Press Release: April 26, 2012

For some, immigration truly is an matter of life or death… 

Psychologist Michael Milgraum just published a novel describing the multigenerational effects of the Holocaust.  During an average work day, he can be found in his office listening to a client tell him about vicious torture, squalid conditions and degrading treatment the client received during his incarceration.  The female clients discuss the additional trauma of having been raped in a similar setting.  The only crime these clients did was to have a different ethnicity, religion or political opinion from the government in power.

But these are not victims of wartime Nazi atrocities.  Milgraum conducts psychological evaluations on immigrants who are seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries. 

“Most of these evaluations are of Africans,” says Milgraum, “particularly Ethiopia, because the Greater Washington, DC area [where Milgraum works] contains one of the main Ethiopian communities in the United States.  The record of political oppression, intolerance for free speech and ethnic-based persecution is horrendous in Ethiopia.  Those who speak out against the government are jailed multiple times on trumped-up charges, beaten during harsh interrogations, and held in unsanitary and crowded conditions.”

Milgraum listens to these immigrants’ stories, examines their psychological profile and provides reports to immigration courts about his findings.  He often is required to testify about his conclusions as well.  Almost all of these clients have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, which can involve flashbacks of the prior abuse, panic attacks, social withdrawal, insomnia, and a host of other symptoms.    

“What’s so ironic,” says Milgraum, “is that both in my personal and professional life I can’t seem to get away from man’s inhumanity to man and dealing with the aftermath.  I am a child of a Holocaust survivor.  That’s why I wrote a book about the whole Holocaust experience.  Now I see clients who are victims of hatred and the abuses of governmental power.  We children of survivors just seem to be drawn back to trauma in one way or another.”

Milgraum goes on to explain that children of survivors frequently feel a mission to make the world a better place and to alleviate suffering.  This mission leads the second generation to work with people who have been hurt or are in trouble.  Milgraum says, “Many in the second generation became psychotherapists, which, I think, represents an unconscious wish to alleviate our parents’ posttraumatic stress.”

About Dr. Michael Milgraum

A psychologist, lawyer, writer, husband and father, Dr. Michael Milgraum has his own practice in Silver Spring, MD.   In addition to conducting psychological evaluations, Milgraum sees patients in individual and group therapy.  Never Forget My Soul is his first novel and is available in bookstores and online (in print and eBook format).  See http://www.doctormmsolutions.com/blog/ for Milgraum’s essays about the Holocaust, psychology and spirituality. 

Copyright © Apr. 27, 2012, Michael Milgraum. All rights reserved. 

There is still much to oppose.  As I write this article, Lithuanian officials are actively involved in promoting Holocaust denial and treating war era anti-Nazi resistance fighters as war criminals.  It should be noted that almost all of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated, during the war, and many Lithuanians assisted in this process.  (For more information about Lithuanian Holocaust denial, see the chilling trailer for a documentary about it at http://rewriting-history.org/.)  

Here in the United States the forces of hatred are alive and well, in the form of neo-Nazi's, the Klan, and the alarming amount of people who believe that immigrants inherently pose a threat to the good moral fiber of the United States.  Ever since 9-11 too many people have made the absurd conclusion that foreigners inherently pose a threat or mean us ill.  I see many immigrants in my psychological practice, and I can assure you that they are just people, pretty much as good as the rest of us.  The great majority of these immigrants that I have seen are honest, hard-working, moral and responsible.  

April 19th, 2012 is Holocaust Remembrance day.  It is a time to reflect and ask ourselves what we are doing to oppose the forces of hatred.  In service of that introspection, I offer a short passage from my book, Never Forget My Soul.  The passage describes the musings of David, a psychologist, after he discovers that two members of his therapy group (Joe and Adam) are children of Holocaust survivors.  In this passage, he stays up late at night, researching and trying to understand the multigenerational effects of the Holocaust:

        David let his eyes drift over his desk, until they came to rest upon a book entitled “Inherited Memories.”  Inherited memories—Joe and Adam were burdened and driven by memories that they had never directly experienced, oppressed by a life they themselves had never actually lived.  Of course that was a simplification. Joe and Adam were driven not only by their parents’ suffering, but also by the way their parents behaved towards them.  Adam’s parents had been emotionally broken people, lacking the accessibility and emotional aliveness that children yearn for, and, in the case of his father, with a quick and sometimes violent temper.  David was unsure about Joe’s story, but suspected that it was similar.  From David’s reading, there was something to this idea of inherited memories.  Children of survivors were often very intuitive and seemed to sense their parent’s Holocaust experiences, even without the parent ever discussing them in front of their children.  He thought of one case history of a woman who suffered from low sexual desire for ten years.  Whenever her husband would approach her sexually, she would seek a reason to argue, in an unconscious attempt to be protected from physical intimacy with him.  She worked for years with therapists on this problem, and the therapists used a great variety of techniques, but made absolutely no progress with the problem.  The breakthrough came when her mother told her that the mother had been raped in a concentration camp, and had never been able to trust men sexually after that.  When the daughter connected with the inherited memory of the rape, she then had a context in which to work and was finally able to overcome her sexual difficulties with her husband.

            As David continued to consider the words “inherited memory,” an image came to his mind.  It was a picture of his father in military uniform, which had been in the family photo album when he grew up.  The face had been proud, young and strong.  His father had fought in the Second World War. Once, his mother had wistfully pointed out that picture to David and said, “Your father was a brave man.  He sacrificed his life so others could be free.  He was injured badly in the war.  He was never able to work after he returned.  He became weaker and weaker over the years, and then his body just ran out of strength to live.”  That was the extent of what his mother had told him about his father’s wartime experience.  But that memory started David wondering.  What wartime action had his father seen?  Was his father’s history somehow more intimately intertwined with Adam and Joe than simply sharing their forebear’s war?  Had David’s father been involved in the liberation of the camps?  David did not know, and at this point it was all speculation.  His mother had been dead for ten years. 

           David put aside the book that he had been reading and reached for a book entitled “A Pictorial History of the Holocaust.”  As he leafed through the pages he saw pictures of crowded Jewish ghettos; marching lines of Jewish prisoners, flanked by German soldiers; shaven-headed, emaciated concentration camp prisoners; and piles of naked corpses.  Suddenly he stopped, transfixed on one picture.  It was a photograph of a United States soldier, standing beside a just recently liberated concentration camp prisoner, who was seated on a bench.  The former prisoner was painfully thin, with sunken eyes.  He had an expression of dull emptiness and disbelief in his eyes.  The American soldier appeared tall, well-fed and strong.  But there was something haunting in the soldier’s face.  David’s eye widened with a realization.  He arose and went down to the basement, where he stood on a chair and removed a box from a shelf.  He searched through the box until he found an old, brown, imitation-leather-covered photo album.  He brought the album upstairs to his desk and turned the pages until he came to a photograph of his father after the war.  There it was!  The look—the same haunting look that was on the face of the soldier in the Holocaust book.  It was a mixture of world-weariness and disbelief.  Disbelief—that was the commonality between the three people—the former prisoner and soldier in the book and David’s own father in the album.  The disbelief, thought David, is about the magnitude of horror that man can inflict on man.  And the disbelief was double for the former prisoner—disbelief about the extent of the horror to which he had been exposed and disbelief that it had finally come to an end. 

            “It’s all my own imagination and supposition,” David warned himself.  He did not know whether his father had liberated a camp.  He did not even know if he was accurately reading the expressions of his father or the American soldier.  Perhaps David had so immersed himself in the Holocaust era, over the past week, that he was really seeing his own reactions, reading them into the faces of those soldiers.  But David did know the following:  his father had fought in a terrible war and had suffered near-fatal wounds.  The war had forever changed his father’s life and had eventually robbed David of his father.  So what David did know was that Hitler’s mad hatred had brought destruction into David’s ancestral past, just as it had to Joe and Adam.  What had his mother said?  David’s father had “sacrificed his life so that others could be free.” 

       “Maybe that’s what draws me so much into this subject,” David thought. “I’m continuing the work that my father did.  He exposed his body to the war’s destructiveness in order to fight and overcome evil.  If he was willing to do that, the least I can do is expose my mind to this evil, to help the suffering next generation find liberation.  That’s my inherited memory.  I’m still fighting my father’s war.”    

There are many ways to oppose hatred.  We all should ask ourselves how we can use our knowledge, connections and individual talents to build a world were such inhumanity will be a thing of the past. 

Michael Milgraum, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, whose new novel, Never Forget My Soul, follows the lives of two Holocaust survivor families.  Dr. Milgraum is a child of a Holocaust survivor.  He is in private practice, in Silver Spring, Maryland.  He provides group, individual and couples therapy and performs psychological evaluations.  He can be reached at (301) 588-5861 or drmilgraum@gmail.com.    

Copyright © Apr. 18, 2012, Michael Milgraum. All rights reserved. 

          Anyway, I was given one of these simple but profound lessons when a 74-year-old patient said to me the following, “I have come to the conclusion that there is a positive correlation between how much attention I pay to myself and how unhappy I am.  I am the happiest when I am the least self-absorbed.  My awareness of the needs of others is as much a gift to myself as it is to anyone else.”

            I have used this insight with patients many times in therapy.  Self-absorption and focusing on one’s problems are strong contributors to depression, hopelessness and elevated stress.  I frequently tell depressed people who are isolated that it is essential that they do something to “get out of themselves.”  I tell them to help someone who is less fortunate, to join a support group to connect with other people, or even get a pet, simply to be aware of the needs of something beyond themselves.  Care for and about others not only improves the world, it is good medicine.  And on days that my ego has been bruised or life does not seem to be sufficiently living up to my dreams, it is a lesson that I must remember. 

            In my novel, Never Forget My Soul, I describe the lives of two descendants of Holocaust survivors who struggle, in different ways, with excessive focus on self and disconnection from others.  One of these characters is a dynamic surgeon, named Joe, who is socially bold but who dares not let anyone truly close to him.  After suffering a serious loss, he comes to an old acquaintance of his, a rabbi, to ask fundamental questions about the goodness of God and the world He created.  Joe sees God as cruel and says that this even can be seen in the Torah.  He says that God intended to destroy Sodom and that it took Abraham’s plea for mercy for God to consider sparing it.  Joe says there is no mercy to be found in God.   

            Here is the answer the rabbi gave him:

The root of all human goodness and happiness is the awareness that we are not alone in this world, and the root of all evil and despair is the belief that we are alone.  Abraham’s life was infused with the awareness that he was not alone.  He was the founder of monotheism, so some might say that Abraham’s awareness that God was always near to him kept Abraham aware that he was not alone. 

But I think this is not the most important reason why Abraham did not feel alone.  Even more than his relationship with God, Abraham is remembered for his relationship with his fellow man.  The real reason that Abraham knew that he was not alone is because he felt that all people were his brothers and sisters and he believed that he had a responsibility to promote the wellbeing of any person whom he could influence.

God did not initially withhold mercy from Sodom to be cruel to Sodom.  Rather, He did so to show kindness to Abraham.  What was the nature of this kindness?  This kindness was giving Abraham the greatest gift that a man can have—the profound awareness of the importance of others and one’s connectedness to them.  God loved Abraham, so He gave him many opportunities to experience this highest of all gifts—the opportunity to demonstrate love of others in our actions.  The action that was required of Abraham in the story of Sodom was to stand his ground with God Himself and bargain for the possibility that Sodom be spared. 

Now, Joe, there is only one way that a person can have that level of commitment to the wellbeing of others.  You have to perceive that other people are real and that other people are part of you.  If my neighbor is hungry, then, in a sense, I am hungry.  If a little girl in Asia is raped or tortured, then it’s happening to me.  Abraham felt this as a reality, and that fueled his passion for the wellbeing of others.

The truth is that God loves all of us.  He gives us all countless opportunities to access this highest of all gifts.  The real challenge is to notice that this gift is being offered. 

            Coming out of our self-absorption is not easy.  It takes a lot of practice and patience with oneself.  Here are a few suggestions for increasing interest in and involvement with other people. 

·        Remember that whoever you deal with during the day is not just a means to an end, but a person.  This includes the bank teller, mailman and supermarket cashier.  Treat them the way you would like to be treated.  Give them a genuine smile and a sincere “thank you.”

·        Make the commitment to give at least ten minutes of your undivided attention to your spouse every day.  Put all your concerns aside and just listen to him or her.  This will certainly make him or her happier, and you may find that you start to enjoy him or her more by investing more time in your relationship.

·        Join a group that has interests similar to your own.  Attend a shiur, join a hiking group, or volunteer for a political action association.  By becoming involved in the lives of others you will discover more and more ways to give to (and receive from) them.   

·        Ask yourself what life would look like if you stood in the shoes of another person. Given their life history, unmet needs, disappointments, aspirations and personality, what might life look like if seen from that person’s eyes?  Of course, the more you actually know about that person, the more you will be able to answer this question.  So listen closely to him or her and ask questions.  It’s a technique that is particularly helpful in improving our relationships with almost anyone, especially difficult people.   

          A traditional Jewish teaching says that our highest aspiration should be to emulate the attributes of God.  He is the giver to all, and He requires nothing for Himself.  Although this level is beyond our ability, we certainly make ourselves more like Him the more we give to others.

This article was originally published on ou.org.  

Copyright © March 30, 2012, Michael Milgraum. All rights reserved. 

As a psychologist, I frequently see couples for therapy.  A common scenario in couples counseling goes like this:  The husband and wife sit before me, with a palpable feeling of discomfort in the room.  I ask for one to start and the wife does, laying out a litany of complaints. “Dave has no self-respect.  He walks around like a slob and doesn’t care what impression he makes on people.  I tell him he is not going to get a job looking like that, but he doesn’t listen.  Also, I have to tell him a hundred times to take out the trash before he’ll do anything about it.  And he never picks up after himself.  I’m not your mother, Dave.  It’s time for you to grow up and pick up after yourself…”

On she goes, until she is finally done, for now, venting her frustration.  During this speech, her husband looks away towards the wall, registering no reaction whatsoever.  After she is done, he sits silently, until I turn to him and say, “So, Dave, do you have any thoughts about all this?”

He looks at me blankly, and I wonder if he is hearing anything we are saying.  Finally he responds, shrugging his shoulders, “Not really.”  

Most people would be angry if they had just listened to this harangue, or at least irritated. But he doesn’t look angry; he looks cold, impassive, untouched.  And I know this is going to be difficult therapy. 

Dave’s cold disconnection from his wife may eventually result in the death of his marriage.   Perhaps I will be able to communicate this to him before it is too late.  Unfortunately, he believes (and probably has been taught by his family of origin) that “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  He probably fears what will happen if he expresses his anger.  So he expresses nothing at all, leading his wife to get increasingly angry and driving the two of them further and further apart. (Of course the same scenario often occurs with the wife as the aloof, distant player.)

Some people think the “if you don’t have anything nice to say” maxim also applies to their relationship with God.  They believe that it is inappropriate to say to God that they are disappointed or angry with Him.  And just as a marital relationship withers when genuine emotions are not shared, so does the spiritual relationship weaken and wither.  Sure, we can go through the motions.  We can attend synagogue, eat only kosher and observe Jewish holy days.  But if our heart is not there, then it is a distant and imperiled relationship. 

This is not an uncommon problem.  As a therapist, I know that anyone in a love relationship will experience anger, at least now and then.  Why should it be any different in our relationship with God?  In addition, anger is a common response to suffering.  After all we Jews have suffered, especially during the twentieth century, it is not surprising that many Jews are angry.  

The Book of Job

The Book of Job clearly illustrates that God views an honest expression of anger towards Him as far superior to a more seemingly respectful and less emotionally-engaged relationship.

 As the story relates, Job is a righteous man and his character is so untarnished, that God himself affirms Job’s righteousness at the beginning of the book.  God starts to test Job, taking away his children, his money and his health.  Job sits on the ground, with an agonizing skin condition, bewailing his fate and saying that it would have been better if he had never had been born.  Three friends come to Job and tell him that God is just and does not give man suffering for no reason.  They tell Job that he must carefully scrutinize his past deeds, identify his sins and repent.  Then, they say, God may have mercy on him.  Job defiantly says he did not sin and that his suffering was not earned.  He does not want their platitudes.  He expresses increasing anger towards God and demands a direct conversation with Him, in which He will explain why He has made Job suffer so much.

What is most striking about the communication of the three friends towards Job is that they are long on advice, but short on compassion.  The reader has no indication that they have empathy for Job or that they are suffering alongside him.  They are more interested in defending their philosophy than reaching out to a soul in agony.  The three friends finally fall silent, when they see that they are having no impact on Job.  

It is then that a younger man, by the name of Elihu, speaks.  He states that he is angry with the friends, who claim to be Job’s friends but have nothing to offer but their preaching.  Elihu tries to speak to the heart of Job, saying that Elihu’s soul bleeds to see Job’s physical, emotional and spiritual suffering.  Elihu tells him that God appears to be cruel only because we are so small compared to Him.  From God’s point of view, everything that He does is an act of love towards us.  After Elihu reaches out to Job, God himself speaks to Job directly, out of a whirlwind.  God does not give answers, but only asks a series of questions of Job, questions that drive home the point that God runs the world and our demands that he justify Himself are like a baby questioning the decisions of adults. 

Job is moved when God reveals Himself.  Job indicates that he will cease questioning God and will accept His will.  Then a very interesting thing happens.  God tells one of the three friends, who defended God to Job, “My wrath burns against you and against your two friends, for you did not speak properly about me as my servant Job did” (42:7).  This statement seems very strange, especially because the rabbinic commentators tell us that the three friends were right — God always has a good reason for his actions, even if we do not understand it.  The problem was, though, that the friends presumed too much, they tried to speak for God, and describe the reasons for his actions.  They denied Job what a suffering person needs the most from a friend — emotional engagement and care.  Elihu gave that to Job and thereby led him back to God.    

We need to be open with our feelings towards God.  But did that make it acceptable for Job to imply that God is unjust?  In answer to this, the Talmud says that a man is not punished for what he says when he is troubled.  Life hurts.  Sometimes we need to be unreasonable, sometimes we need to shout, sometimes we need to cry.  God wants us to offer him our wounded souls with all of their “ugly” realities, including our anger.  That is a real relationship, and it is the only path to real healing, spiritual or otherwise.

This article was originally published on aish.com.   

Copyright © March 11, 2012, Michael Milgraum. All rights reserved. 

To be a child of a Holocaust survivor is to live in a world of contradictions.  It means trying to ignore a horrid past while feeling, in one’s chest and stomach, that the aguish of the past is always present. 

It means feeling too close to the parent survivor and needing some emotional distance, while at the same time feeling that one does not really know his parent.  It means wanting to ask questions and fearing to ask questions.  It means feeling an extremely heightened responsibility to have a powerful impact on the world, while having great doubts about one’s own potency. 

It means parents being overprotective of children and children being overprotective of parents.  It means chronic anger and frustration and attempts to deny both.  It means receiving a constant message that one has such a good life and should be grateful, while feeling constantly unworthy of one’s blessings.

We are now almost 70 years past the Holocaust, but the emotional effects of that devastating period live on powerfully in the children and grandchildren of survivors.  The Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) suffered by many survivors is a complex condition involving three central defining characteristics: 1) unwanted, spontaneous recollections of the trauma; 2) attempts to emotionally distance oneself from memories of the trauma or from other sources of emotional arousal, and 3) chronic anxiety and physiological arousal.

We can see from the first two characteristics that PTSD involves an internal contradiction between trying to forget the trauma and the inability to do so.  Thus, it is not surprising that children of survivors experience strong contradictions within themselves, as they try to make sense of contradictory messages they received from their parents. 

In the present article, I want to highlight a very important aspect of the experience of survivors and their children.  One of the most fundamental difficulties that survivors and their children struggle with is their ability to trust.  In part, I refer to the ability to trust other people—friends, acquaintances, strangers, even spouse and family members.  Given the cold brutality that the survivor witnessed, it is not surprising that he came to doubt the fundamental goodness of man, and passed this attitude on to his children.  With a heightened awareness of the fragility of life, the survivor inculcated into his children that the world is a dangerous place and that others should not be trusted.  This generalized mistrust has resulted in a tendency for survivors and their children to keep emotional distance from others in order to protect themselves. 

However, the lack of trust does not just pertain to other people.  I believe that the feeling of devastation and hopelessness caused by the Holocaust was so severe that it also gave rise, in many, to a mistrust of self and of Hashem.  One reason for the mistrust of self was the extreme demoralization, mistreatments and insults inflicted in the camps, which wounded the survivor’s self-image. Another reason is that intense anger burned within survivors, and some survivors subconsciously feared what they would become if they let their anger flow out.          

There are many other reasons for this mistrust of self.  Many children of survivors learned these patterns of self-mistrust and imitated them.  In addition, many children of survivors mistrust and detach from their feelings because they feel it is selfish to focus on one’s “petty” feelings when compared with the horror that the parent has endured. 

As for mistrust of Hashem, I believe the reasons are obvious.  I will only say that the mistrust of and anger towards Hashem experienced by many survivors was so painful that it was easier to deny His existence than to try to reestablish a connection with Him. 

It is the mistrust of and disconnection from others, oneself and Hashem that, I believe, defines the experience of many survivors and their children.  By the same token, I believe the most powerful way to heal the multigenerational Holocaust trauma experience is to address these three types of disconnection.  In my experience, one of the best ways to reestablish a connection with self, others and Hashem is in group settings.  It can take the form of a therapy group, self-help group or a discussion group.  The important element is that group members must be willing to be introspective, mutually supportive and courageous enough to speak openly about their feelings and experiences.  (Assurance of confidentiality within the group facilitates such openness.)  Groups allow people to experience the comfort, support and understanding that others can provide. Further, groups are a powerful emotional stimulant and allow the participant to “get to know” himself better. 

Regarding the spiritual dimension, I believe that experiencing others’ compassion is one of the best ways to increase feelings of hope.  And I believe that motivation to develop a relationship with Hashem only occurs when there are feelings of hope.  Tragically, many survivors and their children have distanced themselves from the only source that can give them real solace in a very troubled world.  In reconnecting with others’ empathy and care, struggling souls may be reminded of the ultimate source of compassion Who looks after us all.

Michael Milgraum, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, whose new novel, Never Forget My Soul, discusses the issues addressed in this article.  Dr. Milgraum is a child of a Holocaust survivor.  He is in private practice, in Silver Spring, Maryland.  He provides group, individual and couples therapy and performs psychological evaluations. 

Copyright © Feb. 27, 2012, Michael Milgraum. All rights reserved. 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:            CONTACT– Dr. Michael Milgraum

Dec. 28, 2012                      mmilgraum@doctorMMsolutions.com, (301) 588 5861

Psychologist Publishes Psycho-spiritual Novel

New Book Looks at How Trauma is Passed from Generationto Generation, and Presents a Path to Healing. 

Silver Spring, MD—Noted psychologist, Dr. Michael Milgraum, is very familiar with the effects of trauma.  “My mother is a Holocaust survivor," says Milgraum, " She bears deep emotional wounds from the war.”  Milgraum's early experiences gave him a lifelong interest in the effects of trauma and in attempts to rebuild ones world after trauma.  His professional experiences include the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their children, spousal abuse and child abuse.   “These are painful  stories,” says Milgraum, “but they are also very important, because, in seeing how people heal from their emotional scars, we learn something essential about the power of hope and faith."

Milgraum started writing a novel about trauma and healing six years ago.  Going against conventional wisdom, he did not submit a sample chapter to publishers before completing the project.  “I did not want to be constrained by issues of marketability.  I felt I had a mission to communicate a particular message to others.”

Now his message is available for all to read.  Milgraum’s first novel Never Forget My Soul can be obtained on Amazon.com and in bookstores.

The novel explores the lives of six traumatized individuals receiving treatment in a therapy group. The book demonstrates how emotional scars are passed from generation to generation and how people must reach out to others in order to heal.  To illustrate the lasting effects of trauma, Milgraum uses flashbacks to individuals’ traumatic experiences, many years before.  Shifts from present to past and back again create a strong feeling of suspense throughout the story.

"Dr. Milgraum’s compelling new book is very much for our times, yet goes far beyond our times.  His narrative takes on a history of destruction and the shattered parts of ourselves with the profound conviction that there must be a better way to live. His story demonstrates gently and with compassion that hope is renewed the moment a human being opens his heart to the plight of another. And much more than a mere story, Never Forget My Soul is a journey towards the discovery of ripened, abiding spirituality,” says Dr. Yael Danieli.  Dr. Danieli is a renowned expert on the effects of the Holocaust on multiple generations.  The Holocaust and its emotional aftermath play an important role in Milgraum’s book.

Milgraum points to present Holocaust denial efforts as an example of the hate that we must struggle against.  This coming January 20^th is the 70^th anniversary of the famous Wannsee conference, where German officials secretly finalized their plan for the annihilation of European Jewry.  “What a significant time to come out with my book!” says Milgraum. “As a defiance against Hitler, my book demonstrates that the only true hope for mankind can be found in compassion, respect for others, community and spirituality.”  Milgraum is deeply religious and actively involved in his local synagogue. 

“This is more than just a story,” Milgraum says. “It’s a lesson in how we inflict pain as a community and how we can heal as a community. Group therapy illustrates this and is a microcosm of our entire world.”

About Dr. Michael Milgraum

A psychologist, lawyer, writer, husband and father, Dr. Michael Milgraum has his own practice in Silver Spring, MD.  Born in Long Island, he lived in Australia for much of his formative years.  Milgraum is an active member of the local Jewish community.  Never Forget My Soul is his first novel, and is available on Amazon.com and in bookstores. 

            In my newly released novel, Never Forget My Soul (publisher: Guidelight Books), I explore how awareness of the soul can transform the lives of even very troubled individuals.  The book follows the interactions of six people in a group therapy setting.  Two of the patients (Adam and Joe) have forebears who were survivors of the Holocaust.  These two men carry a family legacy of chronic discomfort, social disconnection, and spiritual emptiness.  (Ironically, Joe sees himself as bold, active and passionate, but the truth is that he is profoundly disconnected from other people and from himself.)  In the story, flashbacks to the war era demonstrate how past traumas evolve into psychological and behavioral dysfunction in survivors and their children.  What Adam and Joe need to learn is that, in one’s search for happiness, there is something that matters much more than our stated beliefs or our pursuit of goals.  What matters is how integrated we are, in other words, that we can flexibly attend to and make connections between our internal life, the lives of other people and a spiritual truth to which we can devote ourselves.  For the religious, that spiritual truth is ultimately serving God, but the nonreligious can conceptualize it differently.  The nonreligious could call it meaning, purpose, or something greater than themselves, but call it what you will, if we lack it, we all eventually find life empty and dissatisfying. 

            My novel is based on the groundbreaking work of Dr. Yael Danieli, who, more than thirty years ago, started studying Holocaust survivors and came to a startling discovery—so many of them thought that no one could actually believe that the horrible stories they were telling about the war were true.  Based on this observation, Dr. Danieli developed her notion of the “conspiracy of silence,” which arose because the world was too afraid to really listen to and emotionally take in the stories of the concentration camps and mass killings.  The stories were just too chilling and raised too many doubts about the fundamental goodness of man.  Dr. Danieli also developed the idea of vicarious traumatization, meaning that the listener to the story of trauma is so overwhelmed by its horror that he reacts with trauma symptoms himself.  This vicarious traumatization was an additional reason for distancing from survivors telling their stories. 

            Through her work, Dr. Danieli described four types of family systems that arose from the Holocaust experience.  These types are 1) Victim Families, 2) Fighter Families, 3) Numb Families and 4) “Those Who Made It.”  I will not get into a description of the characteristics of these families here.  All I want to note is that survivors and their families developed different ways to reestablish some level of normalcy in day to day living, but, at the same time, they exhibited some characteristic types of psychological dysfunction.  One cannot truly understand individuals within these families without understanding the prior trauma and the ways of acting and being that developed within each family type.  I also want to note that the last category, “Those Who Made It,” is in quotes, because these individuals appeared externally successful, but psychological scars and lasting effects were there, which still can be seen in the second and third generation. 

            I believe the most important reason for psychologists to make space for the soul in their work is that there are some issues that only make sense when you discuss them from the perspective of the soul.  In order to recover from their legacy of trauma, it is not enough for survivors and their children to develop more positive thought patterns or engage in anxiety reduction techniques.  They need to admit that their souls are troubled because profound inhumanity is, by its very nature, a wound to the soul.  They need to experience and express the feelings of emptiness within their souls and find a profound source of hope to sustain them.

            The Holocaust legacy that I discuss has never been more relevant.  As I write this post, Lithuanian officials are actively involved promoting Holocaust denial and treating war era anti-Nazi resistance fighters as war criminals.  It should be noted that almost all of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated, during the war, and many Lithuanians assisted in this process.  For more information about Lithuanian Holocaust denial, see the chilling trailer for a documentary about it at http://rewriting-history.org/.

            This January 20^th will be the 70^th anniversary of the Wannsee conference.  At this conference, German officials met in 1942 to plan the “Final Solution”— the extermination of European Jewry.  It is a time for us to reflect and call upon our own souls, to see how we can promote a world where such things can never happen again. 

Copyright © Michael Milgraum, November 2011.  All rights reserved. 

I will not bore you with the movie’s convoluted plot.  What is interesting, though, is how both characters have epic, exciting conflicts and adventures, but at the same time, live empty lives, devoid of any true meaning.  Metroman ends up faking his own death, because he is tired of the Superhero gig.  He lives as a hermit, composing terrible music, which entertains only himself.  Megamind, left without an arch foe, quickly conquers the city, but is then left aimless and bored, without a purpose.  He becomes so desperate, that he creates another good guy superhero, so he can have something to fight.  He goes on to battle with his creation, who is an ignorant, infantile and crass bore, and, at the movie’s climax, Megamind tells his new foe that the winner, in the battle of superheroes, is the one who fights with the most theatrical style.

Megamind eventually finds something beyond himself to fight for, the clichéic woman he loves. However, what is so painfully and sadly striking about this movie is how much intuitive sense it makes to those living in our times.  The movie’s protagonists are the reflection of a postmodern society, which has all it needs, in terms of financial resources, but is haunted by the question “What am I living for?”  Some people seek to soothe this existential emptiness by filling up their time with entertainments of various types—movies, video games, drugs, serial relationships, etc.  Such people seek the bigger and bigger thrill and are just like Megamind’s motto that the winner is the one who created the greatest theatrical event.  Other’s, like Megamind, try to create a cause to live for or fight against, but are frequently haunted by the question, “If I created it, is it really an important purpose for living or just another pastime.”

The brilliant and incisive psychiatrist Victor Frankl devoted his life work to this very issue, that is, man’s essential desire for a purpose in life.  Frankl, who survived the horrors of Auschwitz, said that his concentration camp experience succeeded in only deepening his conviction that man can maintain a sense of dignity and hope, in even the worst of circumstances, as long as his life is guided by a meaning, a higher purpose, that he is living for.  That meaning may take on different forms, but one fundamental characteristic is that it is something beyond oneself and greater than oneself.  For many of us the welfare of others provides a primary and lifelong meaning that sustains us and motivates us.  Frankl remained intellectually productive into his 90’s, when he published a book called Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning.  In this book, he emphasizes that what makes us uniquely human is that, moment to moment, we have the responsibility to chose between following the dictates of our conscience or ignoring it.  And this conscience that speaks within us hints at the existence of a higher morality, that we did not create, but, on the contrary, to be fully human, we must serve.  Frankl views this higher morality as a real and vital force, which can ultimately connect us with our spiritual core and our spiritual origins.  Frankl also pointed to research findings that there was a positive association between feeling that one is living a meaningful life and mental health.  In my own clinical experience, I have repeatedly seen patients who have found a higher meaning to live for, and subsequently, their symptoms of mental illness started to improve.  Another splendid exposition of Frankl’s thought is in the worldwide bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning, this book being more accessible (requiring less knowledge of the field of psychology) than the book mentioned above.  However, I think one can best benefit from his point of view by reading both books (neither one is long).  Without such enriching perspectives, we having nothing left but over-stimulating, bad and boring theatre.      

Copyright © Michael Milgraum 2010.  All rights reserved.  

Turn off the phone, tell your wife/kids/significant others to not disturb you for 15 minutes.  Sit or lie in a comfortable position.  Observe the rising and falling of your breath, and gently encourage yourself to deepen your breath, perhaps by letting out a couple of sighs.  Mentally scan through your body, and tell yourself that your arms and legs are getting warm and heavy.  Notice any areas of discomfort or tightness in your body.  On the next breath, imagine that a soothing warmth is flowing into that uncomfortable place and allowing you to deepen your relaxation and let go.  If any thoughts run through your mind, just patiently allow them to come and go, without trying to follow, control or comment on them.

Now imagine that you are in a beautiful and peaceful vacation spot.  Involve all your senses, as you call this place to mind.  Perhaps you can see yourself lying or walking on the beach.  Feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, and a soothing light breeze blowing through your hair.  Listen to the lapping of the waves.  Smell the slightly salty scent in the air.  Look around you and see the blue sky, with a few fluffy white clouds floating above.  Imagine yourself doing whatever you would like to do– swimming, walking, running or sitting in a beach chair sipping your favorite drink.  You can imagine yourself with someone or alone, enjoying the peaceful solitude.  When you are ready, you can bring your awareness back to your present surroundings and resume your normal activities.       

Practice this relaxation activity daily for two weeks, and I bet you will feel less stressed.  If not, I’ll see what we can do about that free trip!

© Michael Milgraum 2010