What You Don't Know About Intergenerational Trauma, But Should

What You Probably Don’t Know About Intergenerational Trauma Treatments, But Should

 

If you are a self-help or personal growth fan, I know that you have heard of the problem of intergenerational trauma. It’s a new buzzword that is flying around the therapy, coaching, and even spiritual communities. I am hearing a lot of interesting things out there, so I wanted to share a bit about it to clear up some of the confusion today. If this is something you have questions about or struggle with, hopefully we can get you a little closer to letting it go today.

 

Thanks for joining me. I’m Laura Giles, and as I say, I hear a lot of people proposing all sorts of remedies and cures for intergenerational trauma, but before we can even talk about that, let’s first define what it is because I know for at least some of you, this is a new idea.

So intergenerational trauma is a pretty new idea in the field of trauma. Although the evidence for post traumatic stress disorder has been around forever, we didn’t even have a formal label for that until 1981, and it was really controversial then.

 

Since then we’ve made a lot of progress in treating trauma, and one of the newest nuances comes from psychiatry. I believe it started with observations of Holocaust survivors. There were obviously psychological things going on from surviving captivity, persecution, starvation, and emotional torture, but there were also changes in the blood and brain and on the molecular levels. 

 

Doctors were seeing anomalies in the children of survivors who didn’t actually go through the concentrations camps and were wondering why. It was as if the children were war survivors too.

 

You see, we all have genes, but we also have proteins that turn genes off and on. And all kinds of things can be the switch that makes that happen. It can be something you eat, the environment, stress. This is why identical twins aren’t totally identical despite having the same genes. They don’t have the same environment, diet, or lifestyle.

 

Anyway, a trauma response is a survival response. It’s your body trying to keep you alive. Nature wants us to survive and produce offspring. If you are a pregnant woman under stressful circumstances, you just may pass along the epigenetic mix that gives your baby the best chance of survival and in a stress-filled environment, and that could be a sky high sensitivity and reactivity. If you are super alert, you are going to react more quickly to danger and increase your chance for survival, right?

 

But the holocaust was over. There was no threat to life, and here are these children with elevated cortisol levels. That impacts everything from mood, inflammation, heart functioning, digestion, the ability to conceive, weight, the ability to have healthy relationships - everything.

 

So these kids start off behind the eight ball, and then they have kids who also have this issue. And they have kids, and it just goes on and on. There are different studies on different animals - and humans are animals - and the impact of epigenetics can go on for 4 to 7 generations depending upon what caused the change. 

 

I don’t know the specifics, but let’s say that exposure to famine could effect the next 7 generations and the exposure to emotional trauma could last for 4. I don’t know the number exactly, but you get the gist of the idea. 

 

I can personally vouch for this because I am an aspiring homesteader. I have goats, and one year we had a drought. There was no rain and the hay was no good. When our goats kidded, they all had birthing problems. One mama’s babies died in utero. They all had hard deliveries that year, and another had a stillborn.

 

I ended up keeping one of the female kids and she was never hardy. Even though the next year’s hay was fine, she never caught up. So, environmental conditions definitely make a difference and the impact can last for more than just one lifetime.

 

But when we are talking about intergenerational trauma for people, we are typically either talking about historical trauma that happens to a group of people like war refugees or the survivors of 911 - and in that I include all Americans, but a subset of that would be those who were directly impacted by the attacks, or we are talking about personal trauma that happens in families.

 

So, if your mother was an alcoholic, she’s not the only person impacted by her addiction. Her children are too, not just because they came from her body and lived in her womb, but because of the chaotic environment created by the addiction as the children are growing up. Her partner is too. So intergenerational trauma is about trauma that impacts a family that basically isn’t healed.

 

And the tricky thing about this is that a lot of people think that some things aren’t traumatic. And if we are going by the diagnostic and statistical manual that defines dis-ease, they’d be right because in order to have post traumatic stress disorder, you have to have faced a life threatening ordeal, and if you’re six years old driving past a car accident where people are bloodied, you may not have been in any danger at all, but your nervous system is off the chart. If you are afraid of dentists and your dentist isn’t the gentlest of creatures, he may not have done a thing wrong. And you may never have been close to death, but your nervous system is still raging like you were jumping out of an airplane.

 

Another thing is that some people have lifestyles that are so chaotic that it just seems normal to them. It’s normal to have drive-by shootings or a dad who comes in and yells when he gets home at night. It is so commonplace that it doesn’t attract any notice, but your nervous system is racing. I have a lot of clients who don’t know what calm is. Their baseline is when their nervous system is screaming, so on a scale of 0 to 10, their baseline in a 9. They are almost always in a state of being maxed out.

 

If you grew up with food insecurity or you weren’t sure where you were going to be living, you may have been safe and dry and ate most of the time, but living in uncertainty day in and day out turns your nervous system on high alert to keep you alive. It’s adaptive in that way, but comes at a really high cost to the rest of your life.

 

So, to me anything that gets you going like that, is trauma. You don’t have to be near death to have your nervous system stuck on high alert.  And I can tell you that the severity of the trauma response and the prevalence in the general population has gone up tremendously during the time that I have been working in mental health. 

 

It used to be that you might never have a client suicide during your entire career in mental health. Now it’s rare to find anyone who hasn’t had that situation. People are overmedicated and ineffectively treated because helpers are not adequately trained. To fill that gap, people are looking to alternative treatments that are also not really effective in helping them.

 

One common one is God or prayer. I am a fan of prayer. I believe in the power of prayer, but it doesn’t work reliably. You have no control over prayer. You surrender and trust. I’ve seen this work for a few people, but the vast majority of people aren’t helped. So, my suggestion on that one is pray if you are a believer, and help yourself. I wouldn’t let that be the only egg in your basket.

 

Another alternative treatment is plant medicine. I’m talking about the pseudo spiritual ones and also the ones that are sanctioned by the government and follow prescribed protocols.

 

The problem that I have with the pseudo spiritual ones is that as a daughter of an indigenous person myself, I have a hard time with people who are not reared with the cultural understanding conducting a spiritual ceremony while appealing to gods they do not know or have a relationship with, the plant is not native to the culture and they have no relationship with the land. Plant medicine is all about relationship and there isn’t one. It’s really the same mentality as taking a pill. It’s stripped of all cultural meaning and all that makes it sacred. And in most cases, the facilitator isn’t a member of the community and doesn’t know the people in the ceremony. Again, there is no relationship. 

 

The most precious thing you do as a facilitator is care for the people who have entrusted themselves to you. I don’t know how you do that when you don’t know who these people are and what they are bringing to the table. I don’t know how you do that when there are 40 people in a ceremony. Not to mention that there is no aftercare or support. It’s like now you see them, and now you don’t.

 

But that’s my perspective, so let’s bypass that and get to the effectiveness, okay?

 

I’ve had LOTS of clients who have done this in different settings. Most have an unforgettable experience, but in most cases, I can’t say that I’ve seen any lasting changes because of it. 

 

I’ve had clients do Ketamine under a doctor’s supervision. If Ketamine is going to work for you, it will kick in fast. It did create dramatic and fast changes in 3 people, not in 1, but he didn’t follow the prescribed protocol either so that may have been his responsibility. The other 3 had to quit because the price tag is so high. Once they did, they went back to their previous level of functioning. So it was a very expensive way to treat symptoms for a short period of time.

 

I have one client who did ayahuasca who was worse from the experience. He should never have been permitted to do it anyway because he was not an ideal candidate.

 

I have had two clients who developed Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder which is where you continuously hallucinate. They can be brief flashbacks or more long lasting. The person does know that they are hallucinations and can function despite them, but it still interferes with their life.

 

I have had one client who got Amotivational syndrome after doing psychedelics, which is apathy and a lack of interest in living. That doesn’t go away. So, a lot of people think that hallucinogens are safe and natural. In most cases they are, but not totally.

 

What I see mostly though is that the person gets a lot of insight and feels great for about a month, then they need to do it again and again and again. Nothing really gets better. It’s just spiritual bypass and kicking the can down the road.

 

My clients have also tried working with helpers who don’t use drugs. They offer chakra balancing, Reiki, meditations, and things like this. I can’t speak about any specific practice or practitioner because they are all different.

 

I have seen one or two benefit tremendously from these types of things quickly and permanently, but most of them don’t. 

 

I have had client who want to go all natural and heal with food. I am a great believer in food, sometimes supplements, and lifestyle changes for healing. While this helps tremendously with symptom reduction, I’ve not seen anyone regain complete wellness this way.

 

And this is why. There is a huge difference between feeling better and healing. When I worked as a rape crisis counselor, my clients were often suicidal. Something horrible had happened. Their world was upside down and they couldn’t see their way out.

 

Don’t ask me how, but I’d often turn that situation around and at the end of our time together, they’d be laughing and talking about shopping, and were definitely not suicidal. So, in other words, they felt better.

 

I didn’t do a single thing for the underlying trauma, but I got them to a place where they weren’t thinking about dying. 

 

Coping is not healing. 

 

Coping gets you from moment to moment. Coping gives you breathing room so you can do the deep work of healing. 

 

And if you don’t know what trauma looks like, you may not know that you are suffering from it. If the trauma didn’t happen directly to you, you may not realize that it’s impacting you. 

 

So, let me give you a quick list of things that can create a trauma response that you may not be aware of, okay. These are things that my clients have endured but didn’t think to talk about because they dismissed them as commonplace and “no big deal.”

 

Car accidents - this could be you were in one or you witnessed one. This is super common. If you have a fear of driving, driving on bridges, you tense up when someone is beside you or behind you, you have unresolved stuff to let go of. This happened to me after skidding on some ice. It doesn’t have to be some big fender bender where you roll the car or smash a windshield. 

 

medical treatment- the modern medical system is particularly brutal and unkind. Any type of interaction with medical professionals can be traumatic - from getting your blood drawn to just doing an intake when you talk about your symptoms to a perfect stranger while in earshot of all kinds of other people. It’s dehumanizing, potentially humiliating and cold. We’ve all either heard about someone or have been someone in a hospital gown that is too small and open in all the wrong places and been exposed, right? You get it. Medical treatment is the worst.

 

Emotional incest- this is when your parent has really poor boundaries and uses you as their confidant. They tell you things about their finances, love life, or work life and then praise you for how mature you are. This is not healthy or normal. It robs children of their childhood and does a real number on their emotional stability.

 

Living with an addict - this could include yourself. Addiction is very destabilizing, and I’m talking addiction to anything, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, eating, exercise. It doesn’t matter. The preoccupation with something else brings that person’s sense of being out of control into the whole family.

 

Death - death is natural, but if you are not prepared, not supported, and don’t have closure, you can have a lot of negative impacts that last a long time. If you don’t have a culture of talking about death and acknowledging it, this can make it harder. You know, as Americans, we don’t do hard things. We ignore them like they are not happening. We outsource them. The more in touch you are with life, the less scary it is. 

 

Helicopter parenting - a lot of my clients have helicopter parents. They don’t know what’s wrong. They report having a great childhood with loving parents who provided well for them, and they don’t see the controlling and critical nature of the parents as anything but love. I had one client who had a hard time buying her own clothes. She lacked the confidence because what if her mom didn’t like her choices? She just froze like a deer in the headlights at the thought of it. Not to mention that she didn’t even know what she liked because she never got to make her own decisions. So, no. There was no physical abuse, but stifling, controlling, or criticizing a child is very damaging.

 

Court - most people have been to court for something. It’s a normal thing that people do. It isn’t often seen as traumatizing, but when all your power is gone and your fate is left up to a judge who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you, it can be traumatizing. Especially if you have been in front of him before and he has not heard you and has made decisions for you that went against your will. 

 

A strict religious upbringing - Religion is another thing that we think of as common and a good, stabilizing thing, but when it’s strict and controlling, it can choke the life out of us. We call that “religious trauma syndrome” but it’s essentially PTSD caused by fear of Hell, fear of disapproval and being kicked out of the clan. 

 

Another commonly overlooked cause is growing up with a sick parent- and this can be a physical or emotional ailment. This is because the parent is not available, so it can feel like abandonment. The parent isn't able to meet your needs, so there is an element of neglect. If you had to care for this person in any way, there is also the stress of too much responsibility before you are able to really handle it. 

 

So, in addition to the obvious things of rape, child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, being a war survivor or soldier, and being a victim of a crime, you have a whole bunch of every day things that can create intergenerational trauma.

 

If you add historical stuff to it like genocide - which happened to Native Americans, Bosnians, Jews, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Serbians, Greeks, Armenians, the Igbo people of Nigeria, Kurds, Vietnamese - all in the 20th century - oppression - which has included women from every culture since the rise of patriarchy, and slavery, we all have quite a heavy burden to bear, don’t we? 

 

Not everyone who goes through something gets traumatized. Some people are resilient and can bounce back. And some people appear to have bounced back because they are great at compartmentalizing, but those are the ones who tend to be hardest to help. First because they aren’t suffering, so they don’t come in for treatment. Second, because they are so good at hiding their symptoms and distress that it’s hard to get at it.

 

But let’s look at the most common signs of hidden emotional trauma to help you know if it’s impacting you. The first two are anxiety and depression. All my clients have one or the other or both. When you have both, that’s a big, giant red flag for PTSD.

 

Anxiety is a nervous system on high alert. Depression is a nervous system that is sluggish. They are two opposite states that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. If it is going on for any length of time, you probably have PTSD.

 

Other symptoms are insomnia, shame, anger, fear, hyper vigilance, perfectionism is a huge one, procrastination, inability to achieve goals, lack of empathy, self-doubt, feeling unworthy, feeling like an imposter, self-harming behaviors like cutting, suicidal thoughts, chronic pain or illness, substance abuse, and ADD/ADHD. In fact, I am not sure that ADD and ADHD are real things. If they are, then certainly a high percentage of people with ADD and ADHD also have a trauma history.

 

Think about what I said about the body wanting to protect itself. One of the ways it does that is by scanning for danger. What is the brain doing with ADD? It’s jumping from one thing to another and paying attention to everything so you can’t focus on any one thing.

 

So how many people don’t have something on that list? Not many, right? Now how many people have a bunch of things on that list? The more that you have, the more likely that the root of your issue is emotional.

 

Well, in my business it’s always emotional. Emotions drive the bus. When your emotions are flowing, acknowledge, and manageable, life is happy. Your emotions don’t have to be all happy. We all need some challenges to keep things interesting, but if your skills are up to the task, it makes life fun and gives us meaning. It doesn’t capsize us.

 

So, here we are. We’ve got some personal baggage and some intergenerational or ancestral baggage. And trust me, this is everybody. Some have a little. Some have a lot, but we’ve been riding this merry go ‘round of sweeping things under the rug and treating symptoms in the west for decades or even centuries. So, there is a lot of unresolved stuff hiding in the basement.

 

And if counseling, Reiki, and meditation don’t work, what does? There is no free lunch. I don’t know of a solution that works reliably that doesn’t include doing your own work.

 

That means that if you don’t have basic life skills, so things like knowing how to take care of yourself, manage your emotions, and deal with the every day ups and downs of life without becoming stressed out or needing to escape into over-activity, alcohol or some other substance, sex, or whatever your escape hatch of choice is, then you have to learn how to do that. If you have had PTSD since childhood, chances are you were too busy surviving to figure that stuff out.

 

If you don’t know who you are, you have to learn that. Life’s about showing up and being you, and if you are hiding behind people pleasing or living someone else’s expectations of what your life should look like, you’re not here. You may be surprised how many grown folks are in this boat. 

 

Like I said, Nature helps us to survive. Fawning, which is another way of saying people pleasing, and it’s a trauma response too, is about trying to stay safe by being agreeable. We do what we learn. If that’s working and it’s a risk to be myself, I am probably going to keep doing what’s worked in the past so I can be safe unless I have a compelling reason to change.

 

If you don’t know how to have great relationships, you’ll want to learn that, too. Why? Because that’s what it’s all about. There really isn't any point to conquering the highest mountain if at the end of it, you’re all alone. We belong to each other. So, we need to learn how to do that.

 

These are some the things that create the resilience that help us to get through tough times without being traumatized by them. 

 

And then you have to do the work of healing the trauma. You’ve got to feel your feeling, tell your truth, and let everything go. You can’t hold on to resentment, withhold love, or hang on to old stories and programs like “I wasn’t loved enough.” 

 

I worked with someone once who, every time I knocked down an emotional block, instead of letting it go, she’d use the memories and her emotions as justification for why the block was valid. For example, if we came upon a memory where her mother was calling her names, she’s say, “See? That’s why we don’t get along today.” Or if it was a memory of her mother intentionally embarrassing her in front of her friends, she’d say, “She always hated me and couldn’t stand if it I had attention.”

 

That’s like me offering you a gift of freedom and you saying, “No, thank you.” Ultimately, we’re all holding the reigns to our own freedom. We can use them to bind us or we can let go and be free. It’s up to us.

 

When I explained to this client what she was doing, she said, “Oh, my God! Are you serious? That’s not what I want at all!” so she stopped searching for validation of why she was wronged and just let the energy move through her. She let herself cry, feel the loss, the pain, and the missed opportunities and within a few minutes, all that emotional releasing was done. 

That was all there was to it, and she had more freedom to move forward. This helped her with her limitations around money and relationships. She kept attracting people who didn’t see her and didn’t respect her, and that ended after we did that bit of work together.

 

You might think that people who say they want healing would be wide open and up for anything, but blocking the healing is common enough that it’s not unusual. Some clients are very skilled about having other crises they need to deal with so we never get to the real issue. Some will shut down. There are lots of ways to hold it in and not go there, but that won’t lead to healing. What’s in has to come out. 

 

When it does, it’s freeing. If there is something in your life that you have the skills and resources to handle, but don’t, you can bet there is trauma behind it. Or if you react to something with a bigger response than is objectively called for, there is trauma behind it. 

 

So, if I say I want to start working out and I don’t, there is a block there. It doesn’t have to be something dramatic like I’m a shut in and can’t go outside. Or I am a hoarder. Little things can be just as limiting as big, obvious things. 

 

If I say “boo” and you curse me out, that’s more than the situation calls for. We say things are in shadow, but they really aren’t. We just aren’t paying attention to the right things.

 

Healing is not a one and done kind of thing. We have our baggage and our intergenerational stuff. And while some people say that you can never heal from it, you can only deal with it, I don’t agree. I see people break these chains every day, link by link.

 

Even strong, old wounds can heal. I worked with a gal who had a lifetime of a death by paper cuts. I don’t really know how she functioned. It was like getting from one panic attack to the next. She really needed an emotional support human to get through the day because the day to day tasks of living were just so hard.

 

The girl wanted it though and brought a lot of determination to the table and turned her life around in, I don’t know, maybe 4 - 5 months? She tried everything I suggested. Everything I asked her to do, she gutted through even though it was hard. She knew she’d survive it, and trusted me to see her through. We got to the other side and she’s thriving now. 

 

No panic attacks. Her relationships are better. Her emotions are manageable. She can talk to people without feeling attacked, getting defensive, or becoming angry. She’s really a whole different person.

 

And really, that’s why I do this work. It’s so important. As a society, 

we can’t kick the can down the road for decades and centuries and not have a huge bill to pay down the road. That bill is coming due, so it’s up to us to clean things up for us and the generations after us. 

 

Oh, and one last thing. I probably shouldn’t have left this to last, but I have heard people say some things can’t be healed. I have not seen this to be true. I have always worked with clients whom others call “treatment resistant.” There is no such thing as a treatment resistant client. There are only unskilled helpers. Anyone who wants help and sticks with it can change. The power lies in you and nowhere else. A facilitator is just that. So, don’t give up that the life you want can be yours.

 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to leave a legacy of sex trafficking, school shootings, horror films so graphic that the audience vomits, race riots, and terrorism to the next generation. I think we all have a part to play in creating the world we live in and the very least we can do is clean up our own mess because here’s the thing. As you clean up your own mess, you clear the junk that was passed down to us too, and that does a tremendous amount of good for the whole.

 

Nobody’s keeping score of where it came from. It doesn’t matter that it started with these people, this religion, or that race. All that matters is that it’s cleaned up. 

 

If you want a preview of the work that I do to help you help yourself, I have a free group session once a month. I’ll place the link in the show notes so you can RSVP if you’re interested in that. If you want a private breakthrough session, just email me. And if you want to do the work of rebuilding a strong foundation so you can sustain your gains, check out my online community at letitgonow.org where you will get lots of experiences and support for your journey to health and balance.

 

Thanks for being here guys. I’m Laura Giles, and I will see you next week.