I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts …
It’s not only the things that we’ve inherited
from our fathers and mothers that live on in us
but all sorts of dead things …
they’re not actually alive in us,
but they’re rooted there all the same.
—HENRIK IBSEN, GHOSTS
When I published my first book, Waking the Tiger,56 one final section was titled “How Far in Space and Time.” When this chapter was written, in the early 1990s, the idea of the generational transmission of trauma seemed, at best, to be thoroughly unscientific, if not fanciful. However, research over the past few years has not only chronicled the existence of such conduction but has demonstrated some of the epigenetic, molecular, and biochemical mechanisms responsible for such transmission.
In one pivotal experiment,57 mice were exposed to the neutral (if not agreeable) scent of cherry blossoms. This neutral scent was then followed by an aversive electrical shock. After several pairings, the mice froze in fear when the scent was presented alone, in the absence of the shock. No surprise—this is a typical example of Pavlovian conditioning. However, what is astonishing about the experiment was that this same robust conditioned response was retained through at least five generations of progeny. In other words, when exposed to the scent of the cherry blossoms, the great-great-grandchildren of the experimentally conditioned mice froze in fear just as though they themselves had been conditioned to the shock. Further, when these progeny were exposed to several other neutral smells, there was no response, just as had been the case for their great-great-grandfathers. Incidentally, this generational transmission was significantly stronger through the male line.
This remarkable specificity of conditioning to one particular odor, to the exclusion of all others, has staggering implications for the transmission of trauma in humans. For example, I have worked with several second-generation Holocaust survivors who during their sessions were startled by perceiving the nauseating smell of burning flesh. This occurred along with an intense visceral reaction of nausea, fear, and a palpable dread that something horrible would happen. Indeed, a number of these clients were so averse to this type of smell that they became strict vegetarians. While I certainly can’t offer this as proof of generational trauma, one can hardly dismiss the significance of this smell transmission, particularly given the results of the mouse experiment.
In an interview article titled “Trauma Ripples through Generations,”58 Israeli trauma researcher Zahava Solomon ends the dialogue with a reflection on her own ancestry. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she describes her very positive relationship with her parents. Her mother shared stories about the courage she and her siblings had demonstrated during that period, and how Zahava’s birth had been a ray of hope, her triumphant victory over the Nazis. Solomon concludes the interview with the statement that, “So far as I can tell, it [my parents’ experience] affected me [only] in a positive way.” However, “I do have a lot of qualms about aggression; I’m also quite anxious,” she adds in a revealing aside.
Rachael Yehuda, one of the leading researchers on the neurobiological effects of generational trauma—and particularly on the children of Holocaust survivors—has demonstrated clear changes in cortisol levels and other physiological markers of anxiety in this population.59 These relatively nonspecific effects could, of course, be transmitted by compromised parenting of their infant offspring. However, from my own clinical work with children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, I have frequently noticed and tracked symptoms of generalized anxiety and depression. I have also noted that these individuals frequently describe surprisingly specific and often horrific images, sensations, and emotions about events that seemed quite real but could not possibly have happened to them. I was able to confirm that many of these specific events had actually happened to the patients’ parents, and could not have possibly happened to their children. However, the children were clearly experiencing their parents’ traumatic memories as if they were their own. Significantly, most of the parents and grandparents had not initially shared these memories with their children.
Several Native American tribes tell us that the suffering of the father is carried forth for four generations,a onto the children and the children’s children. Indeed, the Bible seems to concur, as in Exodus 34:7: “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” Perhaps, “sins” are metaphors for the traumas of slavery that the Jews were subjected to in Egypt and which would not be readily shed, even upon their exodus to the Holy Land. I strongly suspect that many African Americans are still suffering from the residual dark cloud drifting ominously behind the eradication of slavery. In fact, the lack of adequate educational opportunities in U.S. ghettos today, as well as the subjugation and mass incarcerations of millions of black men and boys, reinforces this tragic legacy of generational trauma.
A Navajo medicine man I once met in Flagstaff, Arizona, told me that the generational effect of trauma was particularly true in the case of wars and in times of social upheaval. An example he shared was of children who were taken from their families, villages, and tribes and relocated to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools. Along with this forced separation and exile, they were exposed to constant humiliation and stripped of their dignity, language, and any connection to their spiritual heritage. The medicine man also described some of the specific rituals performed for warriors when they returned home from battle, ceremonies known to help reduce the source of their trauma—before it could be passed on to family and subsequent generations. He then invited me to participate in a powerful ritual that had been used when the courageous “Code Talkers” returned from World War II, and which was then (in 1979) being offered to the returning Navajo Vietnam veterans. It was a critical rite of passage we would do well to learn from in welcoming, honoring, and “cleansing” the wounds of our returning warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children.
—PHILIP CARR-GOMM, ARCHDRUID OF SUSSEX
No discussion of generational trauma would be complete without at least acknowledging one intriguing aspect of traumatic transmission that seems to defy explanation: the inheritance of survival-based information. Specifically, I am referring to the critical, even life-saving, transmission of implicit information that can be traced back through several generations of a family’s or tribe’s history.
In 1990, I was asked to see a young woman, “Kelly,” who had been in the Sioux City, Iowa, airplane disaster (upon which director Peter Weir based his compellingly honest 1993 movie Fearless). United 232, a DC-10, en route from Denver to Chicago on July 19, 1989, lost its rear engine in an explosive blast. This severed all the hydraulic lines, making the plane virtually uncontrollable. The crippled plane tilted and plummeted downward at such a steep angle that a tailspin seemed inevitable. Remarkably, the pilot, Al Haynes, and an emergency flight instructor, Denny Fitch, who just happened to be on board, kept the plane from going into a tailspin and were able to make an emergency landing onto the tarmac of a small regional airport. Upon impact, the plane exploded and split apart. Pieces of the burning, crushed fuselage were strewn into the surrounding cornfields.b Kelly was one of the fortunate survivors. She escaped her collapsed section of the aircraft by crawling through a twisted maze of metal and wires toward a crushed opening and into the daylight.
As we worked together, Kelly recalled the sheer terror and panic among the passengers when the engine first exploded, and then again as it crashed violently onto the tarmac. In gradually focusing on her body sensations, her terror was greatly attenuated. This allowed for the emergence of the critical procedural memory of crawling on her hands and knees toward a “pinpoint of light.” She then recalled hearing the voices of her father and grandfather shouting: “Don’t wait! Go now! Go to the light! Get out before the fireball!” She obeyed.
Kelly next reported an image of sitting in the cornfield beside the tarmac and feeling the warmth of the sun on her face. As she experienced a relieving wash of warm sensations, she then described feeling powerful waves of gratitude for being alive and for the “life preserver” passed on by her father and grandfather. Both Kelly’s father and grandfather had survived separate plane crashes (one commercial, the other military). Both men had narrowly escaped death by leaving the wreckage as soon as the plane hit the ground. It is, of course, entirely possible that Kelly had heard stories about her father’s and grandfather’s harrowing experiences, and these tales may well have helped her know what to do when the plane went down. On the other hand, maybe it was not simply remembering the stories, but having theses imprints branded onto her psyche and into her body memory.
Direct transmission of procedural memories may well serve the evolutionary function of ensuring survival in situations where conscious deliberation would be limited, if not fruitless. Along this line of thought, our nonprofit organization, the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, was working in Thailand in the aftermath of the Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami in 2004. Many of the villagers told our team that elephants and other wild animals ran for higher ground at the moment of the earthquake and before the resulting tsunami, as did many of the tribal communities. While stories passed on over a period of three hundred years, since the time of the previous mega-tsunami, could be a plausible explanation for the tribal members’ escape, we cannot explain the wild animals’ instantaneous “instinctual” responses by citing myths, lore, or storytelling, at least not so far as we understand the linguistics of these species.
As a biological scientist, trusting in evolution as the “go-to,” default mechanism for change, my view of the transmission across time and space of traumatic procedural (body) memories is this: I see generational transmission of trauma as a necessary downside, “a side effect,” of being able to transmit and receive vital survival-based information. This information can lie dormant and then suddenly appear as a compelling procedural memory when a similar situation is encountered, even after many generations—just as it did in Southeast Asia’s mega-tsunami or when Kelly, hearing the voices of her deceased father and grandfather, sprang into action by crawling to safety through the tangled mess of the crushed and torn fuselage, thus escaping the fireball that would certainly have doomed her to a fiery death. Clearly, these transgenerational promptings saved Kelly’s life.
Homeopaths have long recognized this kind of generational information exchange through their understanding of “miasma,” a term referring to a cloud of contagious power that has an independent life of its own and must be treated by influencing the patient’s “energy/information field.” These miasmas are seen to spread across generations. Evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake carried out a wide array of provocative experiments suggesting similar generational field effects through what he calls “morphic resonance.”60,61
In one of Sheldrake’s early experiments, a particular strain of mice was taught to run a maze in Sydney, Australia. Then, mice of the same strain—though born and raised in New York and never transported between continents—were run through an identical maze at the Rockefeller Labs in New York City. Surprisingly, they learned the maze at a statistically significant faster pace. Now of course, one could point out that everything is faster in New York. However, when the experiment was reversed and mice first learned the maze in New York, then the Sydney brethren claimed the edge. If such demonstrable effects exist in biologically related mice when learning a simple maze, then the likelihood of transmitting emotionally significant survival information between humans, across space and time—particularly when there is something so violent as an airplane crash, tsunami, or war—seems likely to be clinically relevant.
Generational transmission is a compelling possibility that we cannot and should not ignore. And while mainstream science tends to ignore Sheldrake’s findings because it does not fit into known paradigms, it should be noted that he has successfully performed many such experiments with similar results. Furthermore, a group of donors has offered a sizable monetary prize to anyone who can disprove any of his experimental findings. So far, there have been no takers.
For now, readers and fellow explorers, I will leave further explanations to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone, but not without wondering just how far in space and time the patterns of traumatic shock truly extend and how wars, persecutions, purges, and other cataclysmic events appear to repeat, often with stunning regularity. Discovering just how these trauma-specific “information packets” are passed on as engrams—as procedural and emotional memories—from generation to generation is a vital “karmic” mysterium tremendum left for future generations to ponder.
a. I believe that some tribes say four generations, others seven. In the animal model described above, transmission was followed through at least five generations.
b. Footage of this dramatic event is available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhSoyUWDmt0; Fitch later told his story to documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on his television show First Person.