Intergenerational Trauma: Healing Wounds That Were Not Originally Yours

You notice the pattern in your family. Fear that has no name. Silence around certain subjects. A particular way of responding to conflict, or to strangers, or to change — that you learned from your parents, who learned it from theirs.

Intergenerational trauma — sometimes called transgenerational or inherited trauma — is the transmission of the psychological and physiological effects of trauma across generations. You are carrying something that did not begin with you.

How Trauma Passes Through Families

Research suggests several pathways:

Epigenetic transmission: Studies of Holocaust survivors and their children, and of communities that experienced famine or mass violence, have shown measurable changes in gene expression across generations. The stress of the parent appears to alter how stress-response genes are expressed in the next generation.

Parenting patterns: Parents who experienced trauma often parent in ways shaped by that trauma — hypervigilance, emotional unavailability, difficulty tolerating the child's distress, over-protectiveness, or, conversely, frightening unpredictability.

Narrative transmission: Stories, silences, and family myths carry emotional content. The things families do not talk about are often the most powerful in shaping the next generation's emotional landscape.

Attachment disruption: Traumatised parents may find secure attachment difficult to provide, transmitting disorganised or anxious attachment styles.

Recognising It

Intergenerational trauma often shows up as anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, or relational patterns that feel disproportionate to your own life circumstances. You may feel the weight of something that preceded you — a grief or a fear that has no clear source in your own experience.

Cultural and community trauma — partition, colonialism, caste violence, poverty — can also be transmitted intergenerationally, shaping entire communities' psychological landscapes across decades.

Healing

Healing intergenerational trauma involves individual therapy that attends to both your personal history and the history that preceded you. Family systems therapy, narrative therapy, and somatic approaches all have relevant contributions.

One of the most powerful aspects of this work is the recognition that the healing you do is not only for you. Every generation that does this work reduces what passes to the next. You can be the place in your lineage where the transmission changes.