How we can break the cycle of intergenerational trauma

Woven throughout most of this newsletter is the understanding that our past informs our present. It shows up in the choices we make, our relationships, our work. No corner of our lives goes untouched by the shadows of our former selves.

The concept that personal history plays a key role in our psychology has been formally recognized since the days of Freud. A younger, burgeoning field of study is now examining the painful imprints of lifetimes before our own — those of our parents, our grandparents, and on.

A Group Therapy reader sent us her thoughts, and a question, about intergenerational trauma:

Because I work with young people, I’m often reflecting on my own childhood experiences, complete with the memories of trauma I’ve brought with me into adulthood. At each new stage of aging, I come to understand my past — and past versions of me — so much better! But I also become more aware of how there’s more to unpack that I may never understand — high on that list is intergenerational trauma. I see glimpses of what my mom experienced herself and passed along, but I’m sure there’s more under the surface I’m oblivious to. And then there’s the matter of my deceased father and more extended branches of my family and ancestry who I’m not in connection with and/or will never be able to tap into directly.

All of this leads to my questions: How can we identify and address intergenerational trauma in our lives? How can we heal hurts that we don’t even know we’ve inherited?

Perhaps an even more vital question for those with children, or who plan to have kids, is: How can we prevent passing along our trauma?

I really appreciate this reader trusting us with this question, because it is one I believe we should all grapple with, if we have the resources and emotional capacity (and not all of us do; we’ll get to that later in the newsletter).

I spoke with three amazing experts for this piece, all with their own legacies of generational wounding and resilience. They’ll help us understand what, exactly, constitutes intergenerational trauma, how it manifests itself in the present, and how we can begin to understand and transform it.

As one of today’s experts, psychoanalyst Galit Atlas, wrote in her book on the subject: “When we are ready to unpack our inheritance, we are able to confront the ghosts we carry within.”

What is intergenerational trauma?

Intergenerational trauma happens when our parents’ or ancestors’ “raw or unprocessed experiences” are passed down from generation to generation, Atlas told me.

These experiences can include poverty, racism and other forms of oppression; cultural dislocation or immigration; war; natural disasters; abuse; and abandonment or neglect.

“One generation can communicate with the next without any awareness and intention,” Atlas said. “Some of the struggles and what we call ‘symptoms’ are actually a result of things that happened to our ancestors, our parents.”

But how does this communication happen?

The answer lies in both our biology and our psychology.

The study of epigenetics suggests that if we have a parent who lived in chronic stress, then that trauma gets imprinted into their genetic encoding — and those genetic markers are passed onto us. For example, research shows that people who have experienced racial discrimination carry more of one type of epigenetic change that can lead to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and asthma than people who have not. Another study found that the sons of Union Army soldiers who endured grueling conditions as prisoners of war were more likely to die young than the sons of soldiers who were not prisoners.

“It creates a biological vulnerability,” Mariel Buqué, psychologist and author of the forthcoming book “Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.” “It may look like a genetic predisposition to really feel emotions in a big way, or perhaps a bigger propensity to experience stress or trauma.”

And our nervous systems begin to develop in utero. Parental stress during pregnancy has been associated with higher rates of both physical illness and mental health challenges for those babies.

How our caregivers interact with us and model behavior can also transmit intergenerational trauma. “Parents who are still in a trauma state may miss cues to care for us, and may be unable to engage us in ways that are nurturing so that we can build a healthy emotional foundation,” Buqué said. They may be short-fused and highly reactive, or emotionally unavailable, and these ways of dealing with stress are modeled to the child, who then carry that form of self-soothing into their adulthood.

“Some of the ways that trauma can be passed down are just different sets of coping skills for dealing with the pain, and sometimes those behaviors produce harmful results,” said Ramona Beltran, a professor of social work at the University of Denver and a historical trauma scholar. “Trauma can also be passed down through silence, or refusal to talk about something, because sometimes it’s just too painful. Folks may have internalized the narrative about the trauma, or what led to the trauma, and blame themselves.”

Atlas, who calls intergenerational trauma “emotional inheritance,” experienced this conspiracy of silence in her own family. “My mother lost her older brother when he was 14; he drowned in the sea. I knew about it but we never talked about it. No one wanted to make my mom sad. We had an unstated agreement to not talk about it, to not hurt each other,” Atlas said. “But this meant that the trauma was not known. We could not process it and share it, or sit with it as a family. It was kept in an isolated place in our minds.”

There can also, conversely, be an immense preoccupation with the trauma, Beltran said, so much so that a family may build their entire identity around it. Both silence and over-identification create an emotional imbalance, she explained.

This may be particularly true in the case of historical trauma, which is a type of intergenerational trauma experienced by cultural, racial or ethnic groups that have been systematically oppressed. For example, the enslavement of African Americans and the displacement and genocide of Indigenous people in the United States are historical traumas. The ripple effects of that emotional inheritance is further exacerbated by structural inequalities that persist today, Beltran said, such as lack of access to clean water, housing and employment.

“The things that happen in large communities — the disruption to family cohesion and the cultural traditions that keep people well — may also affect how individuals within families cope,” Beltran said.

What does intergenerational trauma look like in our everyday lives?

No two emotional inheritances are alike, and how it shows up in our lives is similarly distinct.

With that said, here are some common manifestations of intergenerational trauma, according to our experts and a large body of research:

• Higher rates of poor physical health, substance use, somatic symptoms like migraines and back pain, and mental health challenges including (but not limited to) depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder
• Poverty
• Internalized oppression, which is experienced when people from oppressed groups believe the myths and misinformation that society communicates to them about their group
• Feeling short-fused, impatient or irritable with the people closest to us, especially children
• Frequent fear and distrust, like you’re always on high alert
• Suppressing your own needs and desires, particularly for people socialized as girls
• Challenges with communicating difficult emotions to others in a way that’s constructive

Beltran, who is a multiracial Chicana of Indigenous Mexican descent, knew that her parents and grandparents had experienced displacement multiple times, but those experiences weren’t directly expressed to her in words. Yet she saw the impacts of that trauma as a child. “We were low-income, my mom struggled with mental health issues, we moved around quite a lot,” she said. “It was this persistent feeling of being an outsider — that there was something wrong with us, with me.”

She’s made it her life’s work to unearth and elucidate the impacts of trauma. But Beltran also emphasized that it’s not guaranteed that everyone with an emotional inheritance of trauma will experience negative outcomes. And even if we do, we often inherit robust strength.

“Our communities are so much more than our traumas. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t resilient and creative,” she said. Part of my job is inviting people into naming of the things that have kept them well. What are traditions that have been passed down to you that you’re proud of? What are memories that you have that are joyful?”

How can we heal intergenerational trauma?

Intergenerational trauma can feel like an impossible, immovable burden.

But ultimately, many of us do have the ability to begin healing pain that’s been passed down to us, experts told me.

We’ll explore how this process might unfold, but first I want to note that not everyone has the ability to go there.

“The second and third generations have the privilege to go toward pain, to know the truth. And that’s something traumatized people aren’t always able to do,” Atlas said. “They need to make sure they don’t fall apart. I find that people who aren’t emotionally capable of doing the work don’t believe in it, and I respect that. Respecting people’s defenses and their narratives about themselves is important.”

Perhaps you are the first person in your family to acknowledge that there are wounds that have gone untended to for a long time. That acknowledgment is the first step toward disrupting the cycle of trauma. “Our parents live inside us without our permission,” Atlas said. “In other words, in order to not pass this emotional inheritance down to the next generation, we need to identify what part of their life lives inside us, and work through it. We cannot separate from something we can’t identify.”

This can look like starting to name the pain if there’s a conspiracy of silence in your family, Beltran said; even if you only have pieces of the story, you can still put together an understanding. If other people in your family aren’t able to join you in this journey, connect with people in your community who have a shared identity or experience. “When we start to name the trauma, we can externalize it from our own bodies and we can begin to address it,” Beltran said.

Once you begin to understand the trauma, this is what healing can look like:

Tend to your body: Some of our choices can disrupt epigenetic changes, Beltran said. Diet and exercise, meditation and positive social connections can not only reverse epigenetic markers but rewire our nervous systems, and allow us to have more ease and fulfillment in our daily lives.

While learning how to integrate these practices into your life can take time, they can also be incredibly simple, Buqué said. “It can look like mindful pauses as short as 60 seconds. Integrating breath-work into our lives. Writing down our thoughts and emotions rather than letting another day go by where we’re keeping them trapped in our bodies without addressing them. A lot of these day-to-day practices can start unloading some of that tension and pain in our bodies.”

Reclaim what your family has lost: For those who have suffered historical trauma, so much has been lost over time, like language, food, medicinal practices and other rituals. Those are coping skills that have been forcibly taken, Beltran said. Individual families and communities can work on reclaiming those traditions “even if it’s with creative liberties or adaptations,” she said. The Indigenous movement to reclaim lands and spaces, often called the “Land Back” movement, embodies this revival of tradition.

Take action within your community: When you are part of a historically marginalized group, only so much healing can happen when there are structural and systemic forces that continue to oppress you, Beltran said. “It’s one thing to make changes to our own behaviors, like eating food that strengthens our bodies, and it’s another thing to have access to fresh foods when you live in a food desert or you’re exposed to environmental contamination on a daily basis because the only place you can live is next to an oil refinery,” Beltran said. “In these cases, collective action and organizing for social and systemic change is one way to reduce impacts of collective trauma.”

Relate in new ways to your loved ones: Our reader asked how we can prevent trauma from being passed to our children.

The first step, beyond everything we’ve talked about so far, is to have compassion for yourself.

“We have to understand that this pain has taken generations to reach us in its current form, and likely will take some time to heal. The trauma may always be a part of us in some way,” Beltran said. “If you’re overwhelmed or angry with your children and you’re yelling at them, it’s a reminder that there’s still healing and care work for yourself that needs to be done. Rather than beating yourself up over it, we can turn our attention to regulation and repair. We can come back to our kids once we’re calm, apologize and tell them what happened in our internal world so they don’t feel so isolated. Let them know it wasn’t OK to yell or stomp and it wasn’t their fault and we’ll keep trying to do better.”

When someone in Beltran’s family starts to get stressed or anxious, they will say the words “three sisters” to each other. Indigenous people call corn, beans and squash the three sisters because they nurture one another like family when planted together. This mantra reminds them to come back to one another.

“If we’re really struggling, we take a bath or play in water. In our traditions, water is medicine. We go outside and walk and look at the sky and name all the animals and nature around us,” Beltran said. “In doing these kinds of things, we’re teaching our kids how to deal with their own experience of being a human in a complex world.”

. . .

I know that healing intergenerational trauma sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But disrupting these cycles of pain and hurt is so worth it.

“It allows you to be fully present in your life and make choices,” Atlas said. Your own choices — choices that are different from those that your parents made, and your grandparents before that.

Until next week,

Laura

If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email [email protected] gets right to our team.

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More perspectives on today’s topic & other resources

Even though the pain carried by many folks from marginalized communities is caused by systemic inequities, many hold themselves personally accountable for the trauma they bear. This episode of the podcast “Radical Imagination” upends the myth that we must hold trauma by ourselves. Host Angela Glover Blackwell speaks with Prentis Hemphill, a writer, therapist and founder of the Embodiment Institute, about the idea of collective trauma and how it can help us heal our selves, our relationships and our communities.

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