Breaking Generational Cycles

Have you ever come across the term “breaking generational cycles”? This term mostly refers to a person’s deliberate effort to change patterns of behavior, communication, thinking, and beliefs that have been perpetuated within their family for generations and often have dysfunctional, negative consequences. Many of these patterns may have started as ways to cope, but over time, they can become maladaptive.

At some point in the family history, they may have served as a form of protection to traumatic event. For example, avoiding difficult conversations may have prevented the risk of conflict. Or emotional numbness may have once helped someone in the family to survive loss. Or being hypervigilant may be a natural reaction due to being in an unsafe environment or relationship. But what may worked (eventhough not functionally) for one generation can be frustrating to the next.

And this is not limited to the caregiver relationships. Intergenerational trauma is not just about the parents/caregivers. Extended family members, cultural expectations, migration stories, or long-standing family beliefs can shape them. In other words, intergenerational trauma often reflects a broader family or culture system that existed long before us. When we begin questioning these patterns or cycles, we may not be challenging a simple behavior or habit; we may be addressing an unresolved issue that has been carried across generations.  

Maybe you are a cyle breaker yourself. Maybe you are the first person to question certain patterns. But what exactly are we trying to break? And could some of the things we are trying to break, which are passed down between generations, be intergenerational trauma? In this therapy sketch, we will review the concept of intergenerational trauma. 

What is intergenerational trauma?

Trauma can feel like intense emotions and stress responses, such as denial, anger, shock, helplessness, fear, or a sense of losing control, after something catastrophic or overwhelming happens to you. It can come from a single experience, like an accident or loss, or from repeated or ongoing harm. You might experience trauma in relationships or within larger systems, and it may continue to affect how you feel, think, and respond long after the event has passed. In some cases, the effects of trauma can even extend beyond you and influence future generations. 

Intergenerational trauma happens when the impact of trauma experienced by earlier generations affects us, even if we did not directly experience the original traumatic event ourselves. But the important question here is how it is passed down? We can say that there is no single explanation. Mental health literature suggests that intergenerational trauma may be transmitted through multiple, overlapping pathways rather than one direct mechanism (Cacace & Summers, 2025; Lang & Gartstein, 2017; Isobel et al., 2020). Here are several processes discussed in the literature:

1 . Trauma affects attachment with caregivers.

Your attachment to your early caregivers shapes the way you think, feel, and act. It gives you a lens through which you understand yourself and the world, and provides you with a context for deciding what closeness, safety, and relationships should look and feel like. Your sense of self, your expectations from others, how you seek support and handle conflict, are all shaped by these early attachments, and you use their blueprint and enact it in other relationships, even into adult life. 

We form attachments to our caregivers through our interactions with them. Therefore, even everyday things, such as whether your caregivers were able to attune to your needs and understand that you were in distress, whether they soothed and calmed you when you were upset, whether they met your physical needs in a timely manner, and whether they showed closeness and warmth, can all signal something different to you about relationships and yourself, creating a lifelong sense of safety, or sometimes a lack of it.

Trauma can affect you in unique ways. It can make you more withdrawn and avoidant, or reactive and impulsive. It can also affect how you respond to your children as caregivers. Instead of being responsive and calm, it can make you emotionally distant from your children and make you feel irritable and prone to overreacting when interacting with them. Because trauma can make it hard for you to emotionally regulate, you may tend to under- or overreact to your child’s signals of distress or joy. It can make it too difficult for you to be predictable and consistent with your child. Because trauma can make it really difficult for you to function at times, it can also make it difficult for you to become the secure base that your child needs. 

When our caregivers are unpredictable or unreliable in their responses, it can make us feel anxious and insecure as children. If they are emotionally distant and not attending to our needs, even if this is because they are struggling themselves, we may internalize this as a fault of our own and feel unworthy of their attention. If our caregivers overreact all the time and easily burst out, we may become fearful or walk on eggshells, not expressing our own needs, thinking we are causing their frustration. When your caregivers can’t read your needs and reflect back what your feelings mean to you, you may struggle to communicate your needs or feel like you won’t ever be understood by others. These effects can carry into adult life.

As we can see, eventhough we have not been exposed to traumatic events ourselves, having caregivers who are struggling with the effects of trauma can affect us deeply and almost mirror the effects of being exposed to trauma ourselves. We can feel unsafe, fearful, and helpless, we can experience heightened stress and become hypervigilant, just like one feels in the aftermath of trauma. Therefore, one mechanism through which the effects of trauma can be transmitted is through our attachment to caregivers.

2. Trauma may shape coping patterns that children learn and model 

In addition to attachment, the learning process may be another mechanism for perpetuating the effects of trauma across generations, particularly the similarity of these responses. Developmentally, we acquire a significant portion of our behaviors by observing others, mimicking their behaviors, and modeling them. If our caregivers or significant figures in our lives, who have had to live with the effects of trauma, resort to dysfunctional methods as coping mechanisms in their own lives, we may have learned that we should exhibit similar behaviors when faced with a situation we need to cope with. For example, if our family members resort to solutions such as avoidance, withdrawal, overreaction, excessive monitoring of threat, or substance abuse to cope with their negative emotions, unhelpful thought patterns, or relationship problems, we may have adopted these through learning processes. In other words, even if we were not exposed to the traumatic event, we may have acquired the dysfunctional coping mechanisms developed in response to that traumatic event by modeling and learning them from our caregivers.

3. Unprocessed emotions can show up indirectly in the relationship 

When someone has unresolved trauma, feelings due to the trauma (like shame, anger, or fear) may not be processed or understood. That might lead emotions to show up indirectly in close relationships. They can quietly shape how people react, speak, and relate to those closest to them. Over time, children may grow up responding to emotional patterns that did not start with them. This is called projective identification in the psychodynamic perspective, meaning that when someone unconsciously projects difficult feelings onto another person, that person may then begin to carry or express those feelings. 

For example, a caregiver who carries unresolved anger might react to their child as if the child is the one who is angry. By locating rage in the child unconsciously, the caregiver might feel temporary relief from internal distress. But this may confuse the child, affect how they perceive themselves over time, and even lead them to act that way.

4. Lack of open conversations about trauma in families prevents its resolution

Not communicating openly about traumatic events experienced by previous generations and avoiding or ignoring their negative effects on family dynamics and members’ mental health prevents these issues from being processed and integrated within the family. It may also distort perceptions among younger generations, causing them to misattribute the sources of certain aspects of familial dysfunction to unrelated events or, most often, to themselves. 

5. Trauma might impact the brain and even gene expression

Trauma causes certain neurobiological changes in the brain. Descendants of caregivers who experienced trauma are also found to show changes in their nervous system, such as their stress regulation mechanisms, including the HPA axis, which may affect their stress-related hormone regulation (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). However, these findings should be interpreted with caution. For example, these changes may also be due to the distress and dysfunction these descantants might be experiencing post-natally, such as due to disorganized attachment with the caregiver, and not necessarily something being marked neurobiologically. Similarly, research on the genetic and epigenetic transmission of trauma is also not definitive. Eventhough research on animals shows changes may occur in gene expression, this is not confidently replicated in humans  (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). Our brains, bodies, and environment interact in a million different ways to create the experience we live in. So it is logical that the effects of trauma would be traced back to those nervous and bodily structures and responses. Still, research in this area is growing, and we need more research to make more confident comments on the neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of transmission of intergenerational trauma.

Healing intergenerational trauma

Individual psychotherapy: Even if you haven’t exposed to traumatic events yourself, being exposed to the effects of others living with trauma, especially those of your caregivers, can affect you deeply and can cause changes in how you form and maintain relationships, how you regulate your emotions, and how you think about yourself and others. It can also become more symptomatic, leaving you vulnerable to anxiety, hypervigilance, heightened fear, and constant feelings of unsafety and changes in your mood. Individual psychotherapy can help you bring about the psychological changes you need to develop better coping skills and emotional regulation, and alleviate symptoms that may be causing you distress, helping you find and express your own unique self.

Family-level interventions:  Just as many of our psychological issues have their roots in our relationships, repair and healing can also come from those same relationships.

Breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma, particularly those perpetuated by the lack of open conversations, can benefit greatly from therapeutic approaches that extend beyond individual psychotherapy. Family therapy, for instance, offers a powerful avenue for processing the effects of trauma and metabolizing its impact, where you and your family can acquire functional coping mechanisms and develop healthier communication patterns. This can enable you to build safer, more fulfilling relationships with your family and help you repair the effects of the past. 

Takeaways

• Intergenerational trauma is when the effects of trauma experienced by one generation impact later generations, even if they did not directly experience the original event.
• Effects of trauma may be transmitted through attachment patterns with caregivers, learned coping behaviors, unconscious relational dynamics, and a lack of open discussion about one generation’s trauma and its consequences for the family members. These can lead to dysfunctionality developed as a result of trauma in one generation being passed down to other generations, eventhough they are not exposed to the traumatic events themselves.
• Although genetic, epigenetic, and neurobiological mechanisms are likely involved in the transmission of intergenerational trauma, more research is needed to make confident statements about these mechanisms.
• Individual therapy can help bring about the psychological changes we need to contain the traumatic effects and dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are perpetuated in our families. 
• Working at the family level and choosing modalities such as family therapy can also be highly helpful, allowing us to target dysfunctional patterns more effectively and repair our relationships.

References

Cacace, A., & Summers, S. J. (2025). Intergenerational Trauma in Phenomenological Research—A Systematic Review. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 30(8), 1134–1169. https://doi.org/10.1080/15325024.2025.2490917

Isobel, S., McCloughen, A., Goodyear, M., & Foster, K. (2020). Intergenerational trauma and its relationship to mental health care: A Qualitative inquiry. Community Mental Health Journal, 57(4), 631–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00698-1

Lang, A. J., & Gartstein, M. A. (2017). Intergenerational transmission of traumatization: Theoretical framework and implications for prevention. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 19(2), 162–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2017.1329773

Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20568

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At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy. 

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