Breaking the Cycle: Understanding Generational Trauma and Attachment Wounds

In families across cultures and continents, patterns often repeat themselves, whether it's how emotions are expressed, how conflict is handled, or how love and trust are experienced. These patterns can be supportive and empowering, or they can be painful and deeply damaging. One of the most complex and often invisible forces behind these cycles is generational trauma.

What Is Generational Trauma?

Generational trauma refers to the transmission of unresolved emotional wounds, behaviors, and beliefs from one generation to the next. It doesn’t require that each generation experience the original traumatic event. Instead, trauma is passed through storytelling, parenting behaviors, family dynamics, and sometimes even biology.

This kind of trauma can originate from:

• War or genocide
  
  
• Forced displacement or immigration stress
  
  
• Systemic racism or oppression
  
  
• Physical and/or emotional abuse or neglect
  
  
• Addiction and mental illness in the family
  
  

Over time, these unhealed wounds can shape family systems, parenting styles, and emotional availability, often without conscious awareness.

Attachment and Emotional Inheritance

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth and others, highlights how early caregiver relationships lay the foundation for a child's sense of safety, worth, and connection. Children rely on their caregivers not just for physical survival but also for emotional regulation and social learning.

When a caregiver is burdened by unprocessed trauma, they may be emotionally unavailable, unpredictably responsive, or even frightening to the child. These disruptions can result in insecure attachment styles, such as:

• Anxious attachment: Hypervigilance to abandonment, clinging, or emotional overwhelm.
• Avoidant attachment: Emotional distancing, self-reliance, and difficulty with intimacy.
  
  
• Disorganized attachment: Fear-based confusion, often resulting from caregivers who are both a source of comfort and fear.
  
  

Children learn to adapt to these attachment patterns for survival, but those adaptations can become internalized and persist into adulthood, manifesting as difficulty trusting others, chronic self-doubt, emotional dysregulation, or unstable relationships.

How Trauma Is Passed Down

Generational trauma doesn’t just live in stories or family dynamics, it can live in bodies. Researchers in the field of epigenetics have found that trauma can affect how genes are expressed, meaning the biological stress responses of one generation can impact the next.

But more commonly, trauma is transmitted through learned behaviors, unspoken rules, emotional suppression, or overt repetition of abusive patterns. For example:

• A parent who was never emotionally soothed as a child may struggle to soothe their own child.
• A family that learned to survive by avoiding vulnerability may pass down a legacy of emotional silence.
• Substance use or mental health issues might become normalized, rather than seen as symptoms of deeper wounds.
  
  

Healing and Breaking the Cycle

The good news is that the cycle can be broken. Healing generational trauma involves both individual and relational work. Some essential elements of this process include:

• Self-awareness: Recognizing patterns without blame is the first step. This might include journaling, therapy, or exploring family histories.
  
  
• Therapeutic support: Trauma-informed modalities such as Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic therapy, and attachment-based approaches can help reprocess trauma at its root.
  
  
• Secure relationships: Safe, consistent, and affirming relationships, whether with a therapist, partner, or community, can help rewire the nervous system and build a new experience of trust and connection.
  
  
• Boundary setting and reparenting: Learning to meet one’s own emotional needs and create new, healthier boundaries is essential to prevent the unconscious repetition of harmful dynamics.
  
  

Rewriting the Legacy

Healing generational trauma is not about blaming past generations. It’s about compassionately understanding how pain can be inherited and choosing to do the work so it stops with you. You are not broken; you are shaped by what you've lived through. And with support and intention, those shapes can change.

You are not doomed to repeat the past. You are capable of transforming it.

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About the Auuthor

Katie Coon, BSN, RN
Clinic Manager & Lead Nurse – San Antonio

Katie Coon is the lead nurse and clinic manager at Transcend Health Solutions’ San Antonio location. With over five years of trauma critical care experience at a Level I trauma center, she brings deep expertise in patient safety and crisis care. After the pandemic, Katie transitioned into mental health nursing to support healing on a deeper level. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree to become a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. Outside of work, she enjoys time with her family, traveling, and enjoying her "silly little hobbies".

References

• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
  
• Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Desarnaud, F., et al. (2016). Epigenetic mechanisms in transgenerational transmission of trauma. Biological Psychiatry, 79(1), 42–47.
  
• Yehuda, R., & Bierer, L. M. (2009). The relevance of epigenetics to PTSD: Implications for the DSM-V. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22(5), 427–434.
• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.