Generational Trauma

The wounds of your parents and grandparents may be shaping your nervous system — and you can break the cycle.

Generational trauma — also called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma — describes the way that the effects of traumatic experience can be transmitted across generations. This transmission happens in several ways: through the parenting practices and emotional patterns of traumatised parents; through the family culture, narratives and silences that surround traumatic history; and — most strikingly — through epigenetic mechanisms that can alter the expression of genes in response to trauma, with some of those alterations transmissible to the next generation.

How Generational Trauma Is Transmitted

Traumatised parents parent from their trauma. A parent who was abused may be hypervigilant about threat, emotionally dysregulated, or — in ways they may not consciously intend — recreating familiar relational dynamics with their own children. A parent who was severely neglected may struggle with emotional attunement. The nervous system and attachment patterns formed in the parent's own childhood become the relational environment in which their children's nervous systems develop.

Families transmit their history — or their silences around it — in ways that shape children's understanding of the world, of safety, of what can be spoken and what cannot. A family in which significant trauma (war experience, violence, loss, poverty) is never spoken of passes on not just the silence itself but the implicit message that certain things are too dangerous or too shameful to acknowledge. Children grow up carrying the emotional weight of what was never said.

Research on the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and more recently on the children and grandchildren of other trauma-exposed populations, has shown that trauma can alter gene expression in ways that are transmissible to subsequent generations. This does not mean you inherit a fixed destiny — epigenetic changes can be modified — but it does mean the biological effects of ancestral trauma may be more literal than previously understood.

Understanding generational trauma is not about blaming your parents or your grandparents. It's about understanding the full context of your own experience — so that you can become the generation in which the cycle ends.

Recognising Generational Patterns

Signs of generational trauma influence might include: emotional or relational patterns that seem to repeat across generations; family rules, often unspoken, about what can and cannot be expressed; a family culture of stoicism, self-sufficiency or the dismissal of emotional needs; certain topics that are never discussed; a sense that your emotional experience doesn't quite match the official family narrative; and responses to certain situations that feel older than your own lifetime.

Breaking the Cycle

The most powerful act of generational healing is doing your own work — understanding your patterns, processing your wounds, developing emotional capacity that was not available in the generations before you. This is not about perfection; it's about increasing the degree of consciousness and choice available in your own parenting and relating. Each generation that does this work reduces the transmission of the original wound a little further.

Take our free 3-minute quiz to understand how your nervous system responds to stress — and what it means for your relationships.

© 2025 What's My Trauma Response  |  Privacy Policy  |  About  |  Home

This site is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice.