Untold family stories: deliberate silence or dissociation?

There is a strange silence that runs through many family histories. It appears, at first glance, deliberate: names omitted, events blurred, whole chapters missing. We tend to assume that someone, somewhere, chose not to speak. But what if that silence was never a choice at all? What if it’s the unconscious forgetfulness of dissociation?

What is dissociation?

Dissociation is a concept which concerns a wide array of experiences, ranging from a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings to a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences. (Wikipedia)

It is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) and is “believed to be related to neurobiological mechanisms, trauma, anxiety, and psychoactive drugs.”

What we call ‘mental disorders’ are not random phenomena. They’re the visible surface of something far older, rooted in unprocessed and often inherited trauma that replicates in our lives as if it has appeared out of nowhere.

As I write in The silence of the lambs: silence as survival strategy, families fall silent to hide their trauma. Yet I’m increasingly seeing another source of silence: the impact of an event is so severe, so shameful, that we are—or our ancestors were—unable to remember it.

Family silence, seen through this lens, is not concealment. It’s memory fragmentation.

Memory formation

The impact of trauma on memory formation is well established:

Trauma can significantly disrupt how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved, often leading to fragmented or inaccessible recollections rather than coherent narratives. Under extreme stress, the brain prioritises survival, activating the amygdala while impairing the functioning of the hippocampus, which is responsible for organising memories in time and context (van der Kolk, 2014).

This can result in dissociation, where aspects of an experience are split off from conscious awareness, producing gaps, distortions, or a sense that events are unreal or not fully remembered (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Additionally, trauma-related stress hormones such as cortisol can interfere with normal encoding processes, meaning that memories may be stored as sensory fragments—images, emotions, or bodily sensations—rather than as complete, verbalised accounts (Brewin, 2014).

As a result, what looks decades later to be forgetfulness or deliberate silence may instead reflect the brain protecting itself from overwhelming experiences.

The wedding photograph

This reframes the missing stories in our genealogies. The absent grandfather who was never spoken of. The ancestor disinherited for no known reason. The scandal that flickers in the family record then dissolves into vagueness. These are not simply edited out—they are dissociated out.

I have a photograph of my grandfather’s wedding in 1921. A little over a decade later, the marriage collapsed in acrimony after my grandmother had an affair. Later in life, my mother wrote on its back: “this would be father with his bride. This would be 1913.”

It would not be 1913. My grandfather wears the uniform of a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, an organisation that did not exist until 1918. My mother was unable to recognise her own mother in the photograph. Silence, forgetfulness—or dissociation?

Frozenness

I knew a woman who celebrated her husband’s birthday and their wedding day on Facebook—over a decade after his death. This example illustrates another aspect of dissociation: emotional frozenness, the inability to move on.

Frozenness is how the mind deals with our dissociated fragments. They are too dangerous. They cannot be allowed into conscious awareness; they must be frozen out. That which is frozen is stagnant; that which is stagnant is toxic.

Dissociation, trauma, and frozenness are inextricably linked, an unholy trinity of defence mechanisms against the unbelievable, the unthinkable, and unbearable events in our lives—and those of our ancestors.

In fact, generational trauma is nothing other than a frozen fight-or-flight reaction. When neither fight nor flight are possible, we freeze. Part of the freezing involves dissociating from the full, overwhelming impact of the situation. This can happen suddenly in extreme events yet also seems to take years to fully bury the dissociated fragments in the unconscious.

States of being

Dissociation, in this context, is not dramatic. It is subtle, systemic, and often inherited. A traumatic event—betrayal, abandonment, shame—overwhelms the psyche. Memory is not erased; it is rendered inaccessible. And crucially, what is dissociated in one generation does not vanish. It persists, manifesting not as narrative, but as behaviour.

This is the critical distinction. Families do not just pass down stories. They pass down states of being. When those states are rooted in trauma, they often resist articulation.

Shame, in particular, resists a coherent narrative. It does not want to be spoken; it wants to remain hidden—even from the person carrying it. Over time, this creates what appears to be silence but is in fact a kind of internal exile. Parts of the self—and thus parts of the family story—are isolated from awareness.

Genealogists and family historians often encounter this as a dead end. Even when records exist, meaning does not. Facts are available, but context is missing.

Resolving dissociation

What emerges, then, is a different way of understanding untold family stories. Not as secrets withheld, but as experiences unintegrated. Not as silence imposed, but as memory fragmented by trauma. This is a more nuanced, more compassionate take on family silence.

To bring these stories back is not simply a matter of research. It’s a process of mining the unconscious—of recognising the patterns, the emotional residues, the behaviours that point to something unresolved—of bringing the unconscious to light.

We do this through awareness, through feeling, through the warmth of the heart. We supply emotional warmth to the frozen, dissociated parts of our being. The first thing that happens is usually that we encounter the pain of the original event—pain frozen in time. Giving voice to that pain gives voice to whatever lies behind it: our families’ untold stories.

When this happens, the silence begins to shift. Not because someone finally decides to speak, but because, perhaps for the first time, they can.

Next steps

For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash