Generational trauma

The pain, the trauma, had been frozen inside me for half a century. Yet I had no idea. I knew that my family was splintered and disconnected. I had a lifelong sense of abandonment, a dull painful throb in my heart that never seemed to go away. It was a nameless part of my emotional […]

In an interview for the Armchair Expert podcast, Prince Harry has revealed the generational trauma at the heart of Britain’s Royal Family. Speaking to actor Dax Shepard, Harry spoke of the “genetic pain and suffering” in his family and his intention to heal it. “If I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of […]

When we survey the seething maelstrom of human behaviour, it’s hard to see it as anything other than random. Even if we restrict ourselves to our own life and those closest to us, it may still seem that what we’re witnessing is haphazard. Yet this is a false randomness. When we achieve clarity, we find […]

Apple guru Steve Jobs famously observed that “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Jobs stated this in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005—a college he later dropped out of to pursue his vision of the future. His speech continued: “You have to trust that the […]

In Trauma exists as a series of ripples, I describe the multiple, interconnected sources of trauma that may exist in our lives. This trauma is inside our minds, our psyche, our physical cells—our DNA. Yet even this doesn’t help us comprehend the full extent and impact of human trauma. Once we raise our children in […]

In Trauma exists as a series of ripples, I describe the multiple, interconnected sources of trauma that may exist in our lives. I’ve broken down these sources into five key layers. In this article I’m going to focus on the fourth layer, racial trauma. Racial trauma is trauma that affects all people of colour, causing […]

In Trauma exists as a series of ripples, I describe the multiple, interconnected sources of trauma that may exist in our lives. I’ve broken down these sources into five key layers. In this article I’m going to focus on the middle layer, community trauma. Community trauma is trauma that affects an entire, specific community, such […]

In mid-2018 I wrote a blog titled The 3 layers of trauma – ancestral, generational, current-life, in which I ascribed all trauma to one of these categories. Fast forward 18 months and the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference (ITC). I’m now seeing trauma in a much more nuanced way. There are key layers—5 of them—but it’s […]

At the 2021 Intergenerational Trauma Conference, Peter Levine referred to trauma as “a rupture in the fabric of connectivity.” The process of healing inherited trauma is a process of restoring connectivity. To do this, we must recognise where connectivity has been lost. Does your family tree have any broken branches? What are broken branches? Broken […]

I have long wondered why some people talk about their issues while others don’t. I’ve often mistaken ‘can’t talk’ for ‘don’t want to talk’. More recently I’ve started to explore the realm of pre-verbal trauma. The fog is lifting. Pre-verbal trauma is trauma that occurred before we developed the capacity for language. The talking cure Before […]