A conversation with Jungian therapist and rabbi Tirzah Firestone about epigenetics and recovering from trauma

Today I’m delighted to welcome Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone for another information-packed conversation together. (See “Inherited Wounds: Tirzah Firestone on Ancestral Healing” and “Recognizing and Healing Inherited Trauma” for our earlier conversations).

Dr. Firestone is a Jungian analyst, rabbi, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, whose research is on recovery from trauma, including the mechanisms of inherited trauma. In the revised edition of her deeply wise book, Wounds into Wisdom, Dr. Firestone draws on the latest neuroscientific and psychological findings, interweaving them with compelling stories of trauma and healing, to offer readers hope, understanding, healing, and the means to discover how suffering can be transformative.

Dale Kushner: There is a lot of new biology out there that is changing how we think about health, lifespan, trauma, and our genetic inheritance. Your recent book explains this in a way that I found very accessible to non-scientists. Can you give us an overview here?

Tirzah Firestone: There is a lot of fascinating research going on. The last ten years have given us much more insight into the growing field of epigenetics, which studies the impact of life’s stresses on our genes’ activities.

We used to think that our genes were the major determinant of our health, our lifespan, the diseases we would get, etc. Now we know that our genes are incredibly responsive. They answer to the environment in which we live. Depending on our stresses, there are a host of epigenetic mechanisms that turn our genes on or off. Scientists call this gene expression.

So, for example, if you are living through a war, or have lost your home, or a parent dies, or some other traumatic life event is occurring, your genes will adjust to these environmental stresses by means of epigenetic mechanisms that act on (epi means upon or above) the chromosomes. They tell the genes what to do.

Epigenetics draws on clinical studies with mice and rats, demonstrating that stress and struggle can imprint not only on us but upon future generations. For example, early nurturing patterns by the mother, for example, have been shown to pass to grand-pups and great-grand-pups, even when they had never interacted.

In a study from Emory University,[1] mice were exposed to a sweet smell, acetophenone, and then received an electric shock to their feet. Associating the two, whenever the mice smelled the smell, they became fearful and froze. Amazingly, their offspring—even the grandpups who had never met their grandparents or been exposed to the smell or shock—showed panic in the presence of the smell.

These offer evidence for what many of us have been intuiting for a long time, that stresses and traumas experienced by our ancestors influence us, say in our resilience or lack thereof, several generations later.

But epigenetics also speaks to the impact of socio-economic stresses on entire ethnic groups. Moshe Szyf, a very prolific epigeneticist, shows how gene expression differs among those who grow up well-off vs. those who grow up disadvantaged, making the latter group more vulnerable to a host of diseases and shortened life spans.[2]

DK: Your own research is on recovery from trauma. Can you tell us about your study and findings?

TF: My study was on Jewish people from around the world who had gone through extreme traumas such as war, racial and religious discrimination, the loss of a child to terrorism, and such. My focus was on those who were able to go through the many stages of healing and integration and come out transformed by their traumas.

I discovered among all of them strong common denominators. But there is no one formula for trauma healing! Every one of us has a unique trajectory for our healing. My thirty years of experience in the healing field tells me that human beings are intrinsically primed for healing. We get directives from the inside that tell us what we need to do to work through our traumas and come back into full life.

DK:  Can you share with us today the seven principles that emerged from your research? 

TF: Yes, I’d be happy to. These are common denominators that I found in my research subjects who thrived again after their tragedies, having transformed their lives.

1. Facing the loss
   More than anything else, directly facing our losses initiates the process of healing. This first principle means resisting our friends’ well-intentioned urges to get back to work or “get on with life.” We must give ourselves the gift of time and ride the waves of our pain.
   

2. Harnessing our pain
   Once we face our losses, we may encounter intense pain. Because trauma disconnects us from our bodies, there’s a tendency to numb out. The alternative is to re-inhabit our physical selves. Physical exercise and self-care are paramount here. Pain made conscious can turn into fuel.

3. Finding new community
   We may find ourselves changed by our trauma, feeling that there is no going back to how we used to be. Now we have to find people who understand us. Because traumatic experiences often leave us with a sense of shame or isolation, finding authentic connections with people who can hear and hold us compassionately is essential. The people I worked with felt a need to build a new social network, to find other like-minded people.

4. Resisting the call to fear, blame, and dehumanize
   Unprocessed trauma can leave us permanently defensive. The human tendency to “other” people around us is the obvious next step. But that leaves us isolated, self-righteous, and lonely. Those who do the hard work of healing their traumas succeed in melting the walls of separation and resisting hatred for those who hurt them.

5. Disidentifying from victimhood
   One of the main keys to trauma recovery is agency, the inner sense that we are in charge of our own lives, and we can shape their outcome.

6. Redefining specialness
   One of the legacies of trauma can be the feeling that we are different, alone, and separate. But these feelings can flip into their opposites: feeling special, chosen, superior, for what we have gone through. One of the most important takeaways from trauma healing is that human beings are interdependent, that our healing depends on one another.

7. Taking action
   Trauma recovery means facing what has happened directly and deeply mourning our losses. Then—and for each person there is their own internal timing—some kind of work or meaningful action in the world emerges.

DK: Our interview will be appearing around the holidays and just before the new year.  Do you have any special advice for readers at this time of year?

TF: Yes, holidays can be a particularly challenging time of year, especially for those of us who are raw from losses and traumatic upheaval. We are often bombarded by family or lack of family, outward cheer that doesn’t match our inner felt sense, and so many distractions that pull us out of our own inner experience. Take alone time to feel your feelings, journal, take walks, move your energy to let off steam, and avoid excesses like sugar, alcohol, or recreational drugs that unground you. Main point: This is the time for doubling down on our self-care. Stay in touch with yourself and lead with self-compassion!

References

[1] Dias, B. G. and Ressler, K. J. (March, 2014). “Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations.” Nature Neuroscience 17:89-96

[2] Nada Borghol, Moshe Szyf, et al., “Associations with Early-Life Socio-Economic Position in Adult DNA Methylation,” International Journal of Epidemiology 41, no. 1 (February 2012): 62-74

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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One fine spring day when I was five, I decided to jump on the back of a neighbor’s schnauzer and ride him around the yard like a horse. Mikey had other ideas. He leaped up and tried to chomp on my cheek. Back then, no one called my run-in with Mikey a trauma. The word “trauma” had not yet entered the popular vernacular. But my experience with Mikey was a trauma, and for many years, I was terrified of dogs.

Times have changed. Discussions about trauma appear everywhere. Simply defined, trauma refers to any deeply disturbing event; in reality, trauma has many nuanced manifestations. Native American scholar and psychotherapist Eduardo Duran calls trauma “the injury where blood does not flow.”

Reference to trauma is now so ubiquitous, it has become almost meaningless. A recent newspaper article suggested that TV audiences are tired of watching gritty, realistic shows about afflictions; they now prefer plots with indomitably cheerful characters like Ted Lasso. It’s understandable we seek entertainment that makes us feel good, but are we denying, ignoring, or dismissing trauma’s impact on our lives and world? Have we seen, heard, read, experienced more trauma than we can process? Do we have trauma fatigue?

The truth is there is still much to learn about traumatic experiences. With deeper knowledge, more healing can occur.

Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone has been investigating this terrain for most of her adult life. Her teachings offer new insights, synergistic modalities of healing, and instill a sense of agency and hope to the burdened. In her second interview with me for Psychology Today, she offers more insights on the heritability of trauma, and how we may be carrying emotional afflictions that do not belong to us.

Dale Kushner: In a recent article for the “International Journal of Communal and Transgenerational Trauma,” you state that trauma can be transmitted by parents and other adults to the younger generation. This is a startling revelation. Can you explain how you became aware of this fact in your own life?

Rabbi Tirzah Firestone: It’s only in the past several years that evidence of the transference of trauma has been studied in depth. In my own life, the residues of war were deeply imprinted in my parents—my mother escaped Nazi Germany narrowly in 1939 and my father was stationed in the death camps as a U.S. soldier—but they kept their horrors a secret. It was only when I began to seriously study trauma science at midlife that I was able to identify their behaviors as the sequelae of trauma.

DK: Can actual memories be transferred?    

TF: It’s well known that children’s psychic borders are highly permeable. Like mirror neurons in the brain,[1] the feelings that echo between people, mental images can also be transferred by parents and other adults to the younger generation. Although actual memories aren’t transferred, it’s not uncommon for parents and caregivers who have experienced extreme psychic trauma to transmit to a child what has been called an image deposit,[2] that is, a mental picture of the excruciating events that they and others from their group have endured.

So yes, mental pictures—like the Twin Towers in flames on 9-11—with the strong feelings that they evoke, can be passed from generation to generation. They become part of the internal reality of descendants. Seeing one’s home demolished before one’s eyes, or one’s town burned to the ground is an experience that rarely dissipates. In my case, the legacy of my father’s trauma from war—the images he saw, the terror he felt, and the rage that ensued over the dehumanization of his people—became part of my visceral inheritance.

DK: How exactly might an adult or caregiver transmit an image deposit?

TF: Numerous studies show that children absorb the stress responses of parents and other caregivers in the wake of traumatic events and invest them with their own meaning[3]. For instance, after the events of September 11, 2001, studies on children whose parents and caregivers responded with heightened emotion suffered far more post-traumatic stress than those whose caregivers remained calm or detached.[4]

Vamik Volkan, who is a student of Erik Erikson and scholar on the topic of collective trauma, calls the powerful mental representations of large-scale trauma internalized images. We’ve already mentioned how permeable the psychological border between the child and caretakers is. Volkan maintains that traumatized adults can unconsciously deposit their internalized images into the developing self of the child. The child then becomes a reservoir for the adult’s trauma images.[5]

DK: How can a person know if the anxiety, depression, or other mental states of suffering are the result of traumas in the ancestral line or have emerged from their own life experience in the present? Are the two intertwined?

TF: That’s an important question. We hardly need studies to tell us that our family’s trauma affects us. With so much research coming out on intergenerational patterning, it can be a relief to know that we didn’t make up our mental and emotional disposition, but that there may be an ancestral precursor for our anxiety, depression, and even feelings of guilt, shame, or alienation. If we are in doubt, we can do some genealogical work on our families and look at the historical traumas they lived through. Did they endure poverty, displacement, or war? Or maybe their lives were continuously hampered by racial discrimination. These and other residues of extreme life conditions can travel down to us, especially when they are not metabolized.

DK: One trauma researcher has noted that a generation can inherit the “unfinished psychological tasks” of a previous generation. What are some examples of these tasks? What is your role as a therapist in helping a client unburden herself from the unfinished task?

TF: I see intergenerational or ancestral transmissions like suitcases stuffed with important family heirlooms. No matter how weird or troubled you think your family is, there are ancestral treasures in your suitcase, like good values, resilience, or gems of hard-earned wisdom. When I taught at San Quentin, the men shared with me the beautiful legacies they carry and think about daily, mostly from their moms and grandmothers.  And then there can be trauma images that we inherit, too.

Think about the Vietnam or Syrian wars, or the incursion of Russia into Ukraine. When a large group has experienced massive trauma and severe losses at the hands of enemies, the children of the next generation receive the emotion-charged images of war. Volkan, who studied post-war populations around the world, maintains that embedded in these memories is a task. The next generations receive a “to do” list associated with the transmitted image.

Unmetabolized tasks translate to the next generations as many things. They might require completing the mourning process over losses, converting shame and humiliation into pride or helplessness into assertion. All these tasks are connected to the mental pictures that are the residue of traumatic events. The image binds the members of the group together in an invisible way.[6]

DK: Unless younger people are helped to address the unfinished tasks and their psychological legacy, is it true/is there evidence that the psychological reverberations travel horizontally through families and nations, and vertically through time and generations?

TF: Ultimately, it’s up to us, members of the younger generation, to decipher our own psychological landscape. We have to discern what inherited legacies we want to bring forward with us, and what we need to work on and discard. Often we find ourselves doing the hard psychological and emotional work that was left unfinished by our parents and grandparents. Will we continue to internalize our people’s defining historical traumas or reject them? These are the questions every psychologically mature person must ask themselves.

[1] van der Kolk, 2014, pp. 58-59, 111-112

[2] Volkan, 2006, 2013

[3] Allen & Rosse, 1998; Scharf, 2007

[4] Shechter & Coates, 2006

[5] Volkan, 2006, 2013

[6] Volkan, 2006, p. 154

References:

“Transgenerational Trauma Shaping History: The Power of Images” by Tirzah Firestone, PhD., in International Journal of Communal and Transgenerational Trauma, Issue 1, Professional and Philosophical Perspectives, February 1, 2022.

The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: New York, 2014)

Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts by Varnik D. Volkan (Pitchstone Publishing: Durham, NC, 2006, 2013)

“Children’s Response to Exposure to Traumatic Events” by Richard D. Allen and William Rosse, in Children, Youth and Environments, Vol.  14, No. 1, Collected Papers (2004) Published by University of Cincinnati.

“Long-term effects of trauma: Psychosocial functioning of the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors” by Miri Scharf, Journal of Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 19, Issue 2, April 25, 2007. Published online by Cambridge University Press.

“Caregiver traumatization adversely impacts young children’s mental representations on the Macarthur Story Stem Battery” by Daniel S. Schechter, MD, and Susan W. Coates, Journal of Attachment and Human Development, Vol. 9, Issue 3, December 4, 2007. Published by Taylor & Francis.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Imagine yourself at a family reunion. Aunt Sadie puts her hand on your shoulder and tells you you’re the spitting image of her sister Rose. Uncle Mo swears your soccer prowess comes from his side of the family, superb athletes all. The baby has the thick black hair of your Irish ancestors, and though you’ve always said you’ll never scowl like your mother, as you age identical scowl lines appear around your mouth.

The heritability of physical traits is a known and accepted fact, but a burgeoning branch of scientific investigation, epigenetics, has unlocked the mystery of how the emotional lives of our ancestors, and the traumas they suffered, affect our well-being.

In the ancient world, when a tragedy recurred in a family line—sons murdering their fathers, suicides, madness—the cause was thought to be the workings of a curse, or Fate, or the actions of punishing, vengeful gods.

With the aid of our vibrant imaginations, humans have spun tales about how the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children and their children’s children “unto the third and fourth generations.” (Exodus 34.7). The great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—warned audiences that transgression against the gods weighed heavily on future generations. The chorus in the opening lines of Sophocles’ Antigone proclaim the horror in the family line:

“How many miseries our father caused! And is there one of them that does not fall on us while yet we live?”

In contemporary fiction, novelists Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer), among others, explore manifestations of transgenerational trauma. We’ve come a long way from pinning our misfortunes on family curses and the whims of the gods, but we are still discovering how the emotional experiences of our ancestors, their personal stories, told and untold, have altered our bodies and minds.

What stories whispered behind closed doors did you grow up with? How many relatives suffered with depression? Were there suicides? Violent behavior? Exile and displacement? A history of poverty? Unmourned griefs? Which questions about your family’s past do not get answered? Evidence supports the claim that what has not been healed in our lineage may manifest indirectly in us, a new generation, as anxiety, depression, physical illness, or other afflictions.

In my own life, for a long time, I felt that the heaviness of a grief I carried did not originate with me. While researching my second novel, I discovered that one of my grandmothers died in a state mental asylum. She was never mentioned during my childhood, and I assume she was a source of pain and great shame. No one is alive now to tell me her story, but I am aware that her presence has always been with me. A character in my second novel is loosely based on her story, and through workings of my imagination, grandma has been returned to her glory!

During the years writing this novel, I began a period of searching and seeking, hoping to uncover, face, and resolve the hurt in my lineage. Toward the end of this time, I discovered the work of Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone. As the saying goes: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Dr. Firestone has spent at least one lifetime investigating intergenerational trauma from spiritual and psychological perspectives. She offers insight into the manifestations of inherited trauma and generously supplies stories and healing practices from many traditions in her online teachings. Her most recent book, Wounds into Wisdom, is a guide into deep inner excavations and explorations. In a world so harshly and painfully broken, her encouragement for us to heal as individuals expands the hope that we can also heal globally.

It brings me pleasure to introduce Tirzah Firestone to you in this two-part interview series.

Dale Kushner: Briefly, what is ancestral healing?

Tirzah Firestone: Ancestral healing is an ancient and currently burgeoning field that is based upon the spiritual premise that consciousness continues after death. After we pass from this world, regardless of our age or station, our bodies return to the earth, but our non-corporeal self continues to travel in non-visible realms, ultimately passing into an ancestral plane. Most spiritual traditions in the world agree that the ancestors, those who are no longer in the physical world, are still tied to us here on earth, for better and sometimes for worse.

DK: Why worse? 

TF: Generally speaking, ancestors wish to play a beneficial role to their living offspring. Their job is to guide and care for their living progeny, assisting them to remain in life and flourish here. But because the deep residue of our lives continues to reverberate after death, it is not only our ancestors’ wisdom but their unprocessed traumas that affect their next of kin. Ancestral healing is the garnering of wisdom, guidance, and blessings of the well and wise ancestors, and then, with their support, helping to resolve and repair the unhealed wounds of those who are not yet well and wise.

DK: Is ancestral trauma, inherited, transgenerational, and intergenerational trauma the same thing? If not, how are they different?  Please clarify collective trauma.

TF: All of these terms are related.

Ancestral traumas are the unworked legacies of those who have died. This might include unresolved life stories, secrets, resentments, or other injuries that never had a chance to heal. The scientific field of epigenetics bears out that these unprocessed life stresses can influence future generations in the form of inherited tendencies to similar kinds of stress, anxiety, and psycho-emotional issues. The term transgenerational trauma is much the same as intergenerational trauma, used more widely in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere.

Collective trauma is the residue of extreme life circumstances that occur (historical trauma is another term for this) that continues to affect not only individuals, but entire groups, ethnicities, communities, and entire nations. One example is the African-American community whose ancestors were abducted, shackled, and forced into centuries of slavery. We might say that their ancestral trauma is also a collective trauma that is still being worked through intergenerationally, in the lives of their living offspring as well as in the life of American society.

DK: In the last several years, you’ve worked privately with individuals and taught experiential courses on ancestral healing. Do all lineages have ancestral wounds?

TF: Yes, we might indeed say that all lineages carry ancestral wounds. Those who colonized others bear great moral wounds; the human pain incurred by their misdeeds is a legacy that continues for generations. Likewise, those who were colonized, enslaved, or murdered bear wounds that reverberate intergenerationally.

DK: You are a revered rabbi as well as a Jungian analyst. What led you to ancestral work?

TF: I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. My mother escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, leaving behind scores of relatives who were murdered in unconscionable ways. Even though she never spoke of them, I felt the reverberations of the family’s unprocessed shock, grief, and trauma. Ultimately, this led me to uncover the family history and then as a rabbi and psychotherapist, to study the effects of collective trauma in my people and far beyond.

DK: Does a person have to know about their ancestry to benefit from your teachings?

TF: One can begin this work with the tiniest amounts of information about one’s family (country of origin, political events there, etc.) Finding out about one’s ancestral history is relatively easy online these days. If we bring sincere intention, the unconscious will assist. Dreams and synchronicities come to inform us and help us to uncover more and more information.

DK: What are the dangers of not acknowledging ancestral/transgenerational trauma?

TF: Uncovering the dimension of intergenerational (or ancestral legacies) in our lives is extremely important. Without understanding the historical context of our lives and what came before us, our tendency is to think that our problems and imbalances began with us, that we created them. It is more often the case that the issues we are working on—whether we suffer from anxiety, fear, addiction, shame, or a feeling of not belonging, to name just a few examples—have roots in the lives of those who came before us, in what they suffered, and what they could not complete in their lifetimes. Often we are doing the work that was left to us, and it becomes our work. This then is ancestral healing! In doing our own inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual healing and untangling, we are also healing the legacies of those who gave us life.

You may also be interested in reading my two other posts about intergenerational trauma: “Family Deeds: Constellation Therapy & Generations of Trauma” and “The Things We Carry: What Our Ancestors Didn’t Tell Us”

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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What is your earliest memory? Where were you? What season was it? Was the sun shining? Clouds in the sky? How old were you? Were you alone? What were you wearing? What did you smell? Were you happy or confused, sad or dreamy?

The world created by memory lives inside our minds. We believe it is an inviolate reservoir of facts. This is what happened, we say. I remember it clearly. And yet if you ask yourself the same questions stated above several weeks apart, you may discover your earliest memory has altered, expanding some details, subtracting others, or offering up a completely different image. Let’s face it: “facts,” as memory sees them, are not stable.

As long ago as the Greek philosophers, we were attempting to unravel the mystery of memory. For centuries, memories were thought to embed themselves in our brains like a stamp onto soft wax, stored forever in archival files. Current cognitive neuroscience conceives memory as a more creative and adaptive system, a complex interconnected neural network involving many areas of the brain. Even when specialized areas of the brain are damaged, causing speech and memory deficits, other parts of the brain can step in to complement the injured functions. This is what’s truly remarkable about the brain: its plasticity, its capacity to transform through learning.

Research on memory continues to unfold, but what we do know is that memory is fallible, and shockingly so. Most of our most cherished memories are confabulations, an intricate blend of fragments from our past, images from dreams, movies, books, and even other people’s memories assimilated as our own. This is the fantastic, frustrating, perplexing nature of memory: it is endlessly redefining and refining what we remember. Ask three siblings about a shared experience and you are likely to get three different versions of the event.

In his autobiography Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, the renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks detailed a memorable childhood event that occurred one evening during the Nazi bombing of London when his family members tried to douse an incendiary bomb with water. With immaculate specificity and the astute eye of a scientist, Sacks wrote:

“There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.”

He remembered, unequivocally. droplets of white-hot aluminum oxide from the thermite bomb cascading over the lawn. He had been seven at the time.

Only later, after his book was published, did he discover that he and his brother Michael had been away at boarding school when the bomb landed and that his recounting of the incident could not possibly have been an eyewitness account. The details he recalled were from a vivid letter written by his older brother who had been home at the time.

Our flawed memory unnerves us. We count on memory to validate reality. As our brains develop, we begin to create an autobiographical first-person narrative that defines who we are. Our identity formation depends on memories strung together into a recognizable story. (Autobiographical Memory.)  In childhood, remembering positive choices and outcomes enhances a positive sense of self. We also remember bad choices and their consequences, which enables us to make better choices in the future. When neurodevelopment is interrupted or delayed, by trauma, illness, poverty, or other factors, children have a harder time using memory to assess how to relate to a situation or prevent negative patterns from repeating. Their sense of self lacks the support of positive memories to reinforce a positive self-image.

What we remember about ourselves shapes the stories we tell about who we are, which in turn shapes who we become. The art and science of psychoanalysis, of talk therapy, in general, respects the role of memory and its significance in our mental health. Examining long-held stories spun from memory and placing them in the context of a life history and a family history elucidates and untangles, and importantly, revises the hurts of the past. People with memory disorders face an inability to retrieve a coherent past. Sufferers of neurodegenerative diseases lose a cohesive sense of self as they experience the erasure of personality. As Sacks writes in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, “If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

For those of us who have witnessed the ravages of memory loss, the rupture of mental processes shakes us to the core. I’ve been drawn to explore the byways of memory for both artistic and personal reasons. Several years ago, my sister was diagnosed with and subsequently died of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. As my sole sibling and only living member of my family, she alone carried the memory of our shared childhood. As her mind dissipated and she began to weave fantastic tales from the images that remained, I realized I would soon lose the only person alive who could corroborate my memories. After she died, to work with grief, I plunged into writing my second novel, which explores family secrets, intergenerational trauma, and how what seems to be forgotten in the family line never really is.

Sacks’ faulty memory about the Blitz bombing did not have serious consequences, but when a witness’s unreliable memory results in a defendant’s prison sentence, or when public policy is based on invalid eyewitness reports, the consequences can be disastrous. Nor are photographs or digital images to be trusted. Photoshop and a slew of other technological advances can change our reality by altering images of real events and inserting them into our collective consciousness. How do we separate the real from the fictitious? The imagined from the remembered? And does it matter? Could it be that our memories are not just the vessels in which events are stored but are the foundation of our beliefs and values?

In the 1950s, when anti-communist sentiment was raging in this country, noir thrillers and futuristic science fiction movies became dramatically paranoic, centering around foreign regimes or space-aliens intent on reprogramming our brains. Words like “thought control,” “indoctrination,” “brainwashing” filled our nightmares. Popular culture featured movies like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Grotesque extraterrestrial pod people were dropping into our world, intent on colonizing our bodies. The contested territory was not land or empire, but our minds. The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 film, featured a POW returned from the Korean War. Memories of his former life and allegiances had been wiped out. As a robotic puppet of the nefarious enemy, he had been programmed to assassinate the U.S. president. A year after the film was released, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the movie was pulled from circulation. Life seemed to be confirming fantasy.

A more recent example is The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood that tells the dystopian story of Offred and her Handmaid sisters, slaves in mind and body to their masters in the new Gilead, where memory of the past is forbidden. But Offred has flashbacks to the before-time, pre-Gilead. Images of her loved ones appear in dreams and waking fantasies. These are forbidden as is all mention of the past, its values of individual freedom and compassionate humanity.

Throughout history, entire populations, nations, and empires have been coerced to annihilate the past so that a new regime can flourish. Chairman Mao understood this as did Stalin, as do all authoritarian regimes. In our own country, amid much debate, we are in the process of collectively remembering the unspoken stories of the indigenous peoples and the enslaved.

Even when faced with exile, gulags, beatings, torture, or the invasive progression of disease, the mind mutinies and remembers. Even suffers from dementia can be spontaneously gifted with gems of memory. Until the very end, I would sit with my sister and she would suddenly take my hand and start swinging it, as if we were children again. The old mischievous brightness would return to her eyes. Remember the time, she would say, and with absolute clarity she would tell me a story from our youth.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at “Transcending the Past.”

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Maybe you’ve had this experience: you’re a child at the dinner table in your childhood home. One of your parents mentions the name of a relative—a father, a sister, a great aunt. The room goes silent and the subject is quickly changed. As Tolstoy famously wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I would add: “All families have secrets, but each secret is unique to that family.”

Family secrets most often involve a person who has shamed kin, or an event, like exile or deportation, abortion, or even murder. The silence surrounding the troubles can feel like safety, but the safety is illusory. What is hidden does not disappear. Through epigenetic research and a deeper psychological understanding of inherited trauma, we have come to understand that “the ghost or ghosts in the room” make their presence felt by presenting within the family as symptoms, physical, mental and spiritual. What is now known is that the pattern of silence and dissociation established at the onset of the original trauma can be passed on to future generations.

Transgenerational trauma is at the heart of my second novel, The Lie of Forgetting. At mid-life, my narrator’s world collapses, and she must piece together her own difficulties as they relate to the hidden trauma of a death in the family that has been forgotten, physically split off, for generations. I have also blogged about this here before in “The Things We Carry: How Our Ancestors’ Traumas May Influence Who We Are.”

In researching this subject, I became aware of the stunning work of family constellation therapist Nikki Mackay with patients suffering from inherited trauma and sought her counsel as a wise guide and tutor, not just as a writer but in my personal life as well.

I hope you will find her answers to my many questions as intriguing and enlightening as I did.

What is family and ancestral constellation therapy?

Who we are in the present moment is knowingly and unknowingly influenced by the energetic field of influence that flows through us from our family and ancestors. Their history lies coiled within us. The untold stories of our ancestors are in our blood.

Family and ancestral constellation is a therapeutic tool that allows the invisible influences from the present and past to be made visible, acknowledged and whole. It allows us as individuals to uncover the hidden historical narrative that we are unconsciously holding. It creates a space for us to bear witness and give place to the trauma before fully and freely moving forward with our own life. It is the key to unlocking the missing parts of who we are.

How would we know if we would benefit from working with a family constellation therapist?

Have you ever wondered why you choose the things you choose? Why you are drawn to the people that you love—even if some of your choices don’t always feel safe for you? We are constantly surrounded by a field of influence made up of not only our family and ancestors but also from the relationships and connections that we have created throughout our life

That connection to the people that you have known and loved stays with you, the cost of the choices you have made stays with you and the influence of the family and ancestors that you come from stays with you. Their memories, the imprint of them, flows through your memories consciously and unconsciously.

That field of influence impacts our belonging and sense of self. It is the heaviness within our heart after a tricky day, it is the emptiness we can feel when we know that something just isn’t quite right, it is the fear that grips us when things change out of the blue and we aren’t in control. It is the unconscious belief that we are not enough.

How is family constellation work different from other forms of therapy?

By working with your own individual historical narrative, the untold or silenced stories that we are each unconsciously holding, you have the opportunity to disentangle the emotional trauma that you are unconsciously entangled with. To literally disentangle yourself from it and shift the influence of it outside of yourself. This therapy allows us to give place, and bear witness, to the trauma and also to liberate ourselves from it. To exist outside of it so that the inherited patterns don’t continue to repeat from one generation to the next.

In setting up a constellation we each enter a version of “trauma time,” where within the created constellation past and present are not separate and we experience them as we are influenced by them. For example, you may wish to explore your relationship with a current partner and find yourself in the field of influence of your great-great-grandmother who is carrying the broken promise of a lost love from a different country.

Is it really true that unresolved, unacknowledged and traumatic events from the past can be unconsciously carried down from generation to generation?  

Yes, it is. In essence, constellation allows for the creation of an energetic map of all of the connections and loyalties, known and unknown, within the field of influence upon us where we can interact with and explore the entangled connections. It is based on the principle of the inter-connectedness of all things so that each person within a family, going back generation upon generation, has an equal place of belonging within that family. When someone in the family is excluded, or there is an event or entanglement that is not seen or acknowledged by the rest, then this has an effect on the family as a whole.

Please talk a bit about the evidence for that, how we know it.

Traumatic events exert a force long after our ancestors have died. Science has shown that trauma can be genetically passed down the generations. Recent research has shown evidence of epigenetic transgenerational transmission of trauma by looking, for example, at the inheritance of holocaust trauma, Native American genocide and trauma within current descendants of the American Civil War. Quantum mind and entangled memory research has also been exploring the use of language and the power of bearing witness and “seeing” an entanglement to begin the process of disentanglement. I am also working on research looking at the efficacy of constellation as a tool for understanding conflict with a view toward disentangling the historical narrative of the trauma from current, intractable, conflict situations.

Can you give an example of a case of someone who has been helped by constellation therapy?

Sharon was a client who had initially participated in a group session focusing on her career and dreams. Her circumstances were complex. Her family, going back several generations, were from Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands located between Britain and France. When we first started working together, she was living in the U.K. in London and was having issues in her working life as well as her relationship with her fiancé. Her relationship with her mother, who lived in the family home in Guernsey, was very close. Her mother’s health was beginning to deteriorate and Sharon made the decision to move back to the family home to care for her. She resigned from the job that she was unhappy in and felt positive about her choice.

However, as her mother’s health deteriorated, so did her relationship with her fiancé. When her mother had to be admitted to a hospice, her fiancé chose that moment to end the relationship. Shortly thereafter, Sharon’s mother passed away. Sharon became withdrawn and isolated in the months that followed. She found it difficult to leave the family home, which she had inherited, and could not contemplate leaving the island. At that point, she contacted me to arrange a series of individual sessions. The obvious place to begin was the exploration of Sharon’s grief around her mother’s death. Although this created a little breathing space for Sharon it became clear that there was more than grief influencing her present situation. When Sharon worked on the connection with her mother, she lost a sense of her own place and identity.

Bringing in her grandmother and great-grandmother gave some relief to Sharon, particularly her great-grandmother; however, they too were held tightly within Sharon’s place. She had no awareness of herself, only them and the land in Guernsey. I asked Sharon if there had been any lost loves connected with her great-grandmother. She shared that her great-grandmother had been engaged before her marriage to Sharon’s great-grandfather but her fiancé, a young fisherman, had died at sea.

Part of Sharon’s great-grandmother had held on to the promise to wait on the land for him to return. This promise to “be the one who waits” had passed from one generation to the next. It had passed to Sharon and she had been unknowingly holding the promise along with the weight of the grief within the relationship promise between her and her fiancé. Her return to the Island and her mother’s death had triggered the inherited trauma within her and her own relationship. By uncovering and releasing the entanglement, Sharon was able to move forward freely with her life. She chose to stay on the island in the family home as her base but now regularly travels to London for work and has begun to date again.

Do you offer sessions online?  Do you also work with groups?  How does a group session differ from an individual session?

I have a large therapy practice focusing on individual sessions in person and online allowing me to work with clients globally. I also work with groups in Europe and the USA as well as sharing my knowledge with students through constellation learning and supervision.

The creation of a constellation needs to begin with the asking of a specific question. This question sets the intention that establishes the influent field upon the created constellation and the lens through which the constellation is experienced.  Then there is the initial placement of the represented loyalties and emotional entanglements relevant to the question, which creates an energetic “map.” This initial map can either be set up in your mind’s eye or physically created using mats or people in a group-represented constellation. The map you create within the constellation reflects your inner perception of the situation that you wish to explore. The process is the same however you choose to step into it.

References:

Epigenetic transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can nightmares be inherited? By Natan P.F. Kellermann, AMCHA, Israel

Intergenerational Trauma: Understanding Natives’ Inherited Pain by Mary Annette Pember

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Trauma. The word is everywhere these days. And something has happened to it. Something like what happened to the word awesome, once used to describe a profound and reverential experience, one filled with terror, dread or awe. Awesome has become a colloquialism that pops up as both a descriptor, as in, “I just bought an awesome lipstick,” or simply as an exclamation—Awesome! Trauma has also taken a step down from its original connotation. This is not a blog about language, but it’s worth noting that trauma and awe denote significantly profound human experiences and are linked in meaning. The Greek origin of trauma means damage or wound. The Greek origin of awe is áchos, or “pain.”

I’ve written about personal trauma before (see “My Childhood Trauma: What I Learned, What You Need to Know”) and revisiting that experience led me to want to investigate the wider dimensions of trauma and how its impact can extend across generations (see “The Things We Carry: What Our Ancestors Didn’t Tell Us”). Studies on trauma have increased in recent years and researchers in a variety of disciplines are uncovering new evidence of the widespread presence of trauma in at-risk populations. Global events such as war, famine, migration, immigration, fire, flood, widespread disease and terrorism ambush some of us every day. An expanded view of trauma that respects the influence of cultural and historical circumstances on individual lives helps to clarify how vulnerable we are to these larger forces.

The depth psychologist Carl Jung, in his exploration the past’s influence on an individual wrote: “Just as psychological knowledge furthers our understanding of historical material, so, conversely, historical material can throw new light on individual psychological problems.” (The Collected Works, Vol. 5)

As early as the beginning of the last century, Jung encouraged psychotherapists not only to study a patient’s personal biography but also to learn about the traditions and cultural influences, past and present, of the patient’s environment. Today we understand that trauma can be “inherited,” passed down through the generations, as if frozen in our psyches and/or bodies, repressed for centuries. Jung believed that repressed trauma or what he called “complexes” affect not only the individual but also the collective culture. He wrote: “…they exist (the archetypes) and function and are born anew with each generation.”

In his somewhat controversial essay, “Wotan,” written in 1936, Jung attempted to understand what was happening in Germany with the rise of Hitler, and the embrace by the populace of a militaristic, jingoistic, fascist leader. As Jung saw it, the god Wotan, or Odin, was an unconscious archetype that had been a latent potential in the German people and arose as a dominant force between the world wars. In Jung’s telling, Wotan-like energy, heroic and victorious, was embraced by the defeated Germans after the First World War – in slogans similar to “Make America Great Again.” Jung wrote: “He (Wotan) is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and an artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.”

Jung was discerning a culture possessed by a demon or god, the inherited and repressed inhabitant of the psyche. Repressed archetypes or psychic complexes are consciously forgotten but linger and influence our unconscious behavior. That is, while we may not be aware of certain tendencies within us, they nonetheless may direct our lives.

Trauma is often repressed. Patricia Michan, a Jungian psychoanalyst in Mexico City and founder of the C. G. Jung Mexican Center, has written and lectured on the inherited trauma she has discovered in some of her contemporary patients. In her essay, “Reiterative Disintegration” in Confronting Cultural Trauma: Jungian Approaches to Understanding and Healing, she writes,“…my focus here is the cultural trauma resulting from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire by the forces of Hernán Cortés in 1521, through which the indigenous people were abused, subjugated, and plundered. The Spanish conquest left imprinted a deep cultural trauma.” Quoting the Jungian Luigi Zoja, she concludes with him that “the lacerating wounds have remained ‘petrified for centuries.’”

John Hill, a training analyst in Zurich, in his essay “Dreams Don’t Let You Forget” in the aforementioned book, advises “that we consider the devastation that can happen with trauma,” and become aware of “the vigilance that prevents the survivor from experiencing the world as a safe place, and the difficulty the traumatized person has in connecting with his or her true self.”

In working with our own psyches, we might consider the cultural, historic, as well as the personal aspects that contribute to trauma. By stepping back and evaluating whether the core wound has its origins in childhood or reaches further into the past and comes down as a legacy, we can widen our understanding of the suffering and increase the potential for reconciliation. A significant avenue of hope in healing the wounded part is in engaging our creative selves in the process of restoration and reintegration. Having a voice, speaking the unspoken, refusing to carry on the silence of generations moves us out of the place of victimhood and hungry ghosts.

Interviewed about Things We Lost in the Fire, her short story collection which is filled with both gorgeous prose and horrific horror, the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez has said: “I think my fiction is very Argentinian. And in Argentina there’s something about bodies that is distinct. I spent my childhood in the dictatorship, and what they did with the bodies was to disappear them. This absence of the body is where my ghost stories come from…As much as I wanted to run away from that horror story, it’s in my DNA.”

In our current chaotic and frighteningly turbulent world where new traumas appear to lurk around every corner, might it not be wise to embrace preventive medicine: before trauma can lodge and incubate in our psyches, why not speak the unspoken now? Before repression chases the pain into a hiding place, let’s name what exists—paint it, dance it, sing it, write it, make a poem. There are limits to what can be accomplished through such acts, but the origins of change are mysterious.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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What if your maverick blood sugar, your obstinate obesity, the asthma that has plagued you throughout your life, or the nightmares from which you wake numb and shaking, are not the result of your own lived experience, but are instead manifestations of hidden or unspoken traumas bequeathed from past generations? What if what happened to your great-grandparents has shaped who you are through a mix of external circumstances and epigenetic expression?

In the old Darwinian understanding of genetic inheritance, evolution was thought to be a gradual process that occurred over eons as a species evolved to adapt to a changed environment. On his trip to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, Darwin observed several species of finches. He speculated that the birds probably originated from the same ancestor finch and wondered what could now account for the slight variation among the birds. He noticed that the beaks of the ground-dwelling nut eaters were uniquely suited for their predominant food source, nuts, while the tree-dwelling insect-eating finches had slightly different beaks. From this observation, he postulated that spontaneous mutation accounted for the difference in finch beaks and that a process of natural selection allowed for the mutant birds to thrive.

In The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance, Nessa Carey, a molecular biologist, writes that our understanding of DNA based on Mendelian and Darwinian principles, and the work of Watson and Crick, cannot sufficiently explain rapid changes in species that occur in a single generation. As she sees it, epigenetics is revolutionizing how we understand biology. Whenever two genetically identical individuals are non-identical in some way we can measure, epigenetics is at play.

Take, for example, identical twins who have the same DNA code. In childhood, they appear to be identical, but as they age and are subject to different environmental and emotional conditions, they may lose their look-alikeness and develop different physical characteristics and medical conditions. Let’s say both twins carry a genetic mutation that predisposes a person to get breast cancer. How do we explain only one twin getting the disease? If DNA were completely responsible for shaping a person, we would expect the twins to be identical in every way, including which heritable diseases they get. This isn’t what necessarily occurs. Epigenetics explains changes in gene activity and expression not dependent on our DNA sequence.

Epigenetics is one way to explain the connection between nature and nurture, or as Carey puts it, “how the environment talks to us and alters us, sometimes forever.” The process of epigenetics changes the chemical modifications surrounding and attaching to our genetic material that in turn changes the way genes are switched on or off without altering the genes themselves.

I was drawn to epigenetics while doing research on transgenerational trauma for my second novel which explores how the hidden or suppressed stories within a family line can shape future generations. In my own life, I couldn’t account for the dread that would sometimes descend on me for no apparent reason. It seemed to me there was something vaster, more amorphous and inexplicable at work than the usual psychological culprits. I needed to understand what it was. I began to wonder if the darkness I carried had its source in the suffering of unknown ancestors whose history of banishment and exile was in my blood.

Epigenetics offered some answers.

In a landmark epidemiological study that investigated the effect of famine in pregnant Dutch women during The Hunger Winter, from November 1944 through the spring of 1945, researchers found that a mother’s starvation affected the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that difficult period. The children of mothers who were malnourished during their first trimester had children with higher rates of obesity in later years. The traumatic stress in the wombs of the Dutch mothers during The Hunger Winter somehow transferred effects to the children, grandchildren and even the great-grandchildren of the original mothers.

In the relatively new field of behavioral epigenetics, Holocaust studies and research have studied the physiological and psychological effects of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other overwhelming emotional experiences such as occur from natural disasters, rape, the loss of a child, or an abusive home situation. Their findings have documented that trauma can affect the expression or suppression of certain genes, not only for the person involved but also for succeeding generations.

In a recent talk on NPR, the award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson raises the question of “ancestral memory” in the descendants of Africans slaves who crossed the Atlantic in slave ships under horrific conditions. Could the prevalence of high blood pressure among African-Americans today be an epigenetic response to the trauma experienced by the slaves who survived the voyage from Africa? Woodson speaks of her fear of swimming in large bodies of water, attributing this fear, which she shares with other African-Americans, to a set of behaviors loosely defined as “The Middle Passage Syndrome.”

What about the effects of familial shame, guilt, despair, rage, hopelessness? Can these be passed on to descendants? Evidence points to the affirmative. Silence, concealment, denial, dissociation are ways individuals and families cope with overwhelming experiences. Many of us are raised with the dictums: It’s water under the bridge. The past is the past. Don’t talk about it. Unfortunately, what is unthinkable or unmentionable does not disappear from our psyches. While the horror may be suppressed in the victim and even her offspring, third and fourth generations often feel “haunted” by something they can’t name. Nightmares, depression, anxiety, and somatic metaphors that stand for the initial trauma resurrect the historical suffering in new forms.

In her book, The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree, French psychotherapist Anne Ancelin Schützenberger describes a patient she calls “the butterfly chaser.” The case offers a fascinating instance of how ancestral traumas can influence and shape an individual who has no knowledge of them:

“The patient was a geology lover. Every Sunday he went out looking for stones, collecting them and breaking them. He also chased butterflies, caught them and stuffed them in a jar of cyanide before pinning them up.”

Distraught with his life, the man went for counseling. His analyst decided to investigate the man’s family, going back several generations. What the analyst learned was that the patient had a grandfather who nobody mentioned and who was a secret. The doctor convinced the patient to find out more about the grandfather. In doing so, the troubled patient discovered that his mother’s father had done “shameful things.” Among other unlawful deeds, he was suspected of being a bank robber and was sent into forced labor, in French, casser les cailloux, which means, “to break rocks.” Later, the grandfather was executed in the gas chamber. The rock-breaking, butterfly-gassing grandson had known none of this.

Schützenberger continues: “In a certain number of cases, pastimes, hobbies or leisure activities which can derive from family secrets, are surprisingly full of meaning.” Her book was written in 1998, before knowledge of epigenetics, but she writes: “strange behavior, illness or delirium” are often the result of these inherited “ghosts” who are half-buried in our unconscious, like a secret buried alive.

However, we are more than our ghosts, more than the composite of our memories, inherited or otherwise. In The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics, developmental cognitive neuroscientist David S. Moore cautions against viewing epigenetics as “fetal programming.” Writing about the effects of abusive parenting on subsequent generations, he finds recent research encouraging: “The possibility that these sorts of patterns reflect epigenetic effects is exciting because epigenetic effects are potentially reversible, either through interventions with specific drugs or through treatment programs that provide other experiences.”

What might these other experiences be? To this point, Jungian analyst James Hollis, in his book Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, asks: “How do we exorcise the haunting of our separate histories? How do we see outside the lens ground for us by fate…?”

His answer aims to inspire creativity. “The difference between us and the mill horse is our capacity for imagination,” he writes, reminding us that our neuroses keep us stuck in old patterns. Our complexes “can only replay the old events, scripts, and moribund outcomes of their origin.”

In suggesting we look to our imaginations as a portal to healing, Hollis leads us back to the ancient arts of ceremony and ritual, and to our in-dwelling creative spirits that remain alive no matter what terrible thing has happened to us. Here might be the way, exclusive of therapy and medication, to re-imagine and remember who we are beyond our traumas. We are our own best shamans, capable of connecting to those divine forces that lie outside our ego’s tunneled and sometimes tortured vision.

Healing trauma involves movement, intrapsychic and literal. If trauma freezes us to a spot in time, a place-memory, and to inherited patterns of behavior, so self-expression in the form of creative ceremony—dancing, singing, sculpting—inspires new energies to flow. Pick up your drum! Dance under the moon! Start a journal. Transformation begins with following your brave heart into the unknown.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “Inherited Wounds: Tirzah Firestone on Ancestral Healing,” “Family Deeds: How Constellation Therapy Treats Transgenerational Trauma,” and “Recognizing and Healing Inherited Trauma.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.

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