Updated on December 26, 2025
You’re sitting in your therapist’s office describing this knot of anxiety in your chest when everything seems objectively fine. Your therapist asks about your family. You mention, almost as an afterthought, that your grandmother survived the Holocaust. Or your parents fled war. Or addiction ran through your family like a fault line.
“Tell me more about that,” your therapist says.
You’ve spent years trying to understand why certain fears feel lodged in your bones. Why you react to abandonment like it’s life-or-death. Why safety never quite feels safe enough. Many people eventually ask: Am I carrying wounds that aren’t entirely mine?
When Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Doesn’t Know
Researchers call this intergenerational trauma (also called generational trauma). It’s how traumatic experiences ripple through families, affecting people who never directly experienced the original traumatic event.
Your grandmother survived extreme scarcity. Her nervous system had to stay in high alert just to keep her alive. She might have passed that setting down to her children, who then passed it to you. You find yourself checking the locks four times or worrying about money even when your bank account is full. Your brain isn’t failing you. It’s using an old map to navigate a new world.
This isn’t metaphorical or purely psychological. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has spent decades studying children of Holocaust survivors. Her research found something unexpected: children of survivors showed different levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) than people whose families didn’t face those extremes, even though they never experienced the Holocaust themselves.
But survivors and their offspring showed changes in opposite directions. Survivors had higher levels of a specific biological marker. Their children had lower levels. This wasn’t a simple transmission. Each generation appeared to adapt to its particular circumstances.
The Science Is Messier Than the Headlines
You’ve probably heard that “trauma changes your DNA” or that “epigenetics proves trauma gets inherited.” The science is messier and less certain.
Your DNA sequence stays the same throughout your life. Life experiences can change how your body reads those genes, though. Think of it like a light switch. Traumatic environments can flip certain stress-response switches to the “on” position, which scientists call changes in gene expression. These switches can be flipped back. Safety, stable relationships, and focused therapy can help shift your biology.
A comprehensive review highlights an important point: these biological changes may represent adaptations rather than damage. Your grandmother survived starvation, so your body might be primed to respond intensely to food insecurity. Whether that helps or hurts you depends on the environment you’re living in now.
Resilience Passes Down Too
Resilience also transmits across generations, though you hear less about this.
A meta-analysis of descendants from Holocaust survivor families found that most adapted well, showing no more psychological distress than comparison groups. Recent research on third and fourth-generation descendants found they showed enhanced social bonding and lower anxiety compared to controls.
They carried their ancestors’ capacity to survive and connect, not just their pain.
Parents who process their own trauma and develop healthy coping mechanisms are less likely to pass these patterns down. This isn’t about being a perfect parent. It’s about how you handle your own pain.
Families where trauma history gets discussed openly tend to raise children who integrate that history into their identity rather than being haunted by it. The silence amplifies things more than the trauma itself. Secrets create ghosts.
Research on family health shows that positive childhood experiences, strong relationships, and family closeness can interrupt transmission. The cycle isn’t inevitable.
How This Shows Up
Intergenerational trauma usually hides in plain sight. It lives in the unspoken rules everyone follows without knowing why.
Maybe vulnerability was seen as dangerous in your family, so you learned to shut down whenever things got emotional. Or there’s a strange guilt that follows you whenever you succeed, as if doing better than your parents is somehow betraying them. Your family goes silent when certain topics come up, leaving you to fill in the blanks with your own assumptions.
Emotional and Behavioral Signs
A friend cancels plans, and you feel abandoned in a way that seems disproportionate to the situation. Your partner is late coming home, and dread floods your system. You might notice hypervigilance, which means constantly scanning for danger even in safe environments. You can’t relax even when circumstances are objectively secure.
Low self-esteem can persist across generations, especially when family members received critical or dismissive parenting styles. You might struggle with self-worth in ways that echo your parents’ or grandparents’ struggles.
When Trauma Lives in Your Body
The effects of generational trauma go beyond mental health. Chronic stress from unresolved trauma can affect your physical health in measurable ways.
Research shows that descendants of trauma survivors have higher risk for conditions including heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders. Your body’s stress response system, shaped by generational patterns, can create lasting effects on your heart and immune system.
Sometimes trauma shows up as chronic tension in your neck. Digestive issues that doctors can’t quite explain. A heart that races for no reason. This is often just the body’s way of storing a story that hasn’t been told yet.
Where Generational Trauma Comes From
Generational trauma can stem from personal experiences like domestic violence or sexual abuse within families. It can also emerge from collective trauma, which means traumatic events experienced by entire groups of people because of their identity.
Historical Trauma in Different Communities
African American communities carry trauma from slavery, segregation, and ongoing systemic racism. Native American communities experience effects from forced displacement, cultural genocide, and the trauma of residential schools. Descendants of Holocaust survivors, refugees from war-torn regions, survivors of natural disasters. Each group carries distinct patterns.
These aren’t just historical events. The healthcare disparities, economic inequalities, and ongoing stressors that originated from these traumas continue affecting subsequent generations today.
Adverse Childhood Experiences
Researchers have identified adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as a significant factor in how trauma gets passed down. ACEs include experiences like abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, witnessing domestic violence, or having family members with substance use issues.
Studies show that parents who experienced ACEs are at higher risk of their children experiencing similar things. These patterns can persist across multiple generations. But awareness of these patterns creates opportunities to break the cycle.
Will I Pass This to My Kids?
This fear brings many people to therapy. Transmission isn’t guaranteed, though.
By examining these patterns, you’re doing work that earlier generations may not have had the resources or safety to undertake. Your awareness makes a difference. Combined with efforts to process your experiences and create healthy relationships, you can interrupt these patterns. It’s not about becoming some idealized version of a parent. It’s about interrupting the autopilot.
Parents who develop healthier coping mechanisms and work through their own unresolved trauma significantly reduce the likelihood of passing trauma effects to the next generation.
How Do I Know If What I’m Feeling Connects to Family History?
Some clues suggest family patterns might be relevant. Feelings disconnected from your life experiences. Family stories about trauma that was never processed. Patterns echoing through multiple generations. Reactions that surprise even you.
A lot of people spend energy trying to categorize this. Working with a therapist can help you understand your experience without getting stuck on labels.
Can Therapy Help If This Is Biological?
Yes. Changes in how genes work in response to environmental shifts, including therapeutic interventions. Therapy can’t change your DNA, but it can change how your genes are expressed by modifying your environment, relationships, and stress levels. Those light switches can be flipped back.
The biological patterns created by intergenerational trauma aren’t a life sentence. With support and treatment, you can interrupt them.
What If You Don’t Know Your Family’s History?
Not knowing doesn’t make healing impossible. Some people discover family trauma through therapy. Others heal from present-day symptoms without ever identifying specific historical events. Focus on your current experience and what helps you feel safer and more regulated.
What Helps Break the Cycle
Therapy Approaches That Work
Several therapy types show strong evidence for healing intergenerational trauma.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps process traumatic material stored in the nervous system. This matters because some of what you’re carrying may not have language attached.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps you recognize and change thought patterns and behaviors that stem from generational trauma. It’s particularly effective for symptoms like anxiety, hypervigilance, and depression.
Family therapy creates space to explore patterns across generations with trained support. Sometimes involving multiple family members can illuminate dynamics that are hard to see alone.
Somatic therapies help you recognize how your body holds stress. You might notice chronic tension in your shoulders, shallow breathing, and constant bracing without conscious awareness. Then you learn to release it.
Looking at Family Patterns
This involves examining your family history so you can see where a behavior or pattern started. A genogram (basically a family tree that includes emotional patterns, not just names and dates) can make invisible dynamics suddenly visible.
You start to see that your difficulty with vulnerability didn’t originate with you. It started two generations back when showing emotion meant being vulnerable to violence.
Support Beyond Individual Therapy
Support groups for trauma survivors can provide a connection with others who understand. Whether through mental health organizations, community centers, or specialized groups for specific experiences, hearing others’ stories can reduce isolation.
Accessing healthcare that understands trauma is crucial. Finding providers who recognize how intergenerational trauma affects both mental and physical health can make treatment more effective.
Deciding What You’re Done Carrying
Sometimes healing means deciding which family traditions or attitudes you’re no longer willing to carry forward. Setting boundaries often becomes necessary. This doesn’t mean cutting people off. It means deciding what you’ll accept in relationships and what you won’t.
When You’re the Only One Doing This Work
A common pain point: you’re healing, but your partner, parents, or siblings aren’t. This can feel isolating. It sometimes creates new relationship challenges.
You can’t control whether others choose healing. Focus on how you show up differently as you change. Sometimes your shifts gradually influence family dynamics. Sometimes they don’t, and you have to grieve that while protecting your progress.
Cultural Context Matters
Different communities have different relationships with trauma and healing. Indigenous communities, descendants of enslaved peoples, refugees, survivors of genocide. Each carries distinct collective traumas with unique healing needs.
The healthcare disparities and systemic stressors that many marginalized communities face make the effects of historical trauma worse. Effective treatment must acknowledge these realities rather than treating intergenerational trauma as purely an individual or family issue.
At Firefly Therapy Austin, we work with clients from diverse backgrounds. We understand that healing looks different across cultural contexts and that Western therapy approaches aren’t always the best fit. Effective therapy integrates your cultural identity rather than ignoring it.
When Trauma Looks Like PTSD
Sometimes the effects of generational trauma look like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even in people who didn’t directly experience the original traumatic event. Symptoms can include intrusive thoughts, nightmares, avoidance of triggers, and heightened stress responses.
If you’re experiencing PTSD symptoms related to family history, know that trauma-informed therapy can help. The treatment approaches that work for direct trauma survivors often work for descendants carrying generational effects.
The Hope in This Research
Intergenerational trauma research initially sounds grim. Trauma echoes across generations, changes are written into biology, and patterns recur despite conscious efforts to prevent them.
But the same research shows that healing is possible. Changes aren’t permanent. Awareness and intervention matter. Third-generation Holocaust descendants show biological evidence of enhanced resilience and social connection. Trauma can transform across generations when survivors create contexts for healing.
The fact that you’re reading this, asking questions, seeking understanding. This interrupts transmission.
Starting the Work
If you recognize yourself in this description and want support, we work with people who are ready to break the cycle and stop living out scripts they didn’t write. You don’t need a perfectly clear family tree or a list of historical dates to start this process. We focus on how these echoes are affecting your life right now.
Starting this work doesn’t mean you’re criticizing your parents or turning your back on your heritage. It means you’re choosing to keep the resilience and strength of your ancestors while setting down the fear they had to carry.
We can help you figure out what belongs to you and what you can finally let go of. The cycle doesn’t have to continue through you.