Intergenerational Trauma: What It Is and How to Heal

HEALING & RECOVERY • September 12, 2022

The Weight You Didn’t Know You Were Carrying

The kitchen smelled like cumin and something burning at the edges. Camille was eleven years old, standing at the stove watching her mother move — quick, clipped, efficient in the way people are when they’re braced for disaster. Her mother never stood still long enough to be caught. She kept her back to the room. She answered questions in half sentences. She flinched when touched, softly, like a person who’d learned a long time ago that contact meant danger.

Camille didn’t have a word for any of this. She just learned, the way children learn everything — by absorption, by watching, by encoding the lesson in her body before her mind could question it. She learned that closeness has a cost. That stillness invites something bad. That being needed was safer than being wanted.

By the time she was thirty-two and sitting across from a therapist for the first time, she’d replicated every one of her mother’s patterns — without once being consciously taught them. She couldn’t stay present in relationships. She over-functioned at work. She flinched when touched. She’d never made the connection between that kitchen and her life. She thought it was just who she was.

It wasn’t. It was something much older than her.

If any part of that resonates — if you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, I don’t know why I do this, I’ve always been this way, this is just my family — this piece is for you. Because what looks like personality is often inheritance. And what feels like fate is often something that can be named, understood, and healed.

What Is Intergenerational Trauma?

Intergenerational trauma — also called transgenerational trauma or ancestral trauma — refers to the process by which the psychological, emotional, and biological effects of trauma are transmitted from one generation to the next. It isn’t always transmitted through abuse. It moves through parenting styles, family rules, the emotional atmosphere of a home, and increasingly, through biological and epigenetic mechanisms that science is still working to fully understand.

The transmission can happen when a parent is so consumed by their own unprocessed grief, fear, or hypervigilance that they can’t fully attune to their child’s needs — not because they don’t love the child, but because their nervous system doesn’t have room. It can happen through the stories a family does and doesn’t tell. Through the rules about what’s permitted to be felt. Through a particular tightness in the jaw that passes, without ceremony, from grandmother to mother to daughter.

It’s worth noting what intergenerational trauma isn’t. It isn’t an excuse. It isn’t determinism. Understanding that your anxiety, your attachment patterns, or your particular flavor of self-abandonment may have roots in what your parents or grandparents lived through doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat it. It means you now have a map. And maps are how you find a different way through.

In my work with clients, I often find that the moment a woman understands intergenerational trauma — truly understands it — she experiences a profound shift in how she relates to herself. The harsh inner critic softens slightly. The shame that says I should be over this by now becomes more complex, more compassionate. Because she can finally see that what she’s carrying isn’t entirely, or even primarily, hers.

The Science: Epigenetics, ACEs, and Holocaust Survivor Research

For years, intergenerational trauma was understood primarily through a psychological lens — parents who’d experienced trauma struggling to parent in regulated ways, passing on their dysregulation to their children. That model is real and important. But in the last two decades, researchers have discovered something even more fundamental: trauma leaves biological marks that can be inherited. The science is still developing, but it’s already reshaping how we understand what we carry.

Epigenetics and Gene Expression

Epigenetics is the study of how gene expression changes without any alteration to the underlying DNA sequence. Think of your DNA as the hardware — it doesn’t change. But epigenetic markers are like software updates: they determine which genes get switched on and which stay off, in response to experience, environment, and stress.

Traumatic experiences have been shown to create epigenetic modifications — particularly in genes that regulate the stress response system, including the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which governs cortisol production. When those modifications happen in the germline cells, or when they shape how a parent regulates and attunes with their child in ways that alter the child’s developing stress system, the biological effects of trauma can be transmitted to the next generation.

Michael Meaney, PhD, professor of psychiatry and neurology at McGill University and a pioneer in behavioral epigenetics, demonstrated in landmark animal studies that mother rats with high versus low licking and grooming behavior produced offspring with measurably different stress response systems — differences that were then passed to a third generation. The parenting behavior itself changed the epigenome of the offspring. Trauma-related parenting disruptions work on a similar mechanism.

The ACEs Study: Measuring the Long Reach of Childhood Adversity

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti, MD, internist and co-investigator of the ACEs study at Kaiser Permanente, San Diego, along with Robert Anda, MD, epidemiologist and co-principal investigator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted one of the largest investigations of childhood adversity ever undertaken. They surveyed over 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patients about their childhood experiences across ten categories of adversity — physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; and household dysfunction including domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, incarceration, and parental separation.

The findings were profound. Higher ACE scores correlated strongly with dramatically elevated rates of depression, anxiety, addiction, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and early death — even decades after the childhood experiences had ended. The dose-response relationship was clear: the more adversity in childhood, the more significant the health consequences in adulthood. And the adversity didn’t have to be dramatic. Childhood emotional neglect and household instability registered as powerfully as more visible forms of harm.

What the ACEs research established — and what matters most for understanding intergenerational transmission — is that adversity doesn’t stay in childhood. It gets wired into the nervous system, the immune system, the inflammatory response. It shapes how a person regulates emotion, forms relationships, and parents their own children. When those children carry elevated stress reactivity and difficulty with emotional regulation into their own families without understanding the source, the ACE cycle continues.

Holocaust Survivor Research: Rachel Yehuda’s Work

Perhaps the most compelling body of research on biological intergenerational transmission comes from Rachel Yehuda, PhD, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who has spent her career studying trauma in Holocaust survivors and their children. Her findings have quietly transformed the field.

Yehuda’s research found that adult children of Holocaust survivors displayed lower-than-normal cortisol levels — the same biological signature found in survivors themselves, and a marker associated with PTSD and heightened stress sensitivity. This was striking because these children hadn’t experienced the Holocaust. They were born into safety. Yet their HPA axis showed the imprint of their parents’ trauma.

In a landmark 2015 study, Yehuda and her colleagues examined epigenetic changes in the FKBP5 gene — a gene that regulates stress response — in both Holocaust survivors and their children. The children of survivors showed the same epigenetic modifications their parents had, even though the children had no direct exposure to the trauma. These findings suggest that “parental trauma leaves a biological imprint on children” in ways that go beyond what can be explained by parenting behavior alone.

How Intergenerational Trauma Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with clients, I’ve noticed that driven, ambitious women often carry intergenerational trauma in a very specific way: it tends to live inside their most impressive achievements. The relentless work ethic that has made them exceptional in their careers. The difficulty delegating, because who can you really trust? The way they manage relationships with the same precision they apply to a project plan. The bone-deep sense that rest isn’t allowed, that slowing down is dangerous, that being still is somehow unsafe.

These patterns don’t look like trauma from the outside. They look like drive. They look like success. But underneath, they’re often adaptations — strategies developed by a nervous system that learned, long before you were aware of it, that the world was not entirely safe and that you needed to work harder, be better, and never let your guard down to survive it.

Intergenerational trauma shows up in driven women as:

• Difficulty with genuine rest — a persistent sense that stopping is dangerous, that relaxation needs to be earned, that stillness is a luxury you can’t afford
• Hypervigilance in relationships — scanning for signs of withdrawal, rejection, or conflict; interpreting neutral expressions as disapproval; struggling to trust that connection is stable
• Emotional compartmentalization — the ability to function at a very high level while carrying enormous emotional weight beneath the surface, often without even being aware of the weight
• Difficulty with grief about childhood — a tendency to rationalize or minimize difficult family history (“it wasn’t that bad,” “other people had it worse”) rather than fully grieving what was lost
• Loyalty binds — feeling responsible for a parent’s emotional state, difficulty setting limits with family of origin, the sense that your healing is somehow a betrayal
• Difficulty imagining a different future — particularly in relationships, where the unconscious assumption may be that closeness always has a cost

Many of these women are also carrying developmental trauma — not from a single event, but from the accumulated experience of growing up in a home where emotional needs were routinely unmet, dismissed, or punished. The two often coexist, and they compound each other in ways that can be difficult to disentangle without skilled support.

What’s particularly challenging is that many driven women don’t recognize any of this as trauma. They’ve normalized their hypervigilance. Their productivity feels like strength rather than a defense. Their difficulty with rest feels like ambition rather than anxiety. That’s exactly what makes the intergenerational piece so important to name: these patterns were installed before conscious memory, before the capacity for reflection, before there was any way to question them. They weren’t choices. They were survival strategies. And they can be changed.

The Red Shoes: Inherited Scripts and the Stories We Carry

Nadia was forty-one when she first came to therapy. She’d been a partner at a law firm since she was thirty-seven. She ran marathons. She’d built a life that, by every external measure, was a refutation of her mother’s small, constrained world. Her mother had married young and stayed in a city she didn’t love, doing work that didn’t suit her, in a marriage that had never quite fit right. Nadia had sworn — at seventeen, explicitly, with the certainty only teenagers manage — that she would be different.

And she was different. Except. Except for the relationships she kept finding herself in — with people who were emotionally unavailable in exactly the way her mother had been. The pattern was so consistent it was almost elegant: compelling at the start, withdrawal once intimacy deepened, her working harder to close the gap, her partner pulling back further, the whole thing eventually collapsing in a way that felt, despite the circumstances, somehow familiar.

Anne Sexton’s poem captures something clinical language often can’t: the way inherited patterns feel both foreign and intimate, both imposed and deeply your own. The red shoes aren’t yours. But they’re on your feet. And you’ve been dancing in them for so long that you’ve stopped noticing the fit is wrong.

For Nadia, the work wasn’t just understanding that her attachment patterns had roots in her mother’s attachment patterns — which had roots in her grandmother’s. It was grieving what had never been modeled for her: what it looked like to be in a relationship where staying didn’t require shutting down. Where love didn’t come paired with distance. Where you didn’t have to earn every increment of closeness through perfect performance.

That grief is part of the healing. You can’t unlearn patterns you’ve never named. And you can’t change what you can’t first see clearly and feel honestly. For many driven women, grieving the childhood they deserved but didn’t get is one of the most important — and most avoided — parts of the work.

It’s also worth noting that intergenerational trauma doesn’t only transmit through pain. It also transmits through family dynamics — the way roles get assigned in a traumatized family system, who carries the anxiety, who plays the peacemaker, who becomes the identified patient. Understanding the whole ecosystem of your family of origin is part of the map.

Both/And: You Carry Your Ancestors’ Wounds AND You Can Be Where the Healing Begins

One of the most important — and most difficult — reframes in healing intergenerational trauma is this: you can hold two things at once. You can carry something that isn’t your fault AND be responsible for what you do with it. You can love your parents AND grieve what their own wounds cost you. You can understand why they were the way they were AND still acknowledge that it hurt you. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full, complex truth.

The Either/Or version of this conversation traps people. Either your parents were terrible, which feels disloyal and too simple — or they were doing their best, which feels true but leaves no room to acknowledge real harm. Both/And is the only framework that’s large enough to hold the actual reality of most families: people who loved imperfectly, who gave what they could, who were themselves shaped by wounds they never had the opportunity to name or address.

I see this with clients regularly. The woman who spent decades defending her mother from her own anger, because acknowledging the anger felt like a betrayal of the love. The woman who couldn’t grieve her childhood because to grieve it was to indict someone she also loved deeply. The Both/And frame gives her permission to do both — to love her mother, to honor the ways she tried, and to grieve the real losses without collapsing into either idealization or blame.

The other Both/And that matters enormously: you are both a product of your history AND capable of writing a different story. Epigenetics shows us that gene expression can change. Neuroplasticity shows us that the brain can rewire. Attachment research shows us that it’s possible to develop earned secure attachment as an adult — through healing relationships, through therapy, through the patient, sustained work of noticing your patterns and choosing differently, again and again, until new neural pathways form.

You are not your grandmother’s silence. You are not your mother’s hypervigilance. You don’t have to pass on what was passed to you. And the work of understanding intergenerational trauma is not an exercise in blame — it’s an exercise in liberation. You can’t choose what you inherited. But you can choose what you transmit forward.

The Systemic Lens: When Race, Colonization, and Poverty Amplify the Wound

Intergenerational trauma is never only a family story. It’s also a structural one. And we can’t talk about it honestly without naming the ways that race, colonization, poverty, and systemic oppression amplify and compound what gets transmitted.

For communities of color in the United States, intergenerational trauma includes the specific, documented impacts of chattel slavery, forced family separation, and cultural erasure — experiences so total and so systematically imposed that the trauma wasn’t individual, it was communal, and it was perpetuated through the very structures of American society across generations. The research on betrayal trauma — trauma inflicted by those or those systems on which we depend — is particularly relevant here.

For Indigenous communities, the specific trauma of boarding schools — where children were forcibly separated from families and communities, prohibited from speaking their languages and practicing their cultures — is now recognized as a foundational source of intergenerational trauma whose effects are still actively present in Native communities today.

Immigrant and refugee families carry a particular form of intergenerational transmission that includes not only the trauma of migration — which often involves danger, loss, displacement, and profound grief — but also the stress of cultural discontinuity, the erasure of identity, and the pressure to assimilate without the resources to do so safely. First-generation immigrants frequently experience what researchers call “acculturative stress,” and when that stress isn’t named or processed, it shapes the emotional environment their children grow up inside.

Poverty compounds all of this. Chronic economic precarity produces sustained elevated cortisol — the same biological signature as trauma — which then shapes the development of the next generation’s stress systems. This is part of why poverty is so difficult to break across generations: it’s not simply a matter of resources. It’s a matter of what chronic scarcity does to the nervous system, the body, and the capacity to form secure attachments.

Naming these systemic forces isn’t about diminishing personal agency. It’s about accurately attributing responsibility. When a woman carries the weight of three generations of systemic oppression, poverty, or forced displacement in addition to her individual family history, treating that as purely a personal psychological issue isn’t just insufficient — it’s inaccurate. Healing in this context requires both personal work AND community, AND systemic change.

How to Heal Intergenerational Trauma

Healing intergenerational trauma is possible. It requires patience, skilled support, and a willingness to feel things that have often been kept carefully at bay for a very long time. But it’s one of the most meaningful things a person can do — not just for themselves, but for everyone who comes after them.

Here’s what the healing process tends to involve:

1. Naming the Pattern

The first step is always naming what’s actually happening. This often involves working with a trauma-informed therapist who can help you map your family-of-origin patterns, identify the transmission pathways, and distinguish between what was passed to you and what is genuinely yours. Many clients find this stage both disorienting and enormously relieving — because it finally explains what they could sense but never quite articulate.

2. Somatic Work: Healing the Body’s Memory

Because intergenerational trauma lives in the body — in the stress response system, in the nervous system’s baseline tone, in the way the body braces or collapses in response to certain relational cues — healing requires somatic work alongside cognitive understanding. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has argued persuasively that talk therapy alone is insufficient for trauma recovery: the body needs to be directly addressed. Modalities like EMDR, somatic experiencing, yoga therapy, and body-centered psychotherapy all have evidence bases specifically for this kind of work.

3. Parts Work and Internal Family Systems

Parts work — particularly the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD — offers a powerful framework for working with the internal legacy of intergenerational trauma. Many of the parts that carry our most protective, defensive behaviors were originally formed to keep us safe in a family system that wasn’t safe enough. In parts work, these protector parts can be approached with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment, and the exiled parts they’ve been protecting — the vulnerable, young parts that hold the original wounds — can finally receive the care they’ve needed.

4. Attachment Repair Through Healing Relationships

One of the most powerful mechanisms for healing intergenerational attachment disruption is experiencing a genuinely different kind of relationship — one that provides what attachment researchers call “corrective emotional experiences.” The therapeutic relationship itself can be this. Safe, consistent friendships can be this. For those who have children, conscious parenting — which is different from perfect parenting — can be this. Every time you respond to yourself or someone you love with the attunement and care that wasn’t available in your family of origin, you’re writing a new pattern into the system.

5. Grieving What Was Lost

This is perhaps the most non-negotiable and most frequently avoided part of healing intergenerational trauma: genuine grief. Not intellectualizing the loss. Not analyzing why it happened. Not jumping immediately to forgiveness. Actual grief — for the childhood you deserved but didn’t get, for the parents who couldn’t give you what they also never received, for the generations of unhealed pain that found its way to you. When you can grieve fully, the weight doesn’t disappear — but it changes form. It becomes something you carry consciously rather than something that runs you unconsciously.

6. Building New Foundations

Ultimately, healing intergenerational trauma is about building something new on a foundation that’s been cleared of inherited rubble. This is what my course Fixing the Foundations is designed to support — working systematically through the relational and psychological foundations that were built in your family of origin, identifying what serves you and what doesn’t, and deliberately constructing something different. It’s possible. It takes time. It’s worth it.

If you’re navigating this work and feeling the weight of isolation in the healing process, know that you’re not alone. Thousands of women are doing exactly this work right now. And the Strong & Stable newsletter is one place where that community gathers weekly.

If you’re wondering whether you might be experiencing the effects of difficulty visualizing a different future — which is one of the hallmarks of deep intergenerational patterning — that piece speaks directly to this experience.

You are not the end of the story. You are, in the most literal sense, the place where the chain can break. And the work of naming, grieving, and healing what’s been passed to you is one of the most profound gifts you can offer both yourself and everyone who comes after you.

You might also find it helpful to read my Inside Out movie review from a trauma therapist.

You might also want to read: An Inner Child Exercise: Talking to Your 9-Year-Old Self.

You might also want to read: Grieving the Parent You Never Had.

You might also want to read: Exercise Addiction and Trauma: When Movement Becomes Another Way to Flee.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women -- including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs -- in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

Work With Annie

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer

Annie Wright, LMFT

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma recovery specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours.

She helps ambitious women whose impressive lives don’t feel as good as they look—women who have used success as a shield but still struggle internally with anxiety, burnout, or relational pain. As the founder of a thriving therapy center she built, scaled, and sold, Annie now coaches and consults with women leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals navigating identity shifts, leadership transitions, and the long arc of trauma recovery.

Her work has been featured in NPR, Forbes, Business Insider, and other national outlets. Annie blends deep clinical expertise with lived experience to help women build lives that are not only high-functioning, but deeply fulfilling.