Transgenerational trauma, intergenerational trauma, or generational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary mode of transmission is the shared family environment of the infant, causing psychological, behavioral and social changes in the individual. Collective trauma is when psychological trauma experienced by communities and identity groups is carried on as part of the group's collective memory and shared sense of identity. For example, collective trauma was experienced by Jewish Holocaust survivors and their contemporaries within the wider Jewish community. As another example, the Indigenous Peoples of Canada experienced it within the Canadian Indian residential school system. African Americans who were enslaved is another. When this collective trauma affects subsequent generations, it is called transgenerational trauma. For example, when Jewish people, who are born into a later generation, learn about the Holocaust (presumably from older family members), and then experience extreme stress or practice survivalism out of fear of another Holocaust. Transgenerational trauma can be a collective experience that affects groups of people who share a cultural identity (e.g., ethnicity, nationality, or religious identity). It can also be applied to single families or individual parent–child dyads. For example, survivors of individual child abuse and both direct survivors of the collective trauma and members of subsequent generations individually may develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Examples of this include collective trauma experienced by descendants of the Atlantic slave trade; segregation and Jim Crow laws in the United States; apartheid in South Africa; the Scramble for Africa, Armenian genocide survivors, Jewish Holocaust survivors and other members of the Jewish community at the time; Bosnian war survivors; by the First Peoples of Canada within the Canadian Indian residential school system; by Native Americans when they were forcibly displaced and removed from their land; and, in Australia, the Stolen Generations and other hardships inflicted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Descendants of survivors may experience extreme stress, leading to a variety of other consequences. While transgenerational trauma gained attention in recent decades, the hypothesis of an epigenetic mechanism remains controversial due to a lack of rigorous experimental results on humans.
History This field of research is relatively young, but was expanded in the mid-to-late-2000s. Intergenerational trauma was first recognized in the children of Holocaust survivors. In 1966, psychologists began to observe large numbers of children of Holocaust survivors seeking mental help in clinics in Canada. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were overrepresented by 300% among the referrals to a psychiatry clinic in comparison with their representation in the general population. Since then, transgenerational trauma has been noted amongst descendants of African-Americans forced into slavery, Native American genocide survivors, war survivors, refugees, survivors of domestic violence, and many other groups that have experienced collective distress. Research on possible biological mechanisms for inheritance of trauma began in the late 1990s. It has been suggested that traumatic stress can be passed down to future generations via epigenetics. However, the effect is difficult to separate from environmental and cultural transmission and conclusive evidence that it occurs in humans has yet to be found. Although methylation of stress-related genes in humans may affect development, there is no evidence that these changes in humans are passed on to subsequent generations. Methylation is normally erased when an egg cell is fertilized.
Definitions and description Transgenerational trauma is a collective experience that affects groups of people because of their cultural identity (e.g., ethnicity, nationality, or religious identity). Because of its collective nature, the term is not usually applied to single families or individual parent–child dyads. However, like survivors of individual child abuse, individually, both direct survivors of the collective trauma and members of subsequent generations may develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma may be transmitted socially (e.g., through learned behaviors) or through the effects of stress on development before birth (inc. increased smoking/alcohol use).
Historical trauma Historical trauma, a sub-type of transgenerational trauma, is the collective devastation of the past that continues to affect populations in the present through inter-generational transmission. Historical trauma results in vulnerability to mental and physical health problems due to ancestral suffering which has been collected throughout generations into "legacies of disability for contemporary descendants". Although the actual traumatic event and affect group(s) are heterogeneous, all historical traumas consist of three elements: a traumatic event, a resulting collective suffering, and a multigenerational impact of that trauma. Over time the trauma and relationship to the victims typically evolve in a similar but more complicated way to genetic anticipation, resulting in a greater loss of identity of the victims and further integration into society. For individual victims, historical trauma often manifests in four ways: depression, hyper-vigilance, traumatic bond formation, and reenactment of the trauma. Building upon the clinical observations by Selma Fraiberg, child trauma researchers such as Byron Egeland, Inge Bretherton, and Daniel Schechter have empirically identified psychological mechanisms that favor intergenerational transmission, including dissociation in the context of attachment, and "communication" of prior traumatic experience as an effect of parental efforts to maintain self-regulation in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder and related alterations in social cognitive processes.
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