The Pain Might Not Have Started With You | Intergenerational Trauma

Michaela Kozlik
Oct 28, 2024
5 min read

Updated: May 28

The anxiety, grief, or the anger that feels too big for your circumstances might be older than you.

By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist specializing in perimenopause anxiety, burnout & trauma | Illinois

Have you ever had a reaction that felt too big for what actually happened?

Anxiety with no clear source or grief that shows up in ordinary moments without an obvious reason. Maybe anger that is a little too intense for the situation or fear of abandonment that doesn't make sense.

What if some of what you're carrying didn't start with you? What if some of it is older than your own life?

Intergenerational trauma and grief therapy in Chicago and Illinois.

What Intergenerational Trauma Actually Is

Intergenerational trauma is the transmission of unresolved pain from one generation to the next. Through the body, the nervous system, and the patterns, silences, and survival strategies that get passed down from our ancestors.

It lives in:

Stories that were never told
Emotions that were not expressed or explained
Silences between words
Survival strategies absorbed so early you thought they were just reality
Nervous system responses that don't quite match your actual history

The grandmother who lost her homeland and never fully grieved it. The grandfather who buried his dreams to survive and never found his way back to them. The mother who learned to make herself small. The father who learned that vulnerability was dangerous. Their unresolved pain shaped how they moved through the world, how they parented, and what they taught you, explicitly and implicitly, about safety, love, and what to expect from life.

As I explain in When the Past Comes Back: Trauma Resurfacing During Perimenopause — trauma doesn't just live in memory. It lives in the body and the nervous system. Intergenerational trauma works the same way, just with a longer timeline.

How Intergenerational Trauma Shows Up

Intergenerational trauma rarely shows up clearly. It tends to present itself in more confusing ways:

In your nervous system:

Anxiety that seems to have no source
Hypervigilance that doesn't match your actual circumstances
Your body always braced for something without knowing what

In your patterns:

Repeating relationship dynamics that feel deeper than your own history
An inability to trust that feels ancient rather than learned
A tendency to shrink, over-function, or make yourself invisible

In your reactions:

Responses to ordinary situations that feel disproportionate
Emotions that seem to belong to a different time and place
Grief that's bigger than the current loss

As I write in You Can See the Pattern. So Why Can't You Stop It? — sometimes the pattern you're running was formed in your grandmother's nervous system and found its way into yours through the relationships.

This Is Not About Blame

This work is not about excavating everything that went wrong in your family or assigning blame to people who were doing their best.

Your ancestors survived things that required survival strategies that were brilliant given the circumstances. The problem is that the strategies got passed down to generations who inherited the protection without inheriting the original threat.

As I write in Not Everything Is Trauma. And That's Actually Good News — understanding what we're actually dealing with matters. Intergenerational trauma is real, significant, and deserves to be named. And it can change — because the nervous system can change.

Why Perimenopause Brings This Forward

Perimenopause, as I explain in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause — directly affects the nervous system. Things surface. Old wounds get louder. Patterns that were manageable become harder to manage.

For women carrying intergenerational patterns, perimenopause turns up the volume on pain that was always there.

Midlife is also naturally a time of looking backward and forward simultaneously:

At what you received from the generations before you
At what you want to pass on to those who come after
At what you are willing to be the last generation to carry

That question what ends with me? — is one of the most powerful questions we can ask.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing intergenerational trauma is not about reliving every painful thing that ever happened in your family. It is slower and more personal than that.

Getting curious. What patterns feel older than your own experience? What reactions don't match your actual history? What beliefs about safety or worth feel like they were handed to you before you were old enough to question them?

Feeling it in the body. Inherited trauma lives in the body. The racing heart, the clenched jaw, the tight shoulders are where we carry the old stories. Healing has to happen there, not just intellectually.

Honoring the survival before transforming the pattern. The strategies your lineage developed kept people alive. Before you work to change them, acknowledge what they protected.

Building new responses. As I write in Where Is the Self in the Brain? — the brain can form new pathways. What was inherited can be updated. Your nervous system can learn something new given the right conditions and support.

Understanding that your healing ripples forward. Every time you choose awareness over avoidance. Every time you respond with compassion instead of judgment. Every time you say the thing that was unspeakable in your family of origin, you are changing what gets passed on.

You Are a Turning Point

You are not just the endpoint of your family's pain, you can be a turning point in your lineage's story.

The needs you are willing to voice that your family never had language for, or the patterns you are willing to examine. The more honest and grounded version of yourself you are willing to become, more fully present in your own life...All of that ripples.

How I Work With Intergenerational Trauma

In my virtual therapy practice across Illinois I draw on a combination of approaches:

Somatic and body-based approaches — because inherited trauma lives in the body and needs to be addressed there
Hakomi therapy — mindfulness-based, body-centered work that creates space for what has been held across generations to finally be met with something other than silence —read more here
Parts work — getting curious about protective parts that developed in response to inherited patterns and helping them feel safe enough to update
Attachment-focused relational work — building new relational experiences that give your nervous system different information about what connection and safety can feel like
Therapy intensives — extended, immersive time for deep work that weekly sessions often can't reach — read more here

You can read more about how I work with complex trauma on my trauma therapy page and about working with me on my work with me page.

You Don't Have to Keep Carrying What Was Never Yours

You inherited this, you didn't choose it. And you have more power to change it than the generations before you because you have awareness, resources, and the willingness to look at it directly. That willingness is not small, and it might be one of the bravest things anyone in your family has ever done.