Healing the Whole Family is a graphic story written by Grace Chiang in collaboration with mental wellness consultant Eunice Yuen and artist Nealie Ngo. The story follows a teenage girl’s struggles with her mental health and her family. The graphic story was designed as a resource for individuals experiencing similar struggles and may be particularly relevant to the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. 

The image above depicts an excerpt from Healing the Whole Family. Accompanied by the story’s prose, this illustration depicts two adult silhouettes drawn as prison cells. Enclosed within each figure is a young boy or girl, both covered in bandages. The silhouette-prison cells also contain multiple liquor bottles, the image of a person raising a fist threateningly, and an anxious-looking child watching two adults who appear to be intimately connected. 

This illustration represents the ways in which unresolved experiences from childhood can be carried into adulthood and can, consequently, shape family dynamics and relationships across generations. The children enclosed in the silhouette-prison cells represent the younger selves of the parents, trapped inside the cells with the traumas they endured. They are both covered in bandages, depicting the unhealed wounds they have covered up over the years. The surrounding images within the cells represent the adverse childhood experiences each parent endured, including alcoholism, aggression, and exposure to familial conflict. Together, this powerful imagery conveys how unhealed childhood trauma can remain trapped in a person, even into adulthood. The children also extend their hands beyond the confines of their respective cells toward one another. This suggests a desire for connection between two people carrying their own unresolved wounds, implying that healing can involve recognizing and sharing experiences of trauma rather than continuing to carry them alone. 

Ultimately, this image captures the experiences of families enduring intergenerational trauma. Taken together with the story’s prose, the illustration suggests that the protagonist’s parents carried their own unresolved childhood experiences into adulthood, which may have shaped their parenting practices and relationship with their daughter. Their unresolved past wounds contributed to how they raised their own child, demonstrating how the effects of trauma can extend beyond the individual who had originally experienced it. However, there is also a sense of hope being portrayed in the image. The children reaching towards one another suggest that connection and vulnerability with each other may allow the parents an opportunity to confront their unhealed wounds rather than carrying them forward into their own parenting. Here, Healing the Whole Family depicts intergenerational trauma not as an inevitable cycle, but instead as something that can be interrupted through awareness, connection, and healing. 

To read the whole graphic story, visit the website: https://nealiengo.wixsite.com/htwfgraphicnovel

Contributing Writer: Bryann Murray

Image Credits: Ngo, N., Chiang, G., & Yeun, E. (2022). Healing the whole family: A graphic story intervention for AAPI mental health [Figure 2]. Graphic Medicine Review, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.7191/gmr.696 . Licensed under CC BY 4.0.