Some of what you carry has been carried before you.
That might sound abstract, or even a little unsettling. But for many of the adults I work with, it lands immediately as truth. The anxiety that spikes in certain rooms. The way your body tightens when authority figures speak a certain way. The deep, unnamed grief that seems to belong to something larger than your own individual story.
Intergenerational trauma is real, it is documented, and it has a social and political dimension that cannot be separated from how it lives in your body and your relationships. This post is an attempt to explain what it is, where it comes from, and what healing can look like when you take the full picture seriously.
What Intergenerational Trauma Actually Means
Intergenerational trauma, sometimes called legacy burdens or inherited trauma, refers to the ways that traumatic stress can be transmitted from one generation to the next. This transmission happens through multiple pathways.
It happens biologically. Research in the field of epigenetics has found that traumatic experiences can alter gene expression in ways that affect stress responses — and that those alterations can be passed down. The bodies of people whose parents or grandparents survived extreme stress may be wired for threat in ways that have nothing to do with their own lived experience.
It happens relationally. Parents and caregivers who are carrying unprocessed trauma pass it forward through the texture of everyday life: the emotional unavailability, the hypervigilance, the silences around certain topics, the reactions that seem outsized to their triggers. Children absorb this. They adapt to it. And those adaptations often outlast the original source.
It happens culturally and communally. When a community has been subjected to sustained harm, the effects ripple forward through shared narratives, collective grief, distrust of systems, and coping strategies that made complete sense in the context of danger but can complicate life in its absence.
The Social Justice Piece That Often Gets Left Out
Here is what a lot of conversations about intergenerational trauma miss: the trauma did not just happen. It was done.
Slavery. Colonization. The forced separation of Indigenous families through boarding schools. Japanese American incarceration. Redlining and the deliberate destruction of Black wealth. The criminalization of same-sex relationships. Medical abuse and experimentation targeting Black and Brown bodies. Gender-based violence normalized and institutionalized across centuries.
These were not natural disasters. They were policies. They were laws. They were choices made by people with power about what other people’s lives were worth. And the trauma that resulted from those choices does not simply dissolve when the policies change — especially when many of those systems are still operating in updated forms.
When we approach intergenerational trauma through a social justice lens, we are saying: the individual healing we do in a therapy room does not happen in a vacuum. Your nervous system learned what it learned inside of a context. That context was shaped by forces much larger than your family. And a therapy that asks you to heal without ever acknowledging those forces is asking you to put down a weight while pretending it was never placed on you.
What This Can Look Like in Daily Life
Intergenerational trauma often shows up in patterns that feel deeply personal, because they are. They have just been shaped by something much larger than one person’s experience.
It can look like a pervasive mistrust of institutions — medical systems, legal systems, educational systems — that other people seem to navigate with ease. That mistrust is often not irrational. It is informed.
It can look like hypervigilance in professional settings, a constant reading of the room, a fear of taking up too much space or being perceived as a threat. Many of my clients who grew up in households where their parents or grandparents faced racial violence or discrimination carry this in their bodies without knowing where it originated.
It can look like complicated relationships with rest, pleasure, and receiving care. When survival required constant effort and vigilance across generations, ease can feel dangerous. Receiving can feel like a trap.
It can look like grief that has no clear source. A heaviness that belongs partly to you, and partly to people who came before you and never had the space or safety to grieve themselves.
How EMDR and IFS Work With Inherited Trauma
Two of the approaches I use in my work — EMDR and Internal Family Systems — are particularly well-suited to intergenerational trauma, and not just because of what they do, but because of how they understand what healing means.
EMDR works with the way traumatic experiences get stored in the nervous system. When a memory or a pattern of activation has not been fully processed, it stays alive in a way that keeps pulling the present into the past. In intergenerational trauma work, this can involve processing not just your own experiences, but the ways those experiences are layered on top of something older. The body often knows things the mind has not been told.
IFS, Internal Family Systems, offers a way to get curious about the parts of ourselves that developed in response to living with inherited pain. There may be a part that learned to perform strength because vulnerability was not safe for generations before you. A part that carries grief that was never allowed to be expressed. A part that learned to disappear in certain spaces. In IFS, we do not try to get rid of these parts. We try to understand what they have been holding, and offer them something different.
When this work is done through a lens that takes seriously the social and political conditions that shaped your family’s story — not just the individual dynamics, but the larger forces at play — the work goes deeper. Your history becomes part of the picture, not a distraction from it.
Identity and the Inheritance of Both Pain and Strength
It matters that we name something else here: intergenerational transmission is not only about trauma.
It is also about resilience, creativity, spiritual practice, collective care, joy, and survival. The same people who passed forward the weight of their experiences also passed forward the strategies they used to survive them. The music. The language. The way a community shows up for its own. The humor that transforms pain. The faith that holds people together.
Part of the healing work I do with clients is helping them see their inheritance in its full complexity. What you received is not only damage. It is also depth. The capacity for empathy that comes from knowing suffering. The attunement that comes from having to read environments carefully. The groundedness that can come from people who knew how to survive.
This does not mean the pain was worth it. It means you are more than what was done to your family.
What Healing Can Look Like
Healing from intergenerational trauma is not about erasing history. It is not about fixing what is broken or reaching some endpoint where the past no longer touches you.
It is about developing a different relationship with what you have inherited. Being able to feel the grief without being swallowed by it. Being able to recognize the patterns without being controlled by them. Being able to choose differently, even when the old pull is strong.
It often involves naming what happened explicitly. For many clients, simply having a therapist say “yes, what your grandparents experienced was a trauma, and it makes complete sense that it shaped your family” is something they have never heard before. There is something profound about having your history witnessed without being asked to minimize it.
It involves mourning. Grief is a significant part of this work — grief for what was lost across generations, for the childhood experiences that were shaped by unprocessed pain, for the versions of your parents or grandparents that might have existed in different conditions.
And it involves building. Learning, often slowly and with support, what it feels like to live in your body without bracing. To receive care without waiting for the catch. To take up space without apology.
A Note About Finding the Right Therapist
If you are carrying intergenerational trauma, it matters who you do this work with.
You need a therapist who understands that your history is not background noise. Who can hold the social and political dimensions of your story with the same care they bring to the personal. Who will not ask you to process pain while pretending the systems that caused it are irrelevant. Who sees your identity as something to celebrate rather than simply accommodate.
This kind of care is available. It is what identity-affirming, trauma-focused therapy looks like when it is done well.
You deserve to be seen fully, and to heal fully, in a space where all of who you are is welcome.
