What Is Generational Trauma? Definition, Examples, and Effects

Generational trauma affects a generation’s worldview, mental health, and overall well-being, starting with something that happened to the parents. Their children, and their children’s children, can carry the effects of trauma despite not living through it. 

Generational trauma can be passed down through learned behaviors, parenting styles, and can influence children’s genetics, predisposing them to mental and physical health challenges. 

What Causes Generational Trauma?

Generational trauma is caused by a parent, or both parents, experiencing trauma¹ and transmitting it to their children. The parents can be part of a collective group, like Holocaust survivors, or singular survivors of a traumatic event like childhood abuse, disasters, or rape. 

Children with generational trauma don’t experience the trauma directly. Instead, the effects of it pass down from their parents and can leave their children with symptoms and worldviews as if they did directly experience it. Without treatment, generational trauma can pass down through multiple generations.

Examples of Generational Trauma

Generational trauma can affect entire groups and races. For example, Indigenous and minority communities still feel the effects of racism, brutality, and segregation. Survivors of war and Holocaust survivors similarly experience collective generational trauma. 

Since generational traumas often impact a group’s culture and way of life, newer generations may collectively seek out more information about their history and the traumas affecting them in the present day. Some groups and races may not be comfortable with that yet, but many are. Here are a few examples of generational trauma in specific groups/races/communities.

Indigenous Communities

Residential schools in America and Canada housed Indigenous children in an attempt to disseminate their culture, impose religion², and ultimately force Indigenous children to adopt a Western culture. Malnutrition, racism, violence, genocide, and abuse in and out of residential schools imposed trauma that’s extended over generations.

Indigenous communities bear generational trauma as a collective group, with singular instances of trauma in each unique family and community. Children and grandchildren of those who were in residential schools and victims of colonization can feel the effects of their trauma despite not having gone through it themselves.

Asian Communities

Past wars, immigration, imperialism, and racism can all cause generational trauma in Asian families and their community as a whole. Many Asian Americans also bear the “model minority” label³, where generations are continually expected to behave with gratitude towards America and to forget the trauma in their past (and America’s contribution to it). Thus, silence can prevail between generations, which further distributes generational trauma³. 

Black Communities

Slavery, racism, segregation, and violence impacted black communities from the slave trade and continued racism from it. Black families and communities in America share a haunting past of death, brutality, and inhumanity that still carries into the present. As a result, generational trauma can pass through families and affect generation after generation.

African Americans have been segregated and not seen as equals. Racial violence has been hidden and expected to be forgotten. Even in present-day America, issues like these continue to affect new generations and promote further generational trauma. 

Holocaust Survivors

The men, women, and children who survived the Holocaust (1933-1945) can carry the burden of generational trauma. Murder, assault, racism, and genocide impacted Jewish families and left deep scars in their lineage. Survivors experienced unforgettable horrors and developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

The effects of the trauma passed through generations of Jewish families in and outside Europe. The brutality of the Holocaust continues to shake and affect Germany, European countries, and America despite efforts of justice and healing.

Other Genocide Survivors

Several countries and cultural groups within them have experienced genocide. Rwanda, for example, experienced genocide in 1994. Genocide has also happened in Darfur, Bosnia, Herzegovina, China, Ukraine, Armenia, and more. Murder, violence, theft, and rape were often used as weapons. 

Those who survive genocide are often left with emotional scars. Many women and girls, for example, were raped and mutilated. The communities and cultures who survived genocide bear the weight of it and can pass that down in future generations, especially as groups try to rebuild relationships and reestablish harmony.