Man who has never been a parent claims that generational trauma has no impact on childrearing across generations.
Can you explain what generational trauma is?
You’ve never heard of this? Okay, well here it is:
We inherit more than just the shape of our bodies and the color of our skin; trauma itself can be passed down from one generation to the next. Here's how to break the cycle.
www.psychologytoday.com
We know now that newborns don’t enter into the world with a clean slate. Their emotional history begins even before they are conceived.
All the eggs a woman will carry form in her ovaries while she is a fetus in her mother's womb. In other words, when your mother was in your grandmother’s womb, she carried, at that time, the egg that eventually became you. This means that a part of you, your mother, and your grandmother all shared the same biological environment. In a sense, you were exposed to the emotions and experiences of your grandmother even before you were conceived.
It’s pretty well known that if a pregnant woman goes through a famine, her in-utero daughter and that daughter’s children suffer genetic detriments.
These can manifest in learning problems, risk decisions, impulse control, health issues that lead to additional costs.
Transgenerational trauma isn't something that can be easily pinpointed. It is often covert, undefined, and subtle, surfacing through family patterns and forms of hypervigilance, mistrust, anxiety, depression, issues with self-esteem, and other negative coping strategies. We also know that trauma can have a significant affect on the immune system and may contribute to the generational curse of autoimmune diseases and other chronic illnesses.
While generational trauma can affect us all, those at the highest risk are in families that have experienced significant forms of abuse, neglect, torture, oppression, and racial disparities. Studies have explored the effects of transgenerational trauma on Holocaust survivors, the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, the displacement of American Indians, and slavery of African Americans, among others (1). While some results are mixed on how trauma is manifested, many studies uncovered higher rates of anxiety, depression and PTSD in trauma survivors and their children.
And more immediately, it’s also well known that people who are abused (such as by slavery, or ongoing racism, or an abusive parent) are more likely to suffer behavioral problems, and then pass those down again.
Not everyone, of course, but more likely than those not suffering abuse.
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Surprised this is news to you.