[Burden and capability of damaged parents--how refugee children can grow in exile]

In trauma, dialectical tension arises between the inner perspective of the traumatized subject and the outside perspective (objective situation), between environmental stress and the subjective attribution of meaning, as well as between experience and behaviour. The traumatic process--the subject's endeavour to comprehend the overwhelming, often inconceivable experience and integrate it into its concepts of self and world--is understood against the backdrop of these interacting dimensions. The process phases "emerge from each other, run parallel, and permeate each other" (Fischer u. Riedesser, 2003). Problems that arise in the aftermath of trauma are rarely overcome by the victims alone. Attempts to process and self-heal have a social dimension, and family members are affected by war, persecution and flight in individual, varying ways. The impacts of violence experienced by parents from different crisis regions are examined in case studies with regard to the psychological development of indirectly impacted children growing up in exile.