In the spring of 2016, I sat on the beach on the far east side of the island of Cyprus not far from where my father lives, and looked across to Syria. I imagined, in that moment, that I had lost my home, that everything was lost. It was quiet on the shore, just a few miles from the border that divides the island. There were few tourists at that time of year and the seascape before me was a shimmering, turquoise paradise. A mere boat ride away, bombs were falling and people dying. The level of destruction was, and is, incomprehensible: devastation and damage so absolute that beautiful towns and cities no longer exist.

I felt compelled to help in any way I could. I couldn’t go to Syria, of course, so I decided to volunteer at the Hope Centre in Athens, a place of safety for women and children, that offered a play area, showers, a sofa where new mothers could nurse their babies and, in the absence of a food licence, have tea and biscuits. Each day, about a hundred refugees would come in from the camps.

During my time in Athens I was able to observe the different ways people dealt with trauma. In the evenings, I spoke to people in nearby Victoria Square, or visited some of the campsites, such as the old airport and the old school. Some people wanted to talk, to string something linear and coherent together, like piecing together a puzzle. One woman drew her memories with charcoal, dark sketches of people and places that she had known. Another woman wrote in a diary, choosing to keep her words secret from the rest of the world. These two women had found ways to release their experiences – through images or words they had communicated with themselves or others.

I heard the war in his voice, in the silences, in tiny displays of emotion

Communication, whether private or public, is integral to healing. Reaching outwards – as I witnessed when a group put together a theatre performance in the school courtyard, chronicling their journeys from Syria – can stop trauma being lost in a deathly void inside the individual. Equally, the shared experience can have a cathartic effect on the audience. Other people’s stories can help us listen to our own.

I took a photograph of the faces of the people in the audience, and I look at this picture sometimes when I want to remember the power and importance of coming together at such difficult times. One girl, however, held a notepad, opened and closed it, and wrote nothing. It was not clear to me whether the atrocities she had experienced had become a blank in her mind, or if she was unable to express her thoughts. I wonder if that notepad has since been filled.

One man had lost his voice, and would sit on the pavement on Elpidos street and cut his arms with a knife. I was told that he had lost his mother and two brothers. Sometimes he held their pictures instead of the knife, and in time he was able to say “I miss you” to the loved ones he had lost. He had used the knife when his feelings were completely and utterly unnameable.

Before volunteering in Athens, I had worked for six years as a psychotherapist in a hospital in Westminster. I had become more than familiar with the concept of transgenerational trauma, and how it played out, often undetected, in people’s lives, just as it had in mine. The idea of transgenerational trauma originated after the Second World War, when various studies demonstrated that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors demonstrated certain symptoms of trauma. As psychologist Molly Castelloe says: “Nightmares and emotional and behavioural problems showed that the original trauma of the grandparent or parent had far-reaching effects.”

In Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations, psychoanalyst Gerard Fromm explains that “what human beings cannot contain of their experience – what had been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable – falls out of social discourse, but very often on to and into the next generation”.

Following 9/11, Maurice De Witt, who worked as a Santa Claus on Fifth Avenue, noticed a difference in the behaviour of parents towards their children. They would not “let the hands of their children go. The kids sense that. It’s like water seeping down, and the kids can feel it… There is an anxiety, but the kids can’t make the connections.” Fromm says: “This astute man was noticing a powerful double message in the parent’s action. Consciously and verbally, the message was ‘Here’s Santa, love him.’ Unconsciously and physically, it was, ‘Here’s Santa, fear him.’ The unnamed trauma of 9/11 was communicated to the next generation by the squeeze of a hand.” This vignette demonstrates how the secret stories of past generations can unconsciously shape our understanding of the world.

I am a second-generation migrant. As a child, I was afraid of bombs. I would wake up in the night because I could hear them, whistles, deep in the atmosphere, though I lived in a quiet neighbourhood in London. Both of my parents had come to the capital as refugees during the war in Cyprus in 1974, where my dad had been a commanding officer. I was born six years later. We lived first in a council estate in Islington, then in Edmonton, then in a house in the suburbs that seemed to be on fire. There was warmth, lots of noise, and the smell of rolled vine leaves or keftedes or moussaka or the Thursday night frozen-meal treat from the supermarket – but that house was on fire with a kind of rage I couldn’t understand. I was afraid of the bombs. I could hear them in my dreams, but when I jumped out of bed and looked through the window, there was only a clear black sky.

My dad never spoke about his experiences during the war, but years later, my uncle told me a story. When my dad escaped the war, travelling through Europe, eating fruits off the trees in France in order to survive, he finally arrived in England with my uncle. They lived for a short time in a studio flat off Vauxhall Bridge Road. He would wake up in the middle of the night, my uncle told me, bolt up-right, and shout: “Get your heads down. Get your heads down!” My dad had never said these words to me, but I could hear them. I heard the war in his voice, in the silences, in his actions, in minute displays of emotion. My dad had handed down a ghost, the uncontained essence of the war he had lived through, formless and huge.

It was only during a recent phone call that my dad opened up

It was only during a recent phone conversation, when I told him that I was writing about transgenerational trauma, that he finally opened up. He explained how, to this very day – 45 years after the war – memories of that time, of the things he had seen, the way he had failed to save his friend’s life, haunted him more or less weekly. He told me that one day he had been travelling with a group of soldiers in a van and saw they were about to be shot. “Get your heads down,” he had shouted, “Get your heads down now!” He saved their lives.

How could I have known this when I was a little girl? During this same phone conversation, he said he had wanted to keep me safe from the pain. But as a child I had felt a sense of unnameable danger, that somehow one wrong move could lead to catastrophe. Is it a coincidence that I write about war and trauma?

During that conversation, my dad had told me his story and I had listened. As Fromm says: “One task of transmission might be to resist the dissociation of that heritage and to bring its full tragic story into discourse.”

Maybe I write about war-torn places as a way of understanding those traumas, of naming something that sometimes cannot be named, a way of understanding and being sorry for what my parents, and others, have endured and lost. Perhaps this was why I was so compelled to volunteer in Athens, though at that time, sitting on the beach in Cyprus, looking out across the water, I was drawn to it in a way that I couldn’t quite explain.

I realise now that people need to be able to release their realities in any way they can, and that if we listen, and show that we want to listen, these traumas will not slip from our social discourse.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri is published by Zaffre at £12.99. Order it for £11.43 from guardianbookshop.com