Transgenerational Trauma: A Personal Account

When I was growing up, I recall how my parents would often talk about injustice.

They spoke about the horrors of the Nazi Concentration camps and told the sad story of Anne Frank. As a young girl myself, I identified with Anne, her courage and her love of writing. As I listened to my parents’ stories, I felt a type of emotional sickness come over me. They were also communicating their untold sorrows.

My parents were Irish immigrants who had escaped from the Republic of Ireland under the rule of De Valera and the Vatican. Their way of being in the world was shaped by a history askew with traumatic events. I have since understood that they were carrying unshed ‘buckets of tears’ from over many years of transgenerational trauma. They identified with all the victims of injustice. By the time I arrived at university, I was ready to join every political group in existence. I bonded with other young, passionate, and determined peers ready to shape the world into a more just society. We studied the history of many cultures and wept and raged as we fought the ‘good fight’.

None of this activity changed my emotional pain until I decided to find a psychotherapist, and shortly after I began my training in transactional analysis. However, it was several years before I found a Jungian analyst who was also a Rabbi. It was only with him that I could excavate the meanings inherent in my transgenerational past. I think this was only possible because he had previously been on his own journey of discovery.

Since then I have studied transgenerational trauma. I have learned how these wounds of history enter our blood stream through the ‘mother’s milk’. Rachel Yehuda researched how the epigenetics of trauma are coded in the body and transmitted to children biologically. Alongside her colleagues she found that a traumatic trigger in the present can activate transgenerational trauma. Allan Shore’s neuroscientific research discovered how the unconscious mind of the mother is transferred to the infant through right brain to right brain connection.

Winnicott describes the sublime beauty of the mother’s gaze but what if the gaze that is reflected back is contained with brokenness and grief? Perhaps many people carry the burden of unconscious un-metabolised trauma without knowing it. Bollas describes these elements of the mind as ‘unthought knowns’.

Unexamined trauma shapes lives. Our ability to live a true and vital life is compromised by unacknowledged burdens of history. In transactional analysis this is referred to colloquially as ‘the hot potato’. Fanita English intuitively identified this process of passing on trauma through the generations as far back as 1969. My own analysis took me on a long and painful journey. My analyst wrote an article in which he courageously insisted he could have been a Nazi if born into Germany at that time. To acknowledge this truth, when he had lost relatives in the camps at Auschwitz, was a stunning confrontation to my inherited ‘buckets of tears and buckets of years of victimhood’. 

Over many years I learned – eventually – to shed my victimhood and discover the liberation of acknowledging that I, too, could be not only the victim but also the persecutor. I found true mental liberation in a way that, when fighting ‘the good fight’, I never did!