Is Trauma Multi-generational?

Gabor Maté thinks that it is, at least in most cases. He asserts that trauma is passed along from parent to child, over and over through the generations as we pass along to our children what we haven’t resolved in ourselves. In the privacy of our homes, we recreate situations that wounded us as children. We don’t do this on purpose, we do this because we don’t know better and because it is all we know.

Trauma is our internal response to something that happened externally, i.e. a bad situation. Externally, the wound will heal but internally, we carry the trauma forward with us. If we follow psychologist Bessel van der Kolk’s advice, we would learn to examine ourselves and question our built-in, hard-wired choices, i.e. the trauma responses passed down to us from our parents. When we examine ourselves, we realize that we do have other choices and we can exercise them. This is the key to breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.

Something that I face fairly often in my counselling office is a client who feels guilt about things they did in the past, things that may affect their children negatively. If you were sitting in my office, feeling guilty about something you did that affects your children negatively, I would ask you if you hurt your children on purpose. Did you do this negative thing with malicious intent? Or… did you repeat an action you learned from your parent? Are you willing to break the cycle? If you want to do better, put the guilt and shame aside. Guilt and shame are wasted, unproductive emotions.

Then I would follow Maté’s and Van der Kolk’s leads and help you examine your choices for moving forward.