Resilience
Growing Up With War: Invisible Wounds
When trauma passes from one generation to the next
Not all wounds of war are visible. Some do not bleed, cannot be treated in hospital, and do not stop when the weapons fall silent. They inhabit the survivors, then their children, and sometimes their children's children.
This page explains, plainly, what these invisible wounds are: war trauma, and its silent transmission within families — in military families and civilian ones alike.
War trauma: a century to be recognised
It was called "shell shock" in 1914-1918, when thousands of soldiers returned from the trenches trembling, mute or haunted, with no visible injury. Long misunderstood — sometimes accused of cowardice — these men were suffering from what medicine today calls post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD can affect anyone exposed to an event of extreme violence: combatants, but also civilians under bombardment, deportees, refugees, and victims of terrorist attacks. It manifests through flashbacks and nightmares, a state of constant alertness, avoidance of anything that recalls the event, and an emotional withdrawal that gradually cuts the person off from those closest to them.
This last point is essential for understanding what follows: emotional withdrawal does not affect only the person wounded. It reaches those who live with them — and above all, their children.
Transgenerational trauma: suffering that is passed down
When suffering cannot be spoken, it does not disappear — it is transmitted. Psychologists first observed this in the children of Holocaust survivors, then in the descendants of veterans and refugees: children grow up amid silences, unspoken pain and unexplained bursts of anger, sometimes developing anxiety, hypervigilance or guilt of their own — without ever having known war themselves.
The mechanism is straightforward: a child learns to understand the world through their parents. When a parent carries an unspeakable fear, the child senses it without being able to name it. They grow up with an unanswered question — and that question sometimes becomes their own.
This phenomenon affects military families and civilian families alike: the child of a soldier who came back changed from Afghanistan, the child of a refugee who never speaks of the lost homeland, the grandchild of a deportee who has inherited a silence.
A story we know from the inside
Our association was born of this reality. Paul, two years old when his father fell in 1914-18, grew up without him. Called up in 1939, a prisoner for six years in Germany, he returned in 1945: his son, who had never seen him, called him "Monsieur". Three generations later, these silences gave birth to Poppies and Daffodils: transforming the legacy of trauma into a legacy of transmission.
Recognising the signs to protect children
In a child directly or indirectly affected by war, suffering is rarely expressed in words. It manifests in other ways:
In the body
Sleep disturbances, nightmares, recurring stomach or headaches, regression (bedwetting, thumb-sucking), unexplained fatigue.
In behaviour
Withdrawal or sudden aggression, hypervigilance, startle responses, difficulty concentrating at school, play that re-enacts violent scenes.
In emotions
Intense fears (separation, loud noises, darkness), lasting sadness, guilt, a permanent sense of insecurity, difficulty imagining the future.
These signs are neither inevitable nor a sign of weakness: they are normal reactions to abnormal events. Recognising them early, talking about them, and supporting the child — this is how the path to rebuilding begins.
An invisible wound stops being passed down the day it can finally be spoken.
The good news is that paths exist: expression, play, connection, transmission. Discover them.
Paths to Resilience Children in War