Do you ever feel that something in your heritage might be holding you back, or wonder if an event in your family’s past might explain a psychological block that you’re keen to overcome? From the very first episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2004, featuring TV presenter Bill Oddie, we’ve witnessed celebrities who’ve grappled with mental health issues uncover ancestry that, according to a popular theory, might go some way to explaining why they are the way they are.
“Intergenerational trauma, also called transgenerational trauma, is the transmission of psychological wounds from one generation to the next. It’s not just about traumatic events – poverty, war, abuse, addiction or bereavement – but how these experiences were processed, hidden or left unresolved,” says Helen Parker-Drabble, who combines her expertise as a genealogist and counsellor to explore how the past echoes through generations in her series of books Who Do I Think You Were?.
“Trauma passes through families via learnt behaviours, silence, family secrets, and the stories we tell or suppress. Its effects often manifest as unexplained anxiety, emotional distance or attachment difficulties,” she adds.
Bill Oddie has been diagnosed with clinical depression, thought to be linked to the absence of his mother, Lillian, when he was growing up. “This isn’t curiosity, this journey, it’s self-help,” he said at the start of his episode. He discovered that Lillian had manic depression, triggered by the tragic loss of two babies, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital – on one occasion, Bill saw her being forcibly returned there. This knowledge allowed him to begin coming to terms with his mother’s absence. “She was immensely unlucky in things that happened to her,” he concluded, adding that he wished he could have done more to help her.
The concept of intergenerational trauma was pioneered in the 1960s by psychiatrist Dr Vivian Rakoff of the University of Toronto. In 1966, he began to investigate the high incidence of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) observed in the children of Holocaust survivors visiting Canadian clinics. It was thought that they were dealing with trauma that they’d never experienced – that of their parents. It was a radical idea: that along with hair and eye colour, you could inherit trauma.
Hundreds of similar studies have been carried out since, noting intergenerational trauma among the descendants of African-American enslaved peoples, war and genocide survivors, refugees and many other groups who have suffered collective trauma. While it’s hard to make generalisations from the results, it’s been theorised that resilience can also be passed down to offspring. This is thought to be governed by the sufferer’s reaction to the original trauma.
WDYTYA? has tackled several stories featuring mass-traumatic events from slavery to the Holocaust, and the celebrities involved have generally had very powerful reactions to the revelations about their family’s past.
“I have lived most of my life in a high-anxiety state and so I want to know where that came from,” said actor, comedian and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax at the outset of her episode of WDYTYA? from 2017.
She was extremely moved to discover what her parents endured during the Holocaust: her father had kept the truth about his incarceration by the Nazis from her, and family members died in concentration camps. She started to understand her mother’s mental health struggles. Ruby also uncovered two great grandmothers and a great aunt who spent time in psychiatric hospitals.
Following on from the studies around intergenerational trauma, researchers began to investigate whether biological changes might be part of the mechanism, a theory called ‘epigenetics’.
Simply put, this idea suggests that trauma and resulting behaviour and environment can alter the way that genes are expressed (although not the genes themselves). Helen says, “Epigenetics offers compelling insights into how trauma and resilience might pass biologically across generations – not just through learnt behaviours. Growing evidence shows trauma can leave chemical marks on genes, affecting their expression in descendants. Research into Holocaust survivors has found stress-related epigenetic changes in subsequent generations.”
But trauma transmission is not down to biology alone.
“Family narratives, socio-economic factors, and culture are equally powerful,” she says. “Most hopefully, supportive experiences can create positive epigenetic changes, allowing families to ‘rewrite’ inherited scripts.”
So how can family history help to heal intergenerational trauma? On a very simple level, it can help heal hurts by witnessing or reframing past traumas, whether big or small.
Victoria Boyd, a writer from New Zealand whose parents emigrated from England in the 1970s, always had a sense of “disconnect, which came from having no knowledge of my history. I knew I must be part of a larger story, but didn’t know what that story was.” Her mother, Janet, and grandfather had both grown up knowing no extended family due to a rift between the wife of her great grandfather, William James Steer, and his siblings.
Researching online, Victoria came across a message from Graham Steer wanting to connect with descendants of William. His grandfather George was William’s brother. Victoria visited England where she met Graham and her extended relations for the first time. She discovered William had 11 siblings, and had been much missed. She’s still in close contact with her English family. “Through Graham, and his efforts to connect us with other Steer family, we have changed the story for our generation,” she explains.
“By breaking silences and surfacing hidden stories,” adds Helen, “we name wounds passed down through generations. Understanding our ancestors’ struggles and resilience helps separate inherited pain from personal identity, creating new meaning and sometimes release.”
To tackle such issues, Helen encourages those with adequate emotional support to research family stories with an open mind, noting both wounds and strengths; apply psychological frameworks to interpret family patterns; share these stories in safe, supportive contexts to develop self-compassion; and recognise that healing is also intergenerational – “breaking silence, reframing pain, and consciously transmitting hope and resilience”.
Celia Heritage, a professional genealogist who has also trained as a therapist, takes a slightly different approach. She runs a programme called Reframing Roots, which helps people re-evaluate events and behaviours in their family past that may be affecting them in a negative way (traumas), as well as looking at the positive inheritances they have received too.
“As I began working with my therapy clients, I soon noticed that with a significant number, our work came round to me asking them about their family history. Doing this in addition to sharing psychological insights gave these clients a new understanding of their own negative feelings and their origin.”
She continues, “Even this simple understanding shifted blocks, as they saw their parents’ behaviour in context. I realised that, of course, this had a knock-on effect – each generation in turn had been affected by the life experiences and behaviours of the previous generations, producing a cascading effect through descending generations.
“As I dug deeper into extending the concept over an increased number of generations, I noted key themes and events that often caused inherited emotional mindsets, such as premature bereavement, illegitimacy and poverty – or simply the threat of poverty.”
There’s still much to be discovered about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics, but one thing is certain: researching your family history is a great way to feel grounded and get to know yourself just a little bit better. As Ruby Wax explained in her episode of WDYTYA?, “You know, I could have saved myself a lot of time and money. Rather than doing therapy, I should have been doing genealogy. Now knowing my ancestors, I understand a lot more about myself.”
