This week we will be travelling back through time again and examining ancestral influences on your development and the impact on you of intergenerational trauma that has passed down to you.
Intergenerational trauma
This is the transmission of harmful effects of trauma from one generation to the next. Trauma that remains unresolved can impact the mental, emotional or physical well being of descendants several generations later who did not directly experience the original event. This invisible inheritance may be known to you in the form of stories passed down through your family, but it is also felt at a deep biological level. Your body is preset to feel act and react to ordinary life stress as if you personally had experienced the trauma of your ancestors first hand. In particular, large scale trauma that occurs both at the personal and cultural level such as war, famine, systemic oppression, genocide etc causes long lasting impacts over several generations.
Here are some common examples of how intergenerational trauma reveals itself in adults:
- Chronic anxiety, depression or PTSD like symptoms without a clear personal cause
- Hypervigilance- constantly feeling unsafe or waiting for disaster
- Relationship difficulties including issues with trust or boundaries.
- Physical challenges with digestion or other disease in the body.
Of course there are usually multiple factors playing a part in all of these conditions, but this week we will be shining a light specifically at the thread offered by your ancestors' experiences.
How the Trauma is Passed On:
The trauma is passed on by a combination of direct environmental factors, particularly with family dynamics and epigenetic changes at the biological layer.
Family Dynamics
The environmental factors include the psychological impact of parenting by traumatised parents which may lead to over protective, volatile, emotionally unavailable or authoritarian parenting styles. Children model parents coping mechanisms including withdrawal, people pleasing or aggressive reactions to stress. They learn silence and secrets where the unresolved trauma is not spoken of but is felt. All of this shapes the children’s relationship with the world and they then pass this onto their own children.
DNA and Epigenetics
Epigenetics is the relatively new study of how your behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work, without changing your underlying DNA sequence.
The prevailing view was that genes are the primary determining factor in an individuals development. This held sway since Francis Crick, along with James Watson, proposed in 1953 that DNA exists as a double helix composed of two antiparallel, complementary strands held together by base pairs. This structure offered a physical explanation for both Mendelian genetics (how traits are inherited) and Darwinian evolution (how changes occur over time) and explained how genetic instructions are passed from parents to offspring. This shifted biology to prioritise DNA as the fundamental blueprint for development, until the focus on epigenetics changed the understanding.
While The DNA code remains the genetic blueprint and for the most part does not change, epigenetics acts like a dimmer switch, turning genes "on" or "off" based on signals like diet, stress, and lifestyle.
A Summary of the Key Points
- The genome is the complete set of our DNA and is largely fixed at birth ( though some mutations are possible) The epigenome is another layer that regulates the expression of the genes through modifications.
- These epigenetic modifications are like chemical ‘switches’ that turn genes on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequence. These markers determine which genes are read or expressed by the cell.
- Recent research in the field of epigenetics has repositioned the importance of the environment during early development as an influence on an individuals development t
- Crucially, these modifications by environmental conditions can be passed on to future generations through the information contained in the sperm and egg, (gametes) or through the prenatal (womb) and early postnatal environment. (exactly the time period we are looking at in this course)
- Genetic changes through random mutation and natural selection require time to be seen population wide. The epigenome can respond much faster to the environment and these changes can occur in multiple people at once
- Different alterations can be passed down via the female or male line within the same population as their experiences of a population wide traumatic event may be widely different.
A closer look at some examples from the research
Much of the research has been on animals and plants, and may be limited to proving changes over a handful of generations, but I believe that these threads can go back much further depending on their intensity and the cumulative effect of mirrored and repeating experiences over time by each generation.
Here are two examples in animals of research that demonstrate ways that ancestral trauma is being passed down so that future generations respond differently to life events even though the original threat is no longer present.
(side note - I question the ethics of many of these types of experiments on other creatures and am not endorsing this type of research by quoting it here)
Cherry Blossom and Mice
Here is an example of research illustrating epigenetics as work over generations.
(side note - I do not like this type of experiment personally causing suffering to other creatures and am not condoning this type of research)
Researchers started with male mice and exposed them to a cherry blossom smell (acetophenone) and gave them an electric shock at the same time. As you would expect, over time the mice became sensitive to that smell and exhibited a fear response when exposed to the smell alone without the electric shock.
Then they bred the mice with females.
Both the children and grandchildren of these male mice exhibited an aversion to the cherry blossom smell without ever experiencing the electric shock the original male mice had received.
They discovered increased receptors for that smell on the offspring and concluded that an altered epigenetic pattern in the specific receptor gene in the sperm of the original mice was then passed onto the offspring so that they could detect the smell at lower concentrations and avoid it.
This type of experiment has also been carried out with nematode worms, both with smell and also with pathogenic food sources. The results- avoidance of the food that had made them sick was passed on to the next 4 generations before fading out. Interestingly the worms that died from the pathogens laid eggs before dying, therefore ensuring their continuation through offspring but they also passed on the knowledge to avoid that type of food.
(Read more here and here)
Scale of the Original Trauma in your Ancestors and examples of Transgenerational Trauma in Humans.
There are obvious ethical issues in repeating controlled experiments like those above for humans and the time scale is different. Nematode worms live for only a few days, mice reproduce multiple times a year. So research on humans has been retrospective after actual traumas that can be studied over time. Events such as war and famine for example that effect whole populations.
Although it is easier to study this at a population level the mechanism for passing on trauma responses is likely to be the same at any scale. The various scales of trauma vary from an individual event, to a wider but still individual family situation to the larger shared cultural collective experience. In addition to these layers of scale, there is a potential cumulative effect of the biological epigenetic information combined with the psychological impact altering parent behaviour as they bring up their children.
Four types of impact have been identified through studying some of the larger cultural traumas:
- depression
- hyper vigilance
- traumatic bond formation
- re-enactment of the trauma.
You can imagine how this will further impact children, even if they did not experience the original trauma, as they are parented by traumatised parents and this influences their own parenting style in return.
This is a factor that is not present for the worms or the mice in the same way as we nurture our children for a lot longer.
In my work I take it as a given that there is a ‘physical’ pathway through which the lingering impact of these types of traumas is passed on regardless of whether we fully understand that in our modern scientific terms. It is difficult to separate out the usually multi faceted, layered impacts of trauma to isolate the epigenetics. A traumatised person will continue to be influenced by the collective stories and will have altered behaviour and care giving that will impact their children as well as the biological input. Working at the energetic layer with an understanding of some of the pathways can dissolve the imprints and change the epigenetic markers.
Which events get passed down?
Any event that threatens survival in some way and is not resolved will have the potential to be passed on. From direct work with clients I notice that the types of events that are passed down through many generations tend to involve shaming and/or violence and violent death, at a community or cultural level, or to have involved significant hardship and loss with impact for at least the immediate family and often the whole community.
Some Examples:
Intergenerational trauma caused by the Holocaust. During the sixties researchers began to observe large numbers of children of survivors seeking mental health help. Later on the grandchildren of the original survivors were found to be over represented by 300% among referrals to a psychiatry clinic in comparison with the general population
(Read more here)
The Dutch Hunger Winter
The Nazis blocked food supplies throughout the winter of 44-45 and caused widespread food shortages leading to over 20000 Dutch people dying of starvation. Studies of children born to women who were pregnant during the famine, found significant differences in birth weight and long term health consequences. These differences varied depending on when the famine occured in the pregnancy. For example, if the famine happened during the third trimester those children were born smaller and showed a higher susceptibility to obesity and diabetes later in life. These changes were also noted in future generations who had not lived through the famine themselves.
(Read more here)
There are lots of examples of research connected with this type of large scale event, including the African American Slaves, Refugee populations and survivors of other famines and also of domestic violence. They all show that there is an impact that lasts at least through to grandchildren.
Here is a good article that explains the history of epigenetics and offers some more examples of population wide traumas that have been studied.
What does this bring up for you? Time for reflection
Generally the impact of the ancestral trauma shows up in situations that energetically resemble the original trauma as you live your life now even if only superficially. You may notice your reactions and responses in certain stressful or ordinary situations will seem greater than the situation warrants. I have also found that your perception of conception and the womb as well as birth itself mirrors these earlier ancestral imprints in the energetics of the experience.
Take a few moments to reflect on any known stories about your ancestors.
Don’t worry if you do not know anything about your family. In our experiential live call we will explore what may have been passed down that needs updating without you needing to know all or any of your family history.
1. Divide a piece of paper vertically down the middle. Label one side Paternal and the other side Maternal
2. Take each side in turn and note down what facts you know about your ancestors on that side of your family. Ask yourself did my ancestors have any adverse life events or live through a particular time in history and note that down.
3. Ask how did this impact that ancestor and how did it impact their children?
4. Intuitively consider the paternal side of the ancestral line. What patterns do you feel were passed to you? What gene modifications are still being expressed in your life now?
5. Come to neutral, Then Intuitively consider the maternal side of the ancestral line. What patterns do you feel were passed to you? What gene modifications are still being expressed in your life now?
6. Take a few moments to consciously breathe in compassion and love around your body and breathe out any energies that have been activated that are not yours. Remind your cells that this is not that time and they are safe.
Do feel free to share in the facebook group.
And see you on this week's call.