Overcoming Generational Trauma

Sergio Ocampo, MA, LMFT Why is generational trauma important in our work as mental health professionals? How does it show up, and what can we do to help resolve it? Is it even possible for us to help clients heal fully from generational trauma?

Generational trauma is about the past. It’s about memories that cause distress in our bodies and our minds. Nature exhibits a unique memory that transcends an individual lifetime. It passes on learned wisdom that informs how all life organizes and takes physical shape. By extension, emotional experiences are transmitted to future generations, too, and affect people’s daily lives. This comprises the backbone of how generational trauma subtly becomes part of daily existence.

Generational trauma can be defined as the psychological and emotional impact of traumatic experiences passed down from one generation to another. It’s a legacy transferred through lineage. It influences individuals through time, determining their outcomes in extremely defined ways.

In the process of therapy, I often see individuals complete the greater part of their self-work in resolving past traumas. For some, there is an ongoing feeling of something left unresolved. Sometimes deeper anxiety, depression, darkness, or indescribable, preoccupying feelings persist as therapeutic processing repeatedly fails to find the source. When I bring the client’s awareness to their ancestry, that is, what befell and affected their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, curious and intriguing experiences arrive. Clients often encounter deeper wells of emotion and internal bodily experiences that uncover the roots of their core anxieties and frustrations. By applying the tools of somatic therapy, I have facilitated the undoing of these profoundly held emotions and a return to a state of wellness.

For many, generational trauma shows up as emotional overwhelm, intensified emotions that have no cause or origin in present life. There’s lingering anxiety, frustration, or disconnection that escapes the tools of therapy and introspection. Individuals will remark that they feel persistent anxiety, which their mother and their grandparents also experienced. Often, entire families share a similar character. When entering a family’s home, we in essence “feel” them. Each family has a unique emotional presence, akin to an emotional fingerprint, that we grow to recognize the more we consort with them. It leaves an indelible impression on us, and we subsequently perceive each family through a unique lens.

Our felt sense experience of a family—i.e., how they make us feel internally—is their distinctive inherited emotional signature. We are actually feeling into the emotional history embodied by the family members. This precipitates our own experience of forming an emotional impression accompanied by a bodily response we can feel in our gut.

We can easily attribute the emotional character of a family to learned behavior. For instance, an anxious parent will tend to raise anxious children. This is a logical inference. However, this doesn’t account for children in the family who are less anxious and more self-regulated when coping with distressing situations. Often, these are the offspring who become the emotional caretakers of the family.

In a well-known study, mice were exposed to a cherry blossom scent and then lightly shocked. After this conditioning, the mice found the scent of cherry blossoms repellant. Scientists then bred them. Up to five generations later, these mice still responded to the cherry blossom scent by backing away fearfully.

During the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, elephants in the areas near the flood-affected beaches began to move to higher ground hours before the tsunami struck. The earthquake that produced it was hundreds of miles away. How did the elephants know what was about to happen?

Babies who were gestating during and just after the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-45 in German-occupied Netherlands were born underweight. Years later, their own children were also smaller at birth than the population average.

Some of these phenomena we can attribute to genetic transmission, and more specifically to epigenetics—immediate changes in genes that help an organism adapt to a changing environment. The case of the elephants migrating to higher ground involves very different forces at work.

In recent years, the field of epigenetics has revealed that genetic modifications can occur in short time spans. Humans can spontaneously adapt to changing environmental forces in order to survive. Fungible genes allow the species to adapt quickly so they can better take advantage of an altered environment. These adaptations shift physiology, allowing the human body to achieve the highest possible survival advantage given the environmental circumstances.

Genetics, to a certain extent, explains how traits are passed down. However, genes are only able to create the basic building blocks that make up the proteins constituting all tissue in the body. Genetic encoding orchestrates the union of amino acids to create proteins, but it does not contain information for how to build a living being. In other words, no one has been able to find the plan that determines how to build a finger, a hand, or an eye. A large gap exists in our knowledge of how living things assume their form. If genes are not providing the blueprint for a full human being or any other living thing on Earth, then what is? We can also ask the larger question: How precisely are the emotional tendencies and past traumas of our ancestors being transmitted to us? If it’s not through our genetic material then what unknown mechanism is at work transmitting the emotional experience of previous generations?

To answer this question, we need a straightforward way to understand the forces at play. Given that we don’t know exactly how a living form creates a structure, we can use a practical tool to help us understand. We can imagine that there is a sort of field that attracts and molds living tissues to create and assemble proteins and other building blocks as a way of producing a discrete living being, similar to how moving a magnet around a mound of metallic chips can create a pattern. Though no one has ever discovered such a field, imagining its existence can help us better understand how generational attributes are transmitted. We can picture genes creating the materials that make individual Lego blocks and this field drawing them together to assemble a unique structure. We can refer to such a field as a generational field. It may hold all the information for how to create a whole living being.

Indeed, through relying on the concept of generational fields to understand how the past is transmitted to all living beings, we can envision emotional overwhelm residing in its own unique field that carries through successive generations. Each generation experiences and is impacted by its influence. We can name this field the generational emotional field. It’s a repository of past traumas and emotional overwhelm that affects future generations. Tapping into such a field could explain how the Indonesian elephants “knew” to move to higher ground.

If we think of generational trauma as an emotional field that influences individuals and entire families, we can more easily make sense of how emotional struggle is transmitted over generations. If this field is a repository of past overwhelm, traumatic experiences, and difficulties, then these can also influence our current emotional state.

Using the concept of generational fields makes it easier for us to connect how the past influences not only our emotional experience but also our health and overall well-being. We experience not only emotional patterns that stem from the past but also adverse physiological symptoms. Individuals who experience trauma often report significant health issues and unexplained symptoms. These may show up as chronic disease, body pain, nervous system afflictions, autoimmune disorders, and many other presentations. Symptoms often are complex and without explanable origin. Coincidentally, ailments suffered by parents or grandparents also affect their children. We attribute these afflictions to genetic inheritance. Studies show that genetic transmission is a strong factor but doesn’t entirely determine outcomes. The most pressing question is: what triggers particular genes to become active and provoke disease in the body?

If we view these tendencies for disease as originating through a generational field, we may make more sense of how genes are triggered. It is widely accepted that stress is a strong factor in health outcomes. If generational emotional stress is present, there’s an increased likelihood that genes will be activated to initiate disease. For example, if an individual’s genes have a marked propensity for developing diabetes and the person experiences emotional stress throughout their lifetime, the chances of becoming ill are much greater. The ACES study on early life trauma clearly shows a strong correlation between trauma and chronic disease. It’s common for traumatized children to have caretakers who were subjected to very similar traumas. Parents are passing on not only emotional overwhelm but also the tendency to acquire the same health outcomes. When trauma and disease coexist, we can clearly see a generational connection.

In my extensive work with the offspring of Holocaust survivors, I have often witnessed their powerful terror and rage, which show up as underlying anxiety, depression, or a sense of disconnection and meaninglessness in life. At times, these strong emotions have no grounding in their developmental years. Many enjoyed more carefree early childhoods than their parents and grandparents did. Nevertheless, their anxiety and depression persist as if they had also experienced significant early-life turmoil.

Similarly, through working with clients who were adopted at an early age, I’ve noticed that their unexpected emotional difficulties have scant justification in their adoptive households. These individuals have never met their biological parents, yet they exhibit similar emotional tendencies despite having had a supportive adoptive household.

As we address and unravel trauma, generational patterns become quite clear. Frequently, there is a strong emotional burden passed from grandparents to their children and their grandchildren. If we inquire further, the pattern stretches back to great grandparents and beyond. If we extend our vision into the distant past, we encounter a profound set of questions: How many tragedies have our ancestors experienced? How many traumas have been witnessed and endured throughout the generations? And how many of these traumatic experiences were left unresolved?

Viewed from this perspective, the emotional weight can be significant. It’s no wonder so many of us start life with one hand tied behind our back. This can explain how entire populations suffer a higher incidence of trauma.

Knowing that trauma can be transmitted from one generation to the next, what can we do about it? If we encounter a stubborn emotional residue that fails to resolve in the process of therapy, it’s most likely emotional overwhelm being transmitted through the generational emotional field.

There are two primary ways in which the generational emotional field shows up: sensations and emotions. As an individual begins to connect with the distant past they may encounter strong emotions and sensations derived from generational trauma but have no actual memories of it. If a family’s generational field holds great fear, descendants will likely inherit anxious emotions they feel in their body much the way their ancestors did. These experiences fuel current difficulties that can be directly addressed because they are acting on the mind and the body in the here and now.

Somatic therapy lends itself perfectly to resolving emotions through its focus on working with sensations in the body. All emotions are embodied because we feel them in our body. This fact provides the roadmap to healing generational trauma by using what we know works effectively:  somatic experiencing, a therapy that is masterful at deactivating emotions through bodily sensations, enabling resolution and a return to wholeness. By using the reliable tools of pendulation, embodiment, and resourcing, we can track sensations and emotions to deactivate an overwhelmed nervous system.

In working with generational trauma, I often invite the client to bring their awareness to both recent and more distant ancestors. I have heard the following expression countless times: “It feels like a dark cloud behind me, all around me.” This perceived darkness seems to be a symptom of something that exists and lingers in the background while causing discomfort in present life.

We can think of this darkness as emerging from the generational emotional field. Generational trauma expresses itself as a unique experience of “darkness,” a sense of depression. Further exploring this darkness can cause strong emotions and sensations to arise. Using somatic experiencing interventions, we work to deactivate embodied emotions to help the client return to a sense of calm. Once this unfolds, the client frequently experiences a profound settling and enlightening insights, as they’re able to hold the pain of past generations with a sense of resolution. After such impactful sessions, I observe clients improving at an accelerated rate, not merely in terms of emotional wellness but also in terms of discovering more of their purpose and value in life. Newfound resilience and confidence pave the way to a more authentic life.

Working in the generational trauma field has an added benefit beyond helping to resolve complex emotional challenges. Bodily ailments such as muscular tension patterns, immune system issues, and other medical conditions tend to be ameliorated or even fully resolved. For example, those who have suffered major digestive issues passed down generationally find relief and often permanent healing. A client who once needed a refrigerated bag full of daily medications to be able to digest a carefully managed diet no longer required this protocol after a few months of somatic therapy sessions. Another client struggling with lifelong bouts of debilitating vertigo eventually returned to wellness. A middle-aged woman who for years struggled with fibromyalgia was finally able to resolve her painful symptoms. These are just a few of the outcomes possible when we work somatically with clients who have experienced generational trauma.

Using somatic tools for generational trauma resolution can catalyze an entire family’s healing process. As clients address generational trauma, curious events unfold: They start to reconnect and dialogue with family members as never before, causing the tension in the relationships to fade. Clients even report sudden reconnections with long-estranged family members, as if there were never a lapse in communication. The cloak of disharmony that sometimes envelops a dysfunctional family seems to fall away, bringing about stronger connections and greater mutual understanding. This often marks the beginning of healing for an entire family. One person who touches into and helps heal generational wounding within the emotional field can activate the process of healing for the rest of their family. The results are remarkable to witness.

If we focus solely on generational trauma and overwhelm, we miss a very important component that is also transmitted through the generational field: the talents, intelligence, and internal resources of our ancestors. We inherit not only the challenges of our predecessors but also their strengths. Family members pass on special abilities and gifts to their descendants, who often become adept artists, doctors, architects, writers, and scientists. These aptitudes seem to come easily. Along with these prominent attributes, a special human quality is also transmitted generationally: resilience. This is our inner capacity to thrive in the face of extreme discomfort and physical and emotional challenges. This innate quality serves as a crucial resource that not only helps us navigate the difficulties of life but also provides us with a strong foundation in the process of healing.

I am frequently humbled by how those suffering from trauma are able to traverse exceptionally challenging lives and survive. I’ve noticed during therapy sessions how inner resilience supports clients in moving forward and achieving deep healing. It seems as if those carrying the heaviest emotional weight also inherit the greatest capacity to endure the burden. We can imagine this as an emotional muscle that grows generationally and is passed on. The resilience that helps people heal these deep wounds has a positive aftereffect: As people heal from trauma, their resilience manifests as an increased ability to find pleasure and embrace the joys of life. It is as if they have been reborn with a larger pool of inner potential that can now be filled with positive human experiences. I have heard many clients describe how they’ve acquired a more profound, and sometimes even more spiritual, experience of being alive that allows them to savor the simplicity of life’s moments.

It’s easy to be skeptical of the existence of a generational emotional field. However, if we use the concept as a way to understand how emotional overwhelm can be transmitted from one generation to another, then we can take practical steps to heal. Individuals and entire afflicted communities can initiate a process of healing from the knowledge that the problem does not originate in their actions, rather it’s been handed down to them generationally. This can significantly ease their burden and redirect the process of therapy so that it targets the proper origin: ancestors of the distant past.

Generational trauma has plagued humanity throughout the entirety of its existence. It holds our collective history of struggle and survival. Generational trauma heavily influences our daily lives, but it need not get in the way of healing, happiness, and fulfillment. Using the tools of somatic experiencing, people can resolve the ancestral emotional burdens they’ve inherited and return to wholeness. Generational trauma  is not a life sentence, but a temporary discomfort that can be resolved permanently.