Ancestral trauma #8 – Fear of famine 1 June 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Ancestral trauma , No Comments Photo by Peter Muscutt on Unsplash When I was a child, I was sometimes puzzled by my mother’s food choices. She had a particular love of lard on toast—rendered pig fat on burnt, stale bread. Sweetbreads—the thymus […]
Trauma – 6 sources, 6 impacts 18 May 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Cornerstones , Generational trauma , No Comments Some people collect butterflies. Matchbox cars. Stamps. I’ve been chasing down a systemic catalogue of trauma’s sources and impacts for some years. Sources of trauma In 2018 I wrote a blog (since deleted) […]
Escaping the present – trauma’s frozen fight-or-flight legacy 13 May 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments Whenever I used to call my father, he always began the conversation with the same question: “What’s new?” It’s twenty years since he passed away, yet only now do I see the pain […]
Are you and your family running on empty? 11 May 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments When I was growing up in the 1970s, the songwriter who spoke most powerfully to my sense of abandonment, depersonalisation and disaffection was Jackson Browne. His 1977 live album Running on Empty, recorded […]
12-Step framework for trauma release 7 May 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Cornerstones , Generational trauma , No Comments Trauma is mechanical. It forms under mechanical conditions and releases under mechanical conditions. The purpose of this 12-step framework is to understand the overarching mechanics of trauma so you can know and work with […]
Trauma-Informed Genealogy: where history and healing meet 29 April 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments There is a quiet convergence happening that is, as yet, largely unrecognised. On one side are therapists, working with the symptoms of trauma as they appear in the present: anxiety, depression, addiction; stumped by […]
Untold family stories: deliberate silence or dissociation? 28 April 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments 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 […]
All trauma is survival trauma 26 April 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Ancestral trauma , Generational trauma , No Comments We tend to think of trauma as something exceptional—something that happens in extreme situations, to other people, at other times. This is a naïve and comforting illusion. Trauma is not the exception. It’s […]
The silence of the lambs: silence as survival strategy 12 March 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments When families encounter hardship, something curious often happens. Just like lambs before slaughter, they fall silent. Not always immediately. At first there may be noise—confusion, blame, or frantic attempts to fix things. […]
Trauma formation: how fight-flight becomes freeze-fawn 13 January 2026 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments In 1915, physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon first described the fight-or-flight response. What has since become clear is that under certain conditions, operations of this mechanism are disrupted—and fight-or-flight becomes freeze-and-fawn. Fight or flight Fight-or-flight is “a physiological […]