The inheritance of trauma

In the field of psychology and personal growth, we often speak of "inheriting" the fears, failures, or blockages of our ancestors. For a long time, the idea that a trauma experienced by our grandfather could affect our ability to attract abundance or our current anxiety seemed like a therapeutic metaphor or a simple spiritual belief.

However, modern science has spoken, and it has done so with irrefutable data through the field of behavioral epigenetics.

The researcher who forever changed our understanding of transgenerational trauma is Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a renowned expert in neuroscience and trauma epigenetics, and director of the Division of Traumatic Stress Studies at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York.

Her exhaustive scientific research has provided the missing biological link that supports what Family Constellations have been observing phenomenologically for decades in clinical practice.

The discovery: Holocaust survivors

Dr. Yehuda focused much of her initial work on a very specific population that had experienced extreme horrors: the Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Her clinical team discovered something remarkable: the children and grandchildren of these survivors (up to two generations later) presented measurable alterations in their basic biological functions.

Studies showed that these descendants presented:

• Levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) lower than normal
• A heightened sensitivity to stress
• A superior activation of the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for alertness and survival

What was striking about the finding was that these individuals displayed this physiology even though they had never directly experienced the original trauma themselves.

How is it transmitted? The mechanism of DNA methylation

The research of Dr. Yehuda and her colleagues managed to empirically demonstrate that exposure to extreme stress has the astonishing capacity to alter the genetic expression of the individual.

This biological process is known as "DNA methylation". It consists of a cellular mechanism in which a chemical tag (a methyl group) to certain key genes related to stress, which deactivates them or profoundly alters how the body will react to danger in the future.

In short: terror, wars, severe famines, and unresolved grief change the biology of those who suffer them, and those epigenetic imprints or marks are transferred across generations.

We don't inherit the memory, we inherit the alarm

One of the most clarifying concepts put forward by Dr. Yehuda's studies is that human beings do not inherit the "memory" of our ancestors; that is, we are not born with the cognitive image of their suffering. What we inherit is the biological stress-adaptation response they developed in order to survive in that moment.

That physiological configuration was enormously adaptive and useful for the ancestor to survive in a context of war. However, when it is passed on to a descendant living in a peaceful environment today, that same biological response becomes a heavy burden. It manifests as:

• Unexplained anxiety
• Depression
• Visceral fear of financial scarcity
• A feeling of being "blocked"

From the paradigm of Family Constellations, this mimicry of suffering is known as "invisible loyalty".

The good news: epigenetics is reversible

Perhaps the greatest and most hopeful contribution of Dr. Yehuda's research is not only confirming that trauma is biologically inherited, but demonstrating that we can heal it. The expert emphasizes that the existence of a biological accommodation to trauma means that we are neither victims nor unchangeable prisoners of our genes.

Epigenetic marks are not permanent sentences written into our DNA. The development of new experiences that provide emotional security and nervous system regulation tools can actively modify gene expression.

This is where profound consciousness-expanding methods, such as Family Constellations or Biodecoding, shine with great force: by ordering our family system internally, assimilating our history and respectfully returning pain to our ancestors, we are literally helping to change our biology, cutting the chain so as not to pass this suffering on to future generations.