When Safety is a Foreign Feeling: Healing for Children of War, Violence, and Political Instability
Growing Up in Survival Mode
Some people grow up with bedtime stories.
Others grow up to the sound of gunfire, protests, or whispered arguments about fleeing.
When we talk about trauma, we often default to the individual the car crash, the assault, the one-time event. But for many, trauma isn’t just something that happened once. It was the entire backdrop of childhood. It was war. It was poverty. It was hiding who you were to survive. It was intergenerational silence passed down like an heirloom.
And for those of us raised in households shaped by war, civil unrest, or political violence, safety wasn’t just missing. It never existed to begin with.
If you’ve lived this, you already know:
Trauma doesn’t start when the war begins.
It starts when the world teaches you that you’re disposable.
The Psychological Fallout of Political Violence and War
Whether you were born into war, fled as a refugee, or were raised by survivors who never unpacked what they lived through, this kind of trauma doesn’t just disappear when the borders change or the news cycle moves on.
This kind of trauma embeds itself.
Into the nervous system.
Into the way we parent.
Into the way we trust or don’t.
Some carry visible wounds. Others carry hypervigilance, numbness, emotional disconnection, or a near-constant fear of being found out or punished, even when there’s nothing “dangerous” happening.
CPTSD: The Unseen Scars
When people talk about PTSD, they picture a flashback, a nightmare, a panic attack. But for many survivors of long-term or repeated trauma, especially trauma that happened in childhood, what we’re really talking about is Complex PTSD (CPTSD).
Unlike single-event trauma, CPTSD isn’t about one moment. It’s about many moments where there was no safety, no escape, and no validation. Symptoms can include:
Chronic emotional dysregulation
Dissociation or disconnection from your body
Intense feelings of guilt, shame, or worthlessness
Trust issues in relationships, including difficulty with intimacy or authority
Deep fear of abandonment even in safe relationships
Always feeling like you’re “on alert,” even in peaceful environments
These aren’t signs of being broken. They’re signs of adaptation. Your body learned how to survive in chaos. And now it doesn’t know how to relax in calm.
The Immigrant and Refugee Experience: A Double Layer of Trauma
Let’s be honest, trauma doesn’t always stop at the border. Many who flee war or violence arrive in a new country only to face racism, poverty, language barriers, cultural erasure, or lack of mental health resources.
You start over, but you don’t get to just leave the past behind.
You’re in a new place, but still carrying the old pain.
In many immigrant households, survival was the only goal. There wasn’t space for feelings, therapy, or processing. You were told to move on. Get over it. Be grateful you made it out.
But trauma that isn’t spoken still gets passed on.
It shows up in how we raise our kids.
It shows up in how we deal with stress, how we connect, how we shut down.
It shows up in silence, in rage, in perfectionism, in emotional numbness and many more ways.
Racialized Trauma and Political Oppression
Let’s not sugarcoat it either, some people experience war in their homeland, then systemic oppression in the country they flee to. Racialized trauma is real. Especially for those who’ve been both victims of political instability and targets of racism, xenophobia, or Islamophobia in Canada.
Being followed in stores.
Being stopped by police.
Being told to “go back where you came from.”
These aren’t small things. They are reminders that “safe” spaces might not be so safe after all.
Whats the result? A layered trauma that’s both individual and collective. Personal and inherited. Acute and chronic.
How This Affects Relationships, Emotions, and Identity
Children raised in survival environments don’t always learn how to feel — they learn how to assess danger. They learn to shrink, appease, stay ready. So as adults, they might:
Struggle to identify emotions beyond “fine” or “angry”
Over-function in relationships (always taking care of others)
Experience guilt when resting, saying no, or feeling joy
Stay in unhealthy dynamics because chaos feels “normal”
Fear intimacy because vulnerability never felt safe
This isn’t just about dysfunction. This is about safety. If your nervous system equates stillness with danger, then calm will feel threatening. Love will feel risky. Self-expression will feel unsafe.
Why Therapy Can Feel Foreign And Why It Helps Anyway?
For many, therapy is seen as indulgent, unnecessary, or even shameful. Especially if you were raised to believe that emotions were a weakness or that survival was the only priority.
But here’s the truth:
You’re not soft for needing help. You’re finally safe enough to feel.
That’s where healing begins.
Therapy helps you:
Recognize how trauma shows up in your body and behavior
Reconnect with emotions that were buried for survival
Build tools to regulate your nervous system
Develop relationships rooted in safety, not hypervigilance
Break cycles of silence and generational trauma
You don’t have to explain the politics. You don’t have to justify your pain. You don’t need perfect words. A trauma-informed therapist meets you where you are — especially when the journey to safety has been long.
Accessing Trauma Therapy in Ontario
At NuHu Therapy, we provide trauma-informed, identity-sensitive therapy to clients across Ontario. Our services are 100% online, which means you can access care from anywhere in the province — no commute, no pressure, no judgment.
Whether you’re in Toronto, Hamilton, Brampton, or a remote part of Northern Ontario, we make sure therapy is accessible, confidential, and rooted in cultural humility.
Our team understands the nuances of CPTSD, immigration trauma, intergenerational trauma, and racialized experiences. If you’ve felt invisible, misunderstood, or dismissed — this space is for you.
Book your free 20-minute consultation here:
Learn more about our therapy approaches for trauma here:
For general service info, insurance coverage, and FAQs:
Your trauma does not make you broken. It makes you a survivor with a story worth honoring.
The Inheritance of Survival – Breaking Generational Trauma
You don’t have to grow up in a warzone to be shaped by one.
Sometimes, the war lives inside the people who raised you.
If your parents or caregivers lived through political violence, genocide, forced migration, or racialized oppression the chances are, their nervous system never fully returned to baseline. They were surviving, not living. That survival instinct becomes the blueprint for how love, protection, and discipline are handed down.
And this is how intergenerational trauma works.
Not as a conscious story — but as a silent inheritance.
How Trauma Gets Passed Down Without Words
We inherit trauma not just in what’s said, but in what’s avoided.
A father who never talks about “back home,” but explodes when doors slam too loudly.
A mother who never speaks of what she endured, but lives in constant fear of something going wrong.
Grandparents who survived war but never told the full story, just passed down anxiety like family jewelry.
Even in families with the best intentions, the trauma shows up:
In rules that feel more like fear than love
In silence around emotional topics
In unspoken pressure to be the “strong one”
In cultural expectations to sacrifice your wellbeing to prove you’re grateful
When you’re raised by people who never felt safe, you learn that love comes wrapped in anxiety. That success comes through self-erasure. That rest is laziness. That vulnerability gets you hurt.
Cultural Silence Around Mental Health
Let’s talk about the cultural piece. In many communities particularly those with colonial histories, migration stories, or histories of religious trauma, mental health isn’t something you talk about.
You’re told to be strong. You’re told others have it worse. You’re told therapy is for the weak, or for “white people,” or that prayer should be enough.
And look, spiritual grounding can be powerful. But it’s not a substitute for working through trauma stored in the body, passed down through behaviour, or inherited through unspoken stories.
This kind of cultural silence doesn’t just invalidate pain.
It can prolong it.
Trauma Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
Trauma doesn’t disappear when we “move on.” It stays lodged in the nervous system. In muscle memory. In breathing patterns. In how easily we’re startled. In how deeply we dissociate. In how tightly we control things so we don’t unravel.
It lives in our bodies even when our minds have forgotten the details.
You might experience:
Chronic fatigue or tension
Gastrointestinal issues (often tied to stress)
Migraines or unexplained aches
Panic attacks that seem to come out of nowhere
A sense of being numb, foggy, or disconnected from your surroundings
This isn’t weakness. It’s your body telling the story your mouth couldn’t.
Healing Is Possible But It Won’t Look Like a Straight Line…
Here’s what most self-help content won’t tell you:
It’s not linear. It’s not always peaceful. And it doesn’t always feel good.
You might feel worse before you feel better. Why? Because you’re finally feeling what your body and mind have spent years trying to protect you from.
But healing isn’t about getting over it — it’s about moving through it.
It’s about returning to yourself. Slowly. Gently. In your own time.
A Clinical and Community-Based Perspective
For those seeking a deeper understanding of how war, displacement, and systemic violence affect mental health, especially in immigrant and refugee communities the video Understanding Immigration and Refugee Trauma offers a powerful starting point. Presented by Dr. Carolyn Garcia (University of Minnesota, School of Nursing), Amirthini Keefe, LICSW, and Dr. Andrea Northwood (Center for Victims of Torture), this session brings together research, clinical insights, and community experience. Originally developed to bridge the gap between research and practice in children’s mental health, the video highlights how trauma shows up across generations and how healing is possible when care is culturally informed, safe, and grounded in evidence. This video is for educational purposes only, and does not constitute therapy. Watch the full video here.
Reclaiming Safety, Redefining Home
What happens when “safety” is a word you’ve never been able to trust?
Not just physically but emotionally.
For many survivors of war, political violence, or intergenerational trauma, the concept of “feeling safe” sounds like fiction. You might be alive. You might even be functioning. But deep down, your body still flinches at closeness. Your mind still braces for the worst. And peace feels… unfamiliar.
That’s not failure. That’s trauma doing its job protecting you long after the threat is gone.
But the truth is: you deserve to feel safe even when nothing’s falling apart.
And you don’t have to wait for the world to change to start healing.
Emotional Safety Isn’t Given, It’s Built
When we talk about emotional safety, we’re talking about the internal signals that let us breathe deeply, express freely, and be fully present.
But if you were raised in chaos, fear, or repression then safety wasn’t something you were taught. It’s something you now have to teach yourself.
That might mean:
Saying no without guilt for the first time
Not flinching when someone gets close
Allowing softness, play, or joy to exist without fear of punishment
Asking for help without feeling like a burden
Emotional safety isn’t a luxury. It’s a human need.
And you’re not too “damaged” to learn it.
What Healing Looks Like When You Never Knew Safety
Healing doesn’t mean erasing your past.
It means integrating it so it no longer controls your present.
And that’s where therapy can help.
Not with quick fixes or 10-step plans. But with real, slow, embodied work.
At NuHu Therapy, we guide clients through healing by helping them:
Recognize when they’re in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses
Learn to self-regulate through breath, movement, or mindfulness
Rewrite internal narratives rooted in fear, shame, or hypervigilance
Reconnect with parts of themselves they had to shut down to survive
Build new models of connection, starting with the therapeutic relationship
If you’ve never known safety, the first time you feel it can be disorienting.
You might mistrust it. Push it away. Freeze.
That’s okay.
We go at your pace. And we’re not going anywhere.
You Don’t Need to Earn Rest
Let’s say this clearly: You do not need to earn rest.
You do not need to be “healed enough” to be kind to yourself.
You don’t need to reach some invisible finish line before joy is allowed.
Trauma taught you that you have to hustle for peace.
But healing teaches you that peace is already your birthright.
Even if you grew up in chaos, you can choose calm now.
Even if love was always conditional, you can learn how to receive it unconditionally.
For Survivors, “Home” Is Often an Internal Place
If your homeland is gone, if your childhood was marked by violence, if your body never felt like a safe place the idea of “home” can feel distant.
But healing invites you to build an internal home, one made of:
Boundaries that keep you safe
Routines that soothe your nervous system
Relationships that mirror back your worth
Moments of quiet that don’t feel like punishment
A sense of dignity that no one can take away
This isn’t abstract. It’s real, somatic, day-by-day work.
And it’s possible even if you’ve never seen it modelled before.
🧠 Q&A: Healing from War, Displacement, and Political Trauma
Q: What does trauma look like in people who grew up around war or violence?
A: It’s not always flashbacks or nightmares. For many survivors, the trauma hides in plain sight: difficulty trusting others, hyper-independence, chronic anxiety, emotional shutdown, or an inability to relax even when life is technically “safe.” You may always feel like something bad is about to happen, even if you can’t explain why. That’s the nervous system adapting to chaos.
Q: Can someone still be affected even if they weren’t directly harmed?
A: Absolutely. Trauma isn’t just about what happened to you, it’s also about what you had to carry alone. Being a child in a violent, unstable environment even if you weren’t physically harmed can deeply shape how affect you feel in the world. This is especially true for those who had to act “strong,” take care of others, or silence their fear just to survive.
Q: I’ve moved away from the danger why do I still feel unsafe?
A: Because trauma isn’t logical, it’s biological. Even when your environment changes, your body might still be stuck in survival mode. Think of it like this: your nervous system learned to live on high alert, and it doesn’t know the war is over. Therapy can help your body slowly relearn what calm feels like and give you the tools to live.
Q: What if I don’t remember much, but I still feel broken?
A: Memory gaps are common with childhood trauma, especially from war or political instability. Dissociation, numbing, or forgetting are ways the mind protects itself. You don’t need a clear timeline to heal. What matters is how the past is showing up in your present and therapy can help you gently untangle that.
Q: How can therapy help with this kind of trauma?
A: Therapy offers a space where you don’t have to minimize, explain, or justify your pain. It’s a place to reconnect with parts of yourself that were buried for survival. Trauma-informed therapy focuses on restoring safety in your body and mind, slowly rebuilding trust in yourself, others, and the world. You don’t have to face this alone.
Q: What if I grew up being told not to talk about these things?
A: Many survivors of war or political trauma were taught to stay quiet out of fear, shame, or family loyalty. But silence doesn’t mean healing. Breaking that silence, even gently, can open the door to a life where you’re not constantly carrying everything alone. Therapy is about giving your present and future the care it deserves.
Q: Does NuHu Therapy offer support for people with this kind of trauma?
A: Yes. Our team includes trauma-informed therapists who understand the complex effects of war, political instability, and generational trauma. We offer virtual therapy across Ontario, so you can access care from the safety of your home. Whether you’re ready to dive in or just want to ask some questions, we’re here when you’re ready.
How to Get Started With Trauma Therapy in Ontario?
If this resonates with you and if you’ve carried survival in your bones for too long, we’re here for you.
At NuHu Therapy, our trauma-informed therapists specialize in supporting:
Survivors of war, violence, or displacement
Children of political refugees or immigrants
Individuals dealing with anxiety, dissociation, or PTSD/CTSD
Those experiencing intergenerational trauma tied to racial, religious, or cultural histories
We offer secure online therapy across Ontario, covered by most insurance plans. No doctor referral needed. Book your free 20-minute consultation today and let’s see if we’re the right fit for your journey.
