How A Trauma Can Travel the Family Tree
Epigenetics involves the study of “heritable changes” in gene function that do not affect the underlying DNA sequence. “Epigenetic marks change the way genes are expressed.” And those changes can be passed down to offspring. These changes can be brought about by environmental events. The things that happen in our lives can stain our genes, potentially leaving marks on our children. Studies on the children of Holocaust survivors have been fruitful in demonstrating the existence of epigenetic trauma. In one study, maternal age at Holocaust exposure and maternal PTSD “were found to independently influence” stress hormones in their adult children. It is a dark magic that a decades-old trauma can live through the lives of its victims’ children. The trauma becomes an unwelcome ghost, haunting a family, clinging to and multiplying up the branches of the family tree.
A Not-So-Simple Definition of Trauma
A trauma, according to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), is an event involving “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.” Under the definition of PTSD in the DSM, the patient must be exposed to that event through direct personal exposure, witnessing the trauma, “indirect exposure through trauma experience of a family member or other close associate,” or “repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the event.” This tidy definition brings a connotation of concision – a trauma is an event that happened, trapped in temporality, contained in the past. Certainly, the effects of a horrible event can ripple into a person’s life through the symptoms of PTSD. However, the event may also leak into their children’s lives and through generations.
Historical Wounds Living in Today’s Wounds
When someone suffers ongoing traumas, multiple traumas, or lives under conditions that apply ongoing, gnawing stress to their lives, those events can live on through epigenetic changes as well. In thinking of groups in America, including African-Americans and Native Americans, who suffer ongoing oppression and historical, systemically-applied disadvantages, “massive cumulative trauma across generations” dwarfs the DSM definition of trauma. Certainly, sociocultural adaptations to trauma – the nurture – also carry these traumatic wounds down generational lines, but they can also be borne in changes to genes – the nature. It is daunting to confront the power of hundreds of years of mass, ongoing traumas. These histories and events live on in both ongoing inflictions and in the bodies of the children of victims. The concept of epigenetic trauma helps both consumers and providers of mental health services to expand an individual-limited focus to the histories that could be affecting daily lived experience.