Having trauma play an active role in your life can be exhausting and have a wide range of effects on who you are and how you live your life. Trauma in general refers to the impact that overwhelming and extraordinary experiences have on your life. This includes feelings of helplessness, your ability to form and maintain healthy relationships, and how much you believe in yourself.
People living with trauma tend to experience a sense of fear even when the traumatic experience is over. They also tend to have altered perceptions of life and see the world differently than they did either before the trauma or than they may have if they’d never experienced the trauma. If you’ve experienced trauma in your life, you may find that you feel feelings of shame and sadness that you can’t always explain. You may also have physical responses to upsetting or triggering situations such as freezing (1).
Some people have been so severely impacted by their traumatic experiences that they’re diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and may experience intrusive thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to their trauma. These people may startle easily and may even feel numb to feelings(1).
Trauma can have a great impact on your life but with proper support such as therapy, somatic exercise and movement, and other clinical and alternative interventions, you can still live a full and healthy life.
Unfortunately, not all trauma has to be directly experienced to feel the effects of it (2). It’s possible to experience the symptoms that people who have lived through trauma experience due to them essentially passing them down to you. This is known as generational trauma.
Generational trauma is trauma that is experienced by someone passing it down to them. This is typically a caregiver such as a parent that passes it down to their children. While the type of trauma passed down can be the result of domestic abuse, it can also be the result of living through things such as war and other related traumatic events (1).
Some examples of this include a mother who was harshly abused during childhood or a father whose parents were part of the Holocaust. While these parents may not abuse their children and their children won’t experience the Holocaust, it’s possible that over-sharing about their experiences or refusing to talk about them at all could pass the trauma onto their children (1).
Any trauma that is passed from a parent or other caregiver down to a child in any way is considered to be generational trauma. How it’s passed down, the extent to which it’s passed down, and the impact the trauma has on the individual it has been passed down to can vary a great deal from one individual to another (1). Some people may be heavily impacted by generational trauma, while others may not be quite as susceptible to its impact.
There are a variety of ways that trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. It’s possible that children with parents who have experienced trauma may feel the need to compensate for the pain and suffering their parents endured. This means these individuals would try to “make up” for what their parents went through.
Parents who have experienced trauma may also unknowingly develop particular parenting patterns that are a result of their own experiences and by using those patterns to raise their children, they could pass their trauma on (1).
The way a parent discusses their traumatic experiences with their children can also have a strong impact on the way their children experience life. Properly sharing information and communicating what was experienced may be important and helpful, but doing so in the appropriate way is key (1). Unfortunately, without the help of a professional, it can be difficult to decipher which way is right or wrong.
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If a parent has disordered attachment, then it’s likely that they may demonstrate inconsistencies in their parenting, which can lead to their children having disorganized attachment styles. Parents who end up with disordered attachment styles tend to end up this way due to unresolved trauma and this can get in the way of properly bonding with their children (1).
Children of parents with unresolved trauma may even feel the need to look after their parents’ emotional well-being all while leaving their emotional needs unmet. It’s also possible that parents with trauma will talk about it to their children and influence the way they view the world, often not in a positive way.
Read more: Trauma Somatic Therapy: Benefits, Techniques, and What to Expect
Yes, intergenerational trauma is real and is also known as transgenerational or multigenerational trauma. This type of trauma is common among groups of people who have had war experiences, such as the Holocaust, and refers to trauma being passed down to a third generation or further (4).
Trauma can be transmitted to a third generation psychologically, socially, and biologically and it can significantly impact the mental health and well-being of a generation, even when they don’t directly experience the trauma (3, 4).
Studies have shown that even the grandchildren of people who have experienced profound life trauma can be affected by the experiences of their grandparents (2). Although this can happen, whether or not it does is often dependent on the type of traumatic experience the first-generation had.
The likelihood that the trauma of the first generation will be passed to the third generation can also depend on how vulnerable and resilient the person who experienced the trauma was. This is because these factors may influence how that person responds to their trauma and therefore which aspects of it they do or don’t pass on (2).
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Intergenerational trauma can manifest in many ways and how it manifests can be quite dependent on who is passing it down and who it’s being transmitted to. The grandchildren of trauma survivors may struggle more with anxiety and depression than their peers who aren’t the grandchildren of trauma survivors, even when they don’t directly experience the trauma (5).
They may also have a hard time regulating their emotions, specifically anger, fear, and sadness. This can be because the generations before them had a hard time with this and passed down their struggles due to never having been set a good example about how to manage their emotions.
The grandchildren of trauma survivors may also struggle with self-esteem, which means that their sense of worthiness and adequacy are compromised due to having been exposed to elders who didn’t feel a sense of worthiness and may have felt inadequate due to their traumatic experiences.
These individuals who experience intergenerational trauma may also struggle with things such as substance abuse, which is often modeled by previous generations due to being used as a way of coping with trauma. Being avoidant of other people or overly aggressive are also behaviors that may have been passed down by people who have experienced trauma (5).
The way people who are grandchildren of trauma survivors function within their relationships can also be impacted by intergenerational trauma. These people may struggle to form healthy attachments to their loved ones due to feelings of fear and mistrust. They may also feel the need to act as caregivers prematurely due to feeling the need to compensate for the struggles of previous generations.
Read more: Trauma Release Therapy: What It Is, Types, and Getting Started
Finding your generational trauma can be a complex process. You need to examine family patterns that can be seen through generations as well as emotional triggers in your family. One of the best ways to uncover generational trauma is to talk to the generations before you and try to learn about their experiences and how those experiences impacted their lives. You may be surprised at what information you can uncover by asking the right person the right question and you should proceed with caution when doing this. Yes, you can break generational trauma, but you must make an effort to understand how the trauma of those before you has impacted your life and make attempts to improve the ways in which you’ve been negatively impacted. You can work on yourself in the hope that you won’t pass negative habits and behaviors down to the next generation. Trauma can’t change the makeup of your DNA, but it can alter the way your genes are expressed down the line. This is called epigenetics and involves the way your genes respond to environmental factors as well as trauma, stress, diet, and lifestyle. If you’re severely stressed during crucial developmental times in your life, then how you regulate cortisol can be altered and that change could be passed on to future generations (6). The best way to break a generational cycle is by trying to recognize and understand patterns through generations. You should also educate yourself on generational trauma in general, as well as your family’s personal trauma. Utilizing therapy and counseling and setting boundaries are also helpful for breaking generational cycles. Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find my generational trauma?
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Avoiding the transmission of generational trauma may be challenging or impossible. Fortunately, understanding why this transmission occurs, who it can impact, and how it can impact them can be helpful for navigating this challenging obstacle. Gaining a better understanding of how the trauma of previous generations has impacted the people from them may be helpful for learning how to decrease your chances of having the trauma manifest within you in a truly damaging way. Understanding coping strategies that can be used to deal with generational trauma and utilizing therapies such as somatic massage and talk therapy may be helpful for your own personal growth and well-being. You may not be able to change how your parents and grandparents experienced life or coped with those experiences, but you can take steps to take control of your own experiences and coping mechanisms.
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