What does Intergenerational trauma have to do with healing?

Intergenerational trauma, also called transgenerational or multi-generational trauma, is becoming more widely known in the study of Epigenetics, and I thought it fitting to write this blog about intergenerational trauma in honor of the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, and given that Irish is my family heritage.

We now know that intergenerational trauma does exist, and thus, traumas that are not processed are passed along to future generations. It is the idea as stated by Mark Wolyn that ‘It didn’t start with you’. Traumas can be abuse and violence but can also be effects of poverty, suppression, and racism.

One of the factors that was very helpful in my own healing journey was the discovery, and acknowledgement of, the trauma that I was, and still am to some degree, carrying from my own family system.

Very briefly here, the Irish were a suppressed people for hundreds of years under the British Empire. They were considered inferior due to their Roman Catholic faith, were not allowed to own land, or have any positions of leadership. By the time the potato famine came along they were already very poor and oppressed. The potato famine devastated the Irish people. The potato had been introduced to the Irish because the potato was a cheap and easy food to grow on the harsher land allotted to them to tend to, on their own time, as they worked for the English Landlords.

When they didn’t have the meager potato, they had nothing. They were blamed for their plight because of their faith, ie. “God is punishing you”, and though there was in fact plenty of food being exported from Ireland during the time of the potato famine, it was not distributed to the Irish people.

Aid such as soup kitchens did open but eventually became an opportunity for propaganda, and the Irish people faced the choice of renouncing their Roman Catholic faith, and convert to Protestantism, or continue to starve. Many did renounce their faith for food and reclaimed their faith later, but they were shunned as “soupers” by those who chose to not give in. An estimated million died of starvation and/or hunger-related disease during the potato feminine. Many endured forced labor in workhouses, while another million emigrated out of Ireland. Truthfully I did not know some of these details until fairly recently. It just wanted talked about.

"Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it…… pain demands to be felt. And somewhere along the line, a child will be born whose charge it is to feel it all. These are your shamans, your priests and priestesses, your healers. You call them mental health patients and label their power as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and the like. But these are the ones who are born with the gift of Feeling. And as we all know, you can't heal the pain that you refuse to feel. “

                                                                                    - Stephi Wagner

I don’t feel past generations need to carry any blame for not feeling the pain. They were in survival mode. The Irish Revolution followed the Potato Famine (Up Ireland!), along with two world wars. My own parents didn’t emigrate from Ireland until the early 1960’s. My paternal great-grandfather did come to New York to work on the Brooklyn bridge, but he chose not to stay in the U.S and returned to Ireland to purchase a home and farm that remains in the family today.

Knowing about the reality of intergenerational trauma can be a very useful and powerful tool. While it certainly isn’t easy to be the one to look at the pain, it is ultimately liberating and empowering and, of course, there’s the good that gets passed along too! I whole-heartedly attribute the courage, steadfastness and resilience I had in overcoming depression and severe anxiety, to my ancestors, along with my faith and devotion in my spiritual path and practice now, though I no longer ascribe to the Roman Catholic faith personally.

Every group of people has their trauma. Knowing your own history opens compassion for the trauma of others. It ‘s not about comparison as to who had it worse, it’s about honoring what is yours to heal while holding a compassionate place for your suffering, the suffering of your family system, and the suffering of other’s. I love when author Kyle Gray says “you are the answer to your ancestor’s prayers”.

It is distressing however, to see history repeating itself. To see the atrocities that have happened to people all over the world in the last couple of hundred years and longer, still happening.

People are still being suppressed, judged, hated, and made to feel inferior, for their religion, their sex, the color of their skin, their culture, country of origin, their sexual orientation, their gender orientation, their mental health and on and on and while I won’t make a more specific list here, I will mention the discrimination that still exists in this country toward the Indigenous peoples of this land we call Canada.

When anyone, or a group of people, are made to feel inferior, for any reason, it is an inhumanity that I don’t think there are really words for. It is an attack on their freedom, dignity, and humanity and an assault on their very soul.

Surely at some point soon we will learn, and start treating everyone, as the human beings that they are, no matter what. We are all human beings. A human family. And all so much more alike than any appearing external difference.

Opening to intergenerational trauma is an opening of the heart and a gateway to deep healing.

Gra Mor (Big Love), Michele

Written by Michele Venema BScN, RN, Psychotherapist, cEFT2 AEFTP

Nurse Psychotherapist/EFT Practitioner/Educator

From Shadows to SoulLight Counselling 2023