These symptoms have been identified in many cultures and people who have faced trauma. Difficulty with relationships and attachment to others.
Research suggests it begins if a parent experienced firsthand trauma or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood, spanning emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or neglect - which can affect the way they raise their children. “This expresses itself biologically, chemically, psychologically, behaviorally, interpersonally, culturally, even nationally.” “It’s the multiple ways in which ancestral and parental post-trauma adaptational styles affect their offspring, and these ways are multidimensional,” Dr. While you may not have been abused, lived through discrimination, or survived war yourself, your thinking, habits, and the way you forge relationships may be rooted in the traumatic experiences your ancestors have dealt with. Significant traumatic events and experiences, like the Holocaust, slavery, sexual abuse, and poverty, can affect people in such a way that survivors’ children and their children (sometimes continuing for decades on) are affected. If unhealed and unaddressed, traumatic wounds can be unintentionally passed on, says Yael Danieli, PhD, the founder and executive director of the International Center for Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma in New York, who has spent decades researching postwar trauma responses of victims, children of victims, their families, and communities. Can you inherit trauma from your family members?