Image by Markus Spiske
As someone who specialises in helping people with childhood trauma, I have long told my clients that trauma gets passed down from generation to generation. This always made sense to me, when I heard someone’s story about the trauma or neglect they experienced in childhood, and the painful experiences of one or both of their parents, their grandparents, and so on. The pain clearly cascaded from one generation to the next.
Heartbreakingly, we can see this trauma being created before our eyes in war zones around the world, as well as countless angry, chaotic, impoverished, substance-abusing, harsh, cold or otherwise unhappy families all around us. As much as humans can be kind, loving, altruistic and compassionate, we can also treat each other with great cruelty. Sadly, these two forces – light and dark – do constant battle in our minds and souls. Too often the dark side wins.
But it remained a mystery to me to understand exactly how trauma moved between generations, until I read a brilliant book by Mark Wolynn recently – It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Wolynn is a family therapist and explains the various mechanisms through which trauma passes along a human chain, from parent to child, through the ages.
Some of these mechanisms are common sense – for example, if your father had a terrible childhood and grew up to numb his pain with alcohol, his drinking will almost certainly inflict suffering on his own family, especially his children. He might come home from the bar in a drunken rage, being violent to his wife and children, smashing up the living room before passing out in a stupor. Clearly, his traumatic childhood shaped the man he became, who then inflicted suffering on his poor, traumatised wife and kids.
The genetic inheritance of traumA
Wolynn also explains the way trauma gets expressed through your parents’ genes, which is somewhat mindblowing but also makes sense if you think about it. Let’s say your mother grew up in a high-stress, high-conflict family environment. Her bloodstream would have been awash with stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, her fight-flight-freeze response would have been triggered on a daily, if not hourly basis, her brain and nervous system would have been dysregulated and on high alert for danger, all the time. Then she grew up, traumatised child becoming a traumatised adult, got pregnant and passed her genes (as well as your father’s) on to you, as you grew from a collection of cells into a baby in her womb.
In evolutionary terms, to optimise your survival your gene expression (which of those inherited genes were switched on and off) would have prepared you for a stressful, hostile world. It’s like you were born ready to survive, prepared for a dangerous environment, not a calm, placid, happy one. And that is how trauma gets handed down genetically, because it shapes us to be hypervigilant, on alert, pre-stressed before we even encounter anything stressful. Your genes created a little human born ready for battle, not peace.
You can break the chain
Something I also tell my clients is that, although their trauma was passed down a long chain of ancestors, they have the power to break that chain. And you do too. Because if you get help from a skilled trauma therapist, you can heal the wounds of your childhood trauma, so you choose not to pass them on to your children and grandchildren. This is vitally important, because we can help the forces of light in our world flourish, bringing an end to senseless war, violence and cruelty, by healing the world’s trauma – starting with our own.
Like a ripple in a pond, your healing profoundly shapes your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and on through the generations, forging a chain of healing, not harm. We live in a time of such enormous challenges – escalating war, rampant inequality, climate change and more – that it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to promote peace, harmony and flourishing for every human on this planet.
Let’s all break that chain, starting today.
Love,
Dan ❤️