THE LEGACY OF TRAUMA: EPIGENETICS AND INHERITED TRAUMA
When you hear about trauma, it’s usually in the context of a personal experience with trauma; something that one personally experienced. What we talk less about is how a traumatic event from our ancestors is impacting us now.
The Akan people of West Africa have a term Sankofa, it’s literal translation is “it is not wrong to go back and get what you forgot”. The belief of the Akan is that understanding the past illuminates the present, or we cannot understand where we are going without understanding where we are coming from.
Similarly, Whakapapa, a principle of the Maori indigenous people of New Zealand, represents the belief that the histories of people, places and events provide the context for where we are now.
In the world of science and the exploration of human experience, science is catching up with the wisdom of many native people as it discovers epigenetics - what happens to you will impact future generations; what happened to your ancestors is impacting you now.
Epigenetics is the study of how experiences leave "marks" on our DNA, influencing gene expression. Trauma studies looking at epigenetics are rewriting the way we understand inheritance. For example, we are learning that after one generation experiences trauma, future generations develop a fear response even though they never experienced the trauma personally.
In the "Fearful memories haunt mouse descendants" study in 2013, scientists exposed mice to a traumatic event - an electric shock, and then observed the behavior of subsequent generations. Surprisingly, they found that the offspring of the traumatized (shocked) mice exhibited heightened stress responses (fear) and anxiety-related behaviors, even though they had never experienced the trauma shock themselves!
This suggests that a traumatic response had been passed down to the next generation.
Trauma and stress experienced by our ancestors impacts our mental health today. Meaning that, how our ancestors responded to stress is passed down to future generations through epigenetics. It's like a biological echo from generations past.
Healing involves the reflection on one’s ancestry and acknowledging how traumas from the past had impacted previous generations emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Once recognized, we can integrate the experience and see what patterns have developed from the trauma and begin to rewrite the narrative, making meaning and learning from our ancestors so we can orient to the future, understanding and integrating lessons from the past.
By acknowledging the experiences of your ancestors, understanding how these events impacted your lineage, you can make meaning of the anxiety challenges you have today. It's a reminder that it isn't your fault, you didn't do anything wrong but it’s up to you to heal these experiences, to integrate and evolve.
How have you been impacted by your ancestry?
References:
https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/14423/Sankofaism.pdf?sequence=1#:~:text=Sankofa%20(which%20means%20%27go%20back,lives%20to%20convey%20important%20messages.
https://arataiohi.org.nz/research/aotearoa-youth-research/whakapapa/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.14272
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6857662/