The complex legacy of our ancestors

How intergenerational trauma is woven through our lives

My grandmother (on the left) in her army days during World War II

Intergenerational trauma is a subject close to my heart. My parents were both born in the immediate aftermath of World War II and their parents, my grandparents, had lived through a lot. I imagine at that point, in the 1940s in England, the whole nation would have been traumatised to a greater or lesser extent. My ancestors had been at war with my partner’s ancestors in Germany. My grandmother (pictured above) had enlisted in the army and was stationed in the UK. My grandfather fought on the frontlines of Europe, part of a division known as the ‘Desert Rats’. I picture the horrors he must have been exposed to on the battlefield as he dodged bullets and witnessed peers losing their lives in the most brutal ways possible.

On the other side of the family, my maternal grandparents lived in an area heavily bombed during ‘the Blitz’ - the night-time air bombing campaign responsible for the death of 40,000 British civilians and the destruction of around a million homes.  I picture my grandparents spending their nights sleeping with one eye open, listening for the wail of the air raid siren that signalled they needed to leave the warmth of their beds and rush into underground bunkers. I imagine them huddled in darkness, inhaling the smell of damp earth and human fear, while they waited to discover whose homes had been decimated in the latest round of bombing. I remember being taken into one of those bunkers during a high school history class, it was a dark, eerie and foreboding place.

Never having lived through a war zone myself, I can only imagine what these experiences did to the psyche and the nervous system. Sadly, my grandparents died before I had asked them about their wartime stories, and as far as I recall, these stories weren’t spoken about much. The word ‘trauma’ was not part of the vocabulary of their generation and they remained tight-lipped about much of what they had witnessed and lived through. It was as if they tried to put these experiences into a box, never to be opened again.

However, we now know that trauma does not just disappear, and time alone does not necessarily heal. Trauma can show up in the lives of future generations, despite these experiences not being consciously ‘known’ or spoken about. I often meet clients who present with all the classic hallmarks of trauma but do not report any obvious ‘event’ in their own history that would fully account for it, and in these moments I’m always curious about the role of intergenerational trauma.

There are a few pathways through which trauma can be passed on to future generations. The most obvious perhaps, is that traumatised people sometimes traumatise other people. Trauma can lead to a dysregulation of emotions and over-activation of the fight/flight response which can show up in the form of mood swings, angry outbursts, violence, substance-use or mental health issues. This can create a re-enactment of trauma that is passed on in gross and obvious ways to loved ones.

However, in many families it is much more subtle than this. Trauma can be passed on to the next generation simply through co-regulation. As babies we are born with little capacity to regulate our own nervous system and essentially need to ‘borrow’ the nervous system of a care-giving figure to calm and soothe ourselves. We are wired to synchronise our breathing and heart rate with those we’re in close proximity with. In an ideal world, this means that a distressed baby is met with a calm adult, synchronises their nervous system with the adult’s, and learns vicariously to calm themselves. Over time this capacity becomes internalised and the child develops the ability to self-soothe and self-regulate. In reality, the adult that meets and holds us as a baby may not be regulated in themselves and so we may internalise a dysregulated nervous system as our baseline. This can show up later in life as heightened anxiety or hypervigilance in the absence of an obvious trigger.

Research has also pointed towards a change in the expression of genes with trauma that can be tracked through successive generations. A study was carried out with mice¹, where the scent of cherry blossom was paired with an electric shock (generating a trauma response). The offspring and grandchildren of those mice all showed a fear response to the scent of cherry blossom, despite having no prior exposure to it, evidencing not just heightened fear in general, but that they had encoded that specific fear into their wiring. Personally, I have to question the ethics of deliberately traumatising an animal for research purposes, however it has been an influential study in our understanding of intergenerational trauma and epigenetics.

If your ancestors experienced trauma – and let’s face it, this applies to so many of us, whether through war, colonisation, racism or intra-familial trauma – it’s possible that the effects of this are wired into your own nervous system and trauma therapy work can play a helpful role in your own healing and growth. We are doing a favour not only to ourselves, but also to the generations that follow when we do this work and help our nervous systems regulate. Our world could be a much healthier place if each of us attended to our own trauma healing work rather than passing it on raw and unprocessed to those who follow.

I’m proud of what my grandparents managed to survive and the strength it took to come back from those horrific times, continue daily life and raise a family. I’d like to think that if I can inherent their trauma, perhaps I also inherited some of their resilience. I’m also aware of the effect those experiences would have had on their nervous systems and overall wellbeing, and I’m curious how it lives on to this day in my own psyche and others of my generation. Trauma is not just about what happened directly to us, our nervous systems also tell the story of our ancestors and our history.

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Thanks for reading.

1. Dias, B.G. & Ressler, K.J. (2014) Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17, 89-96