Remembrance Day. What to tell children about war and grief.
Eleventh hour of the eleventh day
In Vienna, Remembrance Sunday is observed differently than in the UK — the silence, the poppy, the specific ceremony of the British Commonwealth are not part of the Austrian tradition. But the underlying question — how do we remember the people who died in wars, and what do we tell the children about them — is one I've thought about carefully for many years, partly because my clinic sees the children of families who carry grief and trauma through generations.
I want to make a distinction that I think is clinically important: the difference between grief and trauma.
Grief is the emotional response to loss. It is painful, it moves through recognisable stages, and it is ultimately manageable — by which I mean that it can be metabolised over time, that it can be talked about, that it can be held in memory without continuing to cause acute distress. Grief, properly supported, becomes remembrance.
Trauma is different. Trauma is what happens when an experience exceeds the nervous system's capacity to process it. It is not primarily emotional — it is physiological. Traumatic memory is stored differently from ordinary memory: it remains present-tense, sensory, unbounded. It doesn't become the past in the way ordinary memory does.
War produces both. The people who died are grieved. The people who survived often carry trauma — not grief, but the ongoing physiological state of the nervous system that remains in the condition of the original event. This is what we mean by intergenerational trauma: the physiological state passed to children not through story but through the nervous system of the parent.
Children who understand grief can hold the ceremony. Children who have absorbed intergenerational trauma carry it without knowing what it is. The difference matters clinically.
Children who understand grief can hold the ceremony. Children who have absorbed intergenerational trauma carry it without knowing what it is. The difference matters clinically.
The difference matters clinically.
Materials, steps, what to notice — the hands-on part that makes the edition usable at home with your children this week.
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