Healing Work as Legacy Work

How Trauma — and Healing — Moves Through Generations

 In the last few decades, science has confirmed something that many ancient traditions and Indigenous cultures have always known: trauma can be inherited.

Through the study of epigenetics, we now understand that our DNA doesn’t just pass down physical traits like eye color or height — it also carries the imprint of experiences, including fear, stress, and trauma. It’s kinda wild. But understanding that we inherit our ancestors’ trauma can open up so many doors for healing otherwise confusing things.

When I first learned about epigenetics and the idea that trauma is inherited, this is the story that made it all make sense:

Imagine somebody being terrified of being in water but not knowing why.

“Did anything ever happen to you in the ocean or in a pool?” a therapist may ask.

If the answer is “No, nothing I can remember,” it can be confusing, leaving you uncertain where to go next.

But imagine learning that your great-grandfather drowned at sea — and that your body, deep in your cells, carries this memory.

Just that awareness alone can alleviate much of the hold this experience has over you.

Trauma leaves chemical marks on our genes, changing the way they express themselves. These changes don’t alter the genetic code itself, but they do influence how that code is read and translated into our biology. And those changes can be passed down from generation to generation.

This means that sometimes, the anxiety we carry, the sensitivity to stress, the sense of hypervigilance or emotional shutdown, isn’t just ours. It’s a pattern echoing through our lineage — shaped by the experiences of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Shaped by wars survived, losses endured, injustices borne, migrations undertaken…and the list goes on.

Here’s another example that illustrates this on a large scale:

Researchers studying the descendants of Holocaust survivors found higher levels of cortisol dysregulation — a marker of stress — in the children and grandchildren of survivors.

Even though these descendants didn’t live through the Holocaust themselves, their nervous systems showed signs of inherited trauma, passed down through the biology of survival.

But here’s the empowering part:

When we engage in healing work and make sense of these experiences, we aren’t just healing for ourselves. We are healing for our children, and for the ancestors who didn’t have the chance to.

In my work — particularly using modalities like EMDR — I see this unfold every day. When we regulate our nervous systems, when we process old traumas instead of passing them along unspoken, when we create space for safety and connection inside ourselves, we shift the entire story line of our family tree.

Healing work updates our legacy.

It honors the resilience of those who came before us — many of whom didn’t have access to therapy, to knowledge about trauma and the nervous system, and to safe spaces for emotional processing. It also gifts something freer, something lighter, to those who come after us.

Our healing becomes a ripple effect: reducing the burden for future generations, creating new patterns of safety, trust, and emotional presence.

It’s humbling to think of healing not as a solitary act, but as an ancestral and generational one.

It can feel overwhelming at times to carry the weight of this — but it’s also deeply freeing. Healing is not about blaming those who came before us; it's about offering compassion, to ourselves and to them, and using the tools we now have to bring restoration where pain was carried too long.

As Maya Angelou said:

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Many of our parents, grandparents, and ancestors didn’t have access to the healing tools we now do.
But today, we can learn nervous system regulation tools — and we can use them.

And remember: every step you take toward healing changes what gets passed forward. 

You are not just surviving —
You are shaping a different future.