Transgenerational Trauma
Transgenerational trauma—repressed emotions passed from one generation to the next—shapes individuals and families in profound, often invisible ways. Imagine a grandfather who, to survive persecution, hides his Jewish identity. He learns that secrecy can save your life. That belief becomes an unconscious law in the family: don’t reveal too much, stay composed and silent. His children, growing up in this inherited survival mode, suppress their own pain. When one of them is sexually abused, they don’t speak out. They internalize it, thinking they can move on and forget. But trauma doesn’t just disappear. As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma that isn’t expressed doesn’t go away, it spreads in the body, shaping how we feel, relate, and even exist
There’s a law in physics that says: Nothing gets lost, nothing gets created, everything transforms. Emotions obey the same law. What isn’t processed doesn’t vanish—it mutates. Repressed pain spills into the body through inflammation, disease, or numbness. It echoes in relationship patterns, recurring dreams, intrusive thoughts, and chronic dissatisfaction. The more we try to ignore trauma, the more it poisons everything.
This isn’t just metaphor. Science now confirms what spiritual and ancestral traditions have always known: trauma can be biologically inherited. Emotional memory travels through cellular mechanisms—epigenetic markers that don’t change our DNA, but influence how it’s read. Our ancestors didn’t just pass down eye color, a musical ear, or money. They passed down fear. Silence. Shame. And also resilience. Sensitivity. Vision. We carry emotional and spiritual heritage as much as the physical and financial. But unless we acknowledge the wounds, they grow deeper with each generation. Until someone decides to stop pretending and turn around to face it. The truth, when revealed, literally saves lives.
Unprocessed trauma often surfaces as depression. But depression isn’t just low mood or “bad luck.” At its root, it’s the inability to be yourself, because too much of you has been buried or denied. When your body feels slow, your thoughts turn dark, and everything feels heavy, it’s often a sign that something inside is screaming to be felt but hasn’t been, because of fear. Overthinking is often a sign of underfeeling. Instead of suppressing these signals with medication or distraction (alcohol, games…), the real path to healing lies in the opposite direction: toward the wound.
Healing doesn’t mean erasing the pain. It’s not about pretending it never happened or intellectualizing it until it makes sense. It’s about feeling it, and letting the wound scar properly: acknowledged, witnessed, integrated. It’s about feeling it, fully. Naming it. Letting it move through you and out of you. Only then can the cycle break.
Trauma is like a root system: buried, tangled, unseen. But its impact rises through the entire tree. If the roots are diseased, the branches will eventually feel it. Healing, then, is like watering the dry soil of your lineage. It doesn’t just liberate you—it nourishes those who came before and those who will come after. Because when even one person chooses to feel what generations refused to, something ancient gets released—energetically, and physically, too. And that release is the beginning of real freedom.
And maybe, happiness, too.