Part Two: Behavioural patterns as intergenerational trauma - a legacy of the Great Famine?
Exploring connections between social change after the Famine, self-silencing and mental health
The previous post in this series was about epigenetics, and how An Górta Mór (The Great Hunger / The Great Famine) could have caused changes in the way genes express themselves and how the passing of these environmentally induced genetic adjustments to following generations may have left people vulnerable to mental illness.
When we talk of intergenerational trauma, I think it’s this passing on of the effects of trauma ‘through the genes’ that we tend to gravitate towards. Yet, it’s still an area of research in its infancy, and quite often it can be nearly impossible to separate whether an apparent intergenerational trauma is a result of a change in gene expression (i.e. epigenetics), or a behavioural response and adaptation to a trauma that becomes a behavioural pattern that rolls on from one generation to the next.
Current working definitions of intergenerational trauma describe it as such:
“Intergenerational trauma occurs when parent figures who have experienced trauma transmit the effects of their trauma to their children via interactional patterns, genetic pathways and/or family dynamics. Transmission may occur via the second generation learning to think and behave in ways that replicate their caregivers’ traumatic adaptations, or by being exposed to the secondary psychosocial effects of these adaptations and themselves similarly having to adapt”1
Our guts, our instincts, tell us that the Great Famine did something to Irish society and, consequently, the generations that have lived in its long shadow. The epigenetic research is giving that a scientific explanation but perhaps because I’m a social scientist, it’s the societal and behavioural changes it wrought (rather than the genetic adaptations per se) that interest me the most.
I have a hunch —a theory— that the societal norms and behavioural patterns that emerged in post-Famine Ireland (both as a direct and indirect result of it) have set generations of people of Ireland up to be more vulnerable to things like depression and mental health challenges. Because post-Famine Ireland was preoccupied with one thing; respectability, and respectability was upheld and maintained by a culture of silence, which required a culture of self-denial and self-silencing that encouraged a mantra of ‘don’t express’, ‘don’t say the thing’.
In the Women of Ireland Project interviews, I have a theme called “The Silence”. It’s all the things that don’t get said. Within families, communities, and individuals. And it’s shown me that there is a clear pattern and a tendency in Ireland in how we deal with difficult things and difficult emotions — we shut them off and shut them down, pretend they never happened, and maintain the pretence of this through a policing of the silence.
Generation after generation have been praised for keeping things to themselves and punished for any direct expression of their frustrations or inner turmoil — “don’t be saying that now”, “that’s best left unsaid”. — and that has to have had an impact on people’s mental health?
Best left unsaid. Best for who?
I repeatedly return to something Erin said in her interview, about how, throughout her life she noticed that if she said things directly — if she said things straight out and didn’t leave them unsaid or vaguely circled about with indirect language— to other people:
“It was like the world would blow up… the very carefully crafted House of Cards would blow up if I, if I kept doing that”
‘Silence’ — that things are best left unsaid— was (and is) Ireland’s collective coping mechanism. It’s protective. But it’s a warped protection that either emerged in response to, or was reinforced by the cataclysmic annihilation of Irish society the Great Hunger wrought.
I have about a thousand different thoughts (and questions) on this running through my mind, so I’ll do my best to express them with the help of some key concepts. But the general gist is that, whether they can be classed directly as intergenerational trauma or not, the societal changes that occurred in Post-Famine Ireland set in motion a set of behavioural patterns (e.g. self-denial, the repressing of emotions, and self-silencing) which, I would argue, have left people in Ireland vulnerable to mental health challenges and meant they often cope in ways that are, ultimately, self-destructive.
Post-Famine Ireland: grasping the ‘life-raft’ of respectability
“This period (1880s onward) witnessed the triumph of respectability”
Society in Ireland changed dramatically in the years and century after the Great Famine*. The death of nearly one-eighth of the population and the emigration of two million more (although estimates for how many people died and emigrated vary — the “one million died, one million emigrated” line is much debated — the numbers could be much higher) will do that.
While these changes were, of course, multifaceted and complex, when you drill into the core of post-Famine Irish culture, one thing repeatedly makes an appearance; respectability.
Respectability was a very Victorian 19th-century code of behaviour, grounded in notions of, and aspirations to, being ‘civilised’ and raising one’s social standing (above the uncivilised and not respectable members of society). Becoming respectable meant adhering to a strict set of moral and social codes, and appropriate behaviours which influenced nearly every aspect of a person’s life. Respectability meant civility and restraint, and it required emotional repression, self-control, and the mastery of bodily urges and desires.
To the average ‘Victorian’, respectability meant social advancement but in post-Famine Ireland, respectablity took on a very different hue — respectability offered safety and protection and it was grabbed at like a life-raft. A raft that promised to carry one away from the debasement, deprivation and horrors of the Famine, to a safe place built on the power of the individual’s own conduct and values.
“The Famine did not simply come and go without making deep impressions on the Irish mind. Other possible repercussions from the Famine demand attention, beginning with the Irish concern with respectability that came to form such a large part of the country’s image and identity until recent times”
Michael Duggan: How the Great Famine made Catholic Ireland
Post-Famine Ireland was preoccupied — bordering on obsessed— with respectability. It was a preoccupation born from its wounds and its traumas. Those who had survived and stayed had directly experienced or observed (or heard tell of) the devastation and atrocities of the Famine, born witness to the debasing of the human body, listened to the colonial framing of the Famine as the fault of the slovenly and indolent Irish character, and been subject to the policies of a British political elite who explained the Famine as ‘divine providence’ — “a divinely ordained Final Solution to the endemic problems of rural population”2 — and prioritised laissez-faire economics over humanity.
Perhaps operating from an internalised shame, Irish society seemed to take it upon itself to craft a new persona built on the ideology of respectability. One that meant they would never again find themselves so debased, nor leave themselves open to ridicule as a ‘degenerate’, ‘indecent’, ‘immoral’ people.
The Irish would be good, respectable people, and their respectability would put a curtain-wall around them; a protection from anything that threatened to cast them in any other light, or pull them back to some low, frightening, inhuman space.
Respectability as the antidote to the effects of Famine took such a hold in the Irish psyche that, throughout the 20th century the Famine was presented as a tragic but positive event that enabled Ireland to cast off its backwardness and become a respectable, modern nation. A school textbook from the early 20th century taught children the following:
“The mud hovel and potato patch vanished gradually from large and increasing areas; the face of the landscape wore a better aspect….above all the conditions for nine-tenths certainly of the peasantry was extraordinarily improved. The misery and rags of the past seldom offended the eye; the potato ceased to be the only chief staple of food”3
The message was clear, Ireland was respectable now, and anything but meant going backwards, backwards into ‘misery’ and horror. But becoming ‘respectable’ required a strict set of social rules, and a population with the self-control to keep them.
Society gets ‘tighter’: the religious and social training of self-denial and self-silencing
“Only a very powerful ideology and a severe socialisation process would be capable of turning “raw” and wild Irish children into “cooked” docile and obedient adults willing to sacrifice themselves to the demands of family and community”
Nancy Scheper Hughes — pg. 23 of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland
Tied to the life-raft of respectability, supporting and balancing it in the water, were two other significant changes happening in post-Famine Ireland — the ‘Devotional Revolution’ and the economic shifts of an emerging rural and urban middle-class. And between the three of them, they engendered a shift in the cultural paradigm which produced a collective self-disciplining of the body, mind and soul — a self-silencing state of mind.
The ‘Devotional Revolution’ was a phrase coined by historian Emmet Larkin in a paper he wrote in 19724 to capture what he saw as a shift in religious gear which “made practising Catholics of the Irish people”. After the Famine, mass attendance rose exponentially and the proportion of clergy to lay-person increased dramatically and continued to rise throughout the following century.
“In 1840 there was one Catholic priest to about 1,500 lay people. In 1960 there was about one to every 600. The proportion of priests increased about six-fold. The proportion of nuns rose even faster. There was one nun to every 7,000 Catholics in 1841, compared with one to about 400 a century later”.5
Although many have questioned Larkin’s thesis that such a quantitative increase in the formal elements of Catholicism (e.g. mass attendance, knowledge of Catholic doctrine) were linked to the tragedies of the Famine — a religious filling of the ‘cultural vacuum’ it left in its wake— the reality is that after the Famine, there were more ‘bums on seats’ in chapels across the country and there were more priests and nuns than ever before to deliver the ideologies of Catholicism to the masses.
The ideology they preached was a heady mix of Catholic doctrine (the sins of the body) and the social ideals of Victorian respectability (self-control, repression) which, when combined and presented to a people desperate for a sense of self-respect, soon produced a regime of ‘self-denial’. Silencing one’s own bodily urges and emotions was the ticket to board the life-raft of ‘respectability’.
Sociologist Tom Inglis explains that while such a regime of self-denial is embodied by an individual — in their everyday self-disciplining and control of their body and emotions — it is rooted in a desire for social order and control. The society that emerged in post-Famine Ireland was one guided by a steadfast belief that:
“Social order [would be] maintained as long as individuals did not seek to satisfy their pleasures and desires—as long as they practiced self-denial”6
In other words, anything considered ‘not respectable’ was viewed as a threat to social order and stability.
Cultural psychology research tells us that the experience of threat, even if it is only short-lived, makes people crave order and stability and produces a ‘Tight Culture’. A tight culture being one that has strong social norms which are strictly enforced through a social policing of anyone who deviates from the norm. There’s a simple and very real logic to this — cultures with stricter norms, which mean greater social order, are more likely to survive in times of threat.
Ecological and human-made threats increase the need for strong norms and punishment of deviant behaviour in the service of social coordination for survival— whether it is to reduce chaos in nations that have high population density, deal with resource scarcity, coordinate in the face of natural disasters, defend against territorial threats, or contain the spread of disease. Nations facing these particular challenges are predicted to develop strong norms and have low tolerance of deviant behaviour to enhance order and social coordination to effectively deal with such threats
(Gelfand et al., 2011: Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures- A 33-Nation Study)
When you consider the social impacts of the Famine through the lens of threat and how that produces a ‘Tight Culture’, the ‘triumph of respectability’ and the self-denial and self-silencing it required begin to make sense. To a people who had experienced the intense threat of the Great Hunger, the social order and civility that ‘respectability’ engendered provided stability and spelt safety and security. Society’s preoccupation with respectability was born from a desire for order and the fear of disorder.
It was a coping mechanism, a trauma response.
While the longer, influencing, reach of the Church’s arm in post-Famine Ireland disseminated the virtues of self-denial and the repression of the body to the masses, the economic changes of a rising middle class, quite literally, brought it home.
The eighteenth century in Ireland saw the rise of a Catholic middle-class, both rural and urban7. The Famine had almost entirely wiped out the small tenant farmer, and the large, middle-class, ‘strong farmer’ (strong meaning the amount of land they hold, not their physical strength) came to make up the majority of the rural population. While in towns and villages, an urban middle-class began to emerge amongst the trades-people and shop-owners. Both groups had a very clear sense of their place within the wider social order, and respectability was the bedrock of their social standing.
“Irish people had a very clear idea of their place in society relative to other people, and of the importance of maintaining this. If landowners tended to see all tenants as members of the lower classes broadly defined, middling and large tenant farmers regarded themselves as belonging to a very different social category from small tenants and labourers, and were anxious to reinforce this sense of difference through adherence to concepts such as respectability”8
For the middle-classes — a group which would come to wield significant social and political power in the coming century— the loss of their ‘respectability’ posed not just a reduction of their social standing, it could also be their ruin. No one wanted to do business with, or be associated in any way with a family considered to be without respectability. This is the root of ‘what would the neighbours say?’.
Respectability, then, had to be guarded at all costs. And for the members of the middle-classes this meant disciplining not just themselves but the next generation. Children got trained up —at church, home and school— in the importance of self-denial, repression and ‘that’s best left unsaid’, lest they do or say anything that might diminish a family’s respectability in the eyes of their wider community. They were taught, through a mix of punishment and praise, that silence and repression were better (the respectable thing to do) than expression until such external constraints on their behaviour became internal — they silenced themselves, emotionally and bodily.
Silencing the Self and its affect on mental health
Dana Crowley Jack, a researcher in the US, came up with something known as ‘Silencing the Self’ theory to explain what she found when she asked women with depression to explain their experiences of it. Amongst their stories, she saw a pattern — to avoid interpersonal conflict these women had silenced themselves. They didn’t voice thoughts or act on self-desires or self-needs that would contradict another’s wishes or expectations. To secure and maintain relationships they prioritised the needs of others before their own, and they judged themselves against external standards and expectations; how society told them they should be. Taken together, this repeated Silencing of the Self had left them vulnerable to depression.
Although Jack developed her theory specifically at the level of the individual (and specific to women), I feel it could just as easily be extrapolated out to the level of the collective — to the level of Irish society. And when you do, you start to unravel the mental health impact of the post-Famine preoccupation with respectability, and the self-denial and self-silencing required to maintain it.
The central tenet of Silencing the Self theory is that individuals engage in a silencing of their inner self (i.e. their needs, wants and desires) in order to avoid conflict and maintain relationships. This is the trellis that ‘respectability’ built itself on. Generations of Irish people were taught that uttering or acting on certain things could cause conflict (that’d cause upset / bring shame on the family / you’d be disgraced!) and silencing the self became the path to both avoid such conflict and maintain relationships, particularly familial relationships.
Think in your own family, what have you been told is ‘best left unsaid?’ What silence have you maintained so as not to ‘cause upset’?
Maintaining relationships has a particular significance and weight in Ireland, because Ireland is what is known as a relationship-based society. In relationship-based societies “a good person is one who keeps faith with their obligations to other members of their social group”9, as opposed to rule-based societies were a ‘good person’ is one that adheres to formal rules and laws - hello Germany! ‘Being good’ means following the expectations of your social group, and maintaining relationships (which is achieved by the adherence to external expectations and obligations) takes precedence over what may objectively be the ‘right’ or ‘fair’ thing to do (i.e. the rule-based way).
This is why generations of people in Ireland have silenced themselves. Because silence has defined this form of ‘being good’, and has been done for the ‘good of others’ so as not ‘to cause upset’, or ‘bring shame on us’.
In trying to describe the experiences of women with depression, Dana Jack said it was like the women she interviewed were having an internal argument between the “I” (the voice of Self) and the “Over-Eye” (the cultural voice that castigates the Self for going against societal and cultural ‘shoulds’)10. In Ireland, that ‘Over-Eye’, for all the reasons expressed throughout this piece — upholding the veneer of respectability, maintaining relationships and avoiding interpersonal conflict — has been extremely powerful.
But while Silencing the Self has enabled ‘respectability’ and helped maintain relationships by avoiding conflict, it carries a great personal toll. Quite simply, the repression of emotion Silencing the Self requires (which underpins ‘respectability) is closely linked to depression.
How many generations have silenced? How many generations have kept things to themselves to maintain a societal code of conduct? How many generations have ‘quietly’ suffered for it?
Silence: the intergenerational trauma of the Great Hunger?
The societal deification of silence and the fear of expression, along with the default tendency so many of us have to self-silence is, to me, an intergenerational inheritance and effect of the Great Hunger.
It’s an inheritance rooted in a fear-based belief that respectability was the life-raft that would save society from descending into the chaos, horror and debasement of humanity experienced during the Famine.
That’s a threat and a fear we no longer even have a conscious memory of but which has shaped they very core of how Irish culture operates and replicates between generations.
Upholding respectability is the carefully crafted “House of Cards” that Erin spoke of. And when that ‘House of Cards’ was once the only thing between a people and an unutterable fear, then it would feel like the world could ‘blow up’ if that was threatened in any way. In making respectability Ireland’s life-raft, Irish society unintentionally created a culture where silence (of the body, emotions and needs) took precedence over the individual need for expression, and, most damaging of all, self-denial and self-silencing came to represent the height of respectability. Many have been lost and sacrificed to its maintenance.
“The regimen of early child rearing [in 1970s rural Kerry] contributed to patterns of adult behaviour that lead to considerable social isolation. I described, for example, the tendency among villagers to avoid touch and to react to hurt, disappointment and anger by withdrawal and denial, evasiveness in speech, and defensiveness in body language and posture. While this rural Irish propensity is perhaps well adapted to the lives of future priests and nuns, monks and scribes, and to certain hermetic bachelor farmers, it was destructive to more physically and emotionally expressive villagers, some of whom (like the village bachelor and sexual outlaw who had exposed himself on a parish hall dancefloor in a fit of sexual frustration) became ready candidates for the mental hospital”
Nancy Scheper Hughes — pg. 41 of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland
When you look back through history, it’s very clear that the Great Hunger wrought massive changes to the social fabric of life in Ireland, and with that came changes to how people behaved. It’s difficult to say that these behavioural changes are ‘traumatic adaptations’ but I feel quite strongly that the society and the social norms which emerged post-famine indirectly injected into people a pattern of behaviours and attitudes which — in the pattern of silence— left many vulnerable to experiencing poorer mental health. As Dana Jack showed with her cohort of women, there’s only so long that you can ignore the ‘Inner Eye’ in order to meet the needs of the ‘Over Eye’ before that takes a toll.
But that balance is, I feel, slowly shifting. The ‘silences’ long kept in Ireland in the name of ‘respectability’ are now starting to spill-out — they are no longer taking precedence. It’s as if we can’t swallow it down any more. Silence has reached its saturation point. People are, literally, sick of and with it.
In Ireland, healing the silence is healing intergenerational trauma.
*Many consider the Famine as a ‘watershed’ moment that changed Irish life, society and culture utterly. However, others have argued that many of the societal changes that emerged post-Famine were already emerging pre-Famine, and that, Ireland’s societal changes were not a sole outcome of the Famine, but driven by numerous economic and social changes, and the furtherance of modernity, that was occuring across Europe in the 19th century anyway. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Famine impacted Irish societly greatly — we just have to be careful not to attribute it as a causal explanation for everything that made modern Ireland the way it is.
If you enjoy the Women of Ireland Project, and it is available to you, you can support this work below:
Isobel, S., McCloughen, A., Goodyear, M., & Foster, K. (2021). Intergenerational Trauma and Its Relationship to Mental Health Care: A Qualitative Inquiry. Community Mental Health Journal, 57(4), 631–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00698-1
Brewster, S., & Crossman, V. (1999). Re-writing the Famine: Witnessing crisis. In S. Brewster, V. Crossman, F. Becket, & D. Alderson (Eds.), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space. Routeldge.
ibid. quoting Litton (1997) ‘The Famine in Schools’.
Larkin, E. (1972). The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75. The American Historical Review, 77(3), 625–652. https://doi.org/10.2307/1870344
Lee, J. J. (2001). Women and the Church since the Famine. In A. Hayes & D. Urquhart (Eds.), The Irish Women’s History Reader. Routledge.
Inglis, T. (2005). Origins and Legacies of Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland. Éire-Ireland, 40(3), 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2005.0022
Wall, M. (1958). The Rise of a Catholic Middle Class in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Irish Historical Studies, 11(42), 91–115.
Crossman, V. (2010). Middle-Class Attitudes to Poverty and Welfare in Post-Famine Ireland. In F. Lane (Ed.), Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland (pp. 130–147). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230273917_8
Hourigan, N. (2015). Rule-breakers: Why ‘being There’ Trumps ‘being Fair’ in Ireland. Gill & Macmillan.
Dana C. Jack and Alisha Ali, Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Belinda, I will need to read through this more than once, but I can completely see the truth of this piece on 'silences'; individual, societal and inter-generationsl - in my own family experience and in a historical WIP that is my current and ongoing writing project. I am so glad to have found your work.
Thank you very much for directing me to this second part. Your work is very important and valuable, in my opinion. I look forward very much to reading your book.