Breaking the Cycle: What Is Transgenerational Trauma?

There are feelings that don't quite belong to you.

Not in the sense that they aren't real, they are absolutely real, viscerally, bodily, undeniably present. But when you try to trace them back to their source, something doesn't fully add up. The anxiety is disproportionate to the actual threat. The grief surfaces without a clear object. The fear of abandonment, or of scarcity, or of authority, runs so deep and so early that it cannot entirely be explained by your own history.

This is often the first clue that something older is at work.

Transgenerational trauma, sometimes called intergenerational trauma, or inherited trauma, is the transmission of unresolved emotional pain, stress responses, and relational patterns across generations. It is the way in which what a parent or grandparent or great-grandparent experienced, but never fully processed, finds its way into the bodies, behaviours, and emotional lives of those who came after them.

It is one of the most fascinating and, I think, one of the most important areas of contemporary psychological understanding. And it is one that I return to again and again in my clinical work, because so much of what people bring to the therapy room, when traced carefully and honestly, has roots that extend well beyond their own lifetime.

This article is an exploration of what transgenerational trauma is, how it moves through families, what it looks like when you are living it, and what healing, real, sustained healing, can look like.

Defining transgenerational trauma

Transgenerational trauma refers to the way that traumatic experience, and the psychological, emotional, and physiological adaptations that develop in response to it, can be passed from one generation to the next.

This is not a metaphor. It is not simply the observation that difficult childhoods tend to produce difficult adults, who then parent in ways that reproduce difficulty. That is part of it, certainly. But the evidence for transgenerational transmission goes deeper, into the body, into the nervous system, and increasingly, into our understanding of how genes express themselves in response to experience.

The science: epigenetics and inherited stress

The field of epigenetics, the study of how environmental experience affects gene expression, has produced some of the most striking findings in this area. Research following Holocaust survivors and their children, the descendants of famine survivors, children of combat veterans, and communities with histories of collective trauma has found measurable biological differences that suggest stress responses and trauma adaptations can be transmitted across generations in ways that are more direct than simple behavioural modelling.

Epigenetic changes do not alter the DNA sequence itself, they alter how genes are read and expressed. Sustained trauma can produce epigenetic markers that affect the stress response system, making descendants more reactive to threat, more sensitive to cortisol, more prone to certain forms of anxiety, even when those descendants have not personally experienced the original traumatic events.

This is still a young field, and the mechanisms are not yet fully understood. But the emerging picture is significant: the body carries more history than we have traditionally recognised. And when someone presents in a therapy room with anxiety, hypervigilance, or a stress response that feels disproportionate to their circumstances, the possibility that the nervous system is responding to something inherited, not merely something personally experienced, deserves serious consideration.

The psychology: attachment and relational transmission

Alongside the biological evidence, the psychological mechanisms of transgenerational transmission are well established and clinically observable.

Trauma that goes unprocessed does not remain contained within the person who experienced it. It shapes how they parent, their attunement, their emotional availability, their capacity to tolerate their child's distress, their relational patterns, their communication around vulnerability, danger, and need. Children absorb this, not through deliberate teaching, but through the texture of everyday relational experience. Through what is spoken and what is unspeakable. Through what the family system organises itself to avoid, and what it cannot help but repeat.

This is the psychological dimension of transgenerational trauma: the transmission of relational patterns, emotional responses, and implicit beliefs about the world through the lived experience of family life, before the child has any capacity to question, contextualise, or resist what is being communicated.

Signs you may be carrying inherited family trauma

One of the most disorienting aspects of transgenerational trauma is that it rarely announces itself clearly. It tends to feel simply like the way things are, as if these patterns, these feelings, these recurring difficulties are just part of who you are, rather than something you may have inherited and can potentially work with.

Here are some of the signs that warrant closer attention:

1. Emotional responses that feel disproportionate to the situation Reactions that others around you experience as excessive, intense anxiety, sudden grief, overwhelming fear, particularly when these arise in contexts that carry symbolic resonance with historical family experience (scarcity, separation, authority, belonging, danger).

2. Recurring relational patterns across the family system When you look across your family, across generations, across siblings, across branches of the family tree, you notice the same dynamics repeating. The same kinds of relationships are chosen. The same patterns of conflict, silence, distance, or enmeshment. The same roles are occupied, generation after generation.

3. A pervasive sense of carrying something heavy that isn't yours to carry A quality of burden or weight that doesn't entirely correspond to your own life circumstances. A tiredness, or a grief, or an anxiety that feels older than you, as though you arrived with it, rather than developing it through your own experience.

4. Family silences around particular events, periods, or people Families that have experienced significant trauma often organise themselves, consciously or unconsciously, around what cannot be discussed. Wars, losses, migrations, abuse, addiction, grief that was never mourned. The silence itself becomes a transmission, the children learn, without being told, that something significant happened that must not be approached.

5. Physical symptoms with no clear medical explanation The body holds what the mind has not been able to process. Chronic tension, unexplained pain, persistent gut issues, a nervous system that is always running slightly too hot, these can sometimes be the somatic expression of trauma that has been handed down rather than healed.

6. A sense of living someone else's story: A quality of inauthenticity in one's own life, of inhabiting choices, fears, or ambitions that don't quite feel like one's own. Of living in the shadow of a narrative that was written before you arrived.

How family trauma is transmitted

Understanding the mechanisms of transmission, how, specifically, this kind of inheritance actually happens, is both intellectually illuminating and clinically useful. Because what can be seen can, at least in principle, be interrupted.

Through silence and secrets

Family secrets, the events, experiences, and losses that are never spoken of, that exist as a kind of charged absence in the family system, are one of the most potent vehicles of transgenerational transmission.

The secret itself may be unknown to younger generations. What they inherit is not the content of the secret, but its effects: the emotional atmosphere it creates, the relational distortions it produces, the unconscious loyalty to a pain that was never named. Family therapists and systemic practitioners have long observed that children and grandchildren can be profoundly affected by experiences they have no conscious knowledge of, carrying the emotional weight of events that preceded their birth.

When the secret is eventually named, in therapy, in family conversation, in the patient work of understanding one's own history, there is often an almost physical release. A sense of something settling into place. Of finally understanding why the air in the family always carried a particular quality of tension, or sadness, or unease.

Through parenting styles and attachment

As explored in the context of attachment theory, the way we were parented shapes our internal working model of relationship, our expectations of others, our capacity for trust, our strategies for managing closeness and distance.

Parents who have experienced trauma, particularly unresolved trauma, parent from that experience. Not deliberately, not usually with any awareness that it is happening. But a parent who grew up in an environment of emotional unpredictability will have a different attunement profile than one who grew up feeling consistently safe. A parent who has never been given permission to grieve will have a different capacity to hold their child's grief. A parent who learned that emotions are dangerous will communicate that to their child through a thousand tiny moments of recoil, redirection, and emotional unavailability.

This is not to blame. It is simply the honest recognition of how patterns move through systems, and the beginning of understanding why breaking them requires more than good intentions.

Through cultural and collective trauma

Transgenerational trauma is not only a family phenomenon. It operates at the level of communities, cultures, and peoples.

The descendants of enslaved people, of genocide survivors, of communities displaced by war or famine, of colonised peoples whose languages, cultures, and identities were systematically suppressed, these communities carry collective wounds that manifest in individual and communal mental health, in relationships to authority and trust, in bodily hypervigilance, in the particular complexity of identity that comes from knowing your history was shaped by violence you did not personally experience but are nonetheless living within.

This is a dimension of transgenerational trauma that mainstream therapy has historically been poorly equipped to hold. It requires a framework that extends beyond the individual and the nuclear family, one that can situate a person's psychological experience within its full historical, cultural, and collective context.

It is one of the reasons that multicultural, integrative therapy, therapy that can hold both the personal and the political, both the individual and the collective, matters so much. The wounds that come from collective history cannot be fully healed by a therapy that sees only the individual.

The role of IFS in healing transgenerational patterns

Internal Family Systems therapy offers one of the most nuanced and, in my experience, most effective frameworks for working with transgenerational trauma, because it operates at exactly the level where this kind of inheritance lives: in the internal world of parts.

In IFS, we work with the understanding that we all carry internal parts, distinct aspects of the self with their own perspectives, feelings, and protective strategies. When we explore transgenerational trauma through an IFS lens, something interesting often emerges: some of the parts a person carries are not, strictly speaking, their own. They are parts that belong to, or that are loyal to, a parent, a grandparent, an ancestor. Parts that are still living out someone else's unfinished emotional business.

Meeting the parts that carry inherited pain

In IFS work, the invitation is always to approach parts with curiosity rather than combat. When a client notices a pattern, a recurring anxiety, a relational dynamic, a bodily response, the IFS question is not "how do I get rid of this?" but "what is this part carrying? How did it come to carry it? And is it ready to put it down?"

When that inquiry extends across generations, when the part reveals that it is carrying grief that belonged to a grandmother, or fear that belonged to a parent who never had the safety to express it, something significant happens. The client can begin to see their own experience with new eyes. What felt like a personal inadequacy becomes a transmitted burden. What feels like an inexplicable anxiety becomes the logical consequence of a history that makes complete sense once it is seen.

And in that seeing, there is the possibility, not automatic, not immediate, but real, of choosing something different. Of saying, with genuine compassion for all who carried it before you: this ends with me.

EMDR and processing inherited trauma responses

EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is primarily known as a trauma therapy, and its application to personally experienced traumatic events is well evidenced. But it also has meaningful application in the context of transgenerational trauma, particularly where the inherited patterns have become lodged in the body as physiological responses rather than explicit memories.

Many people carrying transgenerational trauma experience a nervous system that is chronically activated, hypervigilant, easily startled, difficult to settle, in ways that cannot be fully explained by their personal history. EMDR works by engaging the brain's natural information-processing system and supporting the integration of material that has been kept frozen, unable to be processed, unable to be filed as past.

In the context of inherited trauma, EMDR can help process not only personally experienced events but also the somatic imprints of transgenerational material, the bodily sense of danger, loss, or threat that has no clear personal origin but is no less real for that. It is careful, boundaried work. And in the hands of a skilled practitioner, it can reach places that words alone cannot.

What healing actually looks like

I want to be honest about what healing from transgenerational trauma actually involves, because the word "healing" can carry unrealistic expectations, and people deserve a more grounded picture.

Healing is not the erasure of history. It is not forgetting, or transcending, or achieving a state of freedom so complete that the inherited patterns no longer register. That is not available. And it would not, in any case, be the right aspiration, because the history, and the people who lived it, deserve to be remembered, not overwritten.

What healing looks like, in my experience, is something more like this:

The pattern is still visible, but it is no longer running you. You can see it coming. You can name it. You can, with increasing reliability, choose a different response rather than simply enacting the inherited one.

The grief, for what your parents didn't have, for what your grandparents lost, for what your community endured, can be felt and mourned, rather than transmitted onward in its unfelt state.

The burden can be set down, gently, with respect for those who carried it before you, rather than passed unconsciously to the next generation.

And there can be, alongside all of that, a genuine deepening of self-understanding. A capacity to locate yourself within your full story, not just the chapter that began with your birth, but the longer narrative that made you possible, and to find in that location not only burden, but also meaning, connection, and sometimes, unexpected resilience.

Reflection questions for your own family story

I offer these not as a therapeutic exercise to be completed independently, but as an invitation to begin noticing, gently, without pressure to arrive anywhere in particular.

• Are there emotional patterns, anxiety, grief, anger, a sense of danger, that feel older than your own life?

• Are there subjects your family of origin could not or would not discuss? What might the silence have been protecting?

• When you look across your family system, what recurring patterns do you notice, in relationships, in the roles people occupy, in what is celebrated and what is feared?

• What do you know about your parents' emotional lives before you were born? About your grandparents' experiences? And what don't you know that might be worth finding out?

• Is there something you carry that you would not want to pass to a child, or to someone who comes after you? What would it mean to set it down?
  

These questions have no neat answers. But sitting with them honestly is, in itself, a form of beginning.

Jojo is a multicultural integrative psychotherapist, speaker, and author. She works with individuals navigating inherited family patterns, cultural identity, trauma, and emotional wellbeing, drawing on EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Emotionally Focused Therapy.

You don't have to keep living patterns that were never yours to begin with. Book a consultation with Jojo →