Noémi Orvos-Tóth

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1:42Naomi Oboshtot and I had an extraordinary conversation about transgenerational trauma. So what does that mean? essentially and simply we think about how our parents affected our behaviours our insecurities the things that we do as adults but perhaps what we haven't thought about is how our grandparents have affected us because of course they would have affected their children, our parents, and that's handed down to us. Now, as we go further back, it's more difficult to explore the generational trauma. But we have to try and understand by asking questions sensitively and delicately of our parents.

2:40Imagine sitting down with your mum and dad and saying was I wanted? Did you prefer to have a boy if you're a girl? Did you prefer to have a girl if you're a boy? How did your parents feel about you? What of their own traumas do you think live in you and then you've passed on to me? All of these fundamental questions lie in Naomi's book. A lot of things are predetermined, as you say, but there is always a chance for change. But you have to be very conscious about your actions and you have to be very careful how you live your life. But yeah, psychology and the psychological knowledge can help a lot to overcome transgenerational traumas.

3:34While some of it would seem very obvious to you, other parts of it will be extremely revelatory and also very difficult because there are chapters about the taboos and secrets that families hold and how you can get over that. how you can begin to deal with that trauma, the questions that you have to ask, how you ask those questions, when you ask those questions. And most importantly, well, two things most importantly. One, to recognize the fact that you are traumatized in certain ways. and then to also know that you can be healed and that you can be saved. Her book is called Inherited Fate and it came out in Hungary and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 2018.

4:39But now in 2025, this book Inherited Fate is also available in English. so listening whether you are a parent yourself or not is almost immaterial because you are a child of someone and a grandchild of someone and so much of what we talk about will be so mind-bendingly revelatory as i say again so listen this is naomi overstock

5:19Headliners with Nihal Arthamayaka

5:25Okay, thank you firstly for this fascinating book, which has been in the world for some time now. One thing I was intrigued by was, is how do you get an older generation to look backwards and to talk about personal issues when, and I'm not trying to stereotype an entire generation, but certainly culturally it was not acceptable to discuss family issues. Yeah. How you start? You have to be patient with them and understand that they are coming from a whole different upbringing and you have to be aware of it by every sentence you say to them.

6:24It's not easy. It's really not easy. And most of my clients face this difficulty and this problem when they approach their parents or even grandparents and try to have conversations about the past, about what hurt them, what was missing in the family system. If the older generation feels offended, of course they automatically try to protect themselves and protect their life. You know, it's very important that we keep the integrity of our life. So it's very understandable if they might react with rejection on the first hand. But we have to keep trying and be open enough. For sure, it wouldn't be a good start by blaming them.

7:26it's much better to ask questions about their childhood experiences. How did it feel when you went through some trauma? How did it feel for you as a child? So questions are much better. But also language, because the language of psychoanalysis is not the same as normal conversational language. So even a word such as trauma may not be a word that an older generation could identify with or even understand. Yeah, but they would understand pain. Instead of using the word trauma, ask them how much had it hurt or how hurtful was this experience? Or just ask an open question. How did you feel in this situation?

8:21But you're trained. You have a professional background. You can do it sensitively. We risk, while asking our parents, hurting them by bringing up this pain that perhaps they have put away in a little box. And buried, yeah. and buried and they don't want to open that box again it would be too painful especially I mean my mother is in her late 80s now 87 I mean I'm lucky that she has told us about her father being murdered her mother dying of a broken heart six months afterwards the terrible childhood that she with relatives who did not treat her well. She's been very open with us about it, but not everybody is.

9:13Not everybody is at the same level, but the door is always open. It depends how much open the door is. And you have to kind of try to weigh in to their inner world. And if they feel that you listen with openness and you are there beside them with all your heart open to them, then they might gradually tell you things. Maybe they just start with little stories and then this is the way how you kind of dig deeper in their past. We all need someone who listens to us. It's very important for all of us, I think. And you just have to find a way and, you know, never give up being curious about their past and about their life, their life stories.

10:16Are there specifics to Hungarian culture and a history of openness or not? The culture that you come from, is it different to American culture and openness? or French culture or British culture? What have you noticed? I wouldn't say there is a huge difference between cultures. There are always taboos and secrets nearly in each family.

10:50Yeah, certainly there is a cultural influence, of course. I grew up in a socialist country where the government established a network of informants, for example, which kind of destroyed social trust. And of course, even within a family, we were very careful what to talk about and how to talk about things. So I kind of I was soaked in in this culture of keeping secrets, not not talking openly about things. But but I talked to people from coming from various cultures and, you know, they they went through the same experiences. So to talk about our feelings and experiences openly, it's not an easy task.

11:49So neither for Hungarians nor for people growing up in the US. The culture of secrecy in the Hungary that you grew up in was because of the informants was political. You couldn't criticize the government. And you couldn't be sure whether someone in your friend's network may be an informant for the government. So you didn't trust your best friends. Because then decades later, it turned out that they used to inform the government about what's going on in private conversations. So that political lack of trust that had an impact on everything. So even your ability to be able to be open emotionally.

12:42Under individuals, under families. Yeah. Wow. So that is an additional layer. Yeah. Of pain and trauma and secrecy. Yeah. You have to overcome that first before you can even begin to talk about your family history. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's a difficult place to start. Did that mean that once Hungary had cast off that, that it cast off the kind of political oppression, that there was an outpouring of freedom, or did it just continue? I think it continued, yeah. This is what my feeling is. It takes not only one, but many generations to overcome secrecy and all these taboos. It will need at least two generations, I think, to overcome it.

13:45And what about the acceptance of psychoanalysis and transgenerational trauma in Hungarian society? Is there an acceptance now or are they still learning to accept it? Yeah, it's a process. But my book came out back in 2018. So it's been seven years. And at the very beginning, I even had to explain what transgenerational trauma means. But nowadays, I think most people are aware of this concept. What they do with this knowledge is a different question. Because many people use this concept for blaming their parents. Okay, it's not my fault. It's an inherited fate, let's say. And I got it from my parents and they are the ones to blame.

14:42which is not the idea I want to support. Nor the idea that you as an individual have no agency, that you are predetermined by the actions of your parents and your grandparents to be who you are and there's nothing that you can do to change that. Of course you can't change the past, but the present and the future, can it be moulded by yourself? Of course. I mean, a lot of things are predetermined, as you said, but there is always a chance for change. But you have to be very conscious about your actions and you have to be very careful how you live your life. But yeah, psychology and the psychological knowledge can help a lot to overcome transgenerational traumas.

15:39I think it's fairly accepted that your parents have a huge influence over who you are, but less so your grandparents or the idea that how accepting your grandparents were, whether it was a boy or a girl or whether you were wanted or not, your parents were wanted or not. people have less i feel conversation about that because it's quite hard i mean i grew up with no grandparents so i couldn't even have that conversation but your grandparents uh raised your parents so their influence is just there uh in your upbringing so it didn't just vanished. Can I just tell your personal story about my grandmother?

16:37How she actually influenced my life? I am maybe two, two and a half years old. We lived in my grandmother's house from my mother's side. My parents went to work very early in the morning and they left me with my grandmother. They just put me next to her to bed. And she started to tell me stories and we had a chat. And then suddenly she closed her eyes and didn't move. She didn't respond. And I tried to open her eyes and shake her. there was nothing she was dead I talked to her I asked her to wake up nothing happened I thought she died and then when I started to to cry hysterically she suddenly opened her eyes and said I'm alive I'm not dead it's a morbid game isn't it and we played it several times in a week I've never told my parents about this game I even forgot it and then three decades later when my daughter was born she was only one week old when I brought her home, when we brought her home from hospital I put her in her little cot and I looked at her and I felt this immense fear instead of feeling happiness, you know, bringing home your first born child, looking at her, I just felt this immense fear that I will lose her, that she will die.

18:39And this is when I started to think of transgenerational traumas because somehow I felt that part of this pain wasn't mine it was deeper it was I don't know it was so huge and the question why my mother played this I don't know morbid game with me lies in her own life story and it goes back to the 1920s when she was born. She was six when she lost her father, nine when she lost her mother, and she was passed in the family, you know, among the relatives, and while her grandfather took her in. And it was middle of the Second World War. They lived together in a house and there was a complete blind out in the city when one night her grandfather died.

19:56And she spent the whole night with her dead grandfather in the house. She was 11, 12, 12-ish. can you just imagine what we might what she might have gone through screaming historically trying him to wake him up to make him alive again and with this morbid game she unconsciously tried to heal herself you know repeating the same pattern hoping that okay now things can change but through this she kind of passed down her trauma to me she was a very very loving grandmother no other morbid games she was really caring very loving but absolutely overproductive she was always behind me i couldn't walk barefoot i always had to wear slippers and shoes because she was so scared that something might happen to me.

21:08And even the slightest cold meant death to her. And through this, she taught me that to love someone means to lose the person. So love and death are so close to each other. And of course, I laughed fearfully and it took me at least 10 years in therapy, getting over this very deep fear of losing the person I love. Are you aware whether you have passed that fear onto your daughter? Some of it for sure. Yeah, yeah. And we have to accept that even if we start the healing process, we won't be able to heal ourselves completely only in one generation. We have to start this journey. But our children will also have to deal with the past.

22:29So, I need to understand something about human beings, specifically parents. Because, as I said to you, Naomi, my mother had a pretty terrible childhood. And she made the decision that my brother and I would not have the same childhood that she had. That she would not ever smack us. She hardly ever really raised her voice to us. She was just loving all the time. So she made a decision to change the future and not repeat the past. But my wife teaches in a school which is for children who are excluded from mainstream schools. So they are put into these places called pupil referral units. And quite often the parents of these children are addicts or they are violent.

23:39They don't seem to work. Now, I can fully understand that many of them have been through their own traumas. But rather than trying to reverse what they've been through, they seem to be visiting those traumas onto their children who are not having childhoods. They're having terrible childhoods. Which involve neglect and abuse, growing up around addiction. And I can't understand why you would want to do that. why you would continue it, how do you persuade a parent to not repeat the mistakes, to not project your own trauma onto your own children and destroy their childhoods like yours was destroyed?

24:42I don't understand. And I'm not trying to be judgmental or apportioned blame, but I just don't understand it. You said that your mother made a decision, but making a decision means that you were able to consciously look at your past. And I think this is the difference. People who just repeat the same traumas they experience as children, they never make this conscious decision. And this is how, yeah, this is where the difference lies. And I'm sure that your mother had a role model in her childhood to look at. because without a role model or without someone looking at you with love, without, yeah.

25:47So we just need this positive experience beside the horrible ones. But if there is one positive experience we have in our childhood, a role model, for example, then it's much easier to make this decision. If it's missing, then, you know, you don't know who to follow. And then you will follow the same patterns as your parents did.

26:24Does it make sense to you? Yes, it does, although I am unsure where that model was. But you're right, it must have been there. But she also met my father and my father loved her and she felt loved for the first time, really. Yeah, I mean, it's the best thing because, you know, we get traumatized by other persons, but the other person's connection can heal us, hurt us and heal us as well. And if we have a healing connection, it means a lot. It's a game changer experience. Do you feel guilty at all that you have passed on that fear to your own daughter? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, but I also learn to forgive.

27:21To forgive my parents, my grandparents, and to forgive myself for not being perfect. for not knowing what I know now. That's really interesting because there is so much information in the world that points towards the fact that we're not doing a very good job of being parents. I've been doing a good job by being humans. we make mistakes but if we try i think the difference is there whether we try or not to overcome our mistakes or apologize for our mistakes i myself for example i i apologized

28:21from my daughter. I said, I'm really, really sorry for not being the perfect mum in many cases. Why would you apologise for that when perfection is something that none of us can ever, ever be? Because it's important to acknowledge our mistakes in this very deep connection with our children or with our partners. But your mistake, in inverted commas, is not a lack of perfection because you could never be perfect. Yeah, but still it's important. I think this act of acknowledgement is very important to deepen the connection, the relationship. Yeah, I can never be perfect, but I still acknowledge that I hurt you.

29:20I wasn't there at times when you needed me or I wasn't there in the way you needed me to be there.

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30:43Do you now look at her and say to yourself, I did a good job? Yeah, I do. Yeah. Although she struggles sometimes, SBI struggles in life, But, yeah, I think I did a good job. She's very open-minded. She's very, yeah, she's a very good person, I think. Did you want a boy or a girl or were you just content to have a healthy child? Yeah, a healthy child, yeah. Because you talk about this choice that people want to make and how damaging it is. And I'm from the South Asian background. And the instances in India, for instance, of missing girls. It's very high, yeah. Yeah, it's very, very high, especially in certain parts of India.

31:49It's very, very high. and also this whole thing about giving sweets when a boy is born. And I've spoken to people who've said that their relatives have said, when a girl is born, don't worry, I'm sure the next one will be a boy. Tell me about the damage that that does. Oh, it influences your whole life, lack of self-esteem, people pleasing, anxiety, PTSD, all these kind of mental health issues can be caused by the fact that you are born the unwanted gender. Parental expectations have a great influence on your life because if you can meet them, means you are accepted, you are welcomed. But if you don't, from the very first day of your life, then you can imagine how it shapes you.

32:53Because we are all shaped by the very first experiences back in our childhood. How our parents look at us, what they see in us. if they see in us something precious, then it's much easier to build up a strong self-esteem. Whereas if they think, oh God, buy a girl, then it's the root of low self-esteem for sure. And it's not just as extreme as the description I gave. Is there an inevitability that if you didn't want a girl or perhaps you didn't want a boy, but you got the opposite gender? Is it inevitable that you won't be able to hide it, even though you never mention it, you never explicitly say it?

33:56Or perhaps you say in joking, you say, oh, your dad wanted a girl, but we got you instead. Does that have power? Of course. Many, many of my clients can remember words like this. Oh, doesn't matter. OK. We were expecting a boy, but. Or your father hadn't touched you for, I don't know, once because you were a girl. It's a very deep pain. I mean, there's quite an extreme example in your book of a man who cut his daughter's hair, wanted a boy, made her dress like a boy. I mean, that is borderline abusive. Yeah, absolutely. It's an abuse. And it happens even nowadays. I can hear conversations when a girl is born and then people say, never mind, maybe the next one.

34:55I mean, just imagine how it shapes the relationship, the parent-child relationship. If you have kind of a mistake from... from your birth. Noemi that's another thing I don't understand is the inability to understand just how much your words affect your children and look I've been guilty of it there's no question that I've said nasty things to my kids when they've been annoying me and I've been angry and I've been frustrated with them and they will remember these things. Even at the age of 80 90 I I used to work with elderly and it was heartbreaking that they still remembered this kind of words at the end of their lives.

35:49This is why I keep telling my patients that, you know, what you do now, it will have an effect. Not tomorrow, but in decades. You will long be gone and your words are still here. But we can remould ourselves, can't we? We can find ways of overcoming. Overcoming and healing. Of course we can. But it's a long journey and we have to accept it. Psychotherapy, mindfulness therapy, there are so many methods and ways to heal yourself. But you have to, first of all, you have to start this journey. Then you have to accept that it doesn't happen overnight. You might have to try several methods, see several therapists, till you find the right one or the one who suits you most in the given period of your life.

36:59But most people can't afford therapy. They can't access it. So what about those people who form the majority of people on planet Earth? Find good people. Form friendships. Friends can help a lot. The people you surround yourself with can make a difference. So as I said, find healing connection. Maybe it's not therapy, but your friends can also help you. Another chapter I found fascinating was this function children. Yeah. We talk about living vicariously through our children. Yeah. One thing that my wife said to me was, don't say that you're proud of your children, because that implies that they have to make you proud.