There are family stories that were never told in words, and yet they go on existing inside our relationships. A loss that was never adequately mourned, fears that were never named, traumas no one ever worked through — no one needs to recount them to us for us to carry them. They pass through the way we love, the way we fear, the way we protect ourselves, the way we can or cannot bear our pain.
Even more individual difficulties — an anxiety, an insecurity, a part of the self or of experience that was never brought into the light and processed — can pass into our closest relationships, not as a story but as a way of making contact. A child does not only inherit what their parents lived through. Far more, they inherit the way those parents learned to survive what they lived through.
What we mean by “intergenerational trauma”
The intergenerational transmission of trauma describes the way difficulties, traumas and unprocessed experiences of one generation affect the next. This is not a “hereditary sentence” — a child is not obliged to repeat the history of their family. It is something with finer shades, in the way we exist: we are born into relationships in which ways of being, of connecting and of avoiding are already circulating, ways we did not choose.
Trauma as an unspoken family inheritance
Trauma is not only about an event in the past. It is also about the imprint that event leaves on the way a person organises their inner life. When an experience is too painful and we find no safe environment in which to process it, its residue is often transferred to those closest to us — and children, precisely because they depend on their parents in order to grow, become the first recipients of what those parents have not yet been able to metabolise.
The psychoanalytic tradition has described this process through the notion of family “phantoms”: experiences that were never acknowledged in one generation and go on haunting the next (Abraham & Torok, 1994). It is usually not the event itself that is transmitted; what is transmitted is the silence around it, the shame, the fear that it will happen again, the difficulty of speaking about it. A child may grow up in a family where everyone senses that “something is there”, without anyone being able to name it. This is exactly what the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron describes in his work on family secrets, showing how concealment weighs on later generations even more heavily than the concealed event itself (Tisseron, 2019). I remember that in my training in parent–infant psychotherapy we were told again and again: “children hear what is not said.” Children, that is, are able to feel and understand through the way we are with them, without our having put anything into words.
These experiences rarely pass through speech. They pass through unspoken family rules: “we don’t talk about that”, “we have to be strong”, “we are not allowed to fail”, “no one will care about you, so you have to stand on your own two feet”. When a child expresses a feeling and the parent has not connected with that feeling in themselves, they invalidate it without meaning to. The child in turn experiences this as personal rejection, while at its core it is an emotional difficulty that belongs to the other person and is being handed on to the next generation.
How it passes through the parent–child relationship
A child learns who they are, what they are worth, whether the world is safe, through their first experiences of relationship. Attachment theory showed that a parent’s capacity to respond to a child’s feelings is closely connected with whether the child will develop a secure bond and the ability to regulate their own emotions (Bowlby, 1969; Ainsworth et al., 1978). When a parent has grown up amid emotional abandonment or instability, it is not unusual for them to struggle to stay available in the face of their child’s feelings — not because they do not love the child, but because that feeling may awaken in them something they themselves never learned to bear and manage.
Imagine a mother with an old, unprocessed difficulty around her body image and her relationship with food. She never has to say it to her child. But she will bring it to mealtimes — in a tension in her gaze, in an anxiety that has no explanation, in a control over how much the child has eaten. A story that was never told, never understood, never integrated by the mother remains an unspoken emotional load, and the child receives it as something of their own, which it is not. The literature shows that a mother’s difficulties with eating can affect her relationship with her child, and particularly with her daughter. Studies have found that mothers with an active or past eating disorder are more likely to show heightened anxiety around food and weight, more controlling behaviour during feeding, and difficulties in responding emotionally to the child’s needs. At the same time, daughters appear to be particularly affected through observing and internalising their mother’s attitudes towards the body, appearance and eating, as well as through the quality of the relationship between them. The mother, then, is not regarded as the cause of the disorder, but as one important link in the complex network of factors that can increase — or, conversely, reduce — a child’s vulnerability.
What biology says: how trauma is inscribed
In recent years research has shown that this transmission is not only relational but also has a biological dimension. One of the best-known studies examined Holocaust survivors and their adult children and found changes in the methylation of a gene that regulates the stress response (FKBP5), shared by parents and offspring — an indication that exposure to extreme trauma can leave a biochemical trace that passes to the next generation (Yehuda et al., 2016). A recent review gathered similar findings around stress-related genes and the neurotrophic factor BDNF, showing how these mechanisms are connected with increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression in offspring (Kac, Qi & Ryznar, 2026).
What matters here is not the idea that “we inherit trauma as destiny”. The same literature stresses that these biological traces are neither fixed nor irreversible: this is a malleable system, one that appears to be influenced by stable, safe relationships and by therapeutic work. Biology describes a tendency towards vulnerability, not an irrevocable sentence.
As we grow up and reach adult life, we carry with us not only our personal experiences but also the relational patterns, fears, anxieties, beliefs and ways of handling emotion that were shaped in earlier generations of our family. If we look carefully at our family history, we often recognise repeating patterns. For example, a woman who grew up with a strict and critical mother may, without realising it, adopt the same stance towards her own daughter. Instead of identifying with the child she once was, she may unconsciously have identified with her mother, reproducing the relationship she experienced. So certain difficulties that look purely personal may in fact be part of an intergenerational chain of experiences and ways of relating that began long before us.
“This feeling exists inside me — but did it even begin with me?” This question, when a person can stand in front of it without becoming frightened, is often the beginning of change. We do not need to blame previous generations; most parents pass on to their children what they themselves never had the opportunity to work through. Therapy becomes the space where the unspoken can finally find words, and where the old pattern can become visible in the present, between two people and within a relationship of safety — perhaps for the first time.
And yet old patterns rarely resolve on their own. In psychotherapy we do not try to “fix” what we inherited, nor to fight the symptom; we ask what it is trying to protect, and within a safe relationship we try out, perhaps for the first time, a different way of being.
References
- Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1994). The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (N. Rand, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. London: Hogarth Press.
- Kac, E., Qi, Q., & Ryznar, R. (2026). Epigenetic changes associated with multi-generational trauma: characterization, mechanisms, and therapeutics. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, 1769422.
- Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.
- Tisseron, S. (2019). Les secrets de famille (Que sais-je? no. 3925). Paris: PUF.
- Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bierer, L. M., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., et al. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372–380.
