There is a kind of grief that doesn’t come with a story you can tell.
This can lead to feelings of confusion and isolation, since you weren’t there and didn’t live through what happened. And yet something in you, something older than your own memories, continues to have feelings or sensations you can’t quite put words to. You grieve losses you haven’t personally experienced and find yourself scanning for danger in rooms that everyone else has already decided are fine.
Just minutes from our office on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills, the Zekelman Holocaust Center sits quietly on a stretch of road that most people drive past without knowing what’s inside.Founded in 1984, the museum was the first stand-alone Holocaust museum in the United States. It includes over 600 survivor testimonies, a WWII-era boxcar, and a tree grown from a sapling from outside Anne Frank’s window. It is not a place that lets you stay at a comfortable distance from history.
Although the Holocaust is over, the descendants of those survivors didn’t escape the weight of what happened. Research has shown that the effects of trauma can extend across generations. As the authors of From Trauma to Resilience: Psychological and Epigenetic Adaptations in the Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors explain, trauma can leave effects that may be reflected across generations through psychological patterns and differences in certain epigenetic markers involved in the body’s stress response.
This is what intergenerational trauma actually is, and it is not metaphor. Intergenerational trauma therapy exists precisely because this kind of inherited wounding is real, and because it responds to treatment.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma, Exactly?
Intergenerational trauma, also called ancestral trauma, historical trauma, or inherited trauma, refers to the way that unresolved traumatic stress doesn’t simply stay with the person who experienced it. It gets transmitted: through parenting behaviors shaped by fear, through nervous system dysregulation passed from caregiver to child in the earliest months of life, and through epigenetic changes that researchers are now documenting with increasing precision.
The Holocaust is one of the most well-studied examples of generational trauma because of the immense scale of the suffering and the extensive historical documentation of survivors’ experiences. Intergenerational trauma is not unique to genocide. It shows up in families that survived war, famine, racism, extreme poverty, addiction, or abuse. It applies to any experience that exceeded what a nervous system could integrate at the time, because there was no room, safety, or support to do so. The people who carry this type of trauma often have no clear sense of why they feel the way they feel, only that something has always felt a little off for the life they’re actually living.
Your Body Is Holding a History You Didn’t Choose
One of the most consistent things that emerges in somatic therapy is how much the body knows that the thinking mind hasn’t caught up with yet. Clients come in describing anxiety that doesn’t connect to any obvious cause, hypervigilance in situations most people find ordinary, or a deep undercurrent of dread that seems to belong to a different era altogether.
When you’ve inherited trauma responses, your nervous system isn’t broken. It learned from your parents’ nervous system, and they learned from theirs, because that is one way that regulation and dysregulation both travel through families. What felt like survival for one generation gets coded into the baseline tone of the next, even after the original threat is gone.
Fortunately, what passes between generations isn’t only pain. According to the same study cited above, the descendants of Holocaust survivors also demonstrated resilience, suggesting that the legacy of trauma can include adaptation, strength, and the capacity to thrive, not only vulnerability. The capacity to persist, to reach toward each other, to rebuild in the dark, that transmits across generations too. Healing intergenerational trauma means making room for both the wound and the ways your family survived.
What Intergenerational Trauma Can Look Like in Your Daily Life
Intergenerational trauma rarely announces itself in obvious ways. More often, it shows up as patterns that seem to have no clear rhyme or reason.
Sometimes these patterns are emotional, while others are behavioral. You may struggle to trust others, feel responsible for everyone’s well-being, or experience guilt for resting, spending money, or enjoying life. Other times, they are physical: your chest tightens during family conflict, your stomach drops when someone raises their voice, or you live with a level of tension and exhaustion that never seems to go away.
In families of Holocaust survivors, there can be observed patterns that often reflect adaptations to extreme deprivation and danger. Some families keep pantries and freezers overflowing with food because going without feels unimaginable. Others save items “just in case,” avoid wasting anything, or become highly anxious when resources feel limited. Some parents become intensely protective, monitoring their children’s safety long into adulthood because danger always feels close. Others rarely speak about their experiences, leaving children to sense the fear and grief without fully understanding where it came from.
These behaviors are not signs of weakness or dysfunction. They are survival strategies that once served an important purpose. The challenge is that what protected one generation during extraordinary circumstances can sometimes create anxiety, hypervigilance, or emotional distance in the next.
Intergenerational trauma doesn’t mean you are destined to repeat your family’s history. Understanding where these patterns come from is often the first step toward changing them.
How Intergenerational Trauma Therapy Works: What Healing Looks Like in Practice
This kind of therapy is not about dramatically confronting the past. It’s slower than that, and more grounded in the present moment than you might expect. Working with a trauma therapist trained in somatic and body-based approaches looks something like this:
- Learning to read your body’s signals. The first thing that shifts is the capacity to notice, not just “I feel anxious,” but where you feel it, what it’s doing, whether it’s moving or stuck. Somatic therapy begins with building that body-level awareness, and that includes noticing warmth, the small ease of a breath that finally drops all the way into your belly, the lightness that comes when your shoulders release a tension you didn’t know you were holding. Before moving toward anything harder, you learn what safety feels like in your own body, because that becomes the ground you return to.
- Understanding inherited nervous system states. With support, you start to see that some of what you carry isn’t yours in origin. That recognition alone can shift something. Not because naming it is enough to heal it, but because it begins to separate your identity from a response pattern that was never really a choice, yours or your parents’. There is often grief in this realization, and relief, and sometimes both at once.
- Processing with EMDR. EMDR therapy is particularly well-suited to intergenerational trauma because it works directly with how traumatic material is stored in the nervous system, not just the story. Even when you don’t have a specific memory to work with, EMDR can address the felt sense of inherited fear, the images that surface unbidden, the body’s rehearsed alarm that fires before your thinking mind has a chance to intervene.
- Building new patterns through the therapeutic relationship. One of the most significant ways inherited trauma shifts is through the experience of steady relational contact. This is something that happens in the therapy room, over time, in a relationship where your reactions are met with steadiness rather than alarm. The nervous system learns something new when the environment consistently offers what it never had before.
- Reconnecting with what else you’ve inherited. Healing doesn’t mean severing your connection to your family’s history. It means metabolizing what hasn’t been processed, and finding, sometimes with grief, sometimes with something closer to tenderness, what has been carried across generations that is worth keeping. This could be resilience, creativity, or a fierce capacity to love under pressure.
Intergenerational Trauma Therapy in Farmington Hills, MI and Throughout Michigan
If you’re in the Farmington Hills, Southfield, West Bloomfield, or Birmingham area, you don’t have to look far for support, and if you’re elsewhere in Michigan, our therapists offer online therapy throughout the state. At Embodied Wellness, we work with people who are beginning to wonder what they’re carrying that wasn’t originally theirs, and who are ready to start untangling those patterns with support that takes both the mind and body seriously.
You don’t need to have a family member who survived a genocide to experience intergenerational trauma. The patterns can come from much quieter histories, histories of silence, of not asking, of things that simply weren’t talked about across the dinner table. Whatever your family carried, its echoes are worth attending to, and you are not too late to begin.
Ready to Begin?
- Contact us for a free 15-minute consultation. You’ll have the chance to share a bit about what’s bringing you in and ask any questions about the process.
- Be matched with a compassionate trauma therapist. We’ll connect you with a therapist whose approach and availability fit what you’re looking for.
- Complete your intake paperwork and log in for your first appointment. Whether you’re coming to our Farmington Hills office or meeting online, your first session moves at your pace.
Get in touch here to schedule your free consultation.
You Might Also Find These Helpful
- Trauma & PTSD Therapy — evidence-based trauma treatment for complex and single-event trauma
- Somatic Therapy — body-centered approaches for healing what talk therapy alone doesn’t always reach
- EMDR Therapy — processing traumatic memories and inherited fear responses through bilateral stimulation
- Somatic Experiencing — Peter Levine’s approach to releasing the physiological residue of unprocessed trauma
