“It is not that fear is being passed down through the generations — it is that fear in one generation leads to sensitivity in the next.”
As if life wasn't challenging enough, growing research in the field of epigenetics is revealing something many of us have instinctively felt but never had words for: trauma doesn't always end with the person who experienced it. It can echo through families — shaping the lives of children and even grandchildren who were never directly exposed to the original event.
This is my attempt to decode the research into plain English — because understanding how trauma travels is the first step toward stopping it.
What Is Transgenerational Trauma?
Transgenerational trauma — sometimes called intergenerational or multigenerational trauma — refers to the psychological and emotional effects of trauma that are passed from one generation to the next. It doesn't require the younger generation to directly experience the traumatic event. Instead, the effects are transferred through behaviour, parenting styles, emotional patterns, and — as we're now learning — through our very biology.
The consequences of passing down the effects of trauma are significant. Even if those effects are subtly altered between generations, they fundamentally change the way we view our lives in the context of our parents' experiences — influencing our physiology, our emotional responses, and our mental health.
The Science: How Epigenetics Carries Trauma Forward
Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviours and environment can change the way your genes work. Unlike genetic mutations, epigenetic changes don't alter the DNA sequence itself — they affect how your body reads and expresses that DNA.
Here's what the research is showing: when a person experiences severe or prolonged trauma, it can create chemical markers on their genes that change how those genes function. These markers can affect stress hormones, immune responses, and emotional regulation. And critically, some of these markers can be inherited by the next generation.
One of the most well-known studies involved the children of Holocaust survivors. Researchers found that the offspring showed altered stress hormone profiles — specifically lower cortisol levels — which made them more vulnerable to anxiety disorders and PTSD, despite never having experienced the Holocaust themselves. Similar patterns have been observed in the descendants of war veterans, survivors of famine, and communities affected by colonisation and displacement.
In the Australian context, this research carries particular weight when we consider the experiences of First Nations peoples, returned service personnel, and families affected by conflict, displacement, and institutional trauma. The effects don't simply disappear when the event ends — they ripple outward.
Beyond Biology: The Behavioural Pathway
Epigenetics is only part of the picture. Trauma is also passed down through the way we live, communicate, and parent.
Mental health is such a vital part of our state of mind that we quite often don't realise we're passing trauma on to our partners, our children, our work colleagues, and our friends. How many times have you been around someone “suffering an episode” and felt like you needed to walk on eggshells — hoping it would pass without too much drama, not knowing how to deal with it, or how to help?
We've all heard it: “Oh, never mind about Joe — they're just having an episode. It'll pass.”
But what happens when we simply wait for it to pass? The underlying issue remains unresolved. The people around the affected person — especially children — absorb the tension, the unpredictability, and the emotional weight of the situation. They don't have a name for what they're experiencing. They just know that something doesn't feel safe.
The Child's Experience: Survival Without Understanding
Now imagine you're a child in that environment. You have no idea what the underlying issue is. You don't understand why Mum or Dad is angry, withdrawn, or emotionally unavailable. All you know is how it feels — and it doesn't feel good.
That child lives the trauma without knowing what it is or what caused it. They don't know how to deal with it. So they do what all children do — they adapt. They build survival mechanisms: hypervigilance, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, perfectionism, avoidance, or explosive anger. These aren't character flaws. They're intelligent responses to an overwhelming situation.
The problem is that those survival mechanisms don't switch off when the child grows up. They become deeply embedded patterns — as I described in The Paradox of the Human Mind, the subconscious files them away and runs them automatically whenever a similar situation arises. The adult may have no conscious memory of the original trigger, but their body and mind still respond as if the threat is present.
The Ripple Effect
Trauma doesn't just affect the person who lived through it. It touches everyone in their orbit — partners who absorb the emotional volatility, children who grow up in its shadow, colleagues who learn to tread carefully, and friends who slowly pull away.
Each of those people may then carry their own version of the wound into their relationships, their parenting, and their own mental health. And so the cycle continues — not because anyone intends to pass it on, but because unresolved trauma has a way of finding expression, even when we think we're keeping it to ourselves.
This is why addressing trauma in isolation is often not enough. We need to break the cycle — not only with the person most affected, but equally importantly with all of the people around them.
Breaking the Cycle: Where Healing Begins
The first step in breaking a transgenerational cycle is awareness. Simply recognising that some of your emotional patterns, fears, or behaviours may not have originated with you can be a profound shift. You're not broken — you may be carrying something that was never yours to carry.
From there, the work is about gently identifying those inherited patterns and addressing them at their root. This is where modalities like Time Line Therapy become particularly powerful. By working along your personal timeline, we can locate the origin of emotional responses — whether they began in your own childhood or were inherited from the generation before — and release the negative emotional charge attached to them.
Reiki and energy work also play a role here. Trauma is stored not just in the mind, but in the body. Somatic approaches help to release tension and emotional energy that you may have been carrying for years without realising it.
NLP and EFT offer practical tools for rewiring the thought patterns and emotional responses that have been running on autopilot. And mindfulness and breathwork create the space to observe your reactions without being controlled by them.
For those who need a more comprehensive and structured approach, the Signature Healing Program integrates all of these modalities over 8–10 weeks — giving you the time and support to address not just your own experiences, but the inherited patterns that may have been influencing your life from before you were even born.
You Are Not Your Trauma
One of the most important things I want you to take from this article is this: the client is the healer — the practitioner merely facilitates the healing process. You already have everything you need within you. Sometimes it just takes the right support to access it.
Breaking a transgenerational cycle doesn't mean erasing your family's history. It means choosing to process it differently — to extract the lessons, honour the resilience, and let go of the pain that no longer serves you. In doing so, you don't just heal yourself. You change the trajectory for your children, your relationships, and the generations that follow.