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 […]
The closer we get to a trauma, the more it affects us 24 November 2025 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Emotional principles , Generational trauma , No Comments When we speak of trauma, we tend to imagine it as something distant—an event in the past, safely contained. But trauma work reveals a different and […]
Releasing trauma – how to calm the nervous system 4 November 2025 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , How-to & step-by-step , No Comments We live in a world where our nervous system is under constant assault. Doom scrolling, 24/7 hyperexcited news feeds, political and economic uncertainty and unsustainable busyness—let alone any […]
The missionary position is a trauma response 15 August 2024 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , Patriarchy , Sexuality , No Comments In Sex in patriarchy – how the past shapes sex today I describe the ‘3 M’s’—married, monogamous, missionary (position)—as the bedrock of modern sexuality. At the time, I attributed the […]
How the endocrine system created humanity’s core anxiety 5 May 2023 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Anxiety , Cornerstones , 1 Comment The British Mental Health Foundation’s statistics for 2022-23 show that 37.1% of women and 29.9% of men reported “high levels of anxiety.” This rose from 21.8% and 18.3% respectively in the period […]
The science behind generational trauma 16 September 2022 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments On the surface, generational trauma seems weird and unfathomable. Its manifestations can border on the supernatural. Yet there is increasingly solid science behind our understanding of inherited trauma. Here are a few of the key strands. […]
Patriarchy arose from a systemic fight-or-flight malfunction 26 September 2021 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Patriarchy , No Comments In Generational trauma is a frozen fight-or-flight response, I describe how a malfunction of the fight-or-flight mechanism causes trauma, which can then be inherited. I’ll now extend that understanding to show how this fight-or-flight malfunction, […]
What is your family narrative? 23 September 2021 Posted by: Michael H Hallett Category: Generational trauma , No Comments 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 […]