You Might Be Carrying Trauma That Isn’t Even Yours
— What generational trauma really is and how to heal from it
Have you ever felt weighed down by something you couldn’t quite name? A persistent low-level anxiety. A deep sense of not being enough. A fear of loss or abandonment that seems disproportionate to your actual life experience?
You’ve done the work. You’ve reflected, journalled, perhaps sat in therapy for years. Your childhood, on the face of it, was fine. So why does this feeling keep showing up?
There’s a possibility that many people never consider: it might not have started with you.
The memories affecting you may not even be yours. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be healed.
What is generational trauma?
Generational trauma — also called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma — is the transmission of the psychological and physiological effects of trauma from one generation to the next. Not through stories told around the dinner table, but through our biology.
Research in the field of epigenetics has shown that traumatic experiences don’t just affect the person who lived through them. They can alter gene expression in ways that are passed down to children, grandchildren, and beyond. The body’s stress response — how it reacts to threat, how it holds fear, how it processes safety — can be shaped by events that happened long before you were born.
Much of the writing on trauma comes from familiar names — and their work is valuable. But one of the voices I've found most compelling recently is Dr. Mariel Buqué, a psychologist whose book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma brought something genuinely fresh to this conversation. Her central idea — that healing one person can shift the entire lineage — is something I've witnessed in my own practice. I'm drawn to these newer voices. The field is evolving and the conversation is getting richer.
THE SCIENCE
Epigenetic research suggests that stress responses shaped by traumatic experiences can be inherited. The higher the adrenaline released during a traumatic event, the stronger the cellular memory — and the more likely it is to be passed on. This is not metaphor. It is biology.
How far back can it go?
Further than most people realise. Some researchers suggest we can carry the imprint of trauma from up to 21 generations back. That’s potentially hundreds of years of unprocessed experiences living in our nervous systems.
Think about what your ancestors lived through. Wars. Famines. Persecution. Devastating loss. Events so catastrophic that no one in the family was ever quite the same again — and yet no one ever spoke of them either, because that’s not what people did.
Those silences didn’t make the trauma disappear. They made it travel.
I’ve worked with many women who came to me confused by the gap between their circumstances and how they felt inside. Successful, loved, objectively safe — and yet quietly drowning. When we went deeper, patterns emerged that clearly didn’t originate with them. One client discovered, after exploring her family history, that a devastating loss several generations back had never been grieved, never been spoken about, and had cast a long shadow through every generation since. Once we identified it and worked with it at the subconscious level, something fundamental shifted.
Not because she relived it. But because her nervous system finally understood it wasn’t hers to carry anymore.
You could have had a perfectly happy childhood and still be carrying something heavy. The source might be further back than you’ve ever thought to look.
How does it actually show up?
Generational trauma rarely announces itself. It tends to live in patterns — the ones that keep repeating no matter how much you try to change them. It might look like:
Confidence issues that feel disproportionate to your actual experiences
A persistent sense of unworthiness or not belonging
Anxiety, depression, or chronic stress with no clear origin
Relationship patterns that repeat across generations in your family
Physical symptoms or health conditions without a clear cause
Addictive behaviours or coping mechanisms that seem to ‘run in the family’
A deep fear of loss, abandonment, or danger that lives in your body
In my practice, almost every client I work with has been significantly impacted by familial and relational patterns passed down from parents, grandparents, and beyond. Often they come in thinking the issue is about them — their personality, their weakness, their failure to ‘just get over it’. What we discover together is that it was never really about them at all.
That realisation alone can be profoundly releasing.
Why being trauma-informed matters
This is why the way we work with people matters as much as the tools we use.
A trauma-informed approach means understanding that what presents on the surface — low confidence, anxiety, self-sabotage, physical symptoms — is often the echo of something much older and deeper. It means never pushing someone to relive pain unnecessarily. It means creating genuine safety before any exploration begins. And it means holding space for the possibility that the pattern didn’t start with this person — and doesn’t have to end with them either.
When we work without this awareness, we risk treating symptoms without ever touching the source. We might help someone manage their anxiety without ever understanding why their nervous system learned to respond that way in the first place.
With a trauma-informed lens, we can go deeper — gently, safely, and in a way that creates real and lasting change rather than temporary relief.
TRAUMA-INFORMED WORK MEANS
Understanding that current patterns often have older roots. Never requiring someone to relive pain. Creating safety as the foundation for every session. Honouring the wisdom of the nervous system — even when its responses feel irrational.
The tools we use — and why they work
Because generational trauma lives in the subconscious and the body — not just in conscious thought — it requires tools that can work at that level.
RTT Hypnotherapy communicates directly with the subconscious mind, bypassing the critical, analytical thinking that keeps us stuck in familiar patterns. In a deeply relaxed state, we can access the beliefs and emotional imprints that are quietly running the show — including those inherited from previous generations — and begin to update them at the source.
Trauma-informed coaching works alongside the hypnotherapy to help you understand and reframe the patterns you’ve identified, build new ways of responding, and integrate the changes into your everyday life.
Nervous system regulation is woven throughout our work, because generational trauma doesn’t just live in the mind — it lives in the body’s stress responses. Learning to regulate the nervous system helps move you out of survival mode and into genuine safety, often for the first time.
Cell Command Therapy is a particularly powerful tool when working with generational patterns, especially where they’ve manifested as physical symptoms, health conditions, or unexplained ailments. This approach works with the intelligence of the body at a cellular level, sending new, healing instructions to replace the old stress-encoded ones. When trauma has been held in the body across generations, Cell Command Therapy can help alleviate the physical expression of it in ways that purely cognitive approaches often cannot reach.
Together, these tools allow us to work with the whole person — mind, body, and the deeper inherited blueprint — rather than just the surface symptoms.
This is where the cycle actually breaks
Here is what I find genuinely moving about this work: when you heal something that has been passed down through your lineage, you are not just healing yourself. You are changing what gets passed forward.
The pattern that affected your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your mother, and you — it doesn’t have to reach your children. Or the generations after them.
That’s not an abstract idea. It’s something I have watched happen, in session after session, with women who came in feeling inexplicably unsettled and left understanding that this was was out of their control. They were simply carrying something that was never theirs to carry.
And once you put it down, everything changes.
Healing yourself is the most profound gift you can give to the generations that come after you.
Where to start
If any of this resonates — if you’ve felt the weight of something you couldn’t explain, or recognised patterns in yourself that seem to echo through your family — it’s worth exploring.
The first step is simply a conversation. A free discovery call where we can talk about what’s been showing up for you, explore whether there’s a generational thread worth following, and discuss what working together might look like.
This work is gentle. It doesn’t require you to relive anything. It doesn’t ask you to spend years excavating the past. It asks only that you’re open to the possibility that some of what you’ve been carrying might be ready to be put down.
You don’t have to keep living as the echo of someone else’s story.
Ready to explore this?
Book a free discovery call with me. We’ll talk about what’s been showing up for you and whether this work could help.
Start a conversation here
I’m Maria — a Clinical RTT Hypnotherapist and Confidence Coach working online with professional women worldwide. I combine Rapid Transformational Therapy with trauma-informed coaching and nervous system regulation, going directly to the subconscious root of self-doubt, anxiety and the patterns that keep brilliant women stuck.
If something in this post resonated, a first call is a relaxed, no-obligation conversation about where you are and whether this work is the right fit.
