Family therapy for generational trauma is a helpful resource to break historical family cycles of pain. All too often, unhealed trauma is inadvertently passed through family members between generations. As such, family history can impact your mental health, even if you did not directly experience trauma.
Most of us experience some form of trauma at one point in our lives. Importantly, each person responds differently to trauma. In this post, we are going to cover how family therapy works to overcome trauma in a sustainable way.
Family Therapy For Generational Trauma
Trauma itself is extremely common. Current research from the World Health Organization estimates that over 70% of individuals have experienced trauma of some form throughout their lifetime.
Left unhealed, effects of trauma passes down from one generation to the next. Trauma is passed through generations in multiple ways:
- Behaviors within families, such as abuse, neglect, mistreatment, and emotional unavailability
- Systems and cultural norms (e.g., racism, discrimination, war, or genocide)
- Genetically, as recent epigenetic research suggests trauma impacts DNA expression and nervous system responses
Traumatic experiences impact not only the person who lived the experience, but potentially their children and grandchildren. This post will primarily focus on learned behaviors and coping strategies that originate in the family.
What Is Generational Trauma?
“Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Generational or intergenerational trauma refers to the passing down of trauma from one generation to another. The generational trauma is the harmful effect of witnessing the impacts of trauma left on a person in your family line.
Importantly, trauma itself does not refer to traumatic events, incidents, or a type of trauma. Instead, trauma is the physiological and emotional response to trauma that lives within the body. While the traumatic event occurred in the past, the trauma response itself occurs in the individual in the present.
How Does Generational Trauma Affect Families?
“History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
James Baldwin
Trauma experiences in the past impact the way that individuals cope with stress in the present. For instance, post traumatic stress disorder PTSD symptoms can include mental health issues like:
- Anxiety- persistent fear
- Depression- sad, hopeless, numb
- Shame- blaming self for the event
- Intrusive thoughts- flashbacks, nightmares
- Brain fog- lack of concentration or difficulty focusing
To manage these stressors, individuals may develop coping mechanisms that impact relationships. These methods of coping can include emotional withdrawal, substance use, and self-harm.
Because the events that lead to trauma responses become de-contextualized, the response appears to be a personality or character flaw. For example, a child may not know that their parent was abused as a child. Seeing their parent respond in anger to slight triggers, out of context of their own childhood, may lead the child to conclude that the parent has a personality disorder or that the child is unlovable.
Of course, if someone struggling with unprocessed trauma has children, the cycle continues. Those children will develop their own coping strategies in reaction to the trauma responses they see in their parent.
For instance, children who are raised in a home with domestic and physical abuse can develop avoidant strategies. In response to stress, they may try to avoid expressing themselves for fear of making the abusive person more violent.
However, this avoidant strategy carried into adulthood and parenthood can have impacts on the child. The child may not have a secure, strong parental figure that teaches and models emotion regulation. The child then must develop a coping skill to deal with the stress of neglect. The cycle can continue across generations.
How Can Family Therapy Help With Generational Trauma?
“…because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma… was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.”
Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Healing from complex trauma is both individual and relational. Therapy methods like EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is a trauma informed therapy that can help process on the individual level. However, this is only part of the work.
In addition, trauma impacts our ability to feel safe and communicate vulnerably in relationships. Trauma teaches us to protect ourselves, even if we have to put up walls with other people.
Family therapy provides an experience for our nervous systems to re-learn how to be safe in vulnerable relationships. A family therapist will help members process their emotional responses and communicate in a way that honors their unique experience.
How To Heal Generational Trauma Through Family Therapy
The pain of complex generational trauma may leave you wondering is therapy worth it. Emotionally Focused Family Therapy is a method of relational treatment that can help individuals and families heal through several of its clinical goals. The model of therapy focuses on both individual trauma processing and healing the family system.
Identify and Acknowledge Trauma Responses
A family therapist will help family members and the family system slow down interactions so that they can understand their own behaviors. Specifically, they will help members to discern which of their actions, which may look dysfunctional on the surface, are actually coping mechanisms in response to trauma.
The therapist will also help the family to understand how the core trauma experience has impacted belief systems and the culture of bonding within the family.
Learn Family History
Creating space to learn about family history can be a healing experience in itself. Learning about the traumatic experiences of prior generations can help members to understand some of the shortcomings in the family. With this understanding, members learn that disconnection and pain may not be personal, but rather, responses to trauma.
Access Your Pain
Trauma impacts individuals in different ways. Family therapy helps each member to reconnect to themselves to explore the ways the trauma affects them. For example, they may discover that they hold shame, guilt, sadness, or loneliness tied to their own trauma.
As family members begin to explore these areas, they prepare to fully access and reclaim parts of themselves. When the pieces of their emotions are assembled, they prepare to fully process and release them.
Process Trauma
Family members process by remaining present in as each individual shares about their own experience being impacted by trauma. Often, the most traumatizing element of the worst moments is being left alone, unseen, and unsupported.
As family members process and share their experiences, they heal the parts of them that were re-traumatized being left alone in fear.
Communicate Vulnerably
Importantly, family members learn to express their pain. Once emotions like anger, an understandable response to trauma, are processed, the hurt parts of family members can be accessed.
Experiences between family members in session where the vulnerable, hurt emotions are communicated in a vulnerable way, a new culture is formed. This culture moves away from shame and defend cycles and into secure bonding between members. This secure bonding allows the nervous system to be re-programmed to learn safety in connection. This safety and resource in others is often lost as a response to trauma.
Transform Family Story
Creating a new, updated family narrative is a key part of family therapy when healing generational trauma. Families learn to reframe their shared story as they move from pain and ineffective communication.
Instead, their story focuses on empowerment to heal and grow together. The process helps in promoting resilience within and between family members.
Build Secure Relationships
Secure relationships are defined by three factors:
- Accessible- I know how to find my people when I need them
- Responsive- When I reach out to my people, I trust that they will respond to my need
- Engaged- The response I receive is emotionally engaged, rather than pitying or flat
When someone goes through trauma, the lack of a secure figure to turn to in the traumatic moment is critical. Often, this experience leads to their nervous system learning it is not safe to trust or rely on others.
By creating safety through processing and sharing of vulnerability, family therapy restores the ability to engage in securely bonded relationships.
Break Cycles of Dysfunction
When family members achieve successful experiences in secure relationships, they no longer need their coping strategies to survive. Instead, they can rely on trusted family members as a resource to manage difficult emotions or experiences.
For example, a woman who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather might carry feelings of shame and thoughts about her negative self worth. In response to shame, she might use substances to numb the pain, leaving her inaccessible to her own children. Her children will then have to learn how to deal with the stress of neglect and the fear of not being able to reach their mother, therefore experiencing impacts of the mother’s trauma.
Through therapy, she can instead learn to access her own emotions and turn to a secure partner (e.g., an adult family member or spouse) to talk about her shame. When she does not have to hide or numb from it, she can experience the pain and stay available and present to her children, breaking generational cycles.
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