Generational & Historical Trauma: What It Is, and How Healing Begins
A plain-language guide to the trauma you may have inherited without ever living through it, and the science and therapy that can help you set it down.
TL;DR: The Short Version
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Generational (or intergenerational) trauma is the way the effects of a traumatic experience get passed down a family line (through behavior, relationships, and possibly biology) so that children and grandchildren carry the impact of events they never personally lived through.
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Historical trauma is a closely related but broader idea: generational trauma experienced by an entire cultural, racial, or ethnic group with a shared history of oppression. Think slavery, genocide, colonization, or forced displacement.
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They overlap but are not identical. Generational trauma can happen in any family. Historical trauma is collective, tied to a group’s shared past, and often compounded by ongoing discrimination.
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Is it “real”? The behavioral and relational transmission of trauma is well established. The biological side, how trauma may leave epigenetic marks on stress-regulating genes, is supported by a growing body of research but is still developing.
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Can it be healed? Yes. Therapy can interrupt the cycle. Approaches like trauma-focused CBT, EMDR, and family or systemic work have shown real promise, and early evidence suggests therapy may even help reverse some of trauma’s biological imprints.
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You are not broken, and you are not stuck. The pattern may have started long before you, but it can change with you.
What Is Generational Trauma?
Generational trauma, also called intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma, refers to the apparent transmission of trauma between generations of a family. People who endured adverse childhood experiences, or who survived historical disasters and traumas, can pass the effects of those experiences on to their children or grandchildren through their genes, their behavior, or both. This can leave the next generation more susceptible to anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and other emotional and mental health concerns.
Here is the part that surprises people most: the memory of the original event stays with the person who lived it, but the worldview that event created in them can be inherited. Even very young children detect and react to a parent’s anxiety cues, absorbing a sense of how safe or dangerous the world is long before they have words for it.
A grandmother who survived a war and learned to never trust strangers, a father who grew up in that household and became emotionally guarded, and a daughter who feels a low hum of vigilance she cannot explain. None of it is traceable to anything that happened directly to her.
What Is Historical Trauma?
Historical trauma takes that same idea and scales it up to an entire community. It is the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding that builds up over a lifespan and across generations, emerging from massive, shared group trauma, the kind inflicted on a specific cultural group with a history of being systematically oppressed.
“The cumulative wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma.”
What makes historical trauma especially heavy is that the original injury is rarely a clean, finished chapter. Present-day trauma (daily reminders of discrimination, ongoing inequality) gets layered on top of the ancestral wound, creating additional adversity in the here and now.
Examples include the descendants of enslaved people, communities that survived genocide or the Holocaust, Indigenous peoples subjected to forced displacement and boarding schools, and refugees fleeing persecution.
How Sandoval Therapy Can Help
At Sandoval Therapy, various techniques are used to help you overcome your concerns. With a personalised approach, you will receive services catered to your needs, working towards understanding, growth, and lasting change.
We help adults and couples explore patterns rooted in trauma, stress, relationships, identity, and emotional disconnection, using compassionate, trauma-informed therapy approaches. Whether your work calls for psychodynamic exploration, CBT-based skill-building, a systemic lens on your relationships, or an understanding of how your attachment history shapes your present, we offer the range of approaches to meet you where you are.
Serving Pasadena and Greater Los Angeles. Both in-person and telehealth services are available. We are based in Pasadena, CA, and proudly serve clients throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including Arcadia, Monrovia, Glendale, Alhambra, and surrounding communities.
If you are curious whether therapy is right for you, we warmly invite you to reach out. You do not need to have everything figured out. That is exactly what we are here for.
What’s the Difference Between Generational and Historical Trauma?
This is one of the most common questions, and the confusion is understandable. The terms are often used interchangeably, and they describe the same underlying process. But there is a meaningful distinction. Think of it as a matter of scale and source:
Generational Trauma Is About a Family
It can begin with any traumatic event (domestic violence, abuse, addiction, a sudden loss, a parent’s untreated PTSD) and ripple down through that particular family line. You do not need to belong to any specific group to experience it.
Historical Trauma Is About a People
It is generational trauma at the level of a whole community, rooted in a shared, collective event of mass oppression, and frequently kept alive by present-day discrimination against that same group.
So historical trauma is essentially a specific type of generational trauma, the version that is collective, culturally rooted, and ongoing. All historical trauma is generational, but not all generational trauma is historical. A family shaped by a single tragic event carries generational trauma; an entire community shaped by centuries of systemic injustice carries historical trauma, often on top of their individual family histories.
Can You Explain Generational Trauma With a Metaphor?
Imagine you inherit a house you never chose and never built.
The people who built it lived through a hard winter you never saw. To survive it, they sealed certain windows shut, built the walls extra thick, and got into the habit of keeping the basement door locked at all times. Those choices made perfect sense for the storm they were weathering.
Then you are born into that house. You grow up never questioning why some rooms are dark, why the air feels heavy near that locked door, or why no one ever opens those particular windows. To you, it is simply home. It is just how houses are. You may even pass the same habits on to anyone who lives with you next, sealing windows against a storm that ended generations ago.
Therapy is the process of walking through the house with someone who can help you turn the lights on. You get to ask: Which of these walls are actually protecting me, and which are just blocking the sun? You learn which doors are safe to open. And slowly, you renovate, not by erasing the family that came before you, but by deciding what stays and what you are finally allowed to let in.
How Trauma Is “Carried in a Family’s Lineage”
It means trauma travels down through more than one channel, and understanding those channels is what makes healing possible.
Through Relationships and Behavior
This is the most direct route. A parent shaped by trauma may struggle to provide steady emotional safety. Children learn how to handle stress, express emotion, and relate to others by watching their caregivers. When the model they absorb is fear, silence, or dysregulation, they often inherit those patterns without ever hearing the story behind them. The behavior gets passed down, but the context does not.
Through the Body and Biology
Researchers studying the descendants of trauma survivors have observed measurable differences in how the stress system is regulated, including altered cortisol levels, changes in the methylation of a key stress-regulating gene (the glucocorticoid receptor gene), and differences in brain structures involved in fear and emotion. This points to what scientists call epigenetics: trauma may not change the DNA sequence itself, but it can change how certain genes are switched on or off, and some of those changes appear capable of being passed to the next generation.
Through Silence and the Stories We Don’t Tell
When painful history goes unspoken, children often sense that something happened without knowing what. They inherit the emotional weather (the vigilance, the grief, the unspoken rules) without the explanation that would help it make sense.
Is Generational Trauma Scientifically Proven, or Just Behavioral?
This deserves an honest, two-part answer, because the science is genuinely more settled in some areas than others.
What the Research Shows
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The behavioral and relational transmission is well established. Few clinicians dispute that traumatized parents can pass dysregulation, fear responses, and coping patterns to their children through caregiving and family dynamics. This has been observed since the 1960s, beginning with studies of the children of Holocaust survivors.
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The biological transmission is real and actively studied, but still developing. A systematic review of how transgenerational trauma is transmitted found evidence of inherited patterns in stress-regulating genes and even accelerated biological aging in some offspring, with transmission occurring through neurobiological and metabolic changes as well as the environment a child is raised in.
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The field is still maturing. Researchers are careful to note the limits: many studies rely on small samples and cross-sectional designs, which makes it hard to prove direct cause and effect. The field is building a strong and growing case, but it is still maturing.
The honest summary: generational trauma is not “just behavioral,” and it is also not a fully closed scientific case. It is best understood as a real phenomenon transmitted through several overlapping pathways (relational, behavioral, and biological) that researchers are still working to fully map. Importantly, you do not need to know the exact mechanism for healing to work.
How Sandoval Therapy Can Help
At Sandoval Therapy, various techniques are used to help you overcome your concerns. With a personalised approach, you will receive services catered to your needs, working towards understanding, growth, and lasting change.
We help adults and couples explore patterns rooted in trauma, stress, relationships, identity, and emotional disconnection, using compassionate, trauma-informed therapy approaches. Whether your work calls for psychodynamic exploration, CBT-based skill-building, a systemic lens on your relationships, or an understanding of how your attachment history shapes your present, we offer the range of approaches to meet you where you are.
Serving Pasadena and Greater Los Angeles. Both in-person and telehealth services are available. We are based in Pasadena, CA, and proudly serve clients throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including Arcadia, Monrovia, Glendale, Alhambra, and surrounding communities.
If you are curious whether therapy is right for you, we warmly invite you to reach out. You do not need to have everything figured out. That is exactly what we are here for.
How Do You Release or Heal Generational Trauma?
Healing generational trauma is not about forgetting the past or blaming the people who came before you. It is about understanding the pattern clearly enough that you get to choose what continues through you. At Sandoval Therapy, that is the heart of what we do, and we approach it through a few key avenues.
We Use Trauma-Focused Therapy
When a client comes to us carrying inherited pain, our trauma specialists draw on evidence-based approaches such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which have shown real promise. Notably, research suggests these therapies may help reverse some of trauma’s biological effects, such as normalizing stress hormone levels and shifting epigenetic markers. One review even found that narrative-based trauma therapy was associated with measurable changes in DNA methylation, and that high-quality intervention can produce lasting changes that strengthen parent–child bonding, a key mechanism for interrupting the cycle. Because no two family histories are alike, we also draw on somatic trauma therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Brainspotting, and Family Constellations therapy depending on what fits you.
We Help You Name the Unspoken
Much of generational trauma survives on silence, so a lot of our work is helping you put language to family history, gently and at your own pace, which is often what begins to loosen its grip.
We Work on Breaking the Behavioral Cycle
In many ways this is the heart of what a breaking-generational-cycles therapist does: together we build new ways to regulate emotion, communicate, and relate, so the next generation inherits something different. We remind our clients that healing, like trauma, can be passed down too.
We Offer Culturally Responsive Therapy
Especially for historical trauma, we make space for reclaiming cultural practices, language, and belonging as part of the repair, rather than treating you as separate from the larger story you come from. Many of the people we work with carry first-generation and immigrant family dynamics, the particular weight of being the one who holds a family’s sacrifices, expectations, and unspoken losses. We understand how those pressures shape identity, guilt, and belonging, and we hold them with care rather than judgment.
The single most consistent protective factor for children facing adversity is at least one stable, supportive relationship. Often, the therapeutic relationship becomes one of those stabilizing connections, a steady place from which the rest of the healing can ripple outward, just as the pain once did.
What Does a Therapy Session for This Actually Look Like?
If you have never been to trauma therapy, the unknown can feel intimidating. Here is what it tends to look like with us.
When a client comes in to Sandoval Therapy, we do not start by asking you to relive the worst things that happened to your family. As trauma-informed therapists, we keep our work paced and collaborative. We begin by getting to know you and building a foundation of safety, trust, and practical coping skills before we move into any deeper processing, because that groundwork is what makes the deeper work effective and bearable. This is also where culturally responsive therapy matters: we pay close attention to your cultural background and family history, working to understand how they shape your experience of trauma rather than applying a one-size-fits-all template.
From there, what a session looks like depends on the approach we choose together. If we use EMDR, for example, we guide you through a structured eight-phase process in which you briefly bring to mind aspects of a distressing memory (images, thoughts, feelings, body sensations) while we lead you through gentle bilateral stimulation (such as side-to-side eye movements), which can reduce the intensity the memory carries. In other sessions we might map your family history together to spot inherited patterns, build emotional-regulation skills, or, in our work with couples and families, explore how trauma has shaped the way you relate to the people closest to you.
Throughout, you stay in control of the pace. Our goal is never to erase your history, but to loosen its hold, so that it no longer quietly runs your present.
How Do Communities Heal “Historical Unresolved Grief”?
This is one of the hardest dimensions of historical trauma. When a community carries grief from events that institutions have never formally recognized or repaired, the wound is harder to close. There is no public validation, no shared acknowledgment that this happened and it mattered. The unresolved grief and anger that often accompany historical trauma can then continue to contribute to physical and behavioral health struggles across generations.
But communities are not powerless in the absence of official acknowledgment. Healing at the collective level tends to draw on:
Collective Mourning & Truth-Telling
Spaces where the history is named, witnessed, and grieved together, even when no formal apology exists.
Cultural Reclamation
Restoring language, ceremony, traditions, and identity that oppression tried to erase, directly countering the wound.
Community-Based Healing
Recognizing that for many groups healing is communal, and interventions must fit the specific cultural context to work.
Passing Down Resilience, Not Just Pain
Research increasingly emphasizes that recovery and strength can transfer across generations just as trauma does.
For an individual within such a community, therapy does not have to wait for the world to make things right. A trauma-informed therapist can help you carry collective grief without being crushed by it, separate inherited pain from your own present-day life, and find your own footing while honoring the larger story you belong to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the questions people most commonly ask when researching generational and historical trauma.
Is generational trauma the same as PTSD?
Not exactly. Someone affected by generational trauma may show PTSD-like symptoms (anxiety, hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, negative core beliefs) but typically without the flashbacks or intrusive memories of a specific event, because they did not live through the original trauma firsthand. It is more accurately understood as inheriting the effects of trauma rather than the event itself.
Can generational trauma skip a generation?
It can appear to. Its expression varies from person to person and generation to generation. One generation might cope through emotional shutdown, the next through anxiety, and another might seem relatively unaffected before patterns resurface. This is part of why family history is such a useful clue in therapy.
Do I need to know exactly what happened in my family to heal?
No. Much generational trauma is transmitted through silence, so many people never learn the full story. Effective therapy works with the patterns and symptoms showing up in your life now. You do not need a complete family history to begin.
How long does it take to heal?
There is no fixed timeline. Generational trauma is layered, so the work tends to be gradual rather than a quick fix. Trauma-informed therapy is paced to your readiness, and many people experience meaningful relief well before every layer is fully resolved.
Is it too late if my parents or grandparents have already passed away?
No. Healing generational trauma is about changing the pattern as it lives in you now, in your nervous system, your relationships, your choices. That work does not require the original people to be present, and it still protects the generations that come after you.
Can therapy really change something biological that was inherited?
Emerging research is encouraging on this point. Trauma-focused therapies like TF-CBT and EMDR have been associated with normalizing stress-hormone patterns and shifting some epigenetic markers. The science is still developing, but it suggests the body’s trauma imprints are not necessarily permanent.
Can I have generational trauma if my own childhood was good and peaceful?
Yes, and this is more common than people expect. A loving, stable childhood does not cancel out inherited patterns, because generational trauma often travels quietly: through a parent’s hidden anxiety, an unspoken family “rule” about not showing weakness, or a low-grade vigilance that felt completely normal to you growing up. Having had a good childhood simply means the inheritance is subtler, not that it is absent.
Can I heal if my family refuses to acknowledge the trauma?
Yes. Healing does not require your family’s participation, agreement, or even acknowledgment that anything happened. The work happens within you, in your nervous system, your beliefs, your relationships, and the choices you make going forward. While family validation can be meaningful when it is available, its absence does not close the door.
How do I know if my anxiety is “normal” or if it’s generational?
This is genuinely difficult to untangle on your own, because the two can feel identical from the inside, and that is exactly the kind of question a therapist can help you answer. In session, we look at the bigger picture together: your family history, when and how the anxiety shows up, and whether it seems to fit your present-day life or echoes something older. You do not have to figure this out alone or arrive with a diagnosis in hand.
I think this might apply to me. What is a good first step?
Reaching out to a trauma-informed therapist for an initial conversation is a low-pressure way to start. You do not need to have your story figured out or organized in advance. Exploring it is exactly what the process is for.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical advice, a clinical diagnosis, or a substitute for professional mental health treatment. The information presented reflects current research and general therapeutic approaches, but every person’s experience is unique. If you are experiencing distress, mental health symptoms, or believe you may be affected by generational or historical trauma, please consult with a licensed therapist or mental health professional. If you are in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or reach your local emergency services.