What is generational trauma?

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Generational trauma (also called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma) refers to the transmission of trauma's psychological and biological effects from one generation to the next — through epigenetic mechanisms, learned behavioral patterns, family systems dynamics, and the emotional climate of the home. Generational trauma passes through multiple channels simultaneously. Biologically, through epigenetic alterations that affect stress hormone systems. Psychologically, through parenting behaviors shaped by unhealed trauma — a parent's hypervigilance, emotional unavailability, or inability to tolerate a child's distress. And systemically, through family narratives, secrets, and unspoken rules. Dr. Resmaa Menakem, licensed therapist and author of My Grandmother's Hands, documents how collective historical trauma — slavery, genocide, colonization, war — becomes stored in the bodies of descendants and transmitted through generations as nervous system patterns rather than conscious memory. Somatic therapist Dr. Pat Ogden notes that many of the body patterns people present with in therapy — chronic tension, collapse, freeze — were learned not from their own experience but from the bodies of their caregivers, which were in turn shaped by the caregivers' own history. Healing generational trauma requires acknowledging what was transmitted, understanding its origins, grieving what ancestors carried, and consciously choosing different patterns — particularly in how one relates to one's own children and to the body.