Epigenetics & Inherited Trauma

When the Body Remembers and Healing Isn’t Just Personal

For a long time, trauma was understood as something that happened to us—an event we experienced, a moment our nervous system couldn’t fully process. But emerging research in epigenetics is expanding that understanding in a powerful way.

Some trauma doesn’t begin with us at all.

Our bodies can carry the imprint of experiences that occurred generations before we were born—and those imprints can quietly shape how we feel, react, and protect ourselves today.

What Is Epigenetics?

Epigenetics refers to how experiences influence the way genes are expressed, without changing the DNA itself. Think of genes as the hardware and epigenetics as the software—environmental factors like stress, danger, nourishment, and safety can turn certain genes “on” or “off.”

In the context of trauma, this means that overwhelming stress can leave biological markers that are passed down through generations, affecting stress responses, fear conditioning, and emotional regulation long after the original event has ended.

The Mice, the Burned Paws, and the Cherry Blossoms

One of the most well-known studies illustrating this comes from neuroscience research involving mice and scent-based fear conditioning.

In this study, mice were exposed to a specific scent—commonly described as a cherry blossom smell—paired with a painful stimulus to their paws. Over time, the mice learned to associate the scent with danger and reacted with fear even when no pain followed.

Here’s the remarkable part:
Their offspring—and even their grand-offspring—also showed fear responses to the same scent, despite never being exposed to the painful stimulus themselves.

The trauma wasn’t learned through experience.
It was inherited through biology.

This study offered compelling evidence that fear memories can be transmitted across generations through epigenetic changes affecting how the nervous system responds to threat.

When Fear Has No Story

In clinical work, this research helps explain a familiar experience:

Someone feels a deep, embodied fear—but has no conscious memory to attach it to.

For example, imagine a person who has always been terrified of deep water. They avoid lakes, panic near the ocean, and feel shame for being “irrational.” There’s no childhood memory of a water-related trauma. No near-drowning. No obvious cause.

Later in life, through family stories or genealogical research, they learn that their great-great-grandfather died by drowning—an event that devastated the family and occurred during a time when grief was never processed or spoken about.

The fear suddenly makes sense—not as a flaw, but as an inherited survival response.

The body remembered, even when the mind did not.

Trauma Lives in the Nervous System

Whether trauma is personal, relational, medical, or inherited, it doesn’t live only in our thoughts. It lives in the nervous system—in patterns of tension, hypervigilance, shutdown, and fear responses that were once protective.

This is why insight alone often isn’t enough.

You can know that you’re safe, loved, and capable—and still feel on edge, flooded, or frozen. Trauma-informed healing recognizes that the body must be included in the process.

What Trauma Treatment Really Does

Modern trauma therapies—such as EMDR, somatic approaches, mindfulness-based interventions, and relational work—don’t erase history. They help the nervous system update.

Trauma treatment works by:

• Helping the body distinguish past danger from present safety
  
  
• Reducing inherited and learned fear responses
  
  
• Restoring choice where there was once automatic survival
  
  
• Creating new neural and physiological pathways grounded in regulation and connection
  
  

From an epigenetic perspective, healing isn’t just emotional—it’s biological. When safety, attunement, and regulation are experienced consistently, the body can begin to shift how stress-related genes are expressed.

In other words: what was passed down can also be softened, integrated, and transformed.

Healing Isn’t About Blame—It’s About Compassion

Understanding epigenetics isn’t about blaming families or digging endlessly into ancestry. It’s about releasing shame.

If you’ve ever wondered:

• “Why do I react so strongly?”
  
  
• “Why does this fear feel older than me?”
  
  
• “Why do I feel unsafe even when life is okay?”
  
  

The answer may not be a personal failure or something you’re missing.

It may be your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive—across generations.

You Are Not Broken—You Are Adaptive

Trauma responses are not signs of weakness or dysfunction. They are intelligent adaptations—ways your nervous system learned to keep you safe, sometimes long before you had words or choice.

Whether your experiences are rooted in your own life or carried forward through lineage, healing is possible.

Trauma therapy isn’t about fixing you.

It’s about helping your body recognize that the danger has passed—and that it no longer has to carry everything alone.

Reference: 

Dias, B. G., & Ressler, K. J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17(1), 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3594