By Cal LaFauci, Belmont Voice correspondent
As a child, Belmont resident Kenneth Reich watched war movies with his brother, searching for clues about how combat changed those who lived through it. His father, Herman Reich, survived the Holocaust but never spoke about the experience.
Kenneth never questioned his father’s silence until he became a psychotherapist and treated a patient whose emotional wounds tracked back to parents who had survived the Holocaust. That case taught him about intergenerational trauma – the passing of psychological harm from one generation to the next – and reshaped his understanding of the mental consequences of war.
The Harvard Medical School teaching associate has since channeled that understanding into a series of projects aimed at easing the emotional aftermath of war for families. His latest: a handbook designed to build resilience in children worldwide.
“There’s another generation of children that are being traumatized all over the world right now in Iran, Ukraine, the Congo … Some of them will fare better, others not as well, depending on how their parents manage the experience,” Reich said. “My main hope is that the toolkits have the potential to disrupt some of that unconscious transmission.”
After several years of additional training, Reich emerged as a psychoanalyst and founded the Psychodynamic Couple and Family Institute of New England (PCFINE), which integrated couples’ therapy and psychoanalytic practices.
Then the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks hit.
Reich’s daughter lived in Astoria, New York, and he rushed to the city to check on her. He woke up in the middle of the night during his first night there because the wind had pushed the scent of ash from the World Trade Center toward Queens. Driving back to Boston, he passed empty fire stations draped in flowers and listened to F-16s roar overhead. He knew he wanted to help people heal from the emotional wreckage.
“All of this trauma just happened, and it was just all reverberating with no way to process it,” Reich said. “It made me think about World War II and the Holocaust, and then that patient. That was when I really started thinking about the impacts of intergenerational trauma again.”
He organized a conference through PCFINE titled “War, Terrorism, and Children: Supporting Family Strength and Resilience.”
While planning the event, Reich learned that relatives of military Reserve members and National Guard troops lacked access to the same psychiatric services available to active-duty military families. The gap left spouses and children at greater risk of developing mental health problems and trauma, especially when a loved one never came home.
Reich set out to close that gap.
He invited those families to attend the conference and assembled a team of three experts – Diane Levin, former assistant superintendent of Newton Schools, Carol Daynard, and Dr. Benjamin Siegel – to write a pamphlet for parents, teachers, and pediatricians on the emotional toll of war and deployment.
Drawing on existing research and each collaborator’s expertise, the group finished the first edition of the Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists (SOFAR) Guide. Reich later recruited Beverly Ann Dexter to help write the second issue and asked Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Thomas Kelley to help distribute it.
“Ken Reich, who is a networker extraordinaire, managed to get funding for the printing and distribution … and it just sort of caught on. It [spread] like wildfire,” Daynard said. “[The SOFAR Guide was] in every school, and some of the nurses from when I had been assistant superintendent in Newton called me up and said, ‘We have this guide. It’s really helpful. Thank you so much.’”
After a two-year break, Reich set out to create a new resource focused on strengthening resilience in children scarred by war. The project paused when his wife and brother got sick. He returned to the work in November 2023, using a bout of COVID-19 as a time to rethink the approach. He then decided to host a symposium on the subject.
The virtual gathering, “The Impact of War on Children: Supporting Resilience in Children and Families,” took place in September 2024.
“It had experts from… all over the world, talking about how we can understand the impact [of war] from a psychological point of view, a family-focused point of view, an epidemiological point of view, and… how music therapy has been used in war-torn areas to promote resilience,” Siegel said. “We hoped the content of the conference would lead to a brochure similar to the SOFAR project, but could be used by a variety of people.”
Reich and his colleagues are now assembling content from those panels into the project’s framework and contacting panelists to ask whether they want to contribute. He hopes to distribute the finished product through the United Nations and the World Health Organization and launch a music video and website alongside it.
The work remains in its early stages, and Reich says he knows the hardest stretch lies ahead. But he intends to see it through so children and families, as well as generations to come, can live happier, healthier lives.
“When I thought about starting this project, I didn’t know if it was going to work or not,” he said with a small laugh. “And, now that I’m in the middle of it, I can certainly say that the hard parts are ahead, but what’s motivating me is that if there’s just one child that gets help from anything that comes out of this project, that’s enough. Because you never know who that one child is going to become.”
Cal LaFauci is a journalism student in BU’s Newsroom program, a partnership between the university, The Belmont Voice, and other news organizations in the Boston area.
