Transgenerational trauma

Transgenerational trauma, intergenerational trauma, or generational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary mode of transmission is the shared family environment of the infant, causing psychological, behavioral and social changes in the individual.

Collective trauma is when psychological trauma experienced by communities and identity groups is carried on as part of the group's collective memory and shared sense of identity. For example, collective trauma was experienced by Jewish Holocaust survivors and their contemporaries within the wider Jewish community. As another example, the Indigenous Peoples of Canada experienced it within the Canadian Indian residential school system. African Americans who were enslaved is another. When this collective trauma affects subsequent generations, it is called transgenerational trauma. For example, when Jewish people, who are born into a later generation, learn about the Holocaust (presumably from older family members), and then experience extreme stress or practice survivalism out of fear of another Holocaust.

Transgenerational trauma can be a collective experience that affects groups of people who share a cultural identity (e.g., ethnicity, nationality, or religious identity). It can also be applied to single families or individual parent–child dyads. For example, survivors of individual child abuse and both direct survivors of the collective trauma and members of subsequent generations individually may develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Examples of this include collective trauma experienced by descendants of the Atlantic slave trade; segregation and Jim Crow laws in the United States; apartheid in South Africa; the Scramble for Africa, Armenian genocide survivors, Jewish Holocaust survivors and other members of the Jewish community at the time; Bosnian war survivors; by the First Peoples of Canada within the Canadian Indian residential school system; by Native Americans when they were forcibly displaced and removed from their land; and, in Australia, the Stolen Generations and other hardships inflicted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Descendants of survivors may experience extreme stress, leading to a variety of other consequences.

While transgenerational trauma gained attention in recent decades, the hypothesis of an epigenetic mechanism remains controversial due to a lack of rigorous experimental results on humans.