Trauma can spread from one body to another, like a contagious disease—through families and from generation to generation.
• When someone with unhealed trauma chooses dirty pain over clean pain, he or she may try to push his or her trauma through another human being, by using violence, rage, coercion, betrayal, or emotional abuse. This only increases the dirty pain, while often creating trauma in the other person as well.
• When one settled body encounters another, there can be a deeper settling of both bodies. But when one unsettled body encounters another, the unsettledness tends to compound in both bodies. In families and large groups, this effect can multiply exponentially.
• Over months or years, unhealed trauma can become part of someone’s personality. As it is passed on and compounded through other bodies, it often becomes the family norm. If it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can turn into culture.
• Trauma can damage the genes in our cells. That damage can be passed on from parent to child, and from the child to his or her own child.
• One of the best things each of us can do for ourselves, and for our descendants, is metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal, we may spread our emotional health and healthy genes to later generations.
• Trauma and other adverse childhood events are associated with a wide range of illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and early death. All of these can also get passed down through the generations.
• Secondary trauma or vicarious trauma involves watching someone else be traumatized (and, sometimes, giving aid to them). An especially poisonous form of secondary trauma can occur when a person not only witnesses another person being harmed, but also inflicts that harm.
• Resilience is built into the cells of our bodies. Like trauma, resilience can ripple outward, changing the lives of people, families, neighborhoods, and communities in positive ways. Also like trauma, resilience can be passed down from generation to generation.
• The human brain always retains the capacity to learn, change, and grow. While trauma can inhibit or block this capacity, once the trauma has been addressed, growth and positive change become possible again.
13 Over time, roles can switch and the oppressed may become the oppressors. They then pass on trauma not only to their children, but also to a new group of victims.
14 This research has led to the creation of a new field of scientific inquiry known as epigenetics, the study of inheritable changes in gene expression. Epigenetics has transformed the way scientists think about genomes. The first study to clearly show that stress can cause inheritable gene defects in humans was published in 2015 by Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues, titled “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects n FKBP5 Methylation” (Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5, September, 2016: 372–80). (Earlier studies identified the same effect in animals.) Yehuda’s study demonstrated that damaged genes in the bodies of Jewish Holocaust survivors—the result of the trauma they suffered under Nazism—were passed on to their children. Later research confirms Yehuda’s conclusions.
15 A landmark study demonstrating this effect in mice was published in 2014 by Kerry Ressler and Brian Dias (“Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behavior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations,” Nature Neuroscience 17: 89–96). Ressler and Dias put male mice in a small chamber, then occasionally exposed them to the scent of acetophenone (which smells like cherries)—and, simultaneously, to small electric shocks. Eventually the mice associated the scent with pain; they would shudder whenever they were exposed to the smell, even after the shocks were discontinued. The children of those mice were born with a fear of the smell of acetophenone. So were their grandchildren. As of this writing, no one has completed a similar study on humans, both for ethical reasons and because we take a lot longer than mice to produce a new generation.
16 A good, if very brief, overview of these studies appeared in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/08/babies-learn-recognize-words-womb.
17 This quote is from an eye-opening article in The Nation, “What’s Killing America’s Black Infants?”: https://www.thenation.com/article/whats-killing-americas-black-infants. Carpenter also notes that in the United States, Black infants die at a rate that’s over twice as high as for white infants. In some cities, the disparity is much worse: in Washington, DC, the infant mortality rate in Ward 8, which is over 93 percent Black, is ten times the rate in Ward 3, which is well-to-do and mostly white.
18 There are other possible causes, of course. Similar low-energy responses are common among people with depression, dysthymia, bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, or antisocial personality disorder (i.e., sociopaths).
19 See, for example: “Early Trauma and Inflammation” (Psychosomatic Medicine 74, no. 2, February/March 2012: 146–52); “Chronic Stress, Glucocorticoid Receptor Resistance, Inflammation, and Disease Risk” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 16, April 17, 2012: 5995–99); and “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Risk Factors for Age-Related Disease: Depression, Inflammation, and Clustering of Metabolic Risk Markers” (Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 163, no. 12, December 2009: 1135–43).
20 Of the people studied, 74.8 percent were white; 4.5 percent were African American; 54 percent were female; and 46 percent were male.
21 The ten “adverse childhood events” are divorced or separated parents; physical abuse; physical neglect; emotional abuse; emotional neglect; sexual abuse; domestic violence that the child witnessed; substance abuse in the household; mental illness in the household; and a family member in prison.
22 These chemicals are cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. They are secreted by the adrenal gland.
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