The Invisible Inheritance: How Past Family Traumas Shape Our Behaviors?
Freud invented a fantastically useful concept that he named repetition compulsion. Seemingly innocuous statements, ordinary looking people, or something quite invisible to us can trigger dormant, old parts of our psyche and activate them again. We act in the present, but we think and process information as if we were in the past. We repeat the same (usually painful) movie time and time again but with different actors, hoping for a different outcome. And it is this desire to correct an event from our past that drives our compulsion to repeat it.
When we reflect on our use of the word trauma, we can think of many things that we can describe as traumatic: assault, rape, war, natural disasters, etc. From a psychological perspective, however, nothing is traumatic in and of itself, and what may be just inconvenient to me, could be traumatic to you (and vice versa). As you are about to see, we don’t actually have to experience a traumatic event directly to live with the consequences of trauma. That’s how permeable and insidious trauma can be!
Trauma is what happens when an event shatters our capacity to make sense of it. When we are experiencing trauma, parts of our brain that process speech and present-moment awareness stop working. Overwhelmed and unable to weave a narrative around those experiences as they’re unfolding, they remain fragmented and semi-verbal. When there are no words, there are images, sensations, intense feelings that continue to live on as unintegrated and incomprehensible parts of our past that deeply affect our present.
When we talk about “working through” a trauma, we usually talk about learning how to make sense of those chunks of horrifying experience that have such a tight grip on us. We do that in a controlled, safe environment of the therapeutic session, we do that slowly and over a period of time. We weave a new, coherent narrative and infuse meaning into what happened to us, making it truly a part of our being thus emotionally blunting its impact.
Psychological suffering aside, it appears that trauma can be passed on to future generations. As startling as this sounds, there’s some solid science to back it up. Ever since the 1960s, psychologists have been mapping out how trauma seems to be passed on to the next generation. Even though the theory is not universally accepted, it’s helpful insofar as it resonates with the experiences of many of us who work with people and hear their stories outside of the laboratory, where meaning-making plays a bigger role in healing than our biology. In his book It Didn't Start with You, Mark Wolynn presents several startling cases where his clients had experienced symptoms that directly mimicked the trauma experienced by their ancestors. To make things even more startling – they weren’t aware of the trauma ta all!
Rachel Yehuda from New York’s Mount Sinai hospital led a research team that studied Jewish men and women who had experienced trauma during the Holocaust, and in addition, her team took a look at their children’s genetic material too. Earlier research had already demonstrated that children of Holocaust survivors have higher chances of struggling with an anxiety disorder and Yehuda’s research confirmed this. Based on her findings, she hypothesized epigenetic changes in children of Holocaust survivors. The word “epigenetic” sounds fancy but the concept isn’t that difficult to grasp. Trauma doesn’t change one’s DNA, but it changes the way DNA is expressed. And these patterns of DNA expression appear to be hereditary. The good news is that DNA activation and inactivation isn’t the same as having a something hardwired. These changes take place in relation to our environment and aren’t fixed and permanent.
Women who had children after pretty severe famine in the Netherlands gave birth to children who had uncharacteristically high incidences of schizophrenia. This kind of historic trauma is being researched more nowadays. Immigration trauma, severe trauma suffered by Native Americas during the conquest of the Americas, etc. World history, unfortunately, gives us ample material to work with and I wish I could say that it’s difficult to find cases for studies like these – but it isn’t.
In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General identified racial trauma as the attributing factor to ethnic and racial disparities. Racial trauma is often accompanied by other elements of systemic racism such as socio-economic equality that further perpetuates the racial trauma.
This type of historic and intergenerational trauma involves reexperiencing and recollection of traumatic events in a subjective way, filtered through the idiosyncrasies and specific circumstances of the lives of the children and grandchildren of those that experienced the original trauma.
Whereas such monumental historical events certainly shift our worldviews, what will create hereditary trauma is not just the event. The event may be enough to create personal trauma, not intergenerational trauma. However, what a person does with a traumatic event is what might be the key. If a parent doesn’t work through their own anxiety, unresolved grief, depression or PTSD, this might have an impact on their capacity to parent: how emotionally available they are to their children, as well as the kind of attachment style they are able to have. In turn, this will shape their children, etc.
When studying epigenetic changes, Rachel Yehuda focused on genes that have to do with stress regulation. The assumption was simple: when faced with enormous stress, this is exactly the part of our genome that would work overtime. Sure enough, the team found epigenetic tags on the very same part of this gene in both the Holocaust survivors and their children. When they looked at Jews who had no direct relation with the Holocaust (people who had lived outside of Europe during those dark years), these tags weren’t found.
In effect, once parents experience trauma their bodies react with an altered production of stress hormones, and unless this is adequately dealt with, this new pattern of stress hormone secretion will be passed on. Needless to say, access to healthcare and psychotherapy is subpar even in developed countries, not to mention mass oppression or wartime. Dealing with trauma is a luxury that even today many don’t have, so “working through” trauma isn’t something that many were able to afford themselves and often there were no resources available.
There have been studies that investigated the possibilities of memories being transmitted too – a mind-blowing revelation in itself, but a topic for another blog.
Because we’re so obsessed with being productive and quick, we tend to overlook the tremendous effects of not only our personal histories, but also family and ethnic dynamics on how we think and experience life. Silly hacks and quick solutions will only take us so far as we struggle to regain our mental health and create a meaningful life.
Much of the latter 20th century developments in psychology and psychiatry have been devoted to overzealous attacks on the legacy of Sigmund Freud, but as we learn more through neuroscience it appears that he will be redeemed. In fact, the idea of the human psyche that is emerging from studies like these seem to have deeper and more radical implications. We are not just what happens to us, we are not just our biological heritage and rational or irrational beliefs and patterns of thinking – we are beyond all that. It just might turn out that we are also our parents’ traumas and our grandparents’ misfortunes as much as we are our own traumas and accidents. And if we are to live an authentic life in the future, we have to accept and embrace the burden of our past that haunts us in more ways than we know.
