Should trans-generational trauma be a sub-topic under "cPTSD Causes"?

[Slackjaw99]

I've noticed this topic getting more attention in the therapeutic community lately. While I can relate to the categories of neglect, emotional abuse, and perpetrator mental illness as describing the actions of my own parents. Seeing those causes in a vacuum caused my to view my parents with contempt and hatred to the point of estrangement for a couple decades. It was a level of hate that had to have taken a toll on my physical health.

Once I became "trauma informed", I did a deep dive into my family history, as well as learning all I could about DTD (developmental trauma disorder). Turns out my great grandmother emigrated to this country from Russia where her family was subject to sadistic pogroms which must have traumatized her. I don't know what my great grandmother's relationship with my grandmother was like, but I know my grandmother appeared to be extremely narcissistic and hysterical, and my mother was completely shut down emotionally. My mother told me she spent something like 4 years on a psychoanalyst's couch in the early 60s, and she still has severe anxiety. I have no doubt that my mother was traumatized by my grandmother.

From what I understand about early childhood development, our brains are still developing after birth- especially in regard to programming the brain's social structures and developing emotional/autonomic regulation. The difference between autism and cPTSD is that autistic kids have a "hardware" problem (malformed or missing social neurons) and cPTSD is a "software" problem where the neurons are there but programmed incorrectly. For normal social development to take place the mother must be attuned to her child. The child cries to indicate it's hungry, tired, itchy from poop, or scared, and the mother soothes her child and meets its needs. This is how secure attachment and self-esteem develop. From a position of secure attachment, a child eventually begins to explore farther and farther on her own. When the child is old enough, the mother takes the child to the playground sandbox to play with the other toddlers. She teaches the child how to share and how to recognize the emotions of other children.

But a traumatized mother has problems performing these basic caregiver activities resulting in DTD and later, cPTSD in the child. A child cries, and the traumatized mother recoils.  I can now see how this dynamic has played out in my maternal ancestry going back 4 generations. It has allowed me to replace my toxic, parental hatred with grace and love and ultimately, I believe, is helping me to find healing. I've even been able to grieve for my mother. Had I not found this knowledge, I'd still be telling others that my parents were two of the most narcissistic assh*les on earth.

The posts I've read here on OOTS make me suspect that trans-generational trauma is major contributing factor to many here with cPTSD as the descriptions of parents who were "narcissistic", addicted, or victims of mental illness themselves are plenty. But those things don't just happen in a vacuum. Trauma is usually a contributing factor. I'd imagine that it's exceedingly rare to find the truly evil parent that hates and abuses their child for no reason other than entertainment.

I believe the trans-generational trauma in my family has been passed down via entirely environmental factors, but there are researchers such as Rachel Yehuda who believe epigenetics (gene expression) plays a factor based on some small studies of children of holocaust survivors. Regardless of specifics though, I think trans-generational trauma causing cPTSD is a topic worthy of more discussion on OOTS. WDYT?

[DecimalRocket]

Interesting you talk about intergenerational trauma. My grandfather on my mother's side abandoned my mom as a child, and I wonder if I ever met him if he had some kind of trauma as well.  I also learned how she had to live in poverty, and how to survive. I also became a lot more patient with what happened after knowing this.

My dad on the other hand refuses to communicate his past at all. Oh well then. My grandma on his side seems to have too much high standards still. I remember in her time our country got temporarily invaded during World War II. Wonder if something happened?

I'm autistic, and it comes to me as strange as how you defined the difference. The mirror neurons theory (Mirror neurons are what fires in the brain when it imitates someone else's emotions or actions) with the theory that it's caused by having faulty connections in the brain. According to Dr. Temple Graindin, It seems these brains are made to be more specialized in a single or few areas, rather than connected in a way for normal social intelligence.

Hardware is software, Slackjaw. I see the difference more as autism is genetic, and Cptsd as environmental. I can reprogram my own brain "software" somewhat  with interventions even if I was born this way, but it won't come naturally. Autism makes socializing harder from lack of intellectual understanding about people, while Cptsd makes socializing harder from lack of emotional trust with people. 

I thought gene expression was different from epigenetics. Expressed genes as in what is physically seen are called phenotype. Epigentics is how genes can express themselves differently as caused by environmental changes not seen in birth. It's certainly possible that trauma can affect it though now that I think about it.

[ah]

This is a really interesting topic.

As far as I'm aware, our brain not only continues to evolve after birth but keeps growing till we're about 20, and then new synapses and connections keep being formed in the brain till the moment of our death. Epigenetics surely play into it too but we don't know enough yet to really see all of it too clearly. But what we do know more about is what abuse results in. We see it in our own lives. I think that's another question to consider.

Broken and hurt as we may be, we can and should be held accountable to our behavior if it becomes dangerous. I feel there's a line between aggression and violence. Aggression is universal, it's human, we're all aggressive here and there. It's nothing unusual. We have conflicts 'etc. But real violence is a different story. When a person abuses others - whether they're in pain or less pain - this is where I feel very little sympathy for them till they either stop what they're doing or are stopped by others.

When I think of abusers as individuals, I have very little doubt they were abused themselves. If I go back to what it must have been like for them as kids, it hurts. But when I look at the results of their actions now as adults, and how they seem to either not want to stop or be unable to stop abusing others, that's where my patience ends.

Maybe seeing a person's pain and helping them - and stopping them from doing harm - are two different, separate issues. I know my FOO were abused themselves. I have no doubt their attachment to their caregivers in childhood was unsafe and erratic and had a negative influence on them. But that was decades earlier, back when they were helpless. Now they're adults who consistently behave like monsters to those who are weaker than they are. If I could I would hold them accountable. That's immoral and disgusting, even if it isn't all illegal yet because of society's blindness when it comes to different types of abuse.

For me, estrangement from FOO has been my first real act of kindness to me and them too, it was better for everyone. Staying in touch meant I'd keep perpetuating the abuse. Stepping away meant I was saying "No, enough." to violence. If I had stayed that'd be self hatred at its worst. And hatred for them too, because it'd mean I let them continue to be abusive. If they're broken and hurt, that isn't a kind thing to do to them at all.

I know my F was abused, and I also know without a shadow of a doubt that he is the most evil, sadistic, dangerous psychopath I ever met. The two are compatible. It's so terribly sad, but I wonder: why would having been abused mean a person couldn't also be narcissistic or even psychopathic?
My F was abused, he's a sadistic psychopath, and he also has brown eyes, a certain IQ and other characteristics.

If my F ever wanted help I'd offer it and never stop helping him, but since all he wants is to abuse and torment and break me, I'm forced to conclude that yes, he's a dangerous predator. Maybe "Narcissist" is one label that can help people to understand what's happening to them and protect themselves better. I see it as a good, healthy thing. Seeing the big picture shouldn't blind us and keep us from also seeing the specifics, or else we'll easily keep getting abused over and over again.

Calling violent people by their true name doesn't make us violent like them, it can be done with compassion. But it's still the truth.

[Dee]

I agree totally with Ah.  I know a little of my father's history, it isn't pretty, but also isn't an excuse.  My T tells me almost every session that he was sick or she will say ill.  She also says that isn't an excuse for his behavior.  He was capable of knowing right from wrong and he should of sought help.  She also says abuse runs rampant in families and commends me on protecting my kids.

[Blueberry]

I'm no expert and I'm writing this with Blueberry hat (not Mod hat), but I thought there's a distinction made between traumatic experiences passed down through the generations (in the form of abuse and neglect) till somebody like us is willing to look at it and start changing AND when a whole segment of the population is traumatised due to oppression, concentration camps, genocide etc. I think I've read somewhere about survivors of Auschwitz not telling their children what they endured for decades (because the survivors didn't want to talk or even think about) but some of these children still developed symptoms that made them seem like second generation Holocaust survivors.

So sometimes people ask "Why can't a whole people / ethnic group get their act together and move into the 21st century or stop their dysfunctional lifestyles??" One possible reason is that the people as a whole is traumatised (e.g. First Nations in Canada, descendants of slaves in the USA, Roma and Sinti in Europe etc etc) and the people as a whole needs to heal. That's the theory. I don't want to offend anybody. There obviously are members of these groups who 'function' already in our societies and don't need healing, but there are a great many who say themselves that their groups need to heal.

I'd say that's different from CSA / CPA / emotional abuse taking place in individual families. One theory is even that when your whole group is injured, it's less traumatising. 'Everybody' was displaced by the war is less personal than 'I was displaced in my childhood because my parents were messed up and nobody wanted me'.  (Just examples.)

[DecimalRocket]

That's actually a good point Blueberry, and hey, non-experts can give good points sometimes too. It sounds like you've found the boundaries issue in problem solving.

In researching issues in society, people often look at the causes of it in history. How it first emerged and how it evolved to this point. It's not uncommon for researchers to go back even a 100 years to see a problem's cause. The thing is to ask is . . . how far back do you go? Technically, you can go back with what caused this and that over and over.

You can say the cause of how a school was created somewhere based on the founder's idea and support. But in another perspective, it might be a good idea to go all the way back to when the first school was put up in the country as a cause. *, you might count in how human beings exist in the first place for this school to be put up, but it won't be essential.

So what counts as essential? Considering our goal is to find a way to heal CPTSD, what would be essential is whatever allows us to heal.

There are some potential pros and cons of this perspective. One, it could allow us to understand our abusers, and in turn understand ourselves. Though, it won't have the same amount of understanding as what we have in our present directly.

For example, different intergenerational trauma can have different effects on present day trauma victims on average. How they responded may affect us differently too. It may also allow us to choose how we might perceive them, or how we might act on what they're doing.

The thing is that practically many abusers won't admit to what happened in their past. Only reformed abusers can be asked about it, and that leaves a certain lack of information in this. Unless there's another way to figure it out, like asking people who were close to the abusers in the past. Personality/psychiatric disorders may already be enough in understanding abusers and are more direct. Though, trying to understand their past indiviually can help too.

Another is that when seeing the cycle of problems as a whole can allow us too see how grave the problem is, and act on it. Especially with how it could affect others in the future. That, or it could cause more hopelessness.

[ah]

Blueberry,

Not sure if this adds much but I was recently reading about 2nd and now there are apparently also 3rd generation holocaust survivors. Grandchildren of people who were there and did their best to just put the past behind them and get back to life.
As far as I know no real help was offered to them in terms of therapy, so there's social trauma that is for sure acknowledged but unchanged and untreated.

And yeah, group trauma definitely seems to get far more acceptance and less shaming. I guess there's strength in numbers..? Sure there's gaslighting, and smear campaigns, but there's also evidence to the contrary. Holocaust deniers can be socially marginalized, but try to out an abusive individual all by yourself with no social context and you'll get far harsher responses - you'll easily be the one who's marginalized. That's been my experience too.

[Blueberry]

I think my own post got a bit convoluted eventually  but one important point for me is the distinction between transgenerational trauma as collective trauma and as individual trauma. I'm sure many of us were traumatised in-family through transgenerational trauma but for me there is always the danger of the abuser being excused. "S/he had a bad childhood etc."  There are members on here who had a bad childhood too (putting it mildly) but didn't pass on the terrible amount of abuse done to them to their own children. So there is a choice. I'm not talking about me btw because I don't have children.

There is also the choice of getting help if you can't seem to stop hurting other people. That's what most of our family abusers don't seem to understand. One GM of mine was traumatised medically as a small child. Not that anybody in FOO called it that but I heard enough stories to recognise that that was the case. The way she went on to treat her daughter, my M, was that a direct result? Partial result? Idk but M was excused by my enabler F and B1 "because look at her childhood, look at her M" at least as far as I suffered under M. F and B1 weren't quite so unconcerned and forgiving as far as their own suffering went. So that's just the usual dysfunctional family crap as far as I'm concerned. Find some scapegoat and bury your head in the sand.

I don't know enough about collective trauma, I especially don't really know about it personally. An IL of mine says it is in her family and she is 3rd generation. It affects her, I know her sister even dissociates in particular circumstances but I don't think they feel they were abused or anything like that. More that their parents had particular irrational fears. Though of course how exactly collective trauma affects the current and subsequent generations will vary widely, and also depend on whether those affected manage to leave the setting or escape to a different context where they 1) are no longer surrounded by others equally traumatised and 2) can get help

I don't know, we Mods haven't yet discussed adding transgenerational trauma as a sub-topic. I know we're trying not to add more and more (sub-) topics in general, though there may be reasons to do so sometimes.  Here we will probably wait to see where this discussion goes and whether there seems to be an actual need for more people.

Probably the topic of collective trauma would actually fit here http://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=2390.0 (Economic, Social, Political Trauma as a Child). The same section exists on the Adult onset part of the forum too. These sub-topics are not widely used. I'm sure you could just start a thread, Slackjaw or anybody else, rather than a separate topic, and everybody interested would find it.

[artemis23]

I can now see how this dynamic has played out in my maternal ancestry going back 4 generations. It has allowed me to replace my toxic, parental hatred with grace and love and ultimately, I believe, is helping me to find healing. I've even been able to grieve for my mother. Had I not found this knowledge, I'd still be telling others that my parents were two of the most narcissistic assh*les on earth.
...
Trauma is usually a contributing factor. I'd imagine that it's exceedingly rare to find the truly evil parent that hates and abuses their child for no reason other than entertainment.

I think it's wonderful that understanding the legacy of abuse in your family is helping you to heal. Releasing resentment towards people who abused us can be very liberating. Compassion too. Just be careful that it doesn't put you in a position to let them, or anyone else, victimize you again, because they can and will use it to play the victim and as an excuse to perpetuate more harm (I've learned this one the hard way over and over). Both my parents came had abusive parents. So did the abusive people I ended up partnering with, and believe me, they milked it to their benefit to play on my deep sense of empathy and compassion and use it as an excuse for more abuse.

I think it is important to acknowledge they are at fault and responsible for their actions regardless of where or how they developed the PD, after all, not all of us become like them. It's also important to note that NPD can and does arise out of sheer entitlement in a trauma-free home. I can't remember the statistic but it's not all that rare or impossible. Epigenetics do seem to play a role.

From my understanding they aren't abusing out of 'entertainment' anyways, it's a control mechanism in order to carry out their superiority complex as we are a threat to their grandiose identity. It's less entertainment and more about feeling powerful, and they derive 'supply' or pleasure from hurting and toying with us, regardless of if they were also traumatized as children or not. Apparently, they cannot live without this narcissistic supply which comes from any positive or negative attention or reaction they are able to glean from those around them that contributes to their skewed view of themselves.

I guess when I look at the whole picture, I see that the narcissistic abuse dynamic is reflective of the greater human dominance hierarchy. It is interesting to question whether this is learned behavior or not. There is fascinating research done for decades by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky on baboon tribes in Africa. He studied how this dynamic in baboons contributes to increased stress and disease in the more oppressed or 'abused' baboons (compare this to ACE studies, so many of us suffer from other health conditions as a result of being abused or 'dominated'). What's crazy is that in one tribe, all the alpha and very abusive baboons were killed by tuberculosis-tainted meat, and that tribe turned into a peaceful egalitarian and non-violent type society, where they even taught new baboon members who wandered in from other tribes that abusive behavior is not ok or allowed.

So I probably look waaaay off topic at this point, haha, but what I'm trying to get at is that holding these types accountable for their behavior is how we end it all. Our society does not currently punish them, it condones them, it's a society wide culture of abuse we can see evident in all of our power structures. And I agree that it has been passed down generation after generation. So I think, personally, that the topic of intergenerational trauma is very, very important. But it's important we do not use it to let people who perpetuate violence (In any and all forms) 'off the hook', but more so to hold them accountable. To say this behavior has to end and we don't accept it anymore. The majority of narcissists are untreatable because they are unwilling to change, and if you explore this further, their actual, documented reasoning is that 'they have no incentive to'.

[DecimalRocket]

Oops, I went in too much of a scientific bent there, huh? Hope it was still insightful even if it was birthed from a misunderstanding.  Well, no worries.  Blue, think I get your point about this, and I have a lot to add to it.

Artemis, by the way, I think going off on a tangent makes for good ideas. Seeing connections rather than what's categorized into certain boxes of ideas. That's often how innovation is made, so I'll do the same.

It's interesting. How seeing abusers as "human" makes a difference. I remember an article on Positive News (https://www.positive.news/2016/perspective/23873/how-the-us-election-could-trigger-a-society-of-empathy/)  where a man talked about how he reacted to the election of Trump. He called not for hostile arguments toward extremists, but a call to understand what they're like.

These people aren't just blank faces solely defined by their beliefs, but they're human too. They have different likes and dislikes, family and friends, fears and doubts, hopes and dreams, and anything that makes them so much more than that.  We can't do something about what we can't understand, and by understanding them is what allows for change.

Another article I can't recall the title of had a man who talked to various white supremist extremists. He talked to them casually over time, and many of them changed eventually.

In the book, "The Mind Club", it discussed how hate breeds in warzones. Many captives and prisoners were labeled with numbers instead of names, so instead of a face on them, it just seems they were part of the "other" in the us vs them.

Not to say that we shouldn't make them responsible for their actions. Not to say that many of them can never change. Not to say that their effects on others are horrible. But even if they never change, it can allow us to make a certain amount of peace with that understanding.

I remember in a horror story I listened to on Mr. Betty Krueger's Youtube channel where two cops try to survive in a crime infested town. One cop's brother became a murderer, and she despaired whether she could have walked or will walk the same path. In the right circumstances, we could have been that way, and there's always a certain side to us that are darker that we're strong enough to resist.

When we understand that side of us without giving into it. . . I wonder if that means we'll understand people who do give into it.

In the story, she said that it was only evil that could defeat evil.

I wonder what that means.










Well, see you.

[artemis23]

DecimalRocket,

I totally agree, they are just human. The longer I viewed my abuser/s as these evil monsters the more power they had over me. The more I accept they are super sick and flawed humans, the less of a grip they have. In fact, malignant narcissists want to be see as monsters to keep us terrified (I realized this in an article by self proclaimed sociopath HG Tudor on his site, TW if you've never been there, but it's helped me understand them from the inside), they want to make themselves as big as possible so we stay feeling small and helpless. I kind of think it's actually most of the game. 

[Rainagain]

Very interesting thread.

Makes me wonder if my family tree could have given me a predisposition for cptsd through epigenetics or gene switching, plenty enough there to do it in my family if there is a mechanism.

When you consider how many million ancestors we all have everyone would have trauma related genes switched on I guess, hard to know.

Think of the baby boomers after WW2, many parents would have been traumatised, my grandparents certainly were.

I've read that not everyone gets PTSD after a trauma, think there is something more inevitable about cptsd though as its harder for me to imagine anyone not becoming damaged over time.

[Andyman73]

I don't know about the science stuff here, that's all beyond me. I have heard of some developing ptsd symptoms, while having never been traumatized, because one of their parents had it.

I lived in fear, and not a healthy kind of fear, I think, of my parents, growing up. Even after the cpa stopped. Which was almost the exact time that corporal punishment was stopped in public schools in the U.S. Come to think of it, I received corporal punishment at school once or twice AFTER it had stopped at home.  But I knew it could come right back in a blink of an eye...just like the excessive cpa  that so loosley resembled corporal punsihment. So...was always afraid.

I did find out, in the past year, that not only are my f and m survivors of DV childhoods, their f and m are as well.  So, I'm at least a 3rd generation DV survivor, to which I did not pass on to my own children, at least not through my own actions. My soon to be ex-wife...that's another matter entirely. She didn't do much to the kids, but they witnesses plenty of what she did to me.
I also learned that I am a 5th generation Veteran of Military service, as well, through my f family bloodline.

Brain getting fuzzy now...gonna stop