Exploration about family history can be a powerful way to gain insight into problems you may be having. Although you may have never met the generations who lived prior to you, their suffering may be causing your suffering. How so? Because of something called intergenerational trauma.
So what exactly is intergenerational trauma?
Intergenerational trauma, or transgenerational trauma, is a term used to describe trauma which gets passed down through generations. When a person suffers a traumatic experience (e.g. a child is abused, a soldier faces combat, someone loses their home to natural disaster) there are many symptoms which commonly develop as a result of the emotional devastation: hyper-vigilance, depression, anxiety, sleeplessness and nightmares, dissociation, guilt or shame, anger outbursts, fear, detachment, and lots more. These are often the symptoms of a bigger problem of post-traumatic stress disorder.
If left untreated, these symptoms get passed down from parent to child, and this cycle occurs again, and again, and again. So intergenerational trauma is the inheritance of the psychological problems over generations.
How does this happen?
This happens for many reasons. As children, we learn about the world from our family. Our first understanding of the world is based on the values, lessons, and message we learn from our parents or caregivers. If a parent copes with trauma in an unhealthy way, the child learns to cope with issues in the same unhealthy way. By the time the child becomes an adult, the unhealthy coping mechanism has become embedded as habit, and they then pass this on to their child.
What perpetuates these problems?
People who are suffering the trauma of their ancestors often don’t realize this is happening. They might experience guilt, anger, sadness, anxiety, and more, without knowing why or have any awareness of the severity. They cannot pinpoint how or when this came to be, and they may go through their entire life without realizing the emotions they have are not connected to their specific life experience, but instead to the experience of an ancestor.
Some people do recognize these emotions as problematic in their life, but they ignore the difficulties (“I’m fine. Everything is fine.”). Or, they may create a false narrative to explain their feelings (“this is the fault of [fill in the blank]”, or“I’m just a bad person.”) Use of both avoidance and false narratives to explain away bad feelings is something which gets passed on from generation to generation.
Unless someone recognizes their feelings, attitude, or behaviors as a problem that they actively want to change, nothing changes. Justifications and normalization of unhealthy habits in cultural settings (family, society, age, occupation, etc.) perpetuates these problems.
How do I work on intergenerational trauma in counseling?
First, there must be self-acknowledgement about the severity of a feeling, attitude, or a behavior in your life. Once you can acknowledge the problem, you can then begin to work on making change through exploration of family history.
Think about your ancestors and what they have survived (e.g. wars, genocide, natural disasters, disease, oppression, ism’s etc.). Think about your parents, your grandparents, and what stories you know about their traumas. All of this impacts you. Talk about all of these things in your counseling sessions. Let your counselor know you want to work on exploration of history, or find a counselor who specializes in cultural issues.
You are a product of your ancestor’s survival, and once you can see how your problems are linked to your family’s history, you get to make a choice whether you want to keep passing on the attitudes and behaviors enabling trauma response in your family, or if you want to stop the cycle.
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