Intergenerational Trauma and Motherhood
Do either of these sound familiar?
You’re 30 weeks pregnant and sitting on the couch with your partner. You’re discussing what you want out of parenthood, and what you hope to be like as a mom. The only thing you can think of is this: “I just don’t want to be like my parents.”
It’s a bad day in your house. The kids are fighting, everything’s a mess, your partner is working late, the dog peed on the carpet, and you just can’t take it anymore. You scream, “Stop it! You all need to start acting your age and get it together! Now go to your rooms!” They sulk off, and your eyes widen. “Oh, $%!#. I’m just like my mother.”
Whether we like it or not, our maternal identities are rooted deeply in our mothers’ parenting style. And her parenting style is rooted in her mother’s parenting style, and her mother’s in her mother’s, and on and on for generations.
Perhaps in that long, long line of mothers before us, there was an event or set of circumstances that affected an ancestor so negatively that it changed how she parented her kids. Suddenly, that negative something was cemented in our whole maternal line.
That negative event or series of events from generations prior is now affecting you and your parenting. That’s intergenerational trauma.
A quick warning: Talking and thinking about our own trauma is hard enough. But considering how it might be affecting our kids is a totally different ball game. If you’re not ready to think about this, it’s totally OK. Or, if you get halfway through this post and decide you can’t keep going, that’s OK, too!
Take a break, get some water, chat with a friend, or do some mindfulness exercises—or whatever helps you re-center and calm your mind. This information will still be here. Take care of yourself, even if it means bookmarking this for later.
Defining Intergenerational Trauma
Trauma is a negative event that overwhelms a person’s coping skills—whether it happened to them directly, they witnessed it happen to someone else, or they learned about it happening to someone very close to them.
Some traumas are single, isolated events like natural disasters or a car crash. Others can be long-term, like abuse, neglect, or poverty. Regardless of how many times a trauma happened, it can take many, many years of courage and hard work to integrate them into daily life.
And sometimes, these traumas can span generations.
Intergenerational trauma is the ongoing impact of a traumatic experience that happened in prior generations but continues to impact the current generation.
Sometimes, it’s easy to guess what caused the trauma being passed down the family line—physical, sexual, or emotional abuse; poverty; substance use problems; systematic racism; neighborhood violence; and more.
Other times, generations of subtle and highly engrained emotional abuse or unavailability creates intergenerational trauma. A lot of families with these concerns:
Seem emotionally numb or avoid discussing feelings.
View discussing feelings as a sign of weakness.
Avoid “outsiders.”
Display a constant state of conflict.
Act overprotective of certain family members despite a lack of threat or danger.
Transmission of Intergenerational Trauma
Trauma affecting the person it directly happened to makes sense. For example, ongoing childhood abuse of any kind will likely produce poor emotional and physical health, decreased social functioning, and increased risk-taking behaviors.
But how could a trauma from 100 years ago impact your family today? It’s all about the transmission cycle.
Anne’s great-grandmother, Sara, learned a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude as a child during the Great Depression. With her family focused on basic survival, emotional discussions were rare and even discouraged.
By the time Sara had children, her Depression-era challenges had ended. Nevertheless, she maintained the same emotional unavailability her parents modeled. Now her children, like Anne’s grandmother, adopted these patterns when they became parents. Then Anne’s mother did the same.
And now here’s Anne—left to wrestle with the effects of a trauma that happened more than a century ago.
This is an example of how intergenerational trauma can be transmitted through social factors, like poor parent-child relationships or pervasive negative thinking patterns.
Intergenerational trauma can also be passed through attachment relationships.
Our psychological and emotional development starts from day one. Our ability to form secure, healthy relationships with people around us, starting with our caregivers, is the key to feeling safe and building empathy later in life. If we experienced disorganized attachment as a child—not knowing who was safe at any given time—we may experience either intense, indiscriminate affection as an adult or a total lack thereof. This can, in turn, affect our kids as we build our attachment with them.
Third, intergenerational trauma can be shared through increased vulnerability to mental health issues, including personality and substance use disorders.
Particularly in abusive situations, shame becomes an everyday part of our lives. As we internalize that shame, our self-esteem is deeply affected. Over time, this can lead to self-blame, self-harm, and other symptoms of depression. These depressive symptoms can affect our parent-child relationships, therefore affecting not only us, but also the next generation.
Or take anxiety disorders as an example. In a healthy and nurturing environment, we learn to deal with uncertainty and lack of control starting in early childhood. As we have contact with emotionally stable and supportive caregivers, we learn to self-soothe and manage our anxieties. But if we don’t have these types of caregivers, we miss out on learning the coping skills and emotional regulation needed to quell these feelings. In the long-term, this can become overwhelming and begin to impact our daily functioning. Cue the anxiety disorder. Then, we pass these same issues to our child, continuing the cycle.
And finally, transgenerational trauma can be passed biologically. This happens via a process called epigenetic inheritance.
Our DNA is the genetic code that produces who we are. Epigenetics is the process by which genes can be “turned on or off” without changing the DNA sequence itself.
When sperm meets egg, the new cells enter a process called reprogramming. This allows the new cells to start from scratch and make their own epigenetic changes. We’ll still inherit traits from both parents, but epigenetics turns those traits on and off in a way that creates a totally unique you. You might inherit the genes for green and blue eyes. Epigenetics decides which of those genes is turned on, determining which eye color you get.
Researchers now theorize some of the epigenetic changes in sperm and egg cells can completely avoid the reprograming process and pass on to the next generation. An increased stress response from your father, originally caused by a traumatic event, might bypass this reprograming and pass to you. You now have an increased stress response, even though you didn’t directly experience the trauma. This may then pass to your children as they develop in utero.
But don’t panic. Although trauma is by nature overwhelming, intergenerational trauma isn’t a permanent scar on your family line—even if epigenetically inherited.
One groundbreaking study, conducted by Dr. Isabelle Mansuy at the University of Zurich, showed that traumatized mice, when raised in an enriched environment, did not pass symptoms of trauma to their offspring (Curry, 2019).
Psychiatrist Dr. R. Andrew Chambers describes learning about our own intergenerational trauma like passing along a gene for high blood pressure. He explains, “If you know you’re at risk, you can start implementing habits and medications to reduce your likelihood of problems down the road” (IU Health, 2021). Similarly, learning and doing something about our own intergenerational trauma can prevent passing these issues to our kids.
Six Tips to Tackle Intergenerational Trauma
The whole idea of learning and doing something about your intergenerational trauma may feel overwhelming. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.
#1 Seek therapy.
Seeking therapy can promote self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness. In addition to being healing for you, the rest of your family will benefit! With therapeutic support, you can model important self-care to your kiddos and become the happier, healthier mom you want to be.
#2 Take parenting classes.
Sometimes, we need a total reset. Taking parenting classes to unlearn how you were raised and discover the ways you want to care for your own kids can help to close the intergenerational trauma cycle.
#3 Send your kids to preschool.
Experts say sending a child to preschool can buffer the consequences of living in a high-stress environment. It can also give you some much needed time away from them. You get a moment to catch your breath while knowing they’re safe, learning, and growing.
#4 Take a tough and honest look at your approach to discipline.
There’s no singular “right way” to parent. But there are certainly practices that are more harmful than others. (Since you’re here, it’s likely you’ve experienced an out-of-proportion punishment or two yourself.)
When appropriate discipline isn’t modeled for us, we often have a low tolerance for high stress moments. Things like temper tantrums can be overwhelming and triggering. Then, we discipline hard because that’s the only thing we were exposed to as kids.
So take a tough look at your discipline. Is it really what you’d like it to be? Or is it just what you’ve always known? Have a chat with your partner and review these things together. No shame or judgment; just self-reflection!
#5 Pivot and try again.
You may be thinking, “OK, so I have this intergenerational trauma thing. I haven’t dealt with it, my kids are too old, and I’ve totally messed them up.”
Take a deep breath.
Kids’ brains have a wild amount of neuroplasticity. Their brains can change and adapt so easily that there’s a pretty slim chance you’ve done irreparable damage to their psyches.
If you’re really concerned, apologize to your kids. Try something like:
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I’m trying to take care of myself. Just like you’re growing and learning every day, I am, too! I’ve learned that [behavior] really isn’t helpful and it might have even hurt your feelings. I’m sorry I did that. I’m learning how to do better.
It’s never too late to pivot and try again!
#6 Practice acceptance.
Motherhood allows us to re-experience our own childhoods, re-parent ourselves, repeat the good, and release the bad. Seeing our own childhoods from a new side can help us understand, and maybe even forgive, some of our parents’ mistakes.
It might be a helpful strategy for you to accept things as they were—and as they are now with your own children—and then move past without judgment. Check in with yourself, though! Sometimes, we really do need to focus on and get angry about the past to truly move through it.
This stuff is tough. You deserve support.
I want you to hear this: If you’re realizing intergenerational trauma is playing a role in your family, you’re not alone. You’re also not a “bad mom.” The fact that you’re here, reading this blog post, is proof of that.
And one gentle reminder: As moms, it’s tough to find time to care for ourselves. But you deserve to invest in your own wellbeing. And when you take better care of yourself, you’ll take way better of your people.
Your needs matter. You matter.
Sources
Athan, A. M. (2020). Reproductive identity: An emerging concept. American Psychologist, 75(4), 445-456. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000623
Bielawski, T., Misiak, B., Moustafa, A., & Frydecka, D. (2019). Epigenetic mechanisms, trauma, and psychopathology: targeting chromatin remodeling complexes. Reviews in the neurosciences, 30(6), 595–604. https://doi.org/10.1515/revneuro-2018-0055
Isobel, S., Goodyear, M., Furness, T., & Foster, K. (2018). Preventing intergenerational trauma transmission: A critical interpretive synthesis. Journal of Clinical Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14735
Youssef, N., Lockwood, L., Su, S., Hao, G., & Rutten, B. (2018). The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings. Brain Sciences, 8(5), 83. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci8050083
https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/long_term_consequences.pdf
https://frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808/full%20
https://www.hereandnowmotherhood.org/post/what-is-matrescence
https://iuhealth.org/thrive/generational-trauma-breaking-the-cycle-of-adverse-childhood-experiences
https://www.livescience.com/37703-epigenetics.html
https://psychcentral.com/lib/how-intergenerational-trauma-impacts-families#3
http://sites.bu.edu/daniellerousseau/2019/04/28/breaking-the-cycle-intergenerational-trauma/