When Family History Lives in Us: Understanding Intergenerational Trauma
What is Inherited/Intergenerational Trauma?
Sometimes the patterns we struggle with seem to reach further back than our own experiences.
You may notice an intense fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, a tendency to stay constantly alert, or a feeling that you have to take care of everyone around you. These patterns can be shaped by our own experiences—but they can also exist within a larger family story.
Mark Wolynn, author of It Didn't Start With You, describes this possibility through the lens of family and intergenerational trauma. His work encourages us to become curious about whether some of our emotional patterns might be connected to experiences, losses, or survival strategies carried through previous generations.
What does the research tell us?
There is growing evidence that trauma can have effects that extend beyond the person who directly experienced it. Research on intergenerational trauma has identified psychological, behavioral, and biological differences among some descendants of people exposed to severe or collective trauma. Researchers are exploring several possible pathways, including parenting and attachment, family and social environments, chronic stress, and biological processes such as epigenetic changes.
Importantly, this does not mean that trauma is simply passed down through our genes, or that a parent's trauma automatically becomes a child's trauma. The science is complex, and researchers are still working to understand exactly how these effects occur.
What we do know with greater confidence is that trauma—particularly trauma occurring during childhood—can have lasting effects on emotional and physical health, relationships, coping, and our sense of safety.
Family relationships are one important pathway. A parent who grew up with violence, neglect, loss, or chronic insecurity may have learned to respond to stress in ways that once helped them survive. Without judgment, we can begin to understand how those adaptations might influence family relationships and, in turn, affect children.
From "What's wrong with me?" to "What happened?"
One of the most useful shifts in trauma-informed therapy is moving away from self-blame.
Instead of asking, Why am I like this?, we might ask:
What experiences shaped the way I learned to protect myself?
What did safety, love, conflict, or loss look like in my family?
Were there experiences that were never talked about?
What patterns seem to repeat across generations?
This kind of curiosity does not require us to find a dramatic family secret or assume that every difficulty originated with an ancestor. It simply gives us another lens through which to understand ourselves.
Wolynn's concept of "core language" can be useful here: paying attention to recurring words, fears, sensations, and relationship patterns may help identify themes that are worth exploring in therapy. These ideas can serve as prompts for reflection rather than as proof that a particular symptom was inherited.
Healing does not require blaming our families
Understanding intergenerational patterns is not about assigning fault to parents or grandparents. Often, the people who unintentionally pass on painful patterns were themselves responding to circumstances they did not choose.
A trauma-informed approach emphasizes safety, collaboration, choice, empowerment, and respect. It recognizes that coping strategies often developed for good reasons—even when those strategies no longer serve us.
Therapy can provide a space to slow these patterns down, understand where they may have come from, and develop new ways of responding. Depending on a person's needs and history, this may involve working with emotions, beliefs, relationships, the nervous system, memories, or present-day behaviors.
The goal is not to prove that every struggle comes from the past.
The goal is to develop enough understanding and safety that the past has less power to determine the present.
Our family history can help explain some of the patterns we carry. It does not have to determine who we become.
