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A review published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health analyzed eight studies that followed survivors of both cultural trauma (such as discrimination) and war and their children, finding that both groups faced negative psychiatric, psychosocial, and behavioral effects.
Psychiatric, Psychosocial, and Behavioral Effects
While the effects of intergenerational trauma may vary depending on what your family may have experienced and the individuals involved, the APA points to these symptoms:
- Shame
- Increased anxiety and guilt
- A heightened sense of vulnerability and helplessness
- Low self-esteem
- Depression and anxiety
- Substance abuse
- Dissociation
- Hypervigilance
- Intrusive thoughts
- Difficulty with relationships and attachment to others
- Difficulty in regulating aggression
- Extreme reactivity to stress
These symptoms have been identified in many cultures and people who have faced trauma.
When Danieli and her team studied adult children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, they found that 35 percent had generalized anxiety disorder, 26 percent had a major depressive episode, and 14 percent had PTSD, according to the paper they published in 2017 in the journal Psychological Trauma.
Amy Bombay, PhD, an associate professor at Dalhousie University’s department of psychiatry in Halifax, Nova Scotia, researches the impact of the Indian residential school (IRS) system in Canada from the 1880s to the 1990s, where Aboriginal children were forced from their homes to live in boarding schools for assimilation. Neglect and abuse were common.
Her work has shown that the children — and grandchildren — of those who attended the schools were more likely to report higher levels of psychological distress, symptoms like depression and anxiety, learning difficulties in school, and communicable diseases (like hepatitis C) linked to drug use than control group participants whose parents did not attend these schools.
“Children of residential school survivors report higher levels of childhood adversity growing up — a kind of race-related stressor this next generation reports in their own lives. This is pretty consistent across our research and other people who have done similar analyses,” Dr. Bombay says.
Another study that looked at three generations of Ukrainian families — those who had lived through mass starvation in the country in the 1930s, their children, and their grandchildren — found a lingering effect among the generations. Across the trio of generations, participants reported anxiety and shame, food hoarding, overeating, and low trust in authority figures — habits and sentiments the researchers say each generation learned from their predecessors who lived through harsh times firsthand.
Other Physical Effects and Disease
Maria Espinola, PsyD, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, says trauma from sexual abuse can cross generations, impacting the children of mothers who were victims.
She points to findings from a 23-year longitudinal study that followed girls ages 6 to 16 years old who faced sexual abuse. Researchers found that sexually abused women experienced earlier onset of puberty; higher rates of obesity; more major illnesses that needed healthcare; depression; dissociative symptoms; higher incidence of dropping out of high school; more self-harm; more drug and alcohol abuse; more domestic violence; and more instances of teen motherhood. Their kids were at an increased risk of these outcomes, too.
“If you’re a child growing up in a home with abuse, you may start to isolate yourself. You’re not paying attention at school, so you’re more likely to drop out. Your self-esteem is damaged and the trauma keeps growing as you get older,” Dr. Espinola says. Those who continue along this trajectory often experience poverty, substance abuse, or unhealthy relationships in adulthood — and subsequently expose children to the same traumas that led to these more problematic outcomes in the first place, continuing the intergenerational trauma cycle.
Espinola notes that the cycle doesn’t necessarily automatically continue. It depends in large part on how families address the initial trauma, what community resources are available to help parents and their children, and how parents respond to their own trauma and, in turn, raise their children.
Relationships and Bonding
A small study published in Psychology of Violence in 2018 looked at 123 African-American students and the multigenerational impact of their history, including ongoing racism they felt, and found that participants reported high rates of discrimination, feelings of alienation, perceiving others as dangerous, and overall worries about the future.
Crawford says trauma can also affect families via:
- Disconnection and detachment
- Trauma bonding, or an emotional connection between an abuser and their target
- Neglect or normalizing unhealthy family dynamics, such as poor communication or violence
“Someone who has experienced significant trauma may not be fully present for their child to be able to provide the emotional support and safety that’s so needed for kids to navigate the complexities of the world. And so these learned behaviors keep getting passed down,” she says.
How parents grapple with their trauma — from overprotectiveness, to silence or being distant at the dinner table — has a crucial role, but genetics may be at play too.
A review in World Psychiatry in 2018 suggested that children are exposed to parental trauma even before they’re born — in utero and through DNA modifications.
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