Human beings have survived on Earth by learning to adapt and evolve for thousands of years. When you experience chronic stress or have survived a traumatic event, your body adjusts to activate specific responses to help you manage the trauma. You might have grown up in a home where yelling, shouting at children, throwing, or breaking items stems from a past unresolved trauma. This article explores everything you need to know about intergenerational trauma.
What is Intergenerational Trauma?
The term intergenerational trauma refers to the trauma experienced in one generation that can resonate in the lives of descendants. This can be explained by the fact that the original traumatic experience is transmitted from parents to children, grandchildren, and so on. It is believed to result from learned behaviour and stress-induced alterations in the body’s internal physiology.
For instance, a child who witnesses physical abuse of the mother, either once or more, experiences trauma. It can then develop into intergenerational trauma, which can affect the behaviour of the child in future relationships, and how they parent their own kids.
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What Causes Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma occurs when the effects of trauma are passed through generations. If a parent experienced abuse or witnessed a close family member, had adverse childhood experiences, it can impact their parenting styles and continue the cycle of trauma.
It is caused by large-scale unresolved traumas like genocide, war, cultural suppression, natural disasters, and forced displacement, and it can traumatise a generation. These children and adolescents may grow up to engage in maladaptive parenting, emotional distancing, and learned behaviours that affect subsequent generations through potential and social pathways.
Family-level issues like neglect, childhood abuse, domestic violence, or substance abuse can create cycles of trauma that are passed through generations.
Effects of Intergenerational Trauma
Traumatised parents are often unavailable emotionally for their children, struggle with developing attachment, or are overly controlling, which affects the child’s emotional development. Moreover, unresolved trauma leads to unhealthy coping strategies like aggression or addiction, which the child can learn and adapt.
Intergenerational trauma also causes chemical changes in DNA (it does not alter the gene code, but it affects how genes are expressed), which can be inherited across generations. Oppression, racial discrimination, or war refugees experience loss of language, or have severed roots from their traditions, cultural or community practices, and customs.
How does Intergenerational Trauma Affect the Brain?
Most survivors of intergenerational trauma display immediate reactions and might not exhibit long-term consequences. It’s because some trauma survivors are resilient and can develop healthy coping mechanisms. They utilise social support and seek help to deal with the aftermath of trauma.
However, some people may show impairment and have difficulty in dealing with future relationships. It affects the functioning and processing of brain systems.
1. Emotional Dysregulation
Trauma survivors have difficulty in dealing with emotions like anxiety, anger, sadness, and shame, especially if they were experienced at a young age. They might develop strong feelings about past trauma, and an emotional reaction might lead to loss of control. Intergenerational trauma can affect emotional processing, and someone might deny having feelings, lack an emotional response, or feel numb.
Intergenerational traumatic stress can evoke emotional extremes, either feeling overwhelmed or a sense of numbness with no feelings. People may engage in self-injurious or high-risk behaviours, eating too much or barely eating, compulsive behaviours like gambling, or denial of emotions.
Some people can find healthy and creative ways to manage stress due to intergenerational trauma by committing to physical activity, social support groups, and seeking support from trauma survivors.
2. Changes in Brain Systems
For your brain to work efficiently, all parts of the brain must have healthy communication from the lower to upper parts of the higher brain, and also between the left and right sides of the brain.
When the lower brain regions (responsible for survival) are repeatedly activated by stress from intergenerational trauma, these regions weaken connections within the brain. It affects your ability to learn, regulate emotions, form memories, reflect, respond, be calm, and think rationally.
Adults who have had prior traumatic experiences have a reduced prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. In the absence of these emotional regulatory mechanisms, one may feel overwhelmed with anxiety even in the absence of real danger.
Researchers have also suggested that adults with PTSD have an increased startle response due to increased activity in the amygdala (increased release of noradrenaline).
Therefore, health care providers believe that every contact with an infant, child, or young person (even a brief one) is an opportunity to promote healing, improve well-being, and build resilience.
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3. Changes in Neurochemical Systems
Stress due to intergenerational trauma causes acute and chronic changes in the brain and neurochemical systems. We know that cortisol and norepinephrine are crucial neurochemical systems in the stress response.
The corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) system and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis play a significant role in the stress response. CRF is released from the hypothalamus after the stimulation of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which is released from the pituitary gland. It results in the release of glucocorticoids (e.g., cortisol in men) from the adrenal glands and exerts negative feedback on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
What is Complex Trauma?
If you were physically or emotionally abused as a child or a young person, it can have a drastic effect on your mental health. Sometimes, a parent or caregiver for a child has gone through traumatic experiences, and they still influence their behaviour. They might have issues with alcohol and substance abuse, or be emotionally or physically unavailable for their child.
In such circumstances, the situations can often cause complex trauma in childhood. Physical, or sexual abuse/trafficking, or being through forced adoption can make a child or young person experience complex trauma. Violence in the home, community, or family while growing up affects developing individuals.
Complex trauma can also affect adults similarly. You may feel trapped, which affects your well-being, and feel ashamed. You have difficulty trusting people, struggle to manage your feelings, don’t feel safe, and feel bad about yourself. One may use different coping strategies like alcohol use, drugs, over- or under-eating, and self-harm.
How to Heal from Intergenerational Trauma?
Children and young people who have had complex trauma or have been a part of intergenerational trauma can break the cycle of trauma. You can seek professional help from Boomerang Counselling Centre for family therapy, EMDR, and the development of healthy coping mechanisms and self-awareness. They can help you to open communication within your family and foster secure attachments, leading to community healing.
