Transgenerational Trauma
My husband, Ron, and I attended Chautauqua last week and the theme was “The Human Brain: Our Greatest Mystery.” It seemed like an apt focus for someone whose brain might be called neurodivergent. Chautauqua, for those who don’t know, is an up-scale camp for adults with music, art, lectures, recreation, and worship.
Bianca-Jones Marlin, Ph.D. Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research, Department of Psychology, Department of Neuroscience, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute
Epigenetics
What captured me most was a session with Bianca-Jones Marlin, Assistant Professor of Cell Research at Columbia University. Using hard science and humane experiments on mice, she and her colleagues are studying how trauma is passed on epigenetically from one generation to another. (Epigenetics refers to changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself.) In a dynamic presentation, she demonstrated the evidence that trauma in parents affects the brain structure and sensory experience of their future offspring.
Inherited Trauma
Marlin says, “Inherited trauma is not about traumatic life events being able to change our DNA (or that of our children), but rather “a memory of a traumatic event in our ancestors living on in us.” Exactly how it lives on, and for what reason, is what she and other researchers hope to discover.
Social science research on inherited trauma began on survivors of the Holocaust, children of both the victims and those perpetrating offenses, on Native American communities, and on sons of Civil War prisoners of war, and more. For instance, when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany, their food was rationed and those who survived often lived on less than 900 calories a day. Researching the offspring of women who were pregnant during this time, they found them to be overweight, with higher levels of cholesterol, and prone to diabetes. “Even though there was no longer a risk of starvation for these offspring, it appeared that the ‘memory’ Marlin mentioned was trying to protect their bodies from a land with no food.” (Washington Post)
Science is still many steps away from showing direct causality in human beings, but dramatic advances both in the social sciences and neuroscience have already begun. My trauma and your trauma is rarely isolated. It’s embedded in an epigenetic and social system that perpetuates itself for the longterm.
Family Secrets
For someone like me, whose family line is checkered and somewhat mysterious, this is important stuff. It casts light on my history and has implications for my children and my children’s children. I wonder how many generations of my family have been burdened by trauma, and what kind of trauma has been transmitted to me and through me transgenerationaly.
During the years of my healing, I intentionally focused on the trauma I experienced and gave little thought to the trauma my parents may have experienced, or their parents, or their parents. Everything was about me because it took all I had just to survive. Now I am looking at how that trauma may live on in my children. I have loved them with all my heart and done the best I could, but I would be foolish to think that my past hasn’t affected them.
For me, it’s been an act of faith to blog about DID, write my memoir, and publish it. I still worry that telling the truth may have potentially negative effects on my adult children. Our family secrets are powerful, controlling, and insidious. I believe the antidote to existing traumatic residue and future traumatic experiences is knowledge, both cognitive and visceral, and I’m committed to breaking the power of family secrets through this blog and my memoir. The discomfort I may experience today is small potatoes compared to the devastation to future generations.
We cannot change the past, but we can heal it and change the future.
Self-Care
It’s hard to factor our ancestors and our great, great grandchildren into our chaotic lives when we’re struggling to stay alive right now. With dissociative disorders, the past and future hardly compete with the painful present.
It may be helpful, though, to be aware that the abuse didn’t begin with you and probably didn’t begin with your perpetrators either. Instead, you are in a long line of victims. The good news is the trauma can stop with you when you give your children the best you have to give, apologize to them for what you could not give, and be developmentally and appropriately honest about the truth.
You are not a victim now. Breathe in your truth, right here, in the present. Breathe out the generations of hurt that came before you. Breathe in the goodness that grows inside you. Breathe out the secrets that no longer control you. Your history is important, but who you are today is even more important!
Invitation
Check out my website at www.lynbarrett.com where you can download my free ebook called DID Unpacked and receive a free weekly newsletter. My memoir, Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory will be released on December 1, 2021. Our new Dissociative Writers website is filled with writing opportunities to explore.
What Do You Think?
What do you know about the trauma history of your family? Of the family of your perpetrator(s)?
How do you think the trauma of past generations has affected you?
If you have children, what can you do to make sure the cycle of abuse has stopped?
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“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Elie Wiesel