Generational trauma

In recent months I’ve been binge-watching the BBC’s long-running heirloom restoration show, The Repair Shop. “What’s in the box?” asks impresario Jay Blades as each new—well, old and badly damaged—item arrives at the Weald and Downland Living Museum. In The Repair Shop today… I’m as eager as Jay to find out. I’m fascinated by the […]

I remember, I remember, The house where I was born,  The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn;  He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day,  But now, I often wish the night Had borne my breath away!  I remember, I remember, Where I was used to swing,  And thought the air […]

“The past is a door I don’t revisit very often”. I’ve heard this, and similar beliefs on leaving the past behind, over the years. This seems to me like wishful thinking. My own experience is the opposite: the only exit from the past is by going back through it. Pema Chodron writes that “nothing ever […]

When healing trauma, we’re dealing with the contents of our unconscious—which, by definition, are unclear to us. Trying to understand what traumatic events are still alive and kicking in our psyche can lead us into a fog of suspicions, half-truths, or completely mis-read signs. Yet trauma never lies. When we reconstruct the past accurately enough […]

One of the characteristics of trauma that may seem confusing from the outside looking in, is that the more traumatised we are, the more we defend trauma. However, when we understand how trauma works, this seemingly paradoxical stance reveals itself to be entirely congruent with the emotional mechanics of trauma. The more traumatised we are, […]

I recently learned that in 1922 my great-grandfather was jailed for six months for tax fraud, in relation to the hotel where he was the publican. This might seem like a small and perhaps a little unsavoury footnote to my family history. Instead, I realised with a flash that this was perhaps the key event […]

We tend to think of trauma as a psychological issue. Yet it’s an issue that’s very much rooted in the body. Research has shown a connection to chemicals produced by the fight-or-flight response. Here I’m going to explore the idea that generational trauma is a frozen fight-or-flight response inherited from one of our ancestors. Generational […]

Philonise Floyd, during the trial for the murder of his brother George, stated that “the world is traumatized”. I’d like to back up that assertion and expand the perception of trauma by recognising India’s caste system as a multi-layered, genetically inherited trauma. At the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference, Peter McBride spoke about community trauma in […]

13 April 2021 was the 12th day of Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd. Amid late winter snow flurries, his brother Philonise Floyd spoke outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis. “The world is traumatized.” If the world was to stop—just for a moment—and ask me what I had to say, […]

I grew up in the shadow of World War 2, in the Channel Islands—the only part of the British Empire occupied by the Nazis. My mother’s family buried their valuables in a potato pot and evacuated to the mainland. Six years later they returned to find the potato pot undisturbed. In my own life, something […]