Skip to content
Home » Blog » Generational Trauma

Generational Trauma

  • by

Generational trauma can happen in any family at any time, regardless of culture, race, or nationality. It i spassed down from one generation to the next, and it begins when a traumatic event extreme distress to an individual or group of people, and then psychological symptoms and emotional disturbances take place which those involved find it hard to heal from.

Holding on to trauma

When there is a lack of (or not enough of) healing with those that experience trauma, they tend to hold on to the emotional memories of what happened, and then make a decision to try and cope with it, or even try and forget it. Trauma can happen for so many reasons, but it always occurs because there is a lack of understanding of what happened, and why it happened. We often attact to our own theories and make judgements and hold on to grudges to those that caused the trauma, instead of working on our understanding of things.

Passing on trauma

If we don’t heal, we often pass it on to our children, and in turn, they often do the same – this is what is called ‘Generational Trauma’.

When we have generational trauma, disfunctions in the family unit tend to occur, and then it is very difficult to repair, because of a lack of healing and growth, and so… We don’t heal, we just pass on. Hurt people, sometimes hurt other people, and this is a result of trauma. Trauma can be avoided by understanding what is happening, why it is happening, and what is causing it. However, we usually see things in a linear way: Why is this happening to me, why are they doing this? What we don’t usually do is ask ourselves… what can we learn from this?

Personalising trauma

We experience things and usually make it very personal us, but if we paused to understand why things happen, we wouldn’t hold on to pain as much as we do. We experience hurt, and then we tend to pass it on to our offspring, and then they pass it on to theirs and so on.

What is trans-generational trauma?

Sometimes, we can stop the generational trauma by realising that we don’t want to repeat the mistakes that we experienced, but then we don’t always vibrate high enough to let things go. What tends to happen in this situation is trans-generational trauma. This is when we don’t act the same way we was taught, but instead the trauma takes on a very different role, and it’s often undetectable. Quite often it results in us not believing in ourselves, or not loving ourselves enough.

I help people with generational trauma, by offering 1 on 1 mentoring, and trauma healing sessions.