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My-Linh Le grew up watching her parents explode over tiny mistakes. When she forgot her backpack in first grade, her mother kicked it across the room so hard it hit the wall. When her sister messed up dinner, her father threw dishes. The house stayed filled with unpredictable rage that left Le awake at night, worried about what she might do wrong the next day.
As a child, Le thought all Vietnamese families acted this way. But years later, during a phone call with her boyfriend, when he didn’t do something she expected, rage “just suddenly came out of nowhere”. She wanted to throw the phone across the room. “It was this really depressing moment of realizing that I’m just like my mother,” she said.
Her parents had experienced profound losses. Her father’s first wife and son had drowned when their boat sank trying to reach America. Her mother had left a daughter behind in Vietnam, too afraid that the girl’s kicking and screaming would mean their escape would be discovered. These losses — never discussed, barely acknowledged — had shaped a family’s emotional landscape and passed their effects to the next generation.
Le’s story shows us something crucial: Trauma doesn’t just affect the people who directly experience it. It can ripple through generations, showing up in unexpected ways in children and grandchildren who never experienced the original events.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma
Most of us think about intergenerational trauma in simple terms. Parents experienced some type of trauma — maybe abuse or neglect — and then their child has similar experiences. But licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Rebecca Babcock Fenerci explains that the definition goes much deeper.
Intergenerational trauma also includes the increased risk children have for experiencing the consequences of that trauma. This includes post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, behavioral problems, and disrupted attachment.
Dr. Fenerci gives this example: “A child whose parent survived physical abuse growing up may be at risk if that child also experienced physical abuse. But the child might also be at increased risk for certain mood disorders or behavior problems or disrupted attachment, altered cortisol or stress-response system functioning.”
This means trauma transmission can happen even when the specific traumatic events aren’t repeated. The effects of trauma — the altered stress responses, emotional patterns, and relationship difficulties — can pass to the next generation.
Why People React So Differently to Trauma
I was surprised to learn how differently people may react to traumatic circumstances. Studies on Holocaust survivors and children of Vietnam War veterans show something surprising. Even within these groups, the effects were completely different for different people. Some people experience truly horrific events and go on to lead fulfilled lives. Others see what we might think of as less overwhelming events, but they are profoundly impacted by them.
Dr. Fenerci explains why this happens using the diathesis-stress model. This shows that our genes and stressful events work together to shape what happens to us. The severity and chronicity of trauma matter too. As she puts it: “The more chronic or severe the trauma, such as the Holocaust, that’s exceptionally severe, exceptionally chronic, the more likely it is that the trauma is going to have an impact on a large percent of the population that has endured that.”
Even siblings who grew up in the same family and share half their genes can have very different outcomes.
How the Brain Processes Trauma
Understanding how trauma works in the brain helps explain why it can affect us and our children for years. The brain handles trauma differently than regular memories.
When an event happens that we find traumatic, our fight or flight response kicks in. Our body gets flooded with stress hormones. When this happens too much, especially with family trauma, it can cause two things. We might have very vivid memories that keep coming back. Or we might forget the trauma completely.
During traumatic events, the limbic system in our brain works extra hard to keep us safe. But the frontal lobe — which helps us think clearly and make sense of things — shuts down. This is the part of the brain that helps us organize our memories and understand what happened to us.
This survival mechanism becomes problematic when trauma isn’t discussed. When a trauma isn’t talked about, the survivor is never able to process and make sense of the events.
The Communication Extremes That Cause Problems
Families handle trauma in very different ways. Some never talk about it at all. Others talk about it all the time. Both approaches can cause problems.
The Danger of Complete Silence
Many Japanese Americans virtually never mentioned their experiences in internment camps during World War II. This left lasting effects on their children. When we’re traumatized by something, it affects us in many different ways. If we never get to make sense of what happened, those effects keep playing out in our relationships and everyday experiences.
The Problem with Constant Rehashing
On the opposite extreme, one family story shows what happens when trauma gets discussed too much. A grandfather had been so abusive that he once lined up his wife and children at gunpoint, planning to kill them all before killing himself. Only when the mother came out of the bathroom and yelled for him to stop did he drop the gun, allowing the grandmother to sneak all the children out of the house that night.
The four older daughters developed various addiction issues throughout their lives. But there was something else going on: “Every time they would get together as a family, they would rehash all of their memories of the abuse in absolutely excruciating detail.”
Despite this constant discussion, a granddaughter who grew up in an otherwise loving home found herself very fearful and couldn’t understand why.
This constant retelling can create vicarious traumatization. When we hear about a traumatic event experienced by someone we love, it can make us upset too.
Final Thoughts
Understanding intergenerational trauma helps us see that many of our parenting struggles might not be personal failures. They might be the result of trauma that happened before we were even born. This knowledge can be both sobering and hopeful — sobering because trauma’s effects reach further than we imagined, but hopeful because understanding gives us the power to make different choices.
In the next post in this series, we’ll explore how intergenerational trauma shows up specifically in our parenting — from the way we respond to our children’s big emotions to the patterns we repeat without realizing it. Breaking these cycles requires more than just trying harder to be better parents.
