We often think about trauma as something that happens to an individual. A painful childhood, abuse, neglect, violence, loss, poverty, discrimination, war, or living with a parent struggling with mental illness can leave lasting effects on the person who experiences it. But trauma does not always end with the person who experienced it. Patterns of fear, depression, anxiety, emotional disconnection, substance use, unhealthy relationships, and difficulty regulating emotions can sometimes appear across generations of the same family.
Researchers have increasingly explored how the effects of severe stress and trauma may be transmitted from parents to children through a combination of learned behavior, family environment, social conditions, biology, and potentially epigenetic mechanisms. This phenomenon is commonly called generational trauma, intergenerational trauma, or transgenerational trauma.
Understanding generational trauma is not about blaming our parents or believing that our genes have permanently determined our future. Instead, understanding where certain patterns may have originated can give us an opportunity to recognize them, address our own mental health, and potentially create a different environment for the generations that follow us.
What Is Generational Trauma?
Generational trauma describes the ways in which the effects of trauma experienced by one generation may influence subsequent generations. Some of these pathways are relatively easy to understand. Imagine a parent who grew up in an unpredictable or abusive household. As a child, that person may have learned that showing vulnerability was dangerous, conflict could erupt without warning, or emotions needed to be suppressed to stay safe. Those behaviors may have been adaptive in their original environment.
Years later, that person may become a loving parent who nevertheless has difficulty expressing affection, managing anger, tolerating conflict, or responding to their child’s emotions. Their child never experienced the original traumatic event, yet the consequences of that event can still influence the environment in which the child develops. Over multiple generations, the origin of a pattern may become almost invisible. Families may normalize emotional avoidance, hypervigilance, perfectionism, substance use, chronic conflict, or untreated depression because “that’s just how our family is.”
Examples of generational trauma can include families affected by war or genocide, childhood abuse or neglect, domestic violence, poverty, displacement, racism or persecution, addiction, parental loss, incarceration, or generations of untreated mental illness. Importantly, having a family history of trauma does not mean that someone will inevitably develop depression, anxiety, PTSD, or another mental health condition. Human behavior and mental health are shaped by a complicated interaction among genetics, biology, relationships, experiences, environment, culture, and individual circumstances.
Researchers have also begun investigating another fascinating possibility: whether severe experiences can leave biological marks associated with how future generations respond to stress.
Can Trauma Affect Future Generations Biologically?
One area of research involves epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to biological processes that influence how genes are expressed without necessarily changing the underlying DNA sequence itself. One commonly studied mechanism is DNA methylation, which can influence whether particular genes become more or less active.
This distinction is important because generational trauma does not mean that a frightening experience literally rewrites someone’s genetic code. Instead, scientists are investigating whether environmental experiences such as severe stress can influence biological regulatory systems and whether some of those changes may subsequently be detectable in offspring. Some of the most fascinating evidence supporting this possibility has come from animal research.
The Famous Mouse Study: Can a Learned Fear Be Passed to the Next Generation?
In 2014, researchers Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler published an influential study in Nature Neuroscience titled “Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations.” Researchers trained male mice to associate a particular smell—acetophenone, which has a scent sometimes described as similar to cherry blossom—with an unpleasant experience. Eventually, the mice developed a fear response to that specific odor.
The researchers then bred the mice. Their offspring had never undergone the original conditioning and had never experienced the father’s traumatic event. Nevertheless, the offspring demonstrated increased sensitivity to the same odor, and the researchers observed similar effects in another generation. Even more interestingly, the descendants demonstrated changes in the neural structures involved in detecting that particular smell. Researchers also identified differences in DNA methylation associated with the relevant odor receptor gene in sperm.
The investigators used techniques including cross-fostering and in vitro fertilization to help determine whether the effect could simply be explained by offspring learning the behavior from their parents. Their findings supported a biological contribution to the transmission observed in this mouse model.
The study provided striking evidence that, under experimental conditions in animals, an experience occurring before conception could influence the behavior and nervous systems of subsequent generations. However, there is an important limitation: mice are not humans. This experiment should not be interpreted as proof that a parent’s traumatic memories are genetically transmitted to their children. Human trauma is vastly more complicated, and translating findings from controlled animal experiments to human psychology requires considerable caution.
Researchers have therefore also looked for evidence of intergenerational biological effects in humans.
Holocaust Survivors and Their Children: The FKBP5 Study
One of the best-known human studies of generational trauma was led by trauma researcher Rachel Yehuda and colleagues. The study, “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” examined Holocaust survivors and their adult children.
Researchers were particularly interested in FKBP5, a gene involved in regulating the body’s stress-response system. The study included 32 Holocaust survivors, 22 of their adult offspring, and smaller groups of demographically comparable control parents and offspring. Researchers identified differences in FKBP5 methylation associated with Holocaust exposure in survivors and differences at the same region in their offspring. Methylation levels between exposed parents and their offspring were also significantly correlated.
The researchers described their findings as evidence of an association between parental trauma and epigenetic alterations observed in both parents and offspring. A later study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry examined a larger independent sample and replicated lower methylation at the studied FKBP5 site among Holocaust offspring, with the effect particularly associated with maternal Holocaust exposure during childhood.
Generational Trauma Is Not Your Destiny
Learning about generational trauma can initially sound discouraging. If experiences that occurred before we were born can influence us, it is reasonable to wonder how much control we really have. Fortunately, genes and epigenetic markers are not a predetermined script for how someone’s life will unfold. The human brain also possesses neuroplasticity, the ability to change its function and connections in response to experience.
Relationships, therapy, new environments, learning, and treatment can all influence how we think, feel, and respond to the world around us. Someone who grew up with an emotionally unavailable parent can learn emotional awareness and become emotionally available to their own children. Someone raised in an unpredictable environment can build stability. Someone whose family avoided mental healthcare can choose to seek treatment.
Breaking generational cycles does not require erasing the past. It means recognizing the influence of the past without allowing it to dictate the future. Addressing these patterns can improve a person’s own quality of life while also changing what they model and provide for their children and other people around them.
Depression and the Cycle of Generational Trauma
Depression can be particularly important in this conversation because mental illness does not affect only the person experiencing symptoms. Severe or persistent depression can influence energy, motivation, sleep, emotional availability, relationships, work, communication, and someone’s ability to engage with their family.
This does not mean that a parent with depression will traumatize their children. Millions of people with depression are loving and attentive parents. Rather, it highlights why taking care of our mental health can have benefits extending beyond ourselves. Seeking treatment for depression is not simply an attempt to feel better today. Effective treatment may help someone reconnect with relationships, become more emotionally present, develop healthier coping strategies, and create a different family environment than the one they experienced themselves.
Addressing mental health can therefore become one component of breaking an intergenerational cycle. We cannot change what previous generations experienced, but we can influence how those experiences affect our lives and relationships today.
How Can Generational Trauma Be Treated?
There is no single medication or therapy that “removes” generational trauma. Treatment instead focuses on understanding and addressing the ways past experiences and learned patterns are affecting a person’s mental health and life today.
Psychotherapy is often central to this process. Depending on someone’s symptoms and history, approaches may include trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure therapy, psychodynamic therapy, family therapy, or other evidence-based treatments. Treatment may involve recognizing patterns that once served a protective purpose but are no longer helpful. Someone might learn to identify triggers, regulate emotions, establish boundaries, challenge deeply ingrained beliefs, communicate differently, or develop healthier relationships.
For individuals experiencing depression, treatment may also include antidepressant medication, lifestyle interventions, social support, and other psychiatric treatments. For some people whose depression has not responded adequately to traditional treatments, ketamine or Spravato (esketamine) may also be considered.
Ketamine and Spravato for Depression Associated With Trauma
Ketamine has generated considerable interest in psychiatry because it works differently from traditional antidepressants. Whereas many conventional antidepressants primarily affect serotonin, norepinephrine, or dopamine systems, ketamine acts principally through the brain’s glutamate system, including NMDA receptor activity. Research suggests its downstream effects may influence synaptic plasticity and communication between neurons.
Ketamine has demonstrated rapid antidepressant effects in many patients with difficult-to-treat depression. Research has also explored IV ketamine for PTSD, with clinical trials and systematic reviews suggesting potential benefits for PTSD symptoms in some patients.
It is important to distinguish treatment of trauma-related mental health conditions from treatment of generational trauma itself. Ketamine is not an FDA-approved treatment for generational trauma, nor should it be described as erasing traumatic experiences or inherited epigenetic changes. Instead, for an appropriate patient experiencing depression—particularly treatment-resistant depression—ketamine treatment may be one component of a broader mental health treatment plan.
Spravato (esketamine) is an FDA-approved nasal spray for adults with treatment-resistant depression and can be used either as monotherapy or together with an oral antidepressant. Because of risks including sedation, dissociation, and respiratory depression, Spravato must be administered under medical supervision through the SPRAVATO REMS program with monitoring after treatment.
For some patients, improving severe depression can make it easier to participate meaningfully in psychotherapy, reconnect with family, make behavioral changes, and address patterns that may have persisted for years. Medication and psychotherapy do not have to represent competing approaches. In appropriate circumstances, they can be complementary parts of treatment.
Breaking the Cycle Can Start With You
Perhaps the most valuable lesson from research into generational trauma is not that we are permanently shaped by what happened to previous generations, but that experiences matter. The environments our brains develop in, our relationships, and the stress we experience can influence our mental health. At the same time, supportive relationships, healthier environments, psychotherapy, and effective mental health treatment can also influence us.
You may not have chosen the environment you grew up in, and you cannot change what happened to your parents, grandparents, or previous generations. You may even recognize patterns in yourself that existed in your family long before you were born. Recognizing those patterns, however, creates an opportunity to change them.
Addressing depression, anxiety, PTSD, unhealthy relationship patterns, emotional avoidance, or unresolved trauma can improve your own quality of life. It may also change the emotional environment experienced by the people closest to you and potentially the generations that follow. Your family’s history may help explain part of your story, but it does not have to determine how that story continues.
At Innerbloom Ketamine Therapy in San Luis Obispo, we provide physician-supervised IV ketamine therapy and Spravato (esketamine) treatment for appropriate patients struggling with depression and treatment-resistant depression. If traditional depression treatments have not provided adequate relief, our team can help determine whether ketamine therapy or Spravato may be an appropriate option as part of your broader mental health treatment plan.
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