Dr. Angela Moré, professor of social psychology at the University of Hanover and group (teaching) analyst: Transgenerational trauma is trauma that was actually experienced by a previous generation, but not by subsequent generations, who have taken it on emotionally. Nevertheless, subsequent generations react to certain inner images and feelings as if they had experienced the trauma themselves.

As a rule, the later generations are not traumatized themselves. In other words, they have not experienced the helplessness or powerlessness that is typical of the development of trauma. An exception is a form of transgenerational trauma in which the generation that suffered the trauma reenacts it by acting it out on the next generation. An example of this is a father who was abused by his own father and then abuses his children. As a result, the trauma is passed on transgenerationally in its immediate form to the next generation. This means that this generation is also traumatized.

The other form of transgenerational trauma is more indirect, and there are different variants of it. I would like to refer to Freud's term “emotional inheritance.” This expression clearly illustrates what it is actually about: not one's own traumatization, but identification with a traumatized parent.

In the process, the child develops inner images and ideas of what the parent has suffered, mainly through nonverbal signals such as Facial expressions and gestures, mood swings, and perhaps also panic attacks, extreme sadness, or Depression. The child then wonders what is wrong with mom or dad and how they can help mom or dad. Very soon after birth, a child can already recognize the Basic emotions they perceive within themselves and can even influence them. The child sees that mom is sad or dad is having a panic attack and, although this does not traumatize them, they feel very uneasy. And they experience that the person is currently unavailable to them.

The child then tries to do something to end this state. This means that the child may become very active. They try to absorb the feelings within themselves and will do something to relieve the parent. The older the child gets, the more they will actively try to take on these feelings, understand them, but also ward them off. In such a situation, the self-protection mechanisms do not completely fail. In many cases, parentification actually occurs. This means that the children worry about their parents and also take care of them in a certain way.

In addition, children take the blame in the sense of an original, primitive causality, because then they can react and do not feel completely helpless. For example, they may be convinced that their bad behavior caused their parent's sadness. In this way, the child tries to adapt to the adult's needs and be comforting and helpful. As the child gets older, they form certain ideas about what might have been the reason for the sadness.

These ideas may be realistic or unrealistic. For many descendants, for example of Holocaust survivors, the signals their parents send are so subtle that the child can develop relatively precise images. Many case studies show that children reenact events and take on the role of their parents in order to relieve them and also to better understand what actually happened.

Often, the parents have not talked about their trauma. If they do talk about it, they do not tell a coherent story, as this is usually not possible in cases of trauma – unless the trauma has been processed and integrated. Instead, the parents experience so-called flashbacks, suddenly finding themselves back in the traumatic situation, suddenly starting to react in panic or developing anxiety or flight impulses.

The child observes this behavior and tries to calm them down and offer things that reduce their fear. At the same time, however, the child also absorbs some of this fear. Dr. Kurt Grünberg from the Sigmund Freud Institute talks about parents scenically remembering the trauma. They remember it as if it were happening again and translate it into actions such as flight or aggression. In this way, the trauma is staged for the child.

From around the age of six, a child is in a mode of dramatic understanding. This means that they can already understand to a certain extent what their parents' behavior means. In his book Totem and Taboo, in which he also introduces the concept of emotional inheritance, Freud states that each generation actually wants to pass on the good things, which the next generation must strive to learn. However, he then goes on to say that there are also things that the older generation wants to hide from the younger generation and therefore tries to encode. But this does not work, because the younger generation has the same psychic apparatus and can decode the information again. This is non-verbal and unconscious communication.

Neurophysiological findings show that trauma changes the brains of those affected. The trauma exposes the parent generation to high levels of stress, which, from an epigenetic perspective, is associated with a reduction in DNA methylation. According to studies by Nathan Kellermann, the next generation experiences an allostatic Adaptation response, i.e., some of the offspring become more resilient to stress, while others become more vulnerable. Animal experiments showed a change in methylation in the offspring of stressed mice, even though they were conceived after the traumatic event experienced by the mother.

In order to integrate the trauma psychologically after the fact, the psyche attempts to find access to what actually happened and process it through repetitive patterns. Successful processing of trauma can be recognized by the fact that the affected person can describe the event as something that is now in the past. This does not mean that strong feelings cannot still arise when remembering, but they no longer overwhelm the person. However, if the trauma is not processed, it manifests itself in the offspring in post-traumatic stress disorders and emotional or psychological disorders in the affected parent. And these can affect the offspring in the manner described above.

Recorded by Stefanie Flunkert