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Intergenerational Trauma.
Are we destined to continue to repeat?

Major life changes like moving house, illness, and loss, can disturb our sense of safety. The deeply held objects in life that offer us familiarity, security and nurturance can be shaken like a snow globe, often after many years of calm waters. Janina Fisher’s work describes the impact of this disturbance on the body, she suggests that it is ‘as if the body and nervous system are loathe to “give up” the automatic responses that ensured safety for another day’ (Fisher, 2017, p.162). Intergenerational trauma research evidences that we are not only at the mercy of our own nervous system’s complex ways of managing perceived threat, we are also living out old ancestral messages contained within our genetics, developed to keep us safe, from events long since passed. Using the example of moving house, we may be frantically fighting with estate agents, changing our mind about the move, fleeing in fear, paralysis, or collapse. These messages can cause us mental, physical, social, cultural and environmental harm, that if not understood and decoded, can mean that we may be destined to act upon them throughout our lives, passing them on to the subsequent generations.

An example from recent history being when pregnant women, traumatised by the World Trade Centre attacks have passed on a susceptibility to stress to their new born babies. Mothers who experienced post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during pregnancy, because of witnessing the attacks have been found to have children with abnormally low levels of the hormone cortisol, which is associated with increased stress. This could mean that these children were “programmed” in the womb, as a result of their mother’s trauma, to respond to any attack, based on internal information from an attack that had already taken place.

Significant changes in our lives such as moving home, bereavement, marriage, childbirth, psychotherapy training! Etc, can all trigger the messages in our RNA code formed by traumas which may have happened to our ancestors many generations ago.

The pain and torment of racial abuse experienced throughout time could have intergenerational trauma as a route cause.

We cannot know who we are unless we know where we have been.

There is hope ……
The story of Rumpelstiltskin taught us that if we name it, the power is lost.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7336-911-babies-inherit-stress-from-mothers/#ixzz71AhLJWJp


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