It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

by Mark Wolynn

Another early event also may have contributed to the fear I carried that my life would suddenly be ruined. My mother told me that she experienced a difficult labor while giving birth to me—one in which the doctor used forceps. As a result, I was born with extensive bruising and a partially collapsed skull, not uncommon with a forceps delivery. My mother revealed with regret that my appearance made it difficult for her even to hold me at first. Her story resonated, and helped to explain the feeling of being ruined that I knew deep inside. Specifically, traumatic memories from my birth that had submerged in my body would resurface whenever I “gave birth” to a new project or presented new work in public. Just having this understanding brought me peace.

In many ways, healing from trauma is akin to creating a poem. Both require the right timing, the right words, and the right image. When these elements align, something meaningful is set into motion that can be felt in the body. To heal, our pacing must be in tune. If we arrive too quickly at an image, it might not take root. If the words that comfort us arrive too early, we might not be ready to take them in. If the words aren’t precise, we might not hear them or resonate with them at all.

He describes the speechless terror of trauma as the experience of being at a loss for words, a common occurrence when brain pathways of remembering are hindered during periods of threat or danger. “When people relive their traumatic experiences,” he says, “the frontal lobes become impaired and, as [a] result, they have trouble thinking and speaking. They no longer are capable of communicating to either themselves or to others precisely what’s going on.”

In an attempt to explain stories such as Jesse’s, scientists are now able to identify biological markers—evidence that traumas can and do pass down from one generation to the next.

Yehuda’s research demonstrates that you and I are three times more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD if one of our parents had PTSD, and as a result, we’re likely to suffer from depression or anxiety.4 She believes that this type of generational PTSD is inherited rather than occurring from our being exposed to our parents’ stories of their ordeals.

An intellectual understanding by itself is rarely enough for a lasting shift to occur. Often, the awareness needs to be accompanied by a deeply felt visceral experience.

It’s human nature: when pain is too great, people tend to avoid it. Yet when we block the feelings, we unknowingly stunt the necessary healing process that can lead us to a natural release.

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to . . . complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

In your earliest biological form, as an unfertilized egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother. When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body—three generations sharing the same biological environment.

Lipton stresses the importance of what he terms conscious parenting—parenting with the awareness that, from preconception all the way through postnatal development, a child’s development and health can be profoundly influenced by the parent’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.11 “Parents that did not wish to have a child, parents that are continuously concerned about their own and consequently their offspring’s chances for survival, women who sustain physical and emotional abuse during their pregnancy all represent situations where adverse environmental cues surrounding the birth of their child can be passed on to the offspring.”12

For better or worse, parents tend to pass on the parenting that they themselves received.

“Mother and offspring live in a biological state that has much in common with addiction,” says behavior science writer Winifred Gallagher. “When they are parted, the infant does not just miss its mother. It experiences a physical and psychological withdrawal . . . not unlike the plight of a heroin addict who goes cold turkey.”2 This analogy helps to explain why all newborn mammals, including humans, protest with such vigor when they’re separated from their mothers. From an infant’s perspective, a separation from the mother can be felt as “life threatening,” says Dr. Raylene Phillips, a neonatologist at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital. “If separation continues for a prolonged period,” she says, “the . . . response is despair. . . . The baby gives up.”

the firstborn son is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the father, and the firstborn daughter is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the mother, though this is not always the case. The reverse can also be true. Later children in the family are likely to carry different aspects of their parents’ traumas, or elements of the grandparents’ traumas.

For example, the first daughter might marry a man who is emotionally unavailable and controlling—similar to how she perceives her father—and, by doing so, share this dynamic with her mother. By marrying a shut-down, controlling man, she repeats her mother’s experiences and joins her in her discontent.

the more we practice something, the more we train our brain to change.

There are other interruptions to the life force that can prevent us from living fully, but these interruptions aren’t always unconscious, and don’t necessarily involve a parent or another member of our family system. One such interruption comes about when we have experienced a personal trauma. Even if we are aware of the trauma’s effects on us, we might still be powerless to resolve it.

Many of us unconsciously take on our parents’ pain. As small children, we develop our sense of self gradually. Back then, we had not learned how to be separate from our parents and be connected to them at the same time.

we must first repair our broken relationships with our parents.

I absolutely disagree.