Dr. Ani Kalayjian Tackles Generational Trauma through the Gift of Forgiveness

Columbia University awarded her the 2025 Highest Medal of Honor and Distinguished Alumni of the Year (2007) awards.

She is a pioneer in treating generational trauma and has led more than 100 humanitarian missions across more than 45 countries, providing mental health rehabilitation after disasters. She has offered help to survivors of 9/11 in New York, the Holocaust, Haitian earthquake, Vietnam and Gulf war veterans, and more.

She is an author of six books, including Forget Me NOT: 7 Steps for Healing Our Body, Mind, Spirit, and Soul. Her work focuses on transforming trauma into meaning, and advocates for forgiveness as a key step in healing.

She also founded the Armenian American society for studies on stress and genocide (AASSG), pronounced as Asg, or people, in 1988.

Kalayjian’s organization, ATOP, offers healing through a seven-step integrative model, which includes mind-body-eco-spirit approaches.

“When we stated in 1990, we were researching the long-term impact of genocide, surveying the survivors,” in the tristate area, she recalled.

“Then we studied the children and grandchildren and found out about the generational transmission of genocide. And since at the time about 75 years had passed since 1915, it was the first long-term psychological paper focusing on survival, coping and huge atrocities such as genocide,” she said.

Kalayjian studied with Viktor Frankl, a noted Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force.

The inception for his study was that he and other survivors of concentration camps had come out with different attitudes.

“He came out with a positive attitude. His main thesis was that you need to find a deeper meaning even when you are suffering,” Kalayjian said. Many of his friends died after their release because they felt defeated after surviving the camps.

It was while Kalayjian and her peers were immersed in generational trauma that the earthquake in Armenia happened in 1988.

“We said, we have to put the research on hold and help our people. I put together a team and we did the first mental health outreach,” she said. “We dealt with a lot of resistance from Moscow.”

She recalled how the Soviet Ministry of Health representatives would insist that they did not need help with mental health, as no one had gone crazy, instead they had experienced the devastation of an earthquake.

However, they soon needed Thorazine and disposable syringes, which ATOP could help with. Thus, they found their way in. Soon, the group sent 55 psychologists and social workers to help.

Then came Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992; many, she said, told her that if her organization helped those in Armenia, they should offer help during American crises, too.

Therefore, she said, the group’s leadership decided to enlarge the organization and put it under the umbrella of Meaningful World.

Meaningful World also helped in the aftermath of the Northridge, Calif. and Kobe, Japan earthquakes, as well as the Rwandan Genocide.

Meaningful World is composed of volunteer staff, with no overhead. “The people who volunteer for missions, like me, have to pay their own way and raise funds,” she said.

Armenian Genocide Trauma

When she and her Meaningful World team started talking to the Armenian survivors, she said 79 percent told her and the other psychologists that it was the first time they were discussing their pasts. Among the reasons were that they did not want to burden their children or they wanted them to assimilate comfortably to life in the US.

“It was very emotional for us. The last question was about the Turkish denial and propaganda and they became from these nice medz babas and medz mamas, they became tyrants, they started cursing… There was so much anger that I was really concerned. The last stage of your life, according to psychological theories, you need to be in a state of reminiscence about the good old days and in a better place,” she said, and not dealing with their past.

She spoke to Frankel about this rage, which often leads to depression.

“When you are raging, you are projecting it to others. When you are depressed, you are turning it inwards. In both cases it was unhealthy for our community,” she said.

She said when she invited Armenians to the United Nations decades ago to mark the Armenian Genocide, the level of anger expressed was so intense that often security had to intervene and the participants had to be escorted out.

To bring more understanding and closure, her group also conducted Turkish-Armenian dialogue sessions for a decade.

She recalled, “I can still hear him [Frankel]. ‘You have to help them forgive. How long do you plan to wait? Haven’t you suffered long enough? They are not going to acknowledge it. You have to create that. You have to validate one another.’”

“That is why I started the monthly healing groups that we still continue,” she said. “We have one hour a week where you come and share your negative emotions and we show you how to cope so you don’t stay in victim psychology and you, by learning a lesson, or a meaning based on victor Frankel’s therapy, based on his logo therapy. Once you find a deeper meaning, you can cope in a better, healthier way.”

Often, she said, people just do the first part, which is remember and relive the trauma, and cry over it, but they don’t go to the next step, which is finding ways to cope. Her approach offers steppingstones to reach a higher horizon, and thus a different perspective.

“We have a seven-step model that takes you step by step through this but you can’t get to the meaning before you heal,” she said.

She used the analogy of a snake bite.

She explained, “You have to squeeze the poison out. Yes, it hurts while you are talking or remembering, but it’s just like an injection. It hurts but you know you are going to feel better,” she said. “You don’t go running after the snake saying I am a nice person, I am kind, why did you bite me. By that time, if you are not healing yourself, the poison has gone systemic and you have poisoned your whole system. That is what is happening with Armenians with diaspora or even in Armenia. We seem to re-poison ourselves, because we don’t want to jump to the next level.”

She clarified that she did not mean for descendants to forgive the people or government that committed the Genocide. “You don’t forgive the act; you forgive the situation we were in. A hundred years ago, things all around the world were more volatile, more violent, more elementary. Even kids were beaten and it was fine, considered discipline. We have a different mindset. We evolved as human beings,” she said.

She said trauma endured in childhood stays with people long into old age, unless it is dealt with.

For example, she said she had people coming to the therapy sessions who at age 65, are still traumatized by a father’s put-downs when they were 10. “Negative messages stay much longer, up to 40-50 years,” she said. “They are painful. They are like poison. They latch onto something in your organs, because we don’t have a specific organ for emotions. It’s going to go somewhere. You either get a heart attack, or diabetes or arthritis. It’s all about inflammation. The energy is very, very strong and it hurts deeply.”

By contrast, she said, “The positive doesn’t last that long. The positive can be gone in a couple of weeks. That is why regular discharge is needed.”

She said that discharge is similar to what the physical aspect of the human body does on a daily basis. “We need to do that,” she said. “You just check in.

Culturally, she said, there is too much guilt and shame.

“Once a month we have longer workshops, where first two hours we have the theory about how long the negative words stay in our world and we show the research. We show a movie from our missions or other educational programs. Then we sit in a circle and we share. We go through the seven steps of integrative healing model. We move them step by step. We validate and we empathize. That is the healing part. Then we can take them to step four, which is meaning-making lessons. We ask how did you become a better person with this situation that happened to you?” she said.

“You are no longer ‘poor me.’ A lot of Armenians say it’s jakatageer [fate]. You are internalizing it rather than discharging it. Accepting that kind of victim mentality is not good,” she said.

The next steps are gratitude, mindfulness and meditation.

Post-Covid, anxiety and panic attacks are much more prevalent. “It’s amazing with Covid – so many people have panic and anxiety attack. Young people 16 to 28, because they went for five years on screens, with no social stimulation,” suffered a lot. “Socialization is necessary for coping. If at the minimum you don’t have four close friends that you can call weekly, not just texting, you are not healthy,” she said.

“We focus on prevention and healing within,” she said. She often use herbs for their beneficial purposes, including sage, rosemary. Not only are they good for colds and other ailments, burning sage can cleanse a space from negative energies.

Horizontal Violence Post Artsakh

She recently returned from Armenia, where she conducted sessions on horizontal violence. “It’s basically the psychology of oppressed groups because we see this in Haiti, in Sierra Leone, in Palestine, in small countries that have been over the centuries been oppressed by either occupiers, or colonialism or an empire. What happens is that frustration and anger are coming up from the people. It doesn’t blow up because we are still under pressure, so it blows horizontally, my brother or sister,” she explained.

Much of it, she explained, has to do with internalization of the “mindset of the oppressor,” which leads to “looking down on our kind.”

What is sad is the similarity in the stories of all the peoples who have been the targets of genocidal attempts. “The tortures in Sierra Leone were the same I heard from my grandmother,” Kalayjian noted.

“In Armenia when we start talking, they say ‘it’s [genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh] in our DNA, you can’t change it.’ They have given up on themselves. They think this is inherent in their Armenianness. I tell them when we went to Haiti, they say this is Haitian disease! In Sierra Leone, they say it is Sierra Leonian disease. They even have a name for it: pulling down syndrome,” she added.

The name comes from the crabs in a bucket experiment, where the crabs would pull each other down if one were to find a way to get out.

“This is not an Armenian disease,” she stressed. “It can be undone once we start saying we are the generation that are going to start to heal.”

She went to Armenia in October.

During the visit they went to six universities, ministries, NGOs. This was the group’s 27^th mission in Armenia.

Post Karabakh, “horizontal violence is much, much, much stronger, because Karabakh survivors are receiving some aid or six months’ rent or something for free. Then the ones that came from Aleppo are like ‘how come we didn’t receive this kind of assistance?’” she said. Similarly, she said that when Iraqi Armenians moved to Armenia after the war in their country, some were bullied in schools, with Armenia-born students chanting Allah uh-Akbar.

“Then we got Karabakh and lost Karabakh and lost 8,000 kids in 2020 and then in 2023 lost it all together. Now what I heard in October was those comments about Karabakh survivors unfortunately,” she said. “There is a learned helplessness in Armenia.

As Kalayjian said, “Psychotherapy is a journey to help you heal, feel empowered, and grow through the processing and releasing of your anxieties, fears, and frustrations, and the achievement of inner happiness. By letting go of painful experiences, we allow positive energy to fill our hearts, and we generate compassion, hope, and love first for ourselves, and then for others. After all, when we learn to practice forgiveness, embracing that which we cannot change and being the change, we want to see; we bring peace into our lives. We then learn how to discover a meaning or a positive lesson, transforming the painful past into an insightful present.”

To learn more, visit www.meaningfulworld.com.