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Parents who have experienced traumas can struggle to develop positive attachments with their children and may have issues anticipating their kids' wants and needs. The way trauma spreads can be more subtle, too. Their children and grandchildren later adopted some of these negative coping strategies and fears. For example, one 2015 study suggests that survivors of the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide were likely to experience feelings of anxiety and fear, and to adopt behaviors like hoarding food. Moreover, if parents have unresolved traumas, they may develop negative coping mechanisms they pass on to their children. For instance, parents may think physical abuse is the best way to parent their children, King says, but ultimately, it contributes to intergenerational trauma. Most obviously, negative cycles of abuse can lead to repeated traumas from generation to generation. Intergenerational trauma is perpetuated through a mix of behavior and genetics. How is trauma passed down through generations?
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Historical trauma occurs in a cultural group that has been systematically oppressed over a long period of time, says Anthony King, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at the Ohio State University. Important: Another common type of intergenerational trauma is historical trauma. Studies have shown that parents dealing with trauma may have a harder time connecting to their children, and children develop potentially unhealthy coping strategies, like self-soothing, as a result.
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Over the decades and centuries, those traumas were passed down to younger generations, in part, due to outside factors of historical oppression like socioeconomic impacts and a legacy of poverty.īut there's also genetic elements of stress transmission, and psychological factors like parent-child relationships that play a role.Īlmost any significant trauma can spread to your children and subsequent generations. One of the longest-running cases of intergenerational trauma still in effect today dates back hundreds of years to the mass enslavement of African people in the United States. Here's how intergenerational trauma may be affecting you and your family and how to break the cycle. "If we don't deal with them, they actually end up compounding over time." They don't just go away on their own," says Susan Beaulieu, an assistant extension professor in family development at the University of Minnesota. "A lot of people don't tend to understand that intergenerational trauma, unless those patterns are changed, the patterns tend to continue. Her studies on Holocaust survivors revealed that their children were more likely to struggle emotionally than kids whose parents hadn't experienced genocide. This is called generational, or intergenerational, trauma.Īlso dubbed transgenerational trauma or multigenerational trauma, the concept of intergenerational trauma was pioneered by Vivian Rakoff in the 1960s. Your trauma can take a toll on others, too - in particular, your children, grandchildren, and other generations that follow. A traumatic event is terrible in the moment, but as anyone who has experienced trauma knows, it doesn't stop there: The emotional and physical ramifications last for weeks, months, and even years.īut it's not just you.