Heritages, genetic conditions, physical characteristics are passed down through families. In some cases, psychological trauma is one of them. This is the reason why the family tree sometimes needs to be decrypted.

Generational trauma (also known as intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma) is still a relatively new area of ​​study, which means that researchers have a lot to discover about its impact and how it presents itself in people who are suffer from it. The notion of psychogenealogy was introduced by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, French psychologist, psychotherapist and academic. “If he is told the truth, the child always has an intuition of his story. This truth builds it ”. But, in families, not all truths are good to speak. Certain events are passed over in silence but manage to slip into the collective unconscious of the family. And we have suffered from past suffering untreated for generations. Suitcases that we carry. To try to understand the history of the family, Anne Ancelin Schützenberger had the idea of ​​creating a science, psychogenealogy.

Learning about intergenerational trauma can help us see how events from our shared past continue to impact our lives. Based on the study of the genosociogram, a sort of genealogical tree extended to significant events (positive or negative) for one’s family and which makes it possible to schematize the history and family ties, the transgenerational analysis wants experienced by an individual’s ancestors have repercussions on the latter to the point of unconsciously inducing disorders, whether of a psychological or physical nature.

One of the first recognized documents of this phenomenon was published in 1966 by Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff, MD, when he and his team noted high rates of psychological distress in children of Holocaust survivors. The children of these survivors who were in perfectly healthy psychological states had a seemingly inexplicable heightened vulnerability to emotional distress, altered self-esteem, behavioral control issues, and aggression issues, which resulted in then also been observed in the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

Even in the third generation, these people reported feelings of fear of being persecuted, of being separated from others, of avoidance issues and nightmares like their parents and grandparents, although they did not. never need to survive anything. Since this documentation, those in the trauma field of psychology have directed their research towards a possible explanation of this phenomenon.

Anyone can be affected by transgenerational trauma and it is important to take it into account and transform it positively in order to avoid it in the next generation. But how to detect traces of transgenerational trauma? It is not necessary to make your family tree. It is an inheritance and therefore it must manifest itself in your life. So ask yourself what are your family’s particular vulnerabilities, recurring conflicts, particularly frequent illnesses. Are there existential difficulties in your life that are heavy, more difficult for you to overcome than for others, and which are inexplicable by your experience? Biologically, ask yourself how you deal with your stress, are you a person whose stress levels are in harmony with what is going on? Or do you have hyperactivity, an anxious tendency, hypervigilance or even a depressive tendency? See how your modus operandi can tell you about the possible existence of increased stressability.

Psychologists and others are also studying how traumatic effects can be passed from generation to generation. Psychologist Rachel Yehuda, PhD, director of the Division of Traumatic Stress Studies at Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai in New York, examines possible epigenetic transmission more directly, with epigenetics being the set of modifications of the body. expression of a gene without the DNA sequence of this gene being modified. More recently, the team looked directly at epigenetic changes across generations. In a study comparing methylation rates in 32 Holocaust survivors and 22 of their children to those of matched controls, they found that Holocaust survivors and their children had changes in the same location of the same gene – the FKBP5, a protein a gene linked to PTSD and depression, unlike control subjects.

Like everyone else, you have inherited some good things and some less so. Accept them as they are. From there, see what you can do with it. There is a positive function to this transmission of trauma. You can take this heritage as a message from your ancestors. It’s up to you to see how you think that certain family transmissions make you repeat either patterns of existential conflict, or metabolic and somatic difficulties.

Start, prioritize a work of calming the nervous system since we know from a metabolic point of view that epigenetics is the proof that we can transform the reactivity of our organism to stress to adapt it to our environment. But it is possible to get help.

Narrative therapy

It consists of getting the person to speak openly about their life. The therapist writes everything down, asks for details. Finally, a book from the patient’s birth to present life is constructed. This forces him to identify important elements of his life that he may have neglected.

One of the many advantages of this therapy is that it does not erase the whole problem but forces the person to rewrite it in order to be able to overcome it. The memory of traumatic events is rewritten and transformed into a coherent, non-stressful memory.