Author Jen Soriano explores generational trauma and the transformative power of healing together in 'Nervous'

In her book Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, activist and author Jen Soriano offers an insightful approach to understanding the lingering impact of generational trauma using science, history, memoir, and family stories. 

The daughter of a neurosurgeon, Soriano shares her healing journey of uncovering the roots of her chronic pain and mental health challenges. Through the collection of essays and personal reflections, she explores ways to address the layers of history, unresolved grief, and trauma held within the physical body and society.

Soriano credits the inspiration for her book to poet and activist Audre Lorde, who once said, “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” 

“Writing about pain was a way I could transcend it so that it could be shared and have a purpose. To express it with the knowledge that there are millions of people out there who also have chronic pain, invisible disabilities, and chronic illnesses of other kinds,” Soriano said. 

Writing Nervous was a healing experience for Soriano. It empowered her to focus on narratives of neurodiverse, disabled, and genderqueer people of color, who she says are often underrepresented in publishing.

“We need everybody’s stories as there are people out there who experience invisible illness and disability. When our stories get told, it shows the world how things could be so that the world is not organized according to ableism. This is a vision I hold very dear because it would benefit all of us.”

According to Soriano, a dominant perspective in Western society views healing as treating an individual’s symptoms rather than taking preventative measures to promote long-term wellness. This framework, she said, perpetuates what health advocates call a sick system instead of a health system and ignores the critical need to heal and transform both on an individual and collective level.

Soriano encourages readers to consider the historical context and consequences of colonization on health and survival, including the legacy of harm caused by Spanish colonization and U.S. imperialism in the Philippines.

“It’s important to look at the impact of these larger systems and expand the notion of health and wellness beyond our individual bodies, blame, and quick fixes. Instead, we need to take into account all the social and environmental things that impact our health and the things we don’t necessarily think of as affecting our health that have come before us,” Soriano said.

Soriano points to epigenetics, the study of how behaviors and environments can cause changes that affect how genes function. She stresses the need for a critical mass of understanding that shifts the focus of health from individual bodies to the social environment, public health, and geopolitical scales. 

“There is no reason health and well-being can’t be recalibrated to address marginalized realities,” Soriano said. “That’s really what disability justice communities mean when they say that if you listen to the needs of people with disabilities and change environments to meet those needs, then you’re changing environments to be sustainable for everyone.”

This sustainable environment shapes Soriano’s vision for a “trauma-wise future,” where all children—regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality, and class—have what they need to feel safe, dream, and thrive physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. 

“A trauma-wise world acknowledges that our current world is organized along arbitrary lines that serve to consolidate power among certain types of people at the expense of others,” Soriano said. “The root of mass trauma is oppression, and systems of oppression rely on those power dynamics to survive. A trauma-wise world sees those power dynamics clearly and realizes we can’t just love each other into equality but must dismantle and erode those systems to shape new ones grounded in love–yes–and also justice.”

Finding and engaging in community with others plays a crucial role in bringing humanity one step closer to trauma recovery. For Soriano, it is only together that people can dismantle systems of oppression and shape new ones conducive to health and healing.

“The fluidity of our nervous systems shows that we can absolutely change and transform the worst impacts of inherited trauma within a generation, which can have effects for generations to come. You are not alone,” Soriano said. “Here’s a call to action to heal and to do it together so that we can create something different, break harmful cycles, and build new generative and healing practices for all of us.”