Silenced secrets of the grandmother in your DNA

There is a weight we don't always know how to name. We feel it in our throat when we want to speak of certain things and the words don't come, or they come out crooked, too small for what they carry. We recognize it in a sadness that appears without visible cause, in a fear that doesn't belong to our personal story — or at least, not to the story we believe is ours.

From my practice as a holistic psychologist and family constellation facilitator, I have accompanied many people who arrive carrying that feeling: something belongs to them but they don't know how. Something aches but they don't know since when. And when we begin to look further back — beyond one's own childhood, beyond the mother, toward the figure of the grandmother— often something lights up. Not with the light of an easy answer, but with the faint, honest light of a question that is finally asked the right way.

What do we inherit from the women who were never allowed to speak?

Silence is also transmission

We tend to think of inheritance as that which is spoken, taught, passed deliberately from hand to hand. But there is another inheritance — less visible, equally powerful — that travels precisely in what was not said. In the topic that was never brought to the table. In the question our grandmother deflected with a glance. In the tears she learned to suppress so early that even she no longer remembered ever having cried.

Dr. Ernesto Lammoglia, in Secretos de Familia. Family Constellations: new solutions to strengthen your life, describes how family secrets do not disappear simply because no one names them — they go underground. They continue operating within the system, shaping behaviors, creating invisible loyalties, generating symptoms that sometimes have no clinical explanation unless the entire family tree is read.

What one generation silences, the next one carries. Not always as memory, but as sensation, as pattern, as a particular way of relating to love or to danger. And when that silence comes from the maternal line — from the women who came before us — the transmission has its own texture: intimate, almost cellular.

The maternal line and its particular memory

There is a current within the studies of memory and lineage that uses the concept of matria —not matriarchy, but matria— to name what is transmitted specifically through the female line: a way of inhabiting the body, a way of surviving, a creative power that passes from mother to daughter, from grandmother to granddaughter, sometimes silently and sometimes through gestures so everyday that it takes us years to recognize them as inheritance. Fi Toledo, in her research on matrilineal lineage, proposes this concept as a way of understanding a transmission that does not depend on explicit power but on feminine presence —and also on feminine absence— within the family fabric.

That transmission does not occur solely on the psychological or cultural level. There is a biological dimension that science has begun to understand, though still with more questions than answers. Mitochondrial DNA —that fragment of genetic material inherited exclusively through the maternal line, from mother to all children without exception— is one of the few places where female inheritance becomes literal, traceable, inscribed in the body.

I have no intention of reducing emotional memory to genetics. That would be an oversimplification that would do a disservice to the complexity of what it means to be human. But I do find it significant that the body itself keeps a direct line to every woman who came before. That at some level —microscopic, silent— your grandmother's grandmother also lives within you.

«Psychological disorders have origins that are sometimes not explained by individual history alone, but from a multigenerational perspective.»

— Trauma, Attachment and Family Constellations

This multigenerational perspective, extensively developed in the field of Family Constellations and psychotraumatology, invites us to broaden our gaze. Not to dissolve personal responsibility —each person remains the author of their own decisions— but to understand where one starts from. Because there is an important difference between choosing from freedom and choosing from an unconscious loyalty to a story that was never yours.

What trauma could not say

Dr. Franz Ruppert, whose work is gathered in Family Constellations. Attachment Theory and Trauma, describes how trauma —especially when left unprocessed— generates what he calls symbiotic entanglements: bonds in which family members fuse emotionally in ways that hinder individuation. A grandmother who lived through a devastating loss and never processed it can, without meaning to, transmit that state of alertness, that rupture in basic trust in the world, to the generations that follow.

It is not her fault. It is, in many ways, a consequence of having lived in times or circumstances where grief had no room, where speaking was dangerous or simply impossible. Many women from previous generations learned to hold things in — hunger, fear, humiliation, the loss of a child — because their context offered no other place to put them. And that containment, which was survival for them, sometimes became a way of being that was passed down as a model: don't feel too much, don't ask for too much, don't speak of what hurts.

In my work with constellations, I have seen time and again how the representative of a grandmother — sometimes a woman who knows nothing of the real story — begins to express emotions that no one has suggested to her, and that nonetheless resonate with a precision that leaves those watching speechless. Something in the field — and here I enter territory that science has yet to fully name, but that systemic practice recognizes — seems to hold information that transcends what is told.

Silvia Mónica Basteiro Tejedor, in her work on the contribution of constellations to the individuation process in psychotherapy —The Contribution of Family Constellations to the Individuation Process in Psychotherapy—, describes how the constellation allows the client to gain distance from the entanglements of the family system in order to, from that distance, recover their own thread. It is not about severing ties with the ancestors, but about ceasing to carry what is not theirs to carry.

Recognizing, not repeating

There is a question that comes up often when someone begins to look at their feminine lineage through this lens: "Does this mean I am condemned to repeat what my grandmother lived?" The answer, in my experience, is no — but with nuance.

Repetition occurs in the darkness, in what is unacknowledged. When we name what we have inherited, when we make room — within ourselves, in the consulting space, in a constellation setting — for the stories that could not be told, something shifts. Not magically, not overnight. But it does shift.

What is named loses its power to operate from the shadows. It does not disappear — a grandmother's pain is not erased because you acknowledge it — but it no longer steers you without your knowing. You can look at it, honor it, and then — with respect, without rushing — choose your own path.

In La Otra Herencia, one of the texts that has accompanied me on this journey, the Bert Hellinger that makes visible the hidden dynamics of the family system through representatives in the s">family constellation precisely as that: a guide that comes from the heart, an attempt to return to each person what belongs to them and release what was carried by mistake or by love. Because many times the heaviest burdens are taken on out of love — to accompany a grandmother in her pain, to not leave her alone in her silence.

The problem is that this love — so real, so legitimate — does not always help. Sometimes it perpetuates. And the task, then, is not to stop loving but to love in a different way: from a place of recognition, of gratitude, of one's own rightful place.

A lineage that also heals

I want to close with something that sometimes gets lost when we talk about generational trauma: grandmothers did not only pass down wounds. They also passed down strength.

The same woman who silenced her pain learned how to survive. The same woman who could not cry in public held an entire family together with her hands. The same woman who kept secrets also kept recipes, songs, ways of healing — wisdoms that carry no academic name but that live on in those who received them.

The matrilineal lineage is not only an archive of wounds. It is also an archive of resilience — a resilience we sometimes fail to recognize as such because it did not come packaged in words, but in gestures, in silences that protected, in loves that did not know how to express themselves yet were given all the same.

Looking at our grandmother with this dual awareness — of what she carried and of what she also held up — is, in my experience, one of the most healing movements a person can make. Not to idealize her or to judge her, but to see her in her full humanity. And in seeing her, to begin to see ourselves with that same complexity, that same compassion.

Because what we inherit is not a destiny. It is a starting point. And from there — with open eyes, with a willing heart — we can write something different.