![]() Then Anne’s mother did the same.Īnd now here’s Anne- left to wrestle with the effects of a trauma that happened more than a century ago. Now her children, like Anne’s grandmother, adopted these patterns when they became parents. Nevertheless, she maintained the same emotional unavailability her parents modeled. With her family focused on basic survival, emotional discussions were rare and even discouraged.īy the time Sara had children, her Depression-era challenges had ended. Īnne’s great-grandmother, Sara, learned a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude as a child during the Great Depression. For example, ongoing childhood abuse of any kind will likely produce poor emotional and physical health, decreased social functioning, and increased risk-taking behaviors.īut how could a trauma from 100 years ago impact your family today? It’s all about the transmission cycle. Trauma affecting the person it directly happened to makes sense. View discussing feelings as a sign of weakness.Īct overprotective of certain family members despite a lack of threat or danger. Seem emotionally numb or avoid discussing feelings. Other times, generations of subtle and highly engrained emotional abuse or unavailability creates intergenerational trauma. Sometimes, it’s easy to guess what caused the trauma being passed down the family line-physical, sexual, or emotional abuse poverty substance use problems systematic racism neighborhood violence and more. Intergenerational trauma is the ongoing impact of a traumatic experience that happened in prior generations but continues to impact the current generation. ![]() Regardless of how many times a trauma happened, it can take many, many years of courage and hard work to integrate them into daily life.Īnd sometimes, these traumas can span generations. Others can be long-term, like abuse, neglect, or poverty. Some traumas are single, isolated events like natural disasters or a car crash. Trauma is a negative event that overwhelms a person’s coping skills-whether it happened to them directly, they witnessed it happen to someone else, or they learned about it happening to someone very close to them. Take care of yourself, even if it means bookmarking this for later. Take a break, get some water, chat with a friend, or do some mindfulness exercises-or whatever helps you re-center and calm your mind. Or, if you get halfway through this post and decide you can’t keep going, that’s OK, too! If you’re not ready to think about this, it’s totally OK. But considering how it might be affecting our kids is a totally different ball game. That’s intergenerational trauma.Ī quick warning: Talking and thinking about our own trauma is hard enough. That negative event or series of events from generations prior is now affecting you and your parenting. Suddenly, that negative something was cemented in our whole maternal line. Perhaps in that long, long line of mothers before us, there was an event or set of circumstances that affected an ancestor so negatively that it changed how she parented her kids. ![]() And her parenting style is rooted in her mother’s parenting style, and her mother’s in her mother’s, and on and on for generations. Whether we like it or not, our maternal identities are rooted deeply in our mothers’ parenting style. You scream, “Stop it! You all need to start acting your age and get it together! Now go to your rooms!” They sulk off, and your eyes widen. The kids are fighting, everything’s a mess, your partner is working late, the dog peed on the carpet, and you just can’t take it anymore. ![]() The only thing you can think of is this: “I just don’t want to be like my parents.” You’re discussing what you want out of parenthood, and what you hope to be like as a mom. You’re 30 weeks pregnant and sitting on the couch with your partner.
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