On Being – How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations – Krista Tippett – Published: July 30, 2015
The concept adds new meaning to the ancient adage that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” New research on the inter-generational transmission of trauma explores how, through activation of stress hormones in a parent, genes (thus DNA) evolve or mutate to effectively pass on the body-memory of the traumatic incident to offspring.
Rachel Yehuda discusses this research in an On Being with Krista Tipett. So, the bad news is that new, direct evidence demonstrates that traumatic experience in one generation can produce symptoms in the next and even in the generation after that, though these offspring never experienced trauma themselves.
The good news is that this research also allows us the opportunity to learn a lot of important things about how we adapt to our environment and how we might pass on environmental resilience. What we do not acknowledge or understand leads to a sense of helplessness and a compromised ability to honor ourselves as we are, to work with our given qualities to enjoy our own lives.
You can read about the study of Holocaust survivors and the passing of trauma-modified genes to children in a recent article in The Guardian by Helen Thomson titled the “Study of Holocaust survivors finds Trauma passed on to children’s genes”.