CSA, Narrative Writing and Cultural Repair: Reclaiming a Lithuanian Identity by visiting scholar Andrea Nicki
Feminist ethicist and interdisciplinary scholar Andrea Nicki was a visiting scholar with the Recovery Histories project at Birkbeck in the summer term 2026. She is currently completing a book about child sexual abuse, mental health ethics, critical trauma studies and feminist psychology. Here Andrea talks about how her lived experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, her intellectual development and her cultural identity as a third-generation north American Lithuanian intersect.
Like many survivors living with the impact of CSA, I have sought to construct a coherent narrative of my trauma informed by broader cultural and political contexts. When I undertook psychotherapy to heal from abuse inflicted by my father, a second-generation Lithuanian North American, the approach was limited and focussed on diagnosing my father’s troubling behaviour rather than making sense of it in terms of wider factors. The counsellors never asked about his cultural background and perceived him wholly within a general framework of feminist theory, and simply as an angry, domineering man who suffered the traumatic loss of his mother at an early age. Growing up in my maternal extended family, some of my personal traits and talents were viewed negatively and were seen as resembling those of my father and his mother. As a result, I lacked a way of valuing both this side of my family and myself.
Susan Brison, in her book Aftermath, on recovering from adult extrafamilial stranger rape, engages in narrative writing that remakes a self from the scattered shards of disrupted memory. This blog suggests that, for some culturally diverse survivors of CSA, recovery depends not only on integrating distressing experiences but also on recovering neglected family and cultural histories that reshape the meaning of those experiences. In this way, survivor narrative writing can help rebuild a personal sense of self by reclaiming a fractured cultural identity and using moral imagination to situate the experience of CSA within broader histories of political violence, migration, and ethnic marginalization. In this blog, I narrate the remaking of a shattered Lithuanian identity and explore Lithuanian family history and the historical damage inflicted on Lithuania and its people.
I grew up as a generation Xer in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, which was, at the time, a small, relatively homogenous city, made up of predominantly Western European settlers. My father was a professor of psychology from Hartford, Connecticut. He was very hard-working and constantly engaged inside and outside the home: playing sports, performing community service, gardening plots of vegetables and fruit in different areas of the city, and refurbishing, doing carpentry, painting, wallpapering, and decorating our home. However, while on the surface he appeared as a success story of the American Dream, at home he was extremely volatile, hypervigilant, and preoccupied with invasion.
While Fredericton was a safe middle-class town, with low city crime rates, my father was regularly reminding us of the risk of kidnapping in malls, parks, and other city spaces. These psychological and behavioural patterns in a middle-class white professional were very troubling for our family and my mother, who was from a prominent family of Western European settlers with considerable cultural capital and male relations who displayed excellent mental health and a strong sense of self-esteem. While psychological approaches seek to understand mental health challenges in terms of family dynamics, my father had shared only a few details about his family, such as that he grew up in tightly knit Lithuanian community, his parents had worked in factories, and that his mother had died at the young age of 44 when he was 12. In general, when asked about his family background and ancestors, my father would become emotionally heavy and sunken, as if his Lithuanian roots were like a heavy anchor pulling him under.
As a mental health ethicist, I have sought to understand my father’s behaviour not simply as irrational but as an intelligible response to harmful contexts. This has led me to explore Lithuanian culture and history. I bought an ancestry DNA kit and discovered many second and third cousins on my paternal side. I travelled to Lithuania during a summer and sought out educated cousins with positive personal traits who could bridge gaps in my knowledge while helping me feel more positive about this side of the family. A very kind cousin who was a professor took me on a day long tour with his brother and wife of a few central cities and explained at length the country’s history and violent occupation by the Russian empire up until 1990, including periods of severe repression involving torture, mass arrests, killings, and deportations to Siberia.
This new knowledge about Lithuania and spending time with psychologically resilient elder cousins served as a catalyst for a more positive reassessment of my father, my family experience, and Lithuania. Growing up in Canada, I was taught that Lithuania and other small countries were part of the USSR, with little recognition of their competing claims to sovereignty. As Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life, public recognition of lives and histories is shaped by hierarchies of value. The limited acknowledgement of smaller nations’ histories can contribute to the demoralization of those who inherit those histories, undermining their sense of belonging and security in multicultural societies.
Research on postmemory in genocide survivors further suggests that cultural trauma is transmitted across generations not only as learned history but also through intergenerational psychological and behavioural patterns, such as preoccupation with invasion. As Lithuanian diaspora writer Laima Vincė has argued, descendants of victims of deportation and imprisonment have experienced long-term effects, showing second- and third-generation trauma consistent with other recognized genocides. While my father appeared to my counsellors and family to exhibit irrational fears and rage, these may also be understood as culturally informed hypervigilance rooted in inherited concerns about survival and protection.
Like other CSA survivors, I have used narrative poetry therapy to facilitate personal growth and healing and to express a reassessment of my father and Lithuania, as illustrated in an excerpt from my poem, “Never Russian, Never Erased,” below. This poem recasts my father’s preoccupation with invasion and anger—his “scarlet” face—as the colour of beetroot soup, a Lithuanian staple food, and as a response reflecting not only male conditioning but also intergenerational cultural trauma and ethnic erasure in North America:
…My Lithuanian American father would rage whenever someone encroached on his space. Once in childhood, he and I were cycling home and a car came alongside ignoring us, coming too close. So, he shouted at the driver, his face as scarlet as Lithuanian beetroot soup.
The driver stopped in the middle of the street and got out. The two shouted at each other, with my father raising a fist and saying the driver had tried to knock him off the road. I remember feeling scared, crying, and thinking my father was a maniac.
But today I realized my father’s fury wasn’t just personal. … My father’s father who had fled from Russian occupied Lithuania in the 20th century was always treated by others as a Russian, his nationality never seen, always erased. No matter how often my grandfather corrected others, spelled and respelled his long Lithuanian name, others could not hear…
That day, and many others, my father was fighting for much more than himself and his daughter—his country.
This revaluation of Lithuanian cultural traits connects to broader efforts among post-Soviet peoples to reclaim cultural identity and heal inherited wounds. Many Lithuanians and members of other communities affected by Soviet state violence may be seen as engaging in a therapeutic process articulated and systematized in the post-Soviet Russian genealogy movement Rodologia, founded by Larisa and Valery Dokuchaev. Promoted as an international practice for post-Soviet communities, it incorporates ideas of self-realization and personal growth while placing greater emphasis on kinship ties, genealogy, and historical influences. As a culturally informed approach, it complements cross-cultural psychiatry and psychology by emphasizing the importance of cultural narratives in understanding psychological distress.
Rodologia’s healing model focuses not only on personal relationships but also on the relationship between the state and its citizens and how this shapes behavioural patterns and psychological well-being across generations. Participants explore pivotal experiences in their ancestors’ lives and consider their relevance to the present while distinguishing the past from the present. Although Rodologia has been aptly criticized for relying on a literal epigenetic model of trauma, underemphasizing present-day structural factors, and overstating its healing potential, as a sociological lens it complements conventional approaches that leave Soviet violence unacknowledged and overgeneralize about European groups. Personal traits such as hypervigilance and low self-esteem are thus historicized in relation to post-Soviet memory and broader social and historical trauma. In this view, my father’s behaviour, which appeared irrational in North America, becomes intelligible within a diaspora community shaped by stories of deportation, imprisonment, and invasion.
Such histories were mirrored in the new North American homeland. Through genealogical research, I learned that my grandfather’s brother and my father’s first cousin were both kidnapped and murdered as young men. Within the Rodologian framework, healing involves confronting pivotal moments in one’s ancestors’ lives. I engaged with newspaper accounts of these crimes and used moral imagination to consider their impact on my grandfather. These losses would have contributed to attitudes of suspicion and hypervigilance. Such experiences differed markedly from those of my maternal Western European North American family and may have contributed, in part, to different psychological and behavioural patterns across generations.
One source of shame that my cultural and genealogical research has transformed is my last name. I was told it had been shortened from Nagrocki to ease assimilation but given no further explanation, leaving me wondering about other possible reasons. I learned that the Lithuanian language differs greatly from English and that Lithuanian surnames tend to be much longer and are difficult for many English speakers to pronounce, a discovery that reduced some of my anxiety about my Lithuanian identity. Further, while my father had told me that his family had struggled financially, he had not explained that this was common among Lithuanian immigrants at the time. Since I had felt some shame that, despite being white people privileged within a racial hierarchy, they had not achieved the American Dream, my research helped me understand that this was due, in part, not only to linguistic and cultural differences but also to Russian imperialism, which had stripped my father’s family of property and educational opportunities and forced them to migrate without cultural capital.
In post-Soviet and diasporic contexts, self-improvement can take different forms. As an act of self-love, I have given myself the Lithuanian first name Austėja, after the goddess Austėja, and publicly share my grandfather’s original Lithuanian last name, Nagrodskė, adjusted to follow Lithuanian naming conventions related to gender. I regularly wear amber, often referred to as Lithuania’s gold, and linen, a longstanding staple of Lithuanian culture.
