There is a question that can often sit in a lot of therapy sessions, difficult family dynamics, and patterns people can’t quite explain in themselves: why do we carry pain that isn’t entirely our own? Why does a grandmother’s wartime fear seem to live in her granddaughter’s nervous system? Why do the children of addicts so often struggle with anxiety, even in safe and stable lives? The answer, researchers and clinicians now believe, lies in intergenerational trauma, one of the most profound and fascinating areas of modern psychology.
What is intergenerational trauma?
Intergenerational trauma, sometimes called transgenerational or inherited trauma, refers to the way traumatic experiences don’t simply end with the person who lived through them. Instead, the psychological, emotional, and even biological effects can be passed down through families, sometimes for several generations, shaping the mental health, behaviour, and worldview of people who never experienced the original event themselves.
The concept first emerged in clinical settings in the 1960s, when psychiatrists working with survivors of the Holocaust began noticing something unexpected. The children of survivors, who had grown up in relative safety, often in new countries, far from the events of the war, were presenting with trauma symptoms of their own. Heightened anxiety, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting the world, a pervasive sense of threat that had no obvious source in their own lives. Something, it seemed, had been passed on.
The history behind the theory
The Holocaust research was a turning point, but the threads of this idea run much deeper through history. Indigenous communities around the world have long understood that collective suffering, colonisation, forced displacement, cultural erasure, leaves marks that outlast the generation that endured it. In North America, researchers studying the descendants of residential school survivors found elevated rates of depression, addiction, and suicide that couldn’t be explained by present-day circumstances alone. The same patterns have been observed in descendants of enslaved people, survivors of famine, refugees, and communities that lived through genocide.
For a long time, these patterns were explained purely through environment and behaviour. Traumatised parents raise children in traumatised households. Parenting styles shaped by fear and survival create anxious, hypervigilant children. Cycles of poverty, instability, and stress repeat because the conditions that created them haven’t changed. All of this is true and important. But science has since suggested the story goes even deeper than behaviour.
What epigenetics tells us
In the last two decades, the field of epigenetics has added a remarkable biological dimension to the conversation. Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression, not changes to the DNA itself, but changes to how genes are switched on or off. And crucially, these changes can be influenced by experience, including traumatic experience, and can potentially be passed down to future generations.
Landmark research on mice at Emory University demonstrated that a fear response to a specific smell, created through repeated negative association, was passed to the offspring of those mice, and then to their offspring, even though the younger generations had never encountered the stimulus themselves. The fear had been inherited biologically.
In humans, studies of Holocaust survivors and their children found measurable differences in stress hormone regulation, specifically in how cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, was being produced and processed. The children of survivors showed altered stress responses that mirrored those of their parents, suggesting the physiological impact of trauma had somehow transferred across a generation.
This doesn’t mean destiny is fixed. Epigenetic changes are not permanent in the way genetic mutations are. But it does mean that when we talk about inherited trauma, we are talking about something that operates on a biological level, not just a psychological one.
How trauma moves through families
Beyond biology, trauma travels through families in ways that are deeply human and often invisible in plain sight. A parent who experienced neglect may struggle to offer the emotional attunement their child needs, not out of indifference, but because they never learned what that felt like. A family that survived persecution may transmit a baseline level of threat vigilance that feels entirely normal within the household, because it is normal, for them, while quietly shaping every child’s nervous system.
Silence is one of trauma’s most effective vehicles. Families that don’t speak about what happened pass on the emotional residue of events without any of the context that might help the next generation make sense of what they’re feeling. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the unspoken. They absorb the tension, the grief, the fear, and often internalise it as something about themselves, rather than something that happened to someone they love.
Attachment patterns are another major pathway. Early childhood attachment, the bond formed between infant and caregiver, is one of the most significant predictors of psychological wellbeing across a lifetime. When a caregiver’s trauma interferes with their ability to be consistently present, warm, or responsive, the attachment that forms is less secure. And insecure attachment, if unaddressed, tends to repeat in the next generation’s relationships and parenting too.
Why this history matters now
Pleso psychotherapists note that understanding intergenerational trauma isn’t about assigning blame to parents or grandparents. It is about developing compassion for the full picture of where we come from. Recognising that some of what we carry emotionally may not have originated in our own lives is genuinely liberating. It reframes the question from “what is wrong with me?” to “what happened to the people who shaped me?”
This shift matters enormously in a therapeutic context. Working with intergenerational trauma often means exploring family history with curiosity, mapping patterns across generations, and gently separating what belongs to us from what we have simply inherited. It is painstaking, often emotional work, but it is also some of the most meaningful, because its effects can ripple forward just as powerfully as the original trauma rippled backward.
The weight we inherit is real. But unlike the generations before us, we now have the language, the science, and the therapeutic tools to set some of it down.
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