By Violet Nance
Web Portfolio Contributor · July 2025
Some inherit jewelry. Others inherit trauma.
Transgenerational trauma, sometimes called intergenerational trauma, refers to the psychological and emotional wounds that do not stop with the person who lived them—they ripple across generations, shaping family systems, coping mechanisms, and even the body’s chemistry. These aren’t just stories passed down. They are survival strategies, silences, and fears that imprint on children before language ever does.
The concept of transgenerational trauma first gained clinical attention in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when psychiatrists like Vivian Rakoff observed elevated rates of psychological distress, particularly anxiety, depression, and hypervigilance, among the children of survivors (Rakoff et al., 1966). These children, though not direct witnesses to the atrocities, carried emotional burdens shaped by their parents’ silence, grief, and survival strategies. Over time, researchers like Yael Danieli and Rachel Yehuda expanded this understanding, documenting how trauma could be transmitted not only through behavior and family dynamics but also through biological mechanisms.
Yet this phenomenon is not confined to Holocaust descendants. It reverberates across histories marked by violence, displacement, and systemic erasure. Indigenous communities carry the scars of colonization, forced assimilation, and residential schools. Descendants of enslaved people inherit the psychological and physiological imprints of generational oppression and racial trauma. Refugee families often pass down survival instincts shaped by war, famine, and exile. And in households where abuse, addiction, or neglect have been normalized, trauma becomes a ritual; unspoken but deeply felt. These legacies are not just emotional; they are embodied.
Modern psychology and neuroscience now recognize that trauma is not solely psychological—it is biological. Through the lens of epigenetics, we understand that chronic stress can alter gene expression without changing the DNA sequence itself. For example, trauma can modify the methylation of genes that regulate the stress hormone cortisol, leading to heightened glucocorticoid receptor sensitivity and dysregulated stress responses in offspring. These changes affect not only emotional regulation but also immune function, increasing vulnerability to anxiety, depression, and physical illness. In this way, trauma becomes more than a memory; it becomes a cellular language, spoken through hormone levels, neural pathways, and inherited sensitivities.
In my own family, the signs weren’t always named. They showed up in slammed doors, whispered warnings, hushed sobs behind bathroom walls, and survival wrapped in rituals that seemed normal. Depression didn’t announce itself; it crept through generations like fog beneath the floorboards, seeping into the emotional architecture of our home. Hunger was not just for food. It was for recognition, for rest, for safety. For someone to say, I see you.
What is hardest to explain is that sometimes the people who shaped the trauma were themselves its first victims. They weren’t monsters; they were wounded. Their rage was inherited. Their silence was survival. And what looked like emotional abandonment was often the only form of prayer they knew. As trauma psychologist Elena Cherepanov writes, survivors often pass down “survival messages” like don’t ask for help, it’s dangerous; messages that protected one generation but alienated the next.
Naming transgenerational trauma is not about blame. It’s about authorship. It’s about understanding how inherited patterns (emotional suppression, hypervigilance, martyrdom, mistrust) can run through bloodlines like undercurrents, until someone learns to name the tide. These patterns aren’t just psychological; they are biological. Studies in epigenetics demonstrate that trauma can alter gene expression, particularly in stress-regulatory genes such as NR3C1 and FKBP5, which in turn affects cortisol levels and emotional regulation in subsequent generations. Trauma becomes more than memory; it becomes a cellular language.
In families shaped by abuse, addiction, or neglect, hypervigilance becomes a survival skill. Children learn to scan for danger in tone shifts, footsteps, or the way a door closes. Over time, this vigilance becomes chronic, wired into the nervous system, passed down like an heirloom. As Annie Tanasugarn, Ph.D., notes, hypervigilance often leads to people-pleasing and emotional parentification, especially in unpredictable households.
I am that someone. The one who names it. The one who traces the ache back to its origin and refuses to let it stay buried. This work is not glamorous. It’s slow. Tender. Sometimes infuriating. Often bringing tears. Nevertheless, every thread I trace (from unanswered grief to survival mechanisms) makes the story clearer. And clarity is a form of freedom.
I choose to write about trauma, not to live in it, but to live through it. To turn silence into a story. To make invisible labor visible. To honor the wounded without inheriting their wounds. And in doing so, I begin to rewrite the legacy, not with shame, but with truth.
In families shaped by trauma, emotional translation often emerges as an unconscious survival skill. It’s the ability to read between the lines of silence, to decode tension before it erupts, and to respond to emotional weather systems that others barely notice. For children raised in volatile or emotionally suppressed environments, this skill is not taught; it is absorbed. It becomes a form of hypervigilance, a way to stay safe by anticipating others’ needs, moods, and triggers. As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk notes, “The brain’s alarm system is always on high alert in trauma survivors” (van der Kolk, 2014). Emotional translation is one way that alertness gets operationalized, especially in children who learn to soothe others before they are ever taught to soothe themselves.
This kind of translation is often mistaken for empathy, but it is more than that. It’s a form of emotional labor that’s invisible, unpaid, and often unacknowledged. It shows up in families where depression is inherited like furniture, where addiction is ritualized, and where silence is the loudest language spoken. In these contexts, emotional translation serves as a means to maintain connection, avoid conflict, and preserve dignity. Nevertheless, it also comes at a cost. As trauma-informed therapist Tim Fletcher writes, “Survivors of complex trauma often abandon their own emotional needs in order to manage the emotional landscape of others” (Fletcher, 2025). Translation becomes a form of self-erasure.
What makes emotional translation powerful is its potential to evolve from unconscious coping to conscious authorship. When survivors begin to name the patterns they have inherited, they shift from reacting to rewriting. This is where emotional translation becomes a tool not just for survival, but for storytelling. As narrative psychologist Robert Neimeyer explains, “post-traumatic growth often involves reconstructing a coherent life narrative that integrates the trauma into a larger sense of meaning” (Neimeyer, 2001). Emotional translation is the mechanism by which that reconstruction happens. It allows survivors to thread together fragmented memories, reframe inherited pain, and create stories that honor complexity without being consumed by it.
This process is deeply tied to what psychologists call “narrative coherence,” the ability to organize life events into a structured, meaningful story. Research shows that individuals who can transform disjointed trauma memories into coherent narratives experience fewer symptoms of PTSD and greater emotional resilience (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999; Wiesepape et al., 2025). Emotional translation is the bridge between chaos and coherence. It is how survivors make sense of what was never explained, and how they begin to author a legacy that does not just repeat the past; it reclaims it.
Naming emotional translation is an act of resistance. It interrupts the cycle of inherited silence and reframes emotional labor as a credential, not a liability. In trauma recovery models, such as Judith Herman’s three-stage framework (safety, remembrance, and reconnection) emotional translation plays a role in each phase (Herman, 1997). It helps survivors establish emotional safety by recognizing patterns. It aids in remembrance by giving language to what was once unspeakable. And it fosters reconnection by allowing survivors to engage with others from a place of clarity rather than codependency.
Moreover, emotional translation is often linked to post-traumatic growth, the positive psychological changes that can emerge from trauma recovery. Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004) describe this growth as increased personal strength, deeper relationships, and a greater appreciation for life. Emotional translators often embody these traits, not because trauma made them stronger, but because they learned to make meaning from it. Their fluency in emotional nuance becomes a source of wisdom, leadership, and creative power.
I was born on April 7, 1969, just days after my mother tried to keep alive the quiet rhythm she had woven into anniversaries and birthdays: the third of the month, her private choreography of meaning. I didn’t arrive on the third. I came later. Not to continue the pattern, but to interrupt it.
The walls of my childhood weren’t just lined with magazine pages; they were lined with quiet grief, coded warnings, and emotional residue. I remember slamming doors. I remember Momma crying in a room that didn’t have a language for her ache. We didn't have much food, but we had hunger, for safety, for affirmation, for someone to notice what silence was doing to us.
After her death, I found alcohol bottles tucked behind linens and bleach—a hidden trail of suffering she never voiced. She was a “closet alcoholic,” yes, but what she was really concealing was the depression she carried from her own malnourished childhood. Clinical? Probably. But also ancestral. This was not just sadness; it was a cellular memory shaped by deprivation, emotional suppression, and inherited shame. Researchers like Yehuda et al. (2005) describe how trauma exposure can lead to intergenerational cortisol dysregulation, a biological basis for what I witnessed firsthand.
My family history is marked by alcoholism. But I didn’t follow that legacy. I became a translator instead. Emotional translation was not a choice; it was instinct. I read the room before I read books. I listened for tone before I listened for words. I became fluent in the language of unsaid things.
In trauma-saturated families, translation is how children survive. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) explains how the brain remains in a constant state of alertness after trauma, and in my case, that alertness led to authorship. I didn’t drink. I wrote. I named the ache. I mapped the mess. I created coherence where there was once only codependency and emotional parentification (Tanasugarn, 2021).
This essay is part of that translation. I’ve drawn from science, scholarship, and memory to stitch together the truths we weren’t allowed to say out loud. I am not just naming the trauma; I am claiming my place outside of it. Because while trauma may echo through generations, so can authorship. So can clarity. So can healing.
Legacy is not just what we inherit. It’s what we choose to carry forward.
I choose voice. I choose pattern interruption. I choose to carry what is sturdy, not what is secret.
And in doing so, I carry myself.