generational trauma (sage sessions #1)

Welcome to my new series. I have been wanting to post this for the longest time. This is really sort of a therapy starter pack, a buffet, if you will, of understanding all the pieces that might be contributing to your childhood and your adult life and where you are now. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and this is my passion and I am just going to show up here with the most minimal amount of editing so I can show up hopefully every day with a new topic in videos somewhere around or less than 10 minutes. And if you know me, you know, that might be a bit of a challenge. But let's get into it. Did you know that in the US nearly half of American children are exposed to adverse childhood events or experiences? And what are those, you may ask? Remember, those are based on studies in the 70s that were actually initially looking at obesity. But they found out that childhood trauma had significant impacts on a person's long-term mental and physical health. In other words, events like divorce, losing a parent, I was going to say loss of a parent, you know, obviously living in a dangerous neighborhood, bullying, all kinds of things can contribute and create adverse childhood events. And so we know that at least, I guess, 64% of human beings that have been surveyed have at least one and the majority have many more. And the idea is that the more ACEs you have, the more at risk you are for mental and physical health dynamics and issues. What I wanted to talk about today briefly is really when you begin to go to therapy or begin to understand yourself, you really want to start, from my perspective, with understanding where you came from. And that is the idea of intergenerational trauma. Generational trauma, historical trauma, there are varying degrees, collective traumas. What we're really talking about is that before you, there were potentially generations of people in your family, in your community, in your country, and their experiences might have significantly impacted, and we know that they often do, where you struggle today. So I thought it was important to start with this concept that some really interesting research has looked at the impact of generational trauma. And especially when we think about, you know, things like obviously historical racism, wars, poverty, famines, all of those things are going to potentially, what we assume, affect, let's say, a person's psychological well-being. In other words, if your mother or grandparent was in the Holocaust and survived, that is going to affect not just how they perceive the world, but how they engage in the world, potentially, around you. And the idea is that that could be impactful. Well, it turns out that it's not just about the behavioral and psychological kind of trickle-down. It can also be about epigenetics. And if you're not really clear, again, what are epigenetics? Epigenetics is this theory and idea that the way that genes are turned off or on, that you inherit, that are often heritable, often depends upon the environment in which you are exposed. So in certain situations, these environments can trigger, perhaps, you know, mutations, genes, illnesses, mental and physical challenges that, given a different childhood or world, you may not have experienced. What is a great example of that is Rachel Yehuda's research on epigenetics. And she's really a pioneer in this field. And basically what she looked at was how distress and trauma, how can that be biologically transmitted across generations? And I could do a whole video on this. And if you want to post questions, by the way, down below. If you will try to post shorter, succinct questions, I was thinking that perhaps I could try to, at the end of each video, pick one question and try to answer it in the next video, if that makes sense. I would love to be able to answer more of your questions. But please keep it short because I, as you know, I'm running a full-time practice. I make content. I run courses. I have a lot of writing projects going on and I just get overwhelmed. I am a little bit short now on the help that I need to do all the things I need to do. But I would love to answer your question. So if you could do that, I would really appreciate it. And I would love to help in some way. The idea is that in Rachel Yehuda's research, she actually took, for example, women who were pregnant during the 9-11 attacks and then looked at what happened to their children. So we would expect that they might have, you know, stress responses and trauma potentially. But it turns out that the further along the women who were pregnant, for example, during 9-11, the further along they were, the more at risk their children were for things like depression and other types of, you know, mental and physical challenges. And so what she looked at was how traumatic experiences can lead to epigenetic changes. Basically modifications that affect gene expression without altering the DNA sequence itself. And so basically these changes are getting passed down and making people perhaps more vulnerable to certain conditions and risks as a result of what happened when they were, even before they were conceived, as part of the egg in a mother's womb, which we're born with all of the eggs when we're baby girls, and also kind of like not just that but during pregnancy as well. And so for example, a significant proportion of her research that was focused also on things like Holocaust survivors and their children found that children of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to develop PTSD if they were exposed to traumatic events in their own lives. So in other words, the trauma of their mothers or parents, and this can be both parents as well, kind of like primed them up to be more vulnerable and susceptible to developing PTSD symptoms in their adult life if they experience trauma. And then offspring of Holocaust survivors showed similar neuroendocrine abnormalities to those observed in their parents with PTSD. So we're seeing these similar dynamics in offspring who weren't present at the time of the trauma, like their parents were. And there's even some research on nurses. They did a study looking at, you know, what kind of discipline they received and the level of childhood wounding that they endured and how that affected, for example, their adult symptoms. And they found that the imprint of violence that they experienced in childhood took a lasting toll on the women's children, these nurses. Researchers found depression rates were 1.7 times higher and chronic depression 2.5 times higher among the children of women who experienced severe child harm compared with mothers who would not endure abuse. So there's a lot of implications about this idea. And then that got me thinking, well, what role does our individual family environment play in the transmission of trauma? And that is what we'll talk about in tomorrow's video. Thank you for being here. Have a beautiful day, and I will see you soon. Remember, you are the only parent you will ever have. So take really good care and love on yourself today.