The Wounds That Cannot Be Seen Hurt the Most

When we analyze Kosovo’s journey over these decades, our eyes naturally turn toward economic development, political challenges, or the successes of our diaspora.

However, there is a massive, silent, and invisible wound that continues to throb in our collective consciousness: the psychological trauma of war and displacement.

Why does this happen? Because our nervous system has a memory.

When we experience a life-threatening danger, the sympathetic nervous system triggers an alarm known as “fight or flight.” When this danger alarm lasts for a long time or is as terrifying as war, our nervous system becomes overloaded and gets “stuck” in that state of alarm.

Only decades later, even when we are safe in our homes in Kosovo or the diaspora, the part of the brain responsible for survival (the amygdala) continues to scan the environment for danger. And we begin to live as though danger is still all around us.

A Pain Without Borders

This pain does not need a passport and knows no geographical boundaries.

Many compatriots in the diaspora, despite having built stable and successful lives around the world, carry a dark room inside themselves where the difficult memories of 1999 sleep. Forced displacement, loss of status, longing for the homeland, and fear for family members have left deep marks that material well-being cannot erase.

In our society, there is often a tendency to minimize this pain. “It passed, we are alive, we must move forward” is one of the phrases we hear most.

However, trauma research consistently shows that it is not the event itself, but the person’s internal experience of it, that determines its psychological impact. Two people can live through the same situation, a war, an accident, a loss, and one may walk away relatively unaffected while the other carries deep and lasting wounds.

This is because trauma, as researchers emphasize, lives in the nervous system, not in the objective facts of what happened.

Psychiatrist and trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, in his landmark work The Body Keeps the Score, argues that what matters is not what occurred externally, but how the brain and body processed, or failed to process, the experience. Someone who was physically distant from danger but whose nervous system was flooded with terror and helplessness can be far more deeply traumatized than someone who was present and witnessed terrible things but had the internal or external resources to cope.

This is why trauma cannot be measured by proximity or “severity” on paper; it must be understood through the lens of the individual’s subjective experience.

Inherited Trauma and the Truth of the Body

Untreated trauma does not vanish; it simply changes form. The nervous system has not yet received the message: “The war is over, we are safe now.”

Today, science proves to us that trauma is transmissible. It is passed down to younger generations in exile through our behaviors, our unexplained fears, and the emotional walls we build around ourselves. Children born in the diaspora, as well as in the homeland, even though they did not experience the war firsthand, often carry the weight of a history they did not live, but feel every day in their homes because they have experienced the war through their parents.

Because of stigma, this pain is often hidden or normalized, but the body never lies. This freeze state of the nervous system manifests openly in our lives:

• In parents: as chronic insomnia.
• In young people: as social anxiety.
• In relationships: as an inability to open up emotionally.

Chronic anxiety, a racing heartbeat, and constant tension in the body are the physical indicators of a trauma that still begs for healing. Most painfully, this overloaded nervous system is unconsciously passed down to younger generations through behavioral patterns and biology. Children feel the “silent alarm” of their parents.

True Strength and Healing

True strength is not to suffer in silence, keeping the body in a permanent state of war. Strength is admitting that you need healing.

Helping the nervous system calm down and find safety is the first step toward true freedom. The time has come to speak openly about our mental health and the symptoms that follow us, both at home and in exile. There is help and healing for everyone, and we hope that no one gives up.

Our society deserves to live in peace, not just on the outside, but inside our own bodies.

Scientific sources: Viking (van der Kolk, 2014) — The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma; World Psychiatry (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018) — Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms.

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