Intergenerational transmission of trauma: what we know and what is myth

“I read that trauma gets written into your genes. My grandmother lost both her brothers in the war. Does that mean I carry her trauma inside me? That I can’t change it?”

Questions like this have become more and more common in recent years. Short videos circulate on social media with titles like “Your anxiety might not be yours”, popular articles write about “inheriting trauma”, and bookshops have a whole shelf on how we carry our ancestors’ wounds. The idea is powerful because it explains something. It gives people words for the feeling that something older than themselves lives inside them.

But the idea also has a dark side. If you believe trauma is written into your genes, you can quickly start to believe it is fate. That there is nothing you can do. And that is not true — or at least it is not that simple. In this post I would like to separate what we really know about the intergenerational transmission of trauma from what is exaggerated or wrong. And to say why this distinction matters for anyone who recognises themselves in this story.

What intergenerational transmission of trauma actually means

I have already written about how patterns are passed down in families — ways of arguing, of keeping silent, of loving — in Intergenerational transmission: how patterns pass on without us noticing, and more broadly in What I inherited besides my genes: a family’s emotional legacy. The intergenerational transmission of trauma is a narrower concept. It is the question of whether and how the consequences of a severe experience — war, persecution, violence, sudden loss — can affect the children and grandchildren of those who lived through it, even though they themselves experienced nothing of the kind.

Research into this question began in the 1960s and 1970s, when clinicians in Canada, Israel and the United States noticed that the children of Holocaust survivors were often among the people seeking help. Since then, researchers have studied the descendants of war veterans, refugees, Indigenous communities, genocide survivors and people who experienced violence in the family. Along the way the question split into three: whether anything is passed on, what is passed on, and how.

What research on survivors’ descendants has shown

Perhaps the most telling study is a meta-analysis published in 2003 by Marinus van IJzendoorn, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg and Abraham Sagi-Schwartz. They combined studies on the children of Holocaust survivors — 32 samples with more than 4,400 participants in total. The finding surprised many: in samples drawn from the general population, survivors’ children were not less well-adapted than their peers. Signs of so-called secondary traumatisation appeared mainly in clinical samples — that is, among people who had already sought help.

This does not mean transmission doesn’t exist. It means it is not inevitable. Most children of people who survived the unimaginable built relatively ordinary lives. In some, though, difficulties did appear — and this is where the interesting question begins: what distinguishes one group from the other? One explanation researchers offer is that parents who were able to work through their trauma at least partly could give their children enough safety — despite everything they carried with them. So transmission does not depend only on what happened to the grandparents, but on what happened afterwards: in the family, in relationships, in the way people talked about it or kept silent.

This is one of the reasons why the simple claim “trauma is inherited” is misleading. At most, vulnerabilities and conditions are inherited — not fate.

The first path: the relationship a child receives

The best-researched path of transmission does not run through genes but through relationships. In 1975 the social worker and psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues published a paper with an unforgettable title: Ghosts in the Nursery. She described mothers who, in their relationship with their baby, unwittingly repeated what they themselves had experienced as children — not because they wanted to, but because their own childhood feelings had been shut away. When the baby cried, the mother did not hear only the baby. She heard something old that she could not allow herself to feel, and she responded by pulling away or with anger.

Fifteen years later, attachment researchers Mary Main and Erik Hesse connected these observations with research. They found that parents with unresolved trauma or loss — those who cannot speak about the experience coherently, who are still flooded or carried away by the memory — were more likely to have children who developed disorganised attachment. They proposed a mechanism: in moments when something reminds the parent of the trauma, the parent becomes frightened or frightening to the child. They may suddenly freeze, stare absently, respond with incomprehensible sharpness. For the child this is an unsolvable puzzle: the person they should run to for comfort is also the one who frightens them. How this shows in a child and later in adult relationships is described in Disorganised attachment: when the same person is both a source of comfort and a source of fear.

The key word here is unresolved. What is passed on is not the trauma itself but the way the parent was left alone with it. A parent who went through terrible things but was able to put them into words and place them in their own story generally does not pass on fear in this way. This is probably the most important thing I can say on the subject: what interrupts transmission is not forgetting, but working through.

The second path: silence and missing stories

The second path is quieter. It is not about what the parent does, but about what they do not say. In many families the worst things were never talked about. The children knew there was something, but not what. They knew you didn’t ask about a particular uncle, that on a certain date everyone at home withdrew, that grandmother went pale at the sound of an aeroplane. Silence did not mean there was no story — it meant the child had to piece the story together alone, from fragments, often wrongly and often with a sense of guilt.

In Slovenia this silence has its own history. The Second World War and the post-war period left experiences that for a long time could not, or were not allowed to, be talked about — from losses on both sides to the post-war killings, which only began to be discussed publicly after independence, and mass graves such as Huda jama, which was opened in 2009. Many families carried a grief that had neither a name nor a grave. Add to this emigration, displacement and families torn apart. I don’t need to generalise to say that many Slovenians have gaps in their family story at which someone still flinches today.

How to find such gaps and how to talk about them I described in more detail in Family secrets and unfinished stories: where the genogram finds them. Here I would only add this: silence in itself is not trauma. It becomes a burden when a child senses that something is dangerous but doesn’t know what — and when nobody helps them understand it.

The third path: epigenetics — what holds and what is exaggerated

This is where the headlines that spread fastest begin. Epigenetics studies how the environment influences which genes are “switched on” and which are “switched off”, without changing the DNA sequence itself. That experiences — including stress — affect gene expression within an individual’s lifetime is well established. The question is whether such changes can be passed on to the next generation.

The study cited most often was done on mice. In 2014 Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler published an experiment in which they taught male mice to fear a particular smell. Their offspring — and even the offspring of their offspring — were more sensitive to that smell, although they had never encountered it before. The study was published in a prestigious journal and attracted enormous attention. But these were mice, in a laboratory, with a single precisely controlled stimulus. This cannot be done with humans.

In humans, the best-known study is by Rachel Yehuda and colleagues from 2016, which compared epigenetic marks on the FKBP5 gene, associated with the stress response, in Holocaust survivors and their children. They found differences. But the sample was small, the study measured blood rather than germ cells, and the children grew up with parents who carried the trauma — so it is impossible to separate whether the difference was biologically inherited or arose from growing up in such a family. Other scientists also publicly criticised the study because of these limitations.

A fair summary, then, would be this: epigenetics is an interesting and lively field of research. It does not rule out that part of the vulnerability to stress could also be passed on biologically. But it does not prove that trauma is inherited like eye colour, and certainly not that memories are inherited. Anyone who promises to “erase your ancestors’ trauma from your cells” with some method is claiming more than science knows.

Myth and what we know

Because claims on this subject get simplified so quickly, it may help to put them side by side.

When the story is recognised

This is how a conversation might sound in which someone first encounters this theme in a session (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t know why I’m even mentioning this. My grandmother was still a child during the war. It shouldn’t affect me.”
“And yet you mentioned her. What do you know about that time?”
“Almost nothing. That she lost a brother. That she never talked about it. That my mum always told me not to ask her.”
“And what was it like at home when someone cried?”
“That didn’t happen. If you were sad, you went to your room. Mum said we don’t feel sorry for ourselves.”
“So it wasn’t only about what happened to your grandmother. It was about what you were allowed to feel in the family afterwards.”
“I’ve never seen it like that.”

This conversation uncovers no secret. But it does uncover a rule that passed from generation to generation: sadness is not shown. And that rule can affect how this woman comforts her own children today, or how she responds when her partner needs support. She did not inherit her grandmother’s trauma. She inherited the way the family coped with that trauma. And a way of coping can be changed — more on this in Breaking the cycle: how a pattern stops with you.

Exercise: three generations, three questions

You can do this exercise on your own, with paper and a pencil, in half an hour. You don’t need all the information — the gaps are often the most telling part.

1. Draw a simple tree of three generations: yourself, your parents, your grandparents. You can use the genogram template or the free genogram drawing tool, which keeps your data only in your browser.
2. Next to each parent and grandparent, write one major experience you know about: war, migration, loss, illness, violence. Where you don’t know, draw a question mark.
3. Write down how it was talked about. Openly, in jokes, in whispers, never? Who was allowed to ask?
4. Write down one rule about emotions you got at home. “Don’t cry.” “Don’t show that it hurts.” “Don’t trust strangers.” Next to it, mark where that rule might have come from.
5. Ask yourself what you want to keep and what you don’t. Caution can be valuable; a silence that isolates you may no longer be needed.

If this exercise opens up more than you expected, that’s all right. Such views often open better in the company of someone who knows how to follow. That is why there is also a longer session, A Look into the Past, in which we draw a genogram together and pause at whatever it reveals. What a genogram can show is also described under genogram in the knowledge base.

Where this view doesn’t hold

The intergenerational view is valuable, but it has limits worth knowing.

Not every difficulty is inherited. If someone is in a violent relationship today, if they are being bullied at work, if they have recently lost their job, then their distress is first and foremost a response to the present. Looking for causes in previous generations can, in such a case, even do harm, because it diverts attention from what needs to change now.

History is not an excuse. Understanding where your pattern comes from does not mean you are not responsible for it. “I’m like this because my father was like this” can be the beginning of understanding — or the end of the conversation. Responsibility for how I treat my children and my partner remains mine, regardless of what my grandfather went through.

Resilience is passed on too. People who survived war or persecution did not hand down only fear to their descendants. They often handed down perseverance, resourcefulness, solidarity and a sense of humour in hard times as well. Researchers of resilience stress this again and again. If you look only for wounds in your family story, you will miss the resources you can lean on.

Families don’t need a culprit. When someone discovers that their mother kept silent because her mother kept silent, it is tempting to shift the blame onto the previous generation. But such a search for a culprit rarely helps. As I wrote in Family therapy isn’t a search for someone to blame — it’s a search for the pattern: understanding does not mean condemning.

When to look for a trauma specialist

I want to be clear here. I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision, and I work with people mainly on family patterns and relationships. I am not a trauma specialist and I do not practise methods such as EMDR or somatic therapies.

EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) is a method in which a person returns to a traumatic memory while receiving guided bilateral stimulation, until the memory loses its power. Somatic methods, such as Somatic Experiencing and sensorimotor psychotherapy, work through bodily sensations rather than through narrative. Both require specific training. I have written about how trauma is recorded in the body in How trauma stays written in the body — and how the body can let it go, and about why suffering in itself doesn’t make you stronger in “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — why this doesn’t hold for trauma.

It makes sense to look for a professional who specialises in trauma when memories — your own, not your ancestors’ — overwhelm you uncontrollably, when you have nightmares, when you switch off or lose track of time, or when your life is shrinking because of avoidance. When trauma is at the forefront of your current relationships, there is more in Trauma and relationships: why closeness is the hardest part of recovery. If you are thinking of harming yourself, call the Mental Distress Helpline (Klic v duševni stiski) on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan Confidential Line (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours). In an emergency, call 112.

What to remember

• The intergenerational transmission of trauma exists, but it is not inevitable: most descendants of people who lived through terrible things lead relatively ordinary lives.
• The best-researched path of transmission is the relationship — how a parent with an unresolved experience responds to a child’s distress.
• Silence matters too: not what happened, but what the family was not allowed to feel or say.
• Epigenetics is a promising field, but in humans it does not prove that trauma or memories are inherited.
• What interrupts transmission most is working through, not forgetting — and it is not only wounds that pass from generation to generation, but resilience too.