is true that any human being can grow calluses—thicker skin—on an area of their body that is repeatedly irritated or abused. But this is a result of the irritation or abuse, not the person’s skin color.) In addition, 20 percent of laypeople, 8 percent of first-year medical students, and 14 percent of second-year medical students believed that Black people have less sensitive nerve endings than white people. Respondents also believed that Black bodies have stronger immune systems than white bodies, and that Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly. The study involved 222 white medical students and ninety-two white laypeople. For more on this, see David Love’s “Study: White Medical Students Hold Outrageous Theories about Black Biology, Explaining Why Black Patients Are Under-Treated for Pain” (Atlanta Black Star, April 5, 2016).
12 For ideas about some of the people who can help, see “Five Opportunities for Healing and Making Room for Growth” at the end of this book.
BODY TO BODY, GENERATION TO GENERATION
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.”
CICERO
“No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
MAYA ANGELOU
Most of us think of trauma as something that occurs in an individual body, like a toothache or a broken arm. But trauma also routinely spreads between bodies, like a contagious disease. When someone with unhealed trauma chooses dirty pain over clean pain, the person may try to soothe his or her trauma by blowing it through another person—using violence, rage, coercion, deception, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This never heals the trauma. Instead, it increases the first person’s dirty pain by reinforcing harmful and aggressive survival strategies as standard operating procedure. It creates a sense of ongoing unease in the first person’s body that he or she then must override. It may also provoke a reflexively defensive or aggressive response in the second person’s body.
Sometimes people inflict this pain on others deliberately, but more often it occurs spontaneously and unexpectedly. Something triggers a person’s trauma; his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever is nearby.
Even as people in these situations inflict harm on others, their reasoning brains may think, What the hell am I doing? I don’t want to hurt this person! More likely, though, their conscious minds make up after-the-fact self-protective rationales: She was reaching toward her purse; there could have been a gun inside. Or, I told him to settle down, but he still acted upset; I felt he might attack me at any moment.
When therapists work with couples in crisis, we often discover that at least one partner has unhealed trauma. We also commonly find that the partnership is configured so that the trauma gets repeatedly reenacted and, sometimes, passed back and forth between the two people. Healing the trauma becomes the first step in mending the relationship.
It’s not hard to see how trauma can spread like a contagion within couples, families, and other close relationships. What we don’t often consider is how trauma can spread from body to body in any relationship.
Trauma also spreads impersonally, of course, and has done so throughout human history. Whenever one group oppresses, victimizes, brutalizes, or marginalizes another, many of the victimized people may suffer trauma, and then pass on that trauma response to their children as standard operating procedure.13 Children are highly susceptible to this because their young nervous systems are easily overwhelmed by things that older, more experienced nervous systems are able to override. As we have seen, the result is a soul wound or intergenerational trauma. When the trauma continues for generation after generation, it is called historical trauma. Historical trauma has been likened to a bomb going off, over and over again.
When one settled body encounters another, this can create a deeper settling of both bodies. But when one unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies. In large groups, this compounding effect can turn a peaceful crowd into an angry mob. The same thing happens in families, especially when multiple family members face painful or stressful situations together. It can also occur more subtly over time, when one person repeatedly passes on their unsettledness to another. In her book Everyday Narcissism, therapist Nancy Van Dyken calls this hazy trauma: trauma that can’t be traced back to a single specific event.
Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.
But it isn’t culture. It’s a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time. Though without context, it has not lost its power. Traumatic retentions can have a profound effect on what we do, think, feel, believe, experience, and find meaningful. (We’ll look at some examples shortly.)
What we call out as individual personality flaws, dysfunctional family dynamics, or twisted cultural norms are sometimes manifestations of historical trauma. These traumatic retentions may have served a purpose at one time—provided protection, supported resilience, inspired hope, etc.—but generations later, when adaptations continue to be acted out in situations where they are no longer necessary or helpful, they get defined as dysfunctional behavior on the individual, family, or cultural level.
The transference of trauma isn’t just about how human beings treat each other. Trauma can also be inherited genetically. Recent work in genetics has revealed that trauma can change the expression of the DNA in our cells, and these changes can be passed from parent to child.14
And it gets weirder. We now have evidence that memories connected to painful events also get passed down from parent to child—and to that child’s child. What’s more, these experiences appear to be held, passed on, and inherited in the body, not just in the thinking brain.15 Often people experience this as a persistent sense of imminent doom—the trauma ghosting I wrote about earlier.
We are only beginning to understand how these processes work, and there are a lot of details we don’t know yet. Having said that, here is what we do know so far:
• A fetus growing inside the womb of a traumatized mother may inherit some of that trauma in its DNA expression. This results in the repeated release of stress hormones, which may affect the nervous system of the developing fetus.
• A man with unhealed trauma in his body may produce sperm with altered DNA expression. These in turn may inhibit the healthy functioning of cells in his children.
• Trauma can alter the DNA expression of a child or grandchild’s brain, causing a wide range of health and mental health issues, including memory loss, chronic anxiety, muscle weakness, and depression.
• Some of these effects seem particularly prevalent among African Americans, Jews, and American Indians, three groups who have experienced an enormous amount of historical trauma.
Some
