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Epigenetics combined with the philosophical idea of Determinism made me wonder if free will is—if not an illusion—a bit of a mirage. That, in addition to the environment we grow up in, the contour and texture of our lives are shaped—in part—by some form of genetic predetermination.
The idea of epigenetic inheritance has long been embraced in many communities. Native Americans have talked about living with generational trauma for as long as I can remember and a hotly debated study of Holocaust survivors appears to show a higher percentage of PTSDs, depression, and anxiety in their children and grandchildren.
But the most captivating example was a study of laboratory mice that were exposed to a cherry blossom fragrance as the floor of their cage was electrified. (I’m so sorry, mice.) The mice were quickly conditioned to panic whenever they smelled that scent. But generations later, the descendants of those mice would have the same fear reaction to that smell. Even though they had never experienced that pain and discomfort in their own lifetimes. They had inherited that trauma.
The more you think about it, if the genetic circuitry of trauma is intertwined with the genetic circuitry of wellness, together they form an intergenerational feedback loop. Where a parent’s output is used as input for a child’s future behavior. And while there is the latent possibility of cycles repeating themselves, if we understand who and where we came from, genetic destinies can be altered, hopefully for the better.
“I will use the time we have left to teach you how to mourn properly.” Her ah-ma spoke, but they both knew she did not need a lesson in grief. She had been born a woman.
Even though she learned a fair amount of English during her travels in America, it took a while for Afong to understand that Mr. Hannington was what some considered a member of the shoddyocracy, a fabulist, prone to saying whatever would hold the audience spellbound.
In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition. I merely tell the crowd what they need to hear to be satisfied.” He smiled. “Because every crowd has a silver lining.”
Afong remembered the last words her ah-ma said to her. Her mother tried to pass on what little hope she had. “Women are born to lead lives of inconsistency.” She tried not to cry as she held Afong’s hands. “While it is our curse, it can also be our strength.”
The idea of treating trauma passed down from one generation to the next in humans was highly controversial, to say the least. Just the idea of historical trauma was argumentative, though the concept had been widely accepted in Native American communities for hundreds of years, or more recently, within groups descended from Holocaust survivors. Yet therapists and geneticists had been puzzled for decades, searching for evidence of what they called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
Her teacher sighed. To Zoe, Mrs. Bidwell seemed equal parts happy and sad. Victorious and defeated. Brave but frightened. Surrounded by students, but perpetually alone.
“We don’t have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost, that which was never allowed to be.”
She’d had her fill of awkward moments sitting in therapist’s offices filled with old magazines and new faces. Everyone avoiding eye contact. Dorothy found that such close proximity to silent strangers always left her feeling naked and vulnerable, as though everyone were thinking, I may have problems, I may need help, but at least I’m not her.
Dorothy had no answer, just scars on her arms and a lifetime of suicidal ideation.
Over the last two decades, she’d taken an alphabet soup of antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and drugs for seizures. She’d meditated, used mindfulness apps, explored Kundalini yoga, cryotherapy, somatic therapy, play therapy, group therapy, and music therapy, until her counselor’s notes had become an orgy of acronyms as the PTSDs on her ACE score had been treated by EMDR, MFT, and ACT, but had become TAU. Nothing had helped.
“As the US poet laureate Anis Mojgani once said about toddlers: They cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God.”
Dorothy thought about the possible merits and potential hazards of opening a Pandora’s box of familial tragedy. The conceit of addressing the pain and sorrow of others in the past—the whole uncanny idea—gave her hope. But as Nietzsche argued, “Hope is the most evil of all evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
She did not see the men as nefarious or the wrong sort, the way Mrs. Hannington described them. They were just poor. The poetics of poverty, the expressions of servitude, the dialects of desperation, were all languages Afong was well versed in.
He never understood that to Dorothy, feeling okay after a lifetime of feeling everything—rage, grief, anxiety, sadness, confusion, disconnection, and longing—to just feel okay was as wonderful as it was unfamiliar. She felt intoxicated by normality.
“Okay then.” Sam looked surprised but flexible in his plans, like he’d gone to get his oil changed and was told the next karaoke song was his and he’d better get ready.
He had dog-eared a single page, a short poem. I found you And you fit me perfectly like a bullet in the barrel of a gun
Looking back, Dorothy realized that her mother had gone from dating no one to meeting and losing the love of her life, to then eventually dating everyone, as if there were enough strangers in the world to fill the bottomless void of her heart.
I went into this thinking that if I’m able to help a patient change how they remember trauma, it will free them up to make different choices in the future. It’s based on a theory called Hebb’s Rule that says, ‘Cells that fire together wire together.’
He’d been looking for a way out then, and she should have let him go. She should have run far away. Instead she smashed her life into his, a strange mix of hubris and naïveté. Six years later, they functioned more like vaguely intimate roommates.
Annabel pouted. “Are you sure I can’t go outside?” “What did I say?” Dorothy tried her best to reason with a five-year-old. “You used to go out there,” Annabel argued the way preschoolers do, subtly planting seeds of logic in guilt-rich soil, hoping that they might eventually bear fruit.
Though after seeing Guto walk around with a broken nose and two black eyes, no one dared confront her or tease her. Instead they laid siege to her heart, catapulting volleys of silence. Firing trebuchets of piercing glances that always managed to find their target even if she was seeking refuge in the garden, or in the library, or like today, holding her breath at the bottom of the swimming pool.
“If you’re asking me about some sort of past life, or rebirth, I’m afraid I will be of little help at best, and at worst, somewhat disappointing. My Buddhist teaching encourages me not to dwell on those conceptions. Because this thing we might call a past life insinuates that we had a primary one to begin with. It implies the existence of a soul that transmigrates from body to body. That alone can be motivating, almost intoxicating, but that idea is also a myth. The Buddhist view of the nonself rejects the existence of an essential soul. It’s my belief that we are just an ever-changing
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“If you plant an acorn,” he said, “it may grow to become an oak tree. Yet there is no acorn within that wooden body. Has the acorn been reborn as a tree? Or does the acorn grow to be something else entirely? It’s my belief that the acorn and the tree are an idea, spread out over an abstraction of time. And if that new tree, when fully grown, drops one acorn or one hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, that idea keeps progressing as this thing we call life.”
“Perhaps he is a part of you,” the monk said. “But instead of trees and acorns, you’re both waves on the same ocean. Of course, you are separate, you crest and you fall as individual waves, but fundamentally you come from the same place, and when the ocean is calm, it is impossible to tell where he ends and you begin.”
In that moment, she thought about what her mother had once said. That the literal meaning of karma is action.
The words of John Clare echoed in her mind. I am the self-consumer of my woes. They rise and vanish in oblivious host. Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes. I can get through this.
Dorothy realized that she wasn’t her mother, Greta. She was stronger. She was choosing rather than existing. Acting instead of being acted upon. Helping and hoping instead of sinking further into despair. She would make things right, for herself, which she realized was the only way to make things right for Annabel. Dorothy held her daughter, and her tears, all through her goodbye.
There was a famous mathematician named Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. He used to say that ‘We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.’ That’s what people are and that’s what epigenetics is all about. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Recognize a pattern of behavior, of repeated cycles of trauma and loss, and then rewrite the script by reconciling those memories that are floating around your limbic system.
The small capsules were like finger-sized Band-Aids for her gaping chest wound.
Epigenetics Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler for their groundbreaking work at Emory University that showed how mice inherit fear from their parents, to which Marcus Pembry, emeritus professor of pediatric genetics at University College London, said, “It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously.” Laura Hercher, the director of research, Human Genetics at Sarah Lawrence College, put it more succinctly, calling it, “Crazy Lamarckian shit.” (Lamarckism is a theory explored in the 1800s that suggests that organisms pass on to their offspring physical
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In the film Pretty Woman, Richard Gere says, “People’s reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They love it or hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.”
