What Is Generational Trauma

This page reflects our understanding of mental health topics as of 2026. If you are reading this at a later date, some details may no longer be current, so please verify anything important against up to date sources. If you notice anything that needs updating, we would welcome you letting us know.

Generational trauma, also called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma, refers to the way the effects of trauma experienced by one generation can affect later generations. This can happen within families, such as when a parent's unresolved trauma shapes how they raise their children, and within communities that have experienced collective harm, such as war, genocide, displacement, colonization, residential schools, or systemic racism. Generational trauma does not mean people are destined to repeat the past. Understanding it can help families and communities make sense of patterns and choose healing.

What Generational Trauma Looks Like

• Patterns of anxiety, depression, addiction, or violence repeating across generations.
• Difficulty expressing emotions, or families where feelings were never discussed.
• Hypervigilance, mistrust, or feeling unsafe without a clear personal reason.
• Parenting shaped by fear, harshness, or emotional distance.
• Silence around family history, or stories told only in fragments.
• Strong reactions to situations that echo what earlier generations lived through.
• A sense of carrying grief or responsibility that is not only your own.

At home, this might look like a parent who reacts strongly to raised voices because of their own childhood, and a child who learns to stay quiet. In some families, patterns such as avoiding talking about feelings pass down without anyone deciding they should.

Why It Happens

Several pathways help explain how trauma affects later generations. Parenting is shaped by one's own experiences, so trauma can influence attachment, emotional availability, and discipline. Family communication patterns, including silence or secrecy, pass down beliefs and fears. Social and economic effects of collective trauma, such as poverty, loss of land, language, or culture, and ongoing discrimination, continue to affect later generations. Some research suggests biological pathways, including stress system changes and possibly epigenetic effects, may also play a role, though this science is still developing.

For Indigenous communities in Canada, the effects of colonization and residential schools are widely recognized as intergenerational. Many immigrant and refugee families, and families affected by war or persecution, also describe the weight of history carried forward.

Generational trauma can be hard to see from the inside, because inherited patterns often feel like simply "how our family is." People sometimes recognize it only when they become parents themselves, notice reactions they do not understand, or learn more about their family's history. That recognition can be painful, but it is also a turning point, because what can be seen can begin to change.

What It Is Not

• Not destiny. Many people break patterns and families heal across generations.
• Not a way of blaming parents. It recognizes that parents often did their best while carrying their own wounds.
• Not a formal diagnosis. It is a framework for understanding family and community patterns.
• Not only about individual families. Collective and systemic harms play a major role.
• Not the whole story. Families and cultures also pass down strengths, resilience, and wisdom.

How It Is Assessed and Supported

A therapist may explore family history, patterns across generations, current symptoms, and cultural context. Healing can involve trauma-informed individual therapy, family therapy, and approaches that honour cultural identity and community healing practices. Learning about family history, understanding how patterns developed, and practising different ways of relating can interrupt cycles. Related pages on the window of tolerance and trauma triggers may help make sense of reactions that seem bigger than the present moment. For Indigenous individuals and communities, culturally grounded supports and Indigenous-led services can be especially important.

Getting Support at Pacific Maple Psych Centre

If you sense that your struggles are connected to your family's or community's history, trauma-informed and culturally responsive therapy can help you understand these patterns and create change for yourself and the generations that follow.