Drawn to memoirs and engaged in my own ancestral research, Jen Soriano’s book Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing captured me with its title. And the enriching and transformational contents of the book more than live up to this intrigue.

Inevitably, life is as challenging as it is joyous. Yet, often we choose to keep the darker aspects hidden. In Nervous, Jen Soriano (b. 1976) reveals the full range of her experience, the painful, unsightly, beautiful, and especially the revelatory. With Nervous, Soriano has created a courageous work of art that invites readers on a journey to better understand ourselves. Although her story is personal, exposing her vulnerabilities, like all powerful memoirs, it reveals greater truths that pertain to all, highlighting our connection with one another and the amazing planet we live on.

The book has three primary threads: Soriano’s personal story, the history of colonization and war in the Philippines, and what she’s learned about transgenerational trauma. Yet, as I write this, I encounter the difficulty in teasing out any one thread from the others because they intersect to such a great extent. The historical, transgenerational, and personal merge when and where we may not expect them to, hence the importance of the kind of examination Soriano conducts and so beautifully shares with us.

A Personal Journey

The nuclear Soriano family is Filipino-American; the parents were born and raised in the Philippines, arriving in the United States as young professionals in 1962.

We meet Jen Soriano as a child living outside Chicago, with two older brothers with whom some of her happiest childhood memories reside. Her father is a medical doctor, and her mother assumes the role of homemaker. The house is surrounded by high fencing, and young Soriano lives a rather secluded and overprotected life. Her parents, especially her mother, are distant, rarely showing their love in any emotional or physical way.

Soriano becomes a person in pain. This debilitating pain is physical and psychological. It is often unbearable. Most frustrating is that it is seemingly unexplainable and she is not taken seriously by the many doctors she consults. After years of intense struggle, she has a breakthrough.

“Then one day, while reading up on various conditions, I realized that they all had one thing in common: they were all issues affecting the nervous system. Suddenly the question that occupied me transformed from “What’s wrong with me and why can’t I overcome it?” and also from “What’s wrong with me and why can’t my father solve it?” to “What happened to my nervous system and how can I understand it?”(32).

This propels Soriano on another mission, one where she traces her roots, connecting with people and places that provide insight into the experiences of her grandparents, parents, the Filipino people, and her ancestors’ island homeland.

Growing up in the Midwest, followed by undergraduate studies at Harvard University in Massachusetts, it isn’t until Soriano relocates to the San Francisco Bay Area that she gains any traction in holistically understanding her condition.

There she increases her community involvement and connects with other activists, many of them Filipino. She becomes part of a compassionate community, and no longer feels as much an outsider.

Although Soriano had been to the Philippines occasionally to visit extended family, she returns as an activist and journalist, one searching for answers, pieces to a puzzle. She widens her lens, seeing more than her own life and feeling more than her own pain. She begins to better understand her people’s history, as well as the steps being taken to heal their land after environmental devastation. She sees that this restoration correlates with the health of the people.

“During the Cordillera Festival in 2002, I also interviewed Banag Sinumlag, a Kalinga leader who was involved in the Chico Dam struggles in the seventies…The story of the Chico River is an unfinished one. It is an allegory for the place where all of humanity finds itself now: at a crossroads between continued exploitation of natural resources and a more sustainable way of being, which is essentially the crossroads between climate destruction and transformation. It’s hard to see how we might choose the right path without completely changing our worldview”(165).

Her need to understand her family and people’s survival, to understand the pain that dogs her, to break open the story of her ancestors, is all to initiate healing. What Soriano learns about herself, she wisely transfers to her son, Little T.  Instead of unknowingly transferring trauma, she transfers understanding, knowledge, and healing.

“Like me, and like so many of us, Little T was struggling to manage a hypersensitive nervous system, one that was easily overstimulated by sound, touch, and the flood of other sensory inputs from everyday life. We learned occupational therapy exercises to help calm his nervous system and pursued a course of music therapy designed to stimulate his parasympathetic system through a fiber of the vagus nerve in the inner ear. I learned about this form of music therapy when I interviewed Stephen Porges for this book, and I will be forever grateful for this example of how the project of writing can indeed heal”(235).

Rewriting the Narrative of a Tragic History

In the chapter titled “381 Years,” Soriano outlines Filipino history, from the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in 1521, until the end of the American-Philippine War in 1902. In poetic format, she uses the left column of the page to describe more factual aspects, and in the right column, she shares an alternate interpretation. On the left is what supposedly happened; on the right, how to transcend centuries of colonization and war, how a people conquered, oppressed, and forced to repeatedly fight for their lives and liberation moves forward. Here’s an excerpt from this 25 -page pivotal chapter: (Tagalog is the language of the Philippines.)

But Luzviminda Francisco enumer-
ates that more than one million Filipi-
nos died during this forgotten war.

When we are met with erasure, we
story back with permanence. On my
back is the word “pagmamahal.” “Big
Love” in Tagalog, needled in perma-
nent ink.

 

American blockades meant Filipinos
had little access to firearms. These
casualties were due to superior fire-
power, not due to superior humanity.

 

We can step up to the superior path
of love. We have its marks on our body.

“[Filipinos] stood up to the heavily
armed Americans with spears, darts,
the ubiquitous bolo, and even stones,
prompting General Lawton to re-
mark, ‘…they are the bravest men I
have ever seen.’”

We take back and flip the meaning
of battle, armed with spears, darts,
and stones, ubiquitous bolos of
transgenerational bravery and love. (121)

Through Soriano’s woven memoir, I learned some Filipino history I had never learned in school and some Tagalog words, such as bolos, a sort of knife or machete, here transformed into tools of love and courage. I was introduced to Filipino-American figures, such as Rocky Rivera, a rapper and journalist, along with many other prominent professionals with cutting-edge research to share about transgenerational trauma. We are reminded and understand  that “history works its forces on us all,” but when we know this, we can work to counteract them.

“We’re tired,” says rapper Rocky Rivera. “We’ve been resisting for so long.”

And so some say: “Walk away from what’s come before. History is heavy. History should be left in the past.”

But we carry history with us whether we face it or not. James Baldwin writes that we must wrestle with history, contest with it, in order to bring ourselves out of it.

My body concurs. Its lightning bolts and embers remind me that history works its forces on us all. Many of our bodies long to read the silent scripts buried in our nerves.

And so we dig up history, and we work it. We flip the conquered word and reverse it”(131).

Soriano shares another one of her discoveries: life’s deepest challenges are not individual battles or anything we should attempt to manage alone. Yet, we absorb the cultural messages to keep our vulnerabilities, usually seen as weaknesses, under wraps, to suppress our pain.

“American individualism tells us that our wounds are our own and that we should hide them while dwelling in shame. Ableism tells us we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, walk off our wounds, and move on…But the Filipino notion of kapwa is an antidote to American individualism, ableism, and toxic self-blame. As Leny Mendoza Strobel writes, “Our collective memory may be wounded, but from this wound also comes a collective power to heal”(151).

Community gatherings and rituals helped move Soriano along the path to wholeness. That and breaking generational silence, a silence that allows pain to travel from grandparents to parents to children, and for Soriano, what might have been to her son but for her breakthrough. As the writer expresses here, there is a time, place, and reason for silence, but not when it continues far beyond its initial necessity.

“My grandfather’s silence endured for generations. Silence can be honorable when telling would betray the lives of others. Silence can propel us forward when coping is the only medicine. Silence can also take on a life of its own. What fails to come out in words becomes buried in bodies of water – human bodies, riverine bodies – until the words are ready to spring from the source and flow free”(237).

Jen Soriano is a Filipina-American writer, scholar, and performer. Her memoir Nervous won the 2024 Memoir Prize. Soriano has a BA in History and Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Rainier Writing Workshop in the Seattle area where she now lives. Soriano is a narrative strategist and a “leader in movements for racial, economic, gender, and climate justice.” Read more about Jen Soriano here.

Transgenerational Trauma

As Soriano processes the story of her grandfather’s torture and death and her grandmother’s home being occupied by Japanese soldiers during WWII, while she and her children still live there, she begins to recognize some of the basis of her pain.

“After the incident where I felt I was reliving my grandmother’s grief, I came across the work of Lakota social worker Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart. Her research extended my journey to tracing the roots of trauma beyond my own life…She developed the framework of historical trauma, which carries with it the related experience of unresolved generational grief…When one generation is simply preoccupied with survival, the trauma response continues, and often worsens, in future generations, until the trauma can begin to be processed. Only when we face this historical trauma response – which can range from grief and illness to depression and addiction – can healing begin both for the individual and for the generations that come before and beyond” (92-93).

Despite all the work Soriano had done and how much healing she had already experienced, when she and her partner decide to have a child, a desired experience, her reaction as the pregnancy progresses is unexplainable until she learns of a condition called tokophobia. Tokophobia is defined as an extreme fear of childbirth that can be caused by abuse or rape. In Soriano’s case, it was related to her grandmother and most likely other ancestors’ experiences.

“I now believe the tokophobia symptoms that I experienced are some of the clearest evidence that I carry transgenerational trauma in my body. With every wave of disgust, I felt the potential energy of war in my nerves. I sensed the muscle memory of running, hiding, striking. I felt my grandmother, how she may not have wanted a fourth child, especially one that may have been born from rape and war…In other words, my body treated pregnancy like a traumatic outcome of imperial war. Perhaps it wasn’t trying to expel a fetus, but instead was trying to expel the toxic imprint of colonization on my nerves”(211).

As the memoir progresses, it becomes less focused on Soriano’s personal story and broadens, encompassing more than the present, and including more of the vast land on which we live and rely. There is so much power in what Dr. Eduardo Duran shares:

“I think of what Pueblo psychologist Eduardo Duran says: that all of us carry a kind of soul wound, a sluice of grief and anger that springs from generational loss. Some of us carry this wound lightly, some so profoundly, it threatens to rupture us from the inside out. Duran writes: “In this moment if you begin to heal yourself, you are healing all the hurts of the ancestors you carry, in this moment you’re healing for the next seven generations. What an incredible place to be”(224).

When Soriano takes her son on a visit to the Philippines to learn more about his heritage, she is prepared to teach him about both the ugliness, along with the beauty.

“I had come prepared to teach Little T about the worst of what we inherit, and instead we are all learning about transformation…when it comes to carrying trauma, it’s not that we are polluted but that we bear burdens from environments past and present, burdens that are sometimes so thick, they can keep us from reflecting the sky”(244).

Environments can and are being cleaned up, nursed back to health, and this process benefits more than the land itself.

Trauma-wise

This journey to becoming trauma-wise is much larger than any one of us and addresses the systemic dynamic of trauma, its prevention, and the healing process (the emphasis in bold is mine):

“This is what it means to become trauma-wise, rather than trauma-responsive or even trauma-informed. When we become trauma-wise, we accept trauma as part of living, but work toward more equitable and coordinated systems for addressing its long-term harms. The work of being trauma-wise requires a vision ample enough to reorganize society toward trauma prevention on a collective scale. As Judith Herman writes, trauma work is fundamentally collective and political since it brings into focus whole populations of people affected by traumatic systems of oppression. As Aurora Levins Morales suggests, trauma healing, at its roots, is therefore the work of systemic political and cultural change. This process looks less like traditional medical care that treats disease as problems of individual bodies, and more like the integrated work of watershed management, which takes an ecosystems approach toward the well-being of all living things”(250).

I feel such hope and guidance in Soriano’s words. She leaves us with a powerful vision and these questions to ponder:

“We are facing a watershed moment where healing from trauma is a generational call. How will we answer it? Will we reproduce old patterns of divide-and-conquer, especially in the face of rising tides of mental health crises and climate change? Or will we re-member and reenvision our interdependence and flow toward collective transformation? The answers, and new questions, are up to us”(252).

Jen Soriano is a Nasty Woman Writer, bravely sharing where few have shared before, beckoning us to reimagine what can be.

© Maria Dintino 2025

Works Cited

Soriano, Jen. Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2023.