When I first started working with my therapist, years before becoming a therapist myself, I viewed healing as an individual process. And indeed, the format of therapy is often one-on-one. Even if our therapists are active, we come in specifically to be the center of the show. I’ve learned, however, that trauma is not an individual experience — so why would healing be any different?
I thought my trauma history came from just the experiences of harm I had gone through. I viewed myself as a house that needed some repairs. I needed to go into the attic and down into the basement to address the damage that had been hidden away; I needed to learn how to replace the locks and the broken windows. But in the process with my therapist, it felt as if we were walking down a long hallway that only got longer. We opened doors into rooms I didn’t even know were there — doors that accessed my childhood, my infancy and what my parents and grandparents experienced leading up to my birth. It wasn’t actually an empty house; there were others living in those backrooms.
We inherit both trauma and resilience from generations before us that in turn impact how we relate to stress in our bodies, operate in relationships and engage the world around us. Trauma reactions are the body’s survival tactic in response to overwhelming circumstances, not primarily an emotional response.
The term “generational trauma” describes both a biological and social process of transmitting these strategies down through our lineage. From medical literature, we know stressors on pregnant people shape fetal biochemistry and gene expression. One well-documented example is the Dutch famine studies that trace the impacts of undernutrition in the 1940s to chronic health conditions that emerged in future generations. They observed that key body systems were affected by famine and resulted in both altered behavior and increased prevalence of degenerative disease. Once we are born, we learn behavior through example or explicit instruction from one generation to another. Here’s how you survive, they tell us, because this is how I survived.
Resmaa Menakem, author of the book “My Grandmother’s Hands,” says: “Trauma decontextualized in a person over time can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family over time can look like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people over time can look like culture.”
Reading Menakem’s work synthesized something I previously had no words for: Social and cultural norms can perpetuate trauma and stress responses in our bodies. When people move out of the context where the original trauma response was warranted, they may still reflexively act — think of anyone in your life who habitually saves every scrap item for later use or who doesn’t want to talk about their emotions because “nothing good will come of it.”
Menakem’s framework of cultural somatics illuminates how our bodies are impacted by systems of oppression such as racism and sexism, whether you are part of the group with more power or the targeted group. For example, the expectation that cis men be stoic and unemotional in the face of even real tragedy can be a conditioned response to stress or trauma. Following the norm can hurt both the individual and their relationships while upholding harmful power structures. In my office, we challenge these norms by putting them back in context, asking the question: How did putting away your emotions keep you safe?
As I started to sort through the clutter in my own shadowy backrooms, I began to connect with parts of myself and my family’s history that I previously had no access to. It began to make sense why there were so many secrets and points of disconnection that I grew up with. A history of colonialism created scarcity that set the conditions for immigration, adoption and interpersonal violence that impacted my family directly.
We don’t get to choose what stressors impact our parents and grandparents; we don’t get to choose what experiences we fall into unaware because of unhealed trauma. But learning about these frameworks opened up more compassion and tenderness toward myself and the generations that came before me. I could express anger and hurt, and I could grieve the fact that those things happened in the first place. It became my responsibility, like it or not, to heal from them.
“I think about it like concentric circles,” I told a client recently. “I always envision the constellation of people my clients are in relationship with.”
If we do our work well, individual healing will deepen and positively impact our relationships, which in turn impacts our community and, hopefully, society at large. Connecting to the past reminded me that I am not alone in this work. It gave me the resolve to continue my healing journey even when it has been tough.
It can be so easy to lose sight of our role in making change to our culture; it can feel too big and abstract. What a gift, then, to contribute in some small way to that transformation.
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