Written by Miranda Pulido, MFT-I
Intergenerational trauma is what happens when the way a family learned to survive something hard outlives the hard thing. The war, the migration, the poverty, the violence, or the loss ends — and the rules it created stay in place, getting taught to children who never experienced the original event and have no idea why the rules exist. Those children often grow up with reactions that fit a world they never lived in.
What is intergenerational trauma, in plain terms?
Think of it as inherited operating instructions rather than inherited memory.
A family that lived through real scarcity learns that food is never secure, and a generation later there is still a habit of over-buying and an unease about waste that nobody can explain. A family that lived somewhere authority was dangerous learns not to trust institutions, and two generations later a grandchild avoids doctors and does not know why. A family where displaying weakness was actually unsafe learns that feelings are not to be discussed, and passes down children who go silent under stress.
None of this requires anyone to have told the story. In many families the story is precisely what was never told.
How does it get passed down?
Mostly through ordinary parenting, not through anything mysterious.
- What gets rewarded. Toughness, usefulness, not complaining, achieving. Children learn fast which version of themselves earns approval.
- What cannot be discussed. Every family has subjects that make the room change temperature. Children register the boundary long before they know what is on the other side of it.
- How emotion gets handled. A parent who was never soothed often has no template for soothing, not from lack of love but from lack of a model.
- Vigilance. A parent scanning for danger raises a child who scans too, because the child learns the world is something to be watched.
- Silence and gaps. Missing relatives, a country nobody talks about, a year that is skipped in every account. Children fill gaps with something, usually something worse or with themselves at fault.
Is it biological?
Possibly in part, and you do not need that question settled to make sense of what you are living with.
The behavioral transmission is plain enough to observe in any family: how people were treated shapes how they treat their children, which shapes how those children treat theirs. That mechanism is sufficient to explain most of what people come in describing. Whether there is also a biological component is an open question, and treating it as settled fact tends to leave people feeling stuck with something permanent. What is being described here is learned, and learned things can be changed.
What does it look like in a regular family?
Rarely dramatic. Usually a set of ordinary-seeming traits that do not quite match the life the person is currently living:
- Reacting to minor conflict as if something serious is about to happen
- Being unable to rest, or feeling guilty when relaxed
- Difficulty accepting help of any kind
- Enormous anxiety about money regardless of what the accounts actually say
- Emotional flatness in a crisis and collapse afterward
- Treating any authority figure as a potential threat
- Loyalty rules so strong that leaving a bad job, a bad relationship, or a bad city feels like betrayal
People often describe it as feeling braced. Braced for what, they cannot say.
Does naming it mean blaming my parents?
No, and this is the misunderstanding that keeps people out of therapy longest.
The point of the frame is the opposite of blame. It puts your parents' behavior in the context that produced it — the era, the country, the circumstances, the things done to them that they never described. Most people who do this work end up with more compassion for their parents, not less, because for the first time the behavior makes sense as something other than a comment on the child.
What changes is accountability for what happens next. Your parents were handed something they did not choose. You are the one who now has a choice about what gets handed forward, which is a burden and also the only place the leverage is.
What actually breaks the chain?
A short list, in rough order of usefulness:
Getting the history. Facts where you can find them — from relatives, records, a country's history. You are not looking for a confession. You are looking for enough context that the family rules stop seeming like statements about you.
Naming the rule. "We do not ask for help." "We do not discuss what happened to your uncle." Once a rule is stated in words, it becomes something you can decide about rather than something you simply obey.
Working on the response, not the origin. Understanding where the vigilance came from is useful; it does not by itself turn it off. Trauma work addresses the reaction in your body now — the startle, the shutdown, the flood of anger — and that is where most of the relief actually comes from.
Changing one thing deliberately in your own household. Repair after conflict. Naming feelings out loud. Letting a child be upset without fixing or punishing it. Small, repeated, and more consequential than any conversation with the previous generation.
Not requiring the family to participate. Some will. Many will not, and waiting for their agreement hands them a veto over your recovery.
Where does this fit for families in the valley?
Las Vegas is largely a city of arrivals — people who came from another country, or another state, after something did not work where they were.
That means a great many households here contain a difficult history that stayed behind but did not stop operating. It also means the older generation is often far away, which changes the work: you may be sorting out a family pattern with no relatives nearby to ask, and holidays or phone calls become the only points of contact where any of it surfaces.
We see people for this at both offices — E Russell Road in the east valley and N Durango Drive in the northwest — and by secure video, which is what most people use when the schedule is the obstacle. Some of this work is individual, and some of it happens in family therapy when more than one generation is willing to sit down.
Common questions
Can I have trauma symptoms from something that did not happen to me?
You can certainly have the reactions, which is what people usually mean. What was transmitted is the response pattern — vigilance, shutdown, silence around certain topics — and that pattern is treatable whatever its origin.
Do I have to confront my parents for this to work?
No. A great deal of change happens without the previous generation participating at all, and confrontation frequently produces less than people hope. If you do want that conversation, it is worth planning rather than improvising.
Where do I start if my family refuses to discuss the past?
Start with your own reactions rather than the archaeology. You can work on how you respond today without ever obtaining a complete family history, and many people never get one.
What if I feel hopeless about changing any of it?
That feeling is common and it is not a verdict on what is possible. If it ever moves toward not wanting to be here, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour.
You are allowed to be the person in your family who looks at this directly, and you do not have to do it alone — start here when you are ready.