlier articles on this site asked: why has shared persecution and shared displacement so rarely produced shared unity among Hazaras?

The earlier piece on sub-groups argued that one reason is structural - geography, state policy, the absence of a unifying institution. Another is psychological at the community level - communities under sustained threat turn inward and contract trust to the smallest verifiable circle. This piece adds the third layer, which sits underneath the other two: the trust pattern of the threatened generation does not stay with that generation. It gets handed forward.

That has practical consequences and they are worth naming honestly.

A Hazara organization in California trying to build a board that crosses sub-group lines runs into people whose default response to a stranger from a different sub-group is wariness, even when they would not articulate it that way. The wariness is not bigotry. It is a trained reflex applied in a setting where the original training conditions no longer apply. But it slows recruitment, complicates trust-building, and tends to push organisations back to the people the founders already knew - which is to say, back to the founders' own sub-group.

A fundraising appeal that asks Hazaras in Quetta to give to relief work in Hazarajat, run by people they do not personally know, runs into the inherited assumption that opaque structures hide bad actors. That assumption was correct in many of the settings our parents lived through. It is now applied, by default, to settings where transparency could in fact be verified - if anyone trusted the verification.

Cross-sub-group friendship and marriage, which the earlier article named as one of the things that actually dissolves internal walls, run into a quiet intergenerational layer of caution. Parents who would not say outright that a Behsudi family should not marry into a Jaghori one will still raise their children with a thousand small signals about who is "ours" and who is "close enough" and who is further out. The signals are not always conscious. They are felt.

And the leadership question, the one the unifying-institution piece spent a lot of time on, runs straight into this. Building an institution whose chair this year is from a sub-group different from yours requires a kind of trust extension that an inherited reflex of wariness makes harder than it would otherwise be. The reflex is not the only obstacle. It is one obstacle, sitting under the others.

What This Is Not

It is important to be careful here, because there are several things this piece is not saying.

This is not saying our parents and grandparents were paranoid. They were not. They were responding rationally to settings that punished trust. The cost we now bear is the cost of having had ancestors who survived. The alternative - ancestors who trusted freely in settings that did not warrant it - is in many cases ancestors who did not make it. The wariness is, in a real sense, why we are here at all.

This is not saying the second generation is broken or damaged. We are not. We are carrying a particular pattern of inheritance, in the same way every people carries some pattern of inheritance from what its forebears lived through. Naming the pattern is not the same as pathologising the people who carry it. The point of naming it is to give us a name for something we already feel, so we can think about it and decide what to do with it.

This is not saying the answer is to "get over" the past. That framing is wrong on its face. You cannot get over what has been written into how your nervous system reads a room. The frame is not "get over it." The frame is: see it, name it, understand where it came from, respect it, and then make decisions about which of its instructions still serve you and which were correct for a setting you no longer live in.

And this is not unique to Hazaras. The same pattern has been documented carefully in other communities. The children of Holocaust survivors carry a measurable version of it. Armenian families post-1915 carry a version of it. Cambodian families post-Khmer Rouge carry a version of it. Indigenous communities in North America - particularly those affected by the residential school system, where the work of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart introduced the term "historical trauma" to describe exactly this kind of multi-generational wound - carry a version of it. Black families in the United States carrying the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow carry a version of it. Tutsi families post-Rwanda carry a version of it. The literature comparing these communities is rich and the pattern recurs.

That should be reassuring rather than discouraging. Communities that have begun to work with this honestly have found ways to hold respect for what their elders carried and still build wider trust within their own ranks. The work is slow. It is also possible.

What Recognising It Changes

If the inheritance is real, what do we do with it?

The first thing it changes is how we read our own reactions. When the second-generation Hazara at the community event in San Diego notices a flicker of wariness as a new Hazara face from a sub-group they do not know walks in, they have a choice that someone unaware of the pattern does not have. They can register the flicker as information about their inheritance rather than information about the new person. That alone, repeated across many such moments, is significant. It means the next interaction starts from a slightly different place.

The second thing it changes is how we read our parents and grandparents. The behaviour we sometimes find frustrating - the slowness to trust new people, the close-held information, the warnings about who not to befriend, the strong loyalty to the smallest circle - stops looking like personal stubbornness and starts looking like the after-image of conditions we did not have to live through. That changes the conversation between the generations. It does not require the older generation to do anything differently. It does require us, the younger generation, to extend a different kind of patience to where their patterns came from.

The third thing it changes is how we design the institutions the unifying-institution piece argued for. If we know that wariness toward unfamiliar Hazaras is part of the inherited landscape, then the institutional answer is not to lecture people out of it. The institutional answer is to design structures that lower the cost of extending trust: published finances, transparent governance, rotating chairs, visible representation from across the sub-groups, public minutes, real accountability when something goes wrong. Trust built that way does not require anyone to override their inherited caution. It gives the caution something to verify against. Over time, repeated verification is what loosens the reflex.

The fourth thing it changes is how we think about parenting and what we pass on next. Many second-generation Hazaras are now raising children of their own. They have a chance to pass on much of what their parents passed on - the language, the food, the music, the connection to home - while making different choices about what to do with the wariness. Not by pretending it does not exist. By being honest about where it came from, talking about it openly enough that it does not have to be inferred from silences, and making explicit, in front of their own children, the difference between caution that is currently warranted and caution that is a heritage from a setting that no longer applies. That is its own quiet act of community-building.

A Closing Note

It is worth saying this clearly. The generation that brought us here did the harder thing. They held a community together under conditions designed to dissolve it. They got their children to safer countries, often at terrible personal cost. They kept the language, the food, the songs, the names of the valleys, the memory of what was lost. They did all of this while their nervous systems carried what they had survived, every day, with no language for it and no support for it.

That they also passed forward a pattern of wariness is not their failure. It is the shape of what survival looked like for them. The work of the next generation is not to disown what they carried. It is to honour it, understand it, and decide carefully which parts of it still serve the world we now live in.

If we do that work, the community that comes after us will inherit something different from what we did. Not a community without caution - caution is a fair gift to give children who will live in any world - but a community in which caution and wider trust can sit together, and in which the lines inside the line, the ones between Behsud and Jaghori and Sheikh Ali and Day Zangi and the rest, become softer because they are held by people who have looked honestly at why those lines were drawn so deeply in the first place.

That is, in the end, what the inheritance asks of us. Not to forget. To remember accurately, and then to choose.

Sources consulted: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992); Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014); Rachel Yehuda et al., research on intergenerational trauma transmission in Holocaust survivor offspring (Mount Sinai, 1998 onward); Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (1997) and subsequent papers on chosen trauma; Vincent Felitti et al., the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (CDC/Kaiser Permanente, 1998 onward); John Bowlby, Attachment (1969) and Mary Ainsworth, "Patterns of Attachment" (1978); Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, work on historical trauma in Indigenous communities (1990s onward); comparative literature on second-generation Holocaust, Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Indigenous community trauma transmission.