Numb (being emotionally detached, having an intolerance of weakness, and a “conspiracy of silence” - a term that describes a dynamic where survivors feel guilty to burden their families or even entire communities with their trauma and choose not to discuss it).Victim (being stuck in the trauma with emotional volatility, skepticism, and overprotectiveness).Crawford, who is also an associate medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).Ī review that looked at intergenerational trauma among war veterans’ children found that parents’ trauma could be transmitted to their families in three ways: direct traumatization by parental behavior, identifying with the parent’s experience, or family dysfunction (an indirect mechanism of transmission).ĭanieli’s research, which focuses on Holocaust survivors, found that families who have been affected by intergenerational trauma can be grouped into “adaptive styles,” including: “That trauma stays with you, so when you become a parent, you may not even know you’re interacting with your children in a way that may create trauma for them as well,” says Dr. When people experience trauma, it can shape how safe they feel in the world, says Christine Crawford, MD, MPH, an adult and child psychiatrist and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine.

Research suggests it begins if a parent experienced firsthand trauma or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood, spanning emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or neglect - which can affect the way they raise their children. “This expresses itself biologically, chemically, psychologically, behaviorally, interpersonally, culturally, even nationally.” “It’s the multiple ways in which ancestral and parental post-trauma adaptational styles affect their offspring, and these ways are multidimensional,” Dr. While you may not have been abused, lived through discrimination, or survived war yourself, your thinking, habits, and the way you forge relationships may be rooted in the traumatic experiences your ancestors have dealt with. Significant traumatic events and experiences, like the Holocaust, slavery, sexual abuse, and poverty, can affect people in such a way that survivors’ children and their children (sometimes continuing for decades on) are affected. If unhealed and unaddressed, traumatic wounds can be unintentionally passed on, says Yael Danieli, PhD, the founder and executive director of the International Center for Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma in New York, who has spent decades researching postwar trauma responses of victims, children of victims, their families, and communities. Can you inherit trauma from your family members?

Intergenerational trauma in oscar wao