Generational Trauma

 *Trigger warning - this blog talks about hypothetical trauma, abuse, and trauma carried through generations.

Here's a hypothetical situation:  A woman in the middle ages is repeatedly mistreated by a man (it may or may not be her husband).    She's so traumatized by this that she vows to protect herself and her future children.  She is constantly tense, can never relax, and is in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and anxiety.  She goes on to have multiple children -  both boys and girls.  The girls pick up on her tenseness and begin to copy it in themselves; they also believe men are bad and try to protect themselves as well.  Her sons do as well, but they are also treated poorly because of their mother's belief that all men are inherently bad.  As a result, they go on to mistreat women because they feel they need to retaliate for the way their mother treated them.  The girls assume all men are bad and carry their mother's burden.  These children may know why; their mother may have told them what happened, but she may not have, and she may have been too ashamed.  So, they go on to have their own children.  They repeat the pattern because it was the way they were raised.  Generations upon generations go by, and now there's a woman sitting in the modern day, wondering why she's so tense all the time and anxious.  By this point, she may also have genetic conditions that predispose her to carrying more cortisol in her body than other women.  She may suffer from infertility.  She may wonder why she can never fully relax.  She starts to do some research into generational trauma, genetics, etc., and she starts to see a correlation.  She begins to wonder if maybe, just maybe, all this "burden" she's carrying came from hundreds of years ago.  She may actually be right.
Some research has begun to show that generational trauma - aka family secrets - can and does change your DNA.  Trauma leaves a chemical marker on your DNA, which is then passed down to future generations. It can passed through the male or female. 

They already can prove that stress in the home can lead to obesity, diabetes, and other physical problems in children, not to mention the emotional and psychological problems such as PTSD, anxiety, etc., that we've known about for a long time.   So, it makes sense that these things carry forward from generation to generation. 

I'm bringing this up because I think if we understood where things come from and if we stop hiding the bad things that happen to us and work through them, we can prevent our descendants from suffering from genetic issues that they have no idea where they came from.  I'm talking about family secrets.  I'll talk more about those in another post.  But, I personally believe that family secrets are detrimental to our health and our descendants' health.  I'm not saying that you should go and tell everyone what horrible things uncle or aunt so and so did.  But, I am saying that those things shouldn't be pushed under the rug, and the people affected by their misdoings are told to get over it.  Those things need to be dealt with correctly and processed in a way that helps those affected overcome what's happened instead of letting it fester and become things like obesity, diabetes,  alcoholism, abuse, etc., in later generations.
Some resources I found offer suggestions for beginning to understand the emotional trauma that's carried forward, such as chronicling all wars, famines,  natural disasters, etc., your ancestors may have gone through and documenting how that may have affected generational trauma as a way of moving forward.  But I honestly think that would take a lot of work,  especially if the source was much further back in history than, say, the last few hundred years.  That resource didn't suggest that the trauma could be ingrained genetically, so it didn't consider that something such as PCOS -such as I have, could've been a traumatic event happening a very, very long time ago and became genetic.  But other sources did.   This is explained through epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of how environmental situations affect our genetic code.  This can include traumatic situations.  Those situations affect how our genes are read and utilized by our bodies.  Those changes are passed down through generations.
So, I've been reminding myself that this isn't my burden to bear and practicing gratitude.  I've noticed a change in my posture and how tense I am.  Or instead, how less tense I am.  If I remind myself this tenseness that's caused by a higher amount of cortisol in my bloodstream due to PCOS isn't my trauma, I actually do find myself letting go of that constant  "clinching."  I feel it in the way I walk, the way I sleep, and the way I carry myself when "relaxed."  I'm finding myself being able to actually relax for the first time in my life without the use of alcohol or medications.  And for me, that's huge.  That verifies to me that maybe this isn't mine; maybe this really is generational trauma passed down from a long time ago through genetics. 

This is a list of some of the resources I found.  But, there's tons more out there, all you've got to do is search for them.

https://arkansasadvocate.com/2023/07/05/understanding-epigenetics-how-trauma-is-passed-on-through-our-family-members/

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808/full

https://psychcentral.com/health/genetic-trauma#looking-ahead