"Trauma in a society becomes a culture"
Rose Eskafi on intergenerational trauma, talking to your inner child, and how mindfulness can help with ADHD
Hi readers,
This week I bring you a conversation with the brilliant Rose Eskafi. I have been following Rose’s fab work for a long while so it was amazing to get to sit down and have this chat with her! Drawing on Rose’s expertise in psychology and mental health, we look at the specific ways SWANA diasporic communities encounter mental health difficulties. We touch on intergenerational trauma, managing ADHD and Rose’s inspirational friend who is bringing indigenous deq tattoos to her clients.
Rose is a certified Mindfulness practitioner with a Masters Degree in Mindfulness & Compassion, and a bachelors in Psychology. She is the former Head of People and Wellbeing at gal-dem and also the founder of Still Chill where she delivers talks, facilitates workshops and actions wellbeing initiatives for companies like LUSH, Headspace and Snapchat. Being of Iranian heritage, born in Germany and brewed in the UK, her work seeks to cultivate awareness, acceptance and compassion as a bridge between cultures, in hopes of strengthening our relationships and understanding of each other. As part of her work, she facilitates a free 6-week mindfulness and self-compassion course for Women and Queer folks from the SWANA region. In a time that can sometimes feel overwhelming, she creates nurturing spaces where people can gather, learn, and relate.
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Parisa: Hello Rose! How are you?
Rose: I'm good, thank you. Let me unblur my background real quick. One second… how do I do that? Oh, we're recording already.
Is that okay?
Yeah, of course, not a problem! Do you know what, I think we’ll just leave the background as it is.
I like it. It's mysterious.
Mysterious. I love that. How are you? Lovely to meet you.
Yeah, I'm good. I'm really excited for this chat. I found it so hard to narrow down my questions, there is just so much I’d love to ask you. Also, we have all these similarities beyond the Iranian thing. Your name is Rose, my middle name is Rose...
Oh yeah wow, those links. Are you fully Iranian?
I’m mixed!
I was going to say, because Rose is quite an uncommon name in Iran. But the translation is exactly the same. Whenever I introduce myself to other Iranians they are like, what kind of name is that? And I’m like, it’s global! It’s just a rose, you know.
I did wonder if it was short for something?
No, it’s literally just Rose, it’s رز. My mum said it's because when I was born I had really rosy cheeks. So she had a completely different name planned out for me and changed her mind at the last minute.
That is so cute! So to start us off, I’d like to ask what words you use to think about your racial and ethnic identity? And has that changed over time for you?
So I was born in Germany and we grew up in this really tight-knit Iranian community. When you’re growing up in Germany, you kind of have this understanding and awareness that you aren't German, you’re Iranian. They make you feel that way, but you also know it yourself because you have community and there are lots of [cultural] things you engage with. I used to go to Farsi school, we used to go to mehmoonis like every weekend. And then we moved to the UK when I was 10 or 11, so that’s probably the first time I would say I was consciously racialised and kind of had to create an identity for myself. In Germany, it was already created for me, I almost fell into it. Whereas when we moved here all of a sudden I had to decide like, am I German? Am I Iranian? It was 2004 and so everything was happening in Iraq, and my parents were like, it's probably best if you don't tell people that you're Iranian because they're going to have some ideas about you. Because I was born in Germany and my second language was German, I thought it made sense to tell people I'm German. So when we first moved here, I was telling everyone I was German. And people would side-eye me. They’d be like, ‘obviously, you’re not German.’ But at the same time, I genuinely did feel that way. Within two or three years everyone was singing ‘German bombers’ at us and I didn’t realise that being German was its own identity and came with its own things, especially in the context of the UK.
But yeah, I was really disconnected from my Iranianess during those years because it just wasn't safe for me to be Iranian. And I was quite embarrassed of it. I was embarrassed of the way my parents were integrated into society, and I was embarrassed about all the things I was getting wrong all the time, just due to being an immigrant myself. So I didn't connect with my culture until my early 20s, which is really late. We celebrated Nowrooz, the inside of our house was still very Iranian. I just didn't start embracing it till I was in my early 20s. And it's when I went on my healing journey and recognised just how much I've been making myself small and how much I'd been surprised by parts of myself that are actually really great and wonderful and are directly linked to my culture. So it was a whole thing. And I think the way that I identify as Iranian has definitely changed throughout the years. I would say I am probably at my most Iranian at this point in time, because you're talking to me! Does that answer your question?
I caught you on your most Iranian day! One of the things I actually wanted to ask about, which you wrote about so beautifully for gal-dem, was that in your teens Farsi became “like hot potato in your mouth.” First of all, that is such gorgeous phrasing. But also, I’m wondering what that process of relearning the language looked like for you? Emotionally, but also — perhaps selfishly for my own agenda — what it looked like in a very practical sense?
I think it all started with me wanting to reconnect with my parents, especially my mum. When I moved to university for the first time, I met a really amazing group of friends. We're still best friends to this day. But we would sit around at 10 o'clock and we were just becoming aware of the patriarchy so we would be like, wow, it was so hard for our mums. We put them through so much. I mentioned my mum didn't integrate very well. And so, during my late teens and early 20s, I very much went intentionally towards my mum and tried to learn about her life, about the stories she had. And naturally, she communicated everything in Farsi. I just realised that I couldn't reply in Farsi in the way that I wanted to, even though I understood perfectly. Once I graduated, I moved back home to do my master's and it just became my mission to find out as much as possible about my parents lives. You know, what they were like as teenagers, what they were like in their early adulthood. There was so much stuff that I didn't know. And just through storytelling, I picked up the language but was also able to repeat it back to them. So then it became this process where, over the course of six months, I decided only to speak with them in Farsi. Then my sister moved home during the pandemic and was like, “how are you doing this?!” So you’ve got to make yourself a plan. And you’ve got to do it through storytelling. There is so much I wanted to know and any time I didn’t understand I was like, “what’s that?” Even now, we’ll be watching TV and I’ll be like “What does that mean?” I was quite lucky because I did years of Farsi school, so I can read and write and understand it well. But it was the speaking. And as soon as you start speaking English, your accent completely changes. So the Farsi I spoke in Germany was very different from the Farsi I speak in England.
That’s so interesting! I can’t totally relate because my spoken Farsi is painfully limited but when my partner asks me certain words or if I try to repeat things to non-Iranians I’m thinking, Like this but not with this English accent! So recently you posted some pictures of yourself on Instagram from when you were younger. You added these beautiful messages to your inner child. One of the things you opened with was that you don’t like to think about your inner child too much. I’m interested in where that came from and, if that is the case, why it was important for you to speak with her now?
You know, I just turned 30 and that's why I was reflecting on the timeline of my life. When you're in the wellness space, people always talk about inner child work and inner child healing. And whenever I think back on my childhood, I'm like, childhood was fine. It was really nice. I was very lucky. It was very privileged, I had everything I needed. And it wasn't until my teenage years that I started to be like, What is going on? And of course, being an immigrant myself, being the eldest daughter, it came with so many layers, so many responsibilities. My life very much changed in the space of a month because we came here and none of us spoke English. None of us knew what we were doing. My parents didn't move for a job, it wasn't like that. We were just like, let's figure it out. But I kind of became the parentified child, and I was having to do things that ordinarily your parents would do. So this new sense of responsibility was a lot. And then also navigating being Iranian in Worcester. Do you know Worcester?
“We take personal responsibility for our mental health, or for our wellbeing when actually, so much of it is systemic”
Do they have a sauce?
They have a sauce, exactly! It is a teeny, tiny cathedral city. It’s lovely, it’s beautiful. But when we moved I think 96% white were the official statistics. So I was navigating being racialised for the first time — because in Germany everything was very ‘multi-culti’ as they call it. So being in a completely different environment, and then also teenage angst, you know, just being a teenager and trying to figure it out. And then also being neurodivergent, with ADHD, as I learned later in life. There was so much I was navigating. And when I got to my 20s, I started my healing journey. I started on my path of mindfulness and self-compassion and I only recently realised just how little I visit that version of myself. Because I'm always almost happy that it's over. I spent my 20s being like, wow, I'm not there anymore. How amazing, how fantastic. And then when I was writing these reflections, I was like, you know what, I really don't like to think about you because it's really emotionally heavy and there was so much you were navigating. And there actually isn't anything that I would say to you because there's nothing that you could have done, it was all out of your control, you just found yourself in the situation. But it is important to talk to that version of myself. Because she was navigating so much trauma and so much hurt, that was healed eventually. But still, I think the context was always really important to acknowledge. And I think we don’t do that enough. We take personal responsibility for our mental health, or for our wellbeing when actually, so much of it is systemic.
That's such a good point, and I'm so glad that you raised it. And I'm glad you also touched on being neurodivergent. I also have ADHD and I also just turned 30 and got my diagnosis only three years ago. How does ADHD show up in your life? And especially as someone who is Iranian, how have people responded to that? And what are some effective tools for helping you manage it?
Good questions!
Oh I’m sorry I just realised that with my ADHD I hate when questions have multiple parts. I get so confused. I can ask them one by one if it’s easier!
No, no, it's okay. Hopefully, I’ll hit all your points but if not just re-ask. So with the ADHD, it’s a funny story. I’ve studied psychology since A level. I did an undergrad in it and a master's and through all that time I had no idea. I really thought, Oh you just think a little bit differently. But what happened was that my sister, as I mentioned earlier, moved home during the pandemic. And when she did, she was like, “How have you been living with mum? How are you doing this?” Because it’s really, really hard. She is a great mum, and I’m not trying to undermine that at all. But she wasn’t as present. We had this understanding it was because she had been through so much trauma. We’ve grown up with these very traumatic stories and when we felt a little bit neglected in our teenage years, we thought that was why. But when she moved home, my sister was like, “That… ain’t it?” She was like, “There’s something there.” And I didn’t recognise it as ADHD because the way mine shows up is similar to her. We started looking into it, and it was a long process of understanding how it shows up for all of us. We realised my mum has it, I have it and my sister has it. I’m hyperactive, and my sister is inattentive.
We started putting together all the pieces of the puzzle of what our childhood was like. The way it showed up for me in childhood was that I hyperfixate a lot and if I want something done, it has to get done the way I want it. My sister is very inattentive so her mind wanders, and before you know it she has no idea what's going on. So that combination didn’t always work very well. She thought I was really bossy, and I thought that she just wasn't paying attention. That has followed us into adulthood because we work together now. Both of us are working at Still Chill and we often have this in our day-to-day where I’ll jump from task to task because I have such a good idea of what I need to do without any regard of what that’s going to look like for someone else. My sister will lose attention then I will get frustrated, and then all the childhood triggers come back up. But for me, it’s mainly hyperfocusing. So I can sit up until 3 am writing something, filming content. Whatever it may be. I have no issue spending four hours doing that, and my mum is the same. She’s an artist and she would just lock us up in the studio for like eight hours at a time. And then another way it shows up for me is I don't do that well with routine to be honest. I know a lot of people say that routine is the antidote, but not for me, I can do routine a week on, a week off. I've learned that I do need a bit of structure but I find it too intense, and before I know it I get into analysis paralysis and then I can't do anything for like two, three days.
My best friend is my notebook. I write down absolutely everything without fail. Even if it's just a fleeting idea, I will write it down, or I'll voice note it just so I can come back to it. Often I have pages and pages of the same thing, the same thoughts written out over and over. But if I don't do that, I get really overwhelmed. And I get really depressed if we're going to be completely honest. And so that's what I was navigating in my teenage years. I was so high functioning but I was so sad. I was so worried all the time about everything, and it was because I was overwhelmed with all of this. Now I notice it myself, I notice it in my body. All of this work that I've done over the last 10 years within mindfulness and embodiment has allowed me to notice my bodily response much quicker. And my body does respond super, super quickly. I notice myself getting stressed, getting frustrated. I notice my energy depleting, and I can stop it before it goes too far. Because something I was dealing with a lot in my early 20s, before I realised that I had ADHD, was ADHD burnout; there is a specific kind of burnout just for ADHD. And when that happens for me, I have to just be in bed for like three, four days at a time. I used to think that was such a failure. I'm much better at spotting it now, even though I'm not perfect. And when it does happen I don't give myself a hard time because I didn't choose this brain, in this body, in this world. It just happened! So I have learned so much self-compassion, and it's been the game changer for me.
It’s great to hear journaling works for you. How else do you manage your ADHD?
Meditation is the game changer. So the answer is really mindfulness and meditation for me. It allows me to recognise what my body is saying to me before it's too late. But also, it really helps with emotional regulation. I would always find myself going from zero to 100 in so many ways and then not being able to regulate myself, and this has really allowed me to learn my nervous system and know what I need in order to calm down. Meditation also helps because when you're out of your stress response, or your fight or flight response, your brain works in a completely different way. I really notice the difference after I've meditated compared with before I've meditated. And meditation doesn't have to be just sitting with your eyes closed. The mindfulness piece for me is going for a walk and tuning into my senses. And as people with ADHD we're far more prone to processing things through our senses and through our feelings than we are through our mind. We are very intuitive people, and really leaning into that has helped. I often do things that are sensory, whether that's making time to play or if I'm cooking, making sure there are lots of colours and textures and ingredients and being intentional with the kinds of things I surround myself with. Not minimalist! Sensory experience has really helped me because I get so much joy from that. And I don't feel like I constantly have to think of the next best thing. I really allow my environment to help me with that. If that makes sense?
It makes total sense, and it's such a detailed and thorough answer, which I'm very grateful for — both for the sake of the newsletter and also just personally! So you do all this brilliant work through SWANA Healing. What are some of the specific mental health challenges that people from our communities face?
It's a really good question. Well, I had a conversation the other day and it was so insightful. Someone said that we are a war people. Not by choice, but we, the whole region, have experienced conflict in the last 50 to 100 years more than so much of the world. So coming from some of the most unimaginable things humans are capable of definitely has an impact in this lifetime and on the ones previously, and that gets passed down intergenerationally. I don't know about yourself, but most of our SWANA community have stories upon stories upon stories of what their parents went through, what their grandparents went through, what they've been through as a result of that. I know trauma is commodified online at the moment but it really applies to our community. We are a traumatised people in so many ways. And the way that it shows up for us is in hypervigilance, it shows up in aggression and rage, it shows up in mental health, be it anxiety, depression, PTSD. And it comes up in secrecy.
Something that we often talk about is how the family of people in our community often don't talk about a lot of these things, there’s so much secret-keeping. Trauma response shows up differently in different communities and different families. But I really like what Resmaa Menakem says, and that is that trauma in a society becomes culture. For a lot of us, the trauma response has become the culture. So it's like — it shows up in big ways for our mental health, but it also shows up in tiny interactions in our day-to-day. At the same time, despite being war people and despite coming from all of this, we're still really warm, we're still really community-focused, and there's still so much love. What I always encourage people to lean into are the sides of your culture that you really love and that have healed you. For a lot of people who are disconnected from their culture, they don't even know what that is, right? Me, personally, if we're going back to my childhood being Iranian or even moving here, I was so traumatised by the times we'd visit Iran with family and my mum would fight with the guards because they were trying to enforce the hijab. Or she would kick off in the airport with security. And I'm like a 10-year-old child, right? I'm like, Can you not please mum. But all of that stuck with me. I had this idea of what it meant to be Iranian, and it was what I had experienced in Iran. The more I uncovered within myself, the more I realised that's not all it was. I also had all these amazing family interactions, my family showed me love. So for anyone who is confused about how to navigate the issues that they're facing within SWANA communities, I would encourage them to go towards the things that bring them joy. The things that bring them pleasure, that they’ve enjoyed in their lifetime, even if it’s little tiny things like food or a TV show or a film that you watched when you were really young. Or if it’s asking your family about their stories. But all with the understanding that we are still navigating really heavy water within our families, within our culture and within wider society as well as the region.
Thank you for explaining that. I would just like to very quickly dig into this idea of intergenerational trauma because some people will be very familiar with it, but others might be coming across this idea for the first time. Could you explain how that works?
They first started research into intergenerational trauma in 1966 when Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff, MD recorded significant rates of psychological distress in children of holocaust survivors, later research showed grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were also affected — they were overrepresented in psychiatric referrals by 330%. They started digging into it and looking into genocides around the world and looked at how that showed up a few generations down the line, and found that trauma is actually marked in our DNA. And trauma shows up in completely different ways for grandchildren than it might have done for their parents or their grandparents.
There have also been studies on mice and rats. One of them was really interesting — they were really sad, by the way, I don't condone animal testing at all — but researchers released the scent of cherry blossom into a cage of male mice while simultaneously shocking their foot with an electric current. After a few times, the mice associated that particular scent with pain. The mice were bred with females, and it was found that their pups became jumpy and nervous when they smelled cherry blossom. But then the grand-pups of the traumatised males also showed heightened sensitivity to that scent, but they displayed different behaviours from the parents and grandparents. Later on, the researchers tested to see what would happen if the traumatised mice were to become desensitised to the smell by exposing them to it without the shock, and they found that while the mice didn’t forget, they could overcome the trauma by forming new associations with the smell.
So when something terrible happens, a traumatic event, it alters your brain chemistry and it alters your DNA. Whether the following generations have the same experiences or not, that trauma is passed on. If you are looking at this within the context of humans, you also have storytelling, right? So you might have this trauma within you but your parents talking about it, your grandparents talking about it, will amplify that, make you hypervigilant or more aware of that thing. But ultimately, it can’t really be disproven at this point that if you, say, have PTSD, the following generations might have an insight into what it was you experienced. Even though they might not know exactly what it was, that trauma response is your body’s alarm system, basically staying constantly alert and hypervigilant and looking for threats.
It's fascinating to hear because I guess my mind automatically goes to more environmental things over something that is so intrinsically physiological. Like, one thing that stood out to me was when you said secret keeping. I thought that's so interesting and that maybe that produces feelings of shame and then that could have these consequences for our mental health.
I'm so glad you touched on that because shame is one thing, but it's mistrust more than anything. So when you are traumatised and, you know what, we are politicised people from the SWANA region, regardless of whether you have an awareness of what's happened in your direct lineage or what’s happening in the region. So as soon as you say, “I'm from Iran” or you say, “I'm from Iraq,” or “I'm from Afghanistan,” or Armenia, wherever you may say you're from, there is already a judgement. There is already a sense of, oh, this is happening, or this has happened to your people. And because we're politicised, we also have a really good understanding of the way the world works and how imperialism works and colonisation and how all of these things interconnect. So mistrust is a huge part of our experiences because we’ve been taught from very early on that you can’t necessarily trust everything. You can’t trust the news or everything people tell you. My dad will now say it was the CIA and it was the British [that are responsible for the Islamic Revolution in Iran], and it was, right? So growing up with these stories, you're just like, well, I'm not going to trust what the government is saying. And I'm not going to trust that people have my best interests at heart.
Who is someone from a SWANA diaspora you find inspiring right now?
My friend Elu. She’s the founder of SWANA healing, and she preserves indigenous deq which is an indigenous tattoo from the SWANA region. She is Kurdish and has done an amazing job of bringing this art form back, almost into popular culture. People are connecting with her from all over the world, just to get her markings. She's so intentional and so pure in what she does, she’s honestly one of the best people I've ever met, online and in real life.
And then my last question is, what is one piece of culture — and it could be a book, a film, art exhibition, anything — that has either changed your life or changed the way that you look at the world?
I would say it's a book called The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. And the reason being that it's a really interesting way of seeing your inside voice. As someone who has ADHD and who has had to navigate a lot of identities, this internal monologue was doing a lot for me over the years and I felt like that book was the game changer in how I spoke to myself.