Relationship Among Perceived Parental Trauma, Parental Attachment, and Sense of Coherence in Southeast Asian American College Students

ABSTRACT There are nearly 2 million Southeast Asians (SEAs) currently living in the United States. The overwhelming majority are refugees from the Southeast Asian wars and political turmoil in the latter half of the 20th century. While an abundance of literature has documented the significant war-related traumas that SEA refugees have suffered, very little is known about the transmission of trauma in these families. This phenomenon deserves our attention because children of SEA refugees may suffer negative mental health consequences through the intergenerational transmission of trauma. This paper empirically examined the effect of parental trauma on SEA American late adolescents' sense of coherence, as mediated by parent-child attachment. The findings demonstrated the deleterious effect of parental trauma on attachment and their offsprings' sense of coherence. Further, attachment mediated the effect of parental trauma on adolescent's sense of coherence. The findings demonstrate the reality that what happened in one generation will affect what happens in the following generation and emphasize the importance of working with SEA populations using a family system approach.