It’s logical that if we can inherit genetic imprinting from our parents and grandparents in the form of genetic predisposition, we can also inherit other aspects embedded in our genes too, right?
It’s only after living a life inflicted with trauma that I’ve come to realize that it’s in my DNA. My mother spoke of unthinkable atrocities that I came to feel emotionally, but it was through the process of elimination that I deemed it her trauma and not mine. After all, much of it happened before I was even born.
Years of torment led me to the realization; however, that not only was her trauma mine in the present tense, but also the very distant past as well. Historical trauma is recognized as cumulative emotional harm to many documented groups of people, including Holocaust survivors, Native Americans, and other Indigenous groups, even descendants of slaves.
Third-generation lab rats have been recorded having the same traumatic response to the exact trigger their grandparents experienced, but without ever experiencing the trauma directly. One particular experiment tormented female rats and found that trauma to a mother mouse can alter behavior in her descendants over multiple generations.
Epigenetics
Epigenetic inheritance is a compelling and popular explanation. Our genetic blueprint consists of our DNA, which is our chemical ‘marks’ on and around our DNA that are passed down by our parents. Our genome is complemented by a number of ‘epigenomes’ that vary by cell type and developmental time point. Epigenetic marks are attached to our DNA and dictate, in part, whether a gene is on or off, which influences the function of the gene.
A Massachusetts General Hospital study found evidence that children under 3 years old are the most vulnerable to the effects of adversity (experiences including poverty, family and financial instability, and abuse) on their epigenetic profiles and chemical tags that alter gene expression. Both animal and human studies found that adverse experiences early in life can have lasting effects on epigenetics.
Research has shown that exposure to adversity was typically associated with increased methylation, which reduces the expression of specific genes; and neighborhood disadvantage appeared to have the greatest impact, followed by family financial stress, sexual or physical abuse, and single-parent households.
The study defines social adversity as financial poverty or long-term unemployment in the family, while stressful adversity relates to the death of a parent, divorce, or alcohol/drug abuse among the parents. They discovered that children who have experienced repeated serious adversity were 4.5 times more likely to die in early adulthood (16-36 years of age). The higher mortality rate mainly manifests itself in suicide and accidents, but the study also shows a higher risk of dying from cancer in this group.
A research team researched adults that were evacuated as children during WWII, and they found that daughters of female evacuees had the same high risk for mental health disorders as their mothers, even though they did not experience the same adversity. The study could not determine why the higher risk for mental illness persisted across generations.
“Many studies have shown that traumatic exposures during pregnancy can have negative effects on offspring,” said study author Stephen Gilman, Sc.D., of the Division of Intramural Population Health Research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. A previous study found that women evacuated as children were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder than their female siblings who remained at home.
The researchers did not find any increase in psychiatric hospitalizations for the sons or daughters of males who had been evacuated as children; however, there is a correlation between adversity during pregnancy and schizophrenia spectrum disorders in males, in particular. Stressful life events ranging from war to natural disasters have been shown to increase the risk. Unwanted pregnancy also creates a hostile environment for optimum development, increasing the risk of psychosis in offspring.
The study could not determine why the daughters of female evacuees had a higher risk of mental illness. One possibility is that the stresses of the evacuees’ experience affected their psychological development in ways that influenced their parenting style. Another possibility is that the evacuee experience resulted in epigenetic changes. For example, the researchers cited an earlier finding that Holocaust survivors have higher levels of compounds known as methyl groups bound to the gene FKBP5 and have passed this change on to their children. This higher level of methyl groups appears to alter the production of cortisol, a hormone that regulates the stress response.
Transgenerational impacts, including risky health behaviors, anxiety and shame, food hoarding, overeating, authoritarian parenting styles, high emotional neediness on the part of parents, and low community trust and cohesiveness, are what many described as living in “survival mode”.
Group Trauma
Historical trauma is an event or set of events that happen to a group of people who share a specific identity, such as Tribal affiliation, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Individual events compiled make up a legacy of cultural disruption and community destruction. Ethnocide, like genocide, undoubtedly leaves lasting effects on the population of people that it was directed towards.
Personally, I know that what my ancestors experienced before me has played a major role in the course of my life. Being bi-racial has exacerbated this trauma for me, as my heritage is Native and African American. While I never ever knew my black father, I innately felt his trauma. My Native mother was unable to shield me from her trauma, in addition to it being housed in my own DNA. I witnessed the torment it caused her my whole life; torment that was no longer a direct threat was still killing her slowly indirectly.
Individual trauma leads to group trauma because the effects impact society as a whole. PTSD and other mental health disorders can be traced back to one’s lineage. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris discovered that exposure to childhood trauma affects brain development, immune and hormonal health, and children were five times more likely to experience heart disease and lung cancer, as well as a 20-year difference in life expectancy.
In addition to being predisposed for a variety of health issues, childhood trauma is also to blame for the imbalance in the nucleus accumbens or the pleasure and reward center of the brain that is implicated in substance dependence. MRI scans show measurable differences in the amygdala or the brain’s fear response center, further demonstrating that it’s much more than “bad choices.” This means our “good luck or “bad fortune” is literally written in our DNA.
Toxic stress response is due to the high levels of cortisol (stress hormone) that one experiences when poverty, trauma, and adversity are experienced too frequently. “Microaggressions are the chronic and commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities and injustices, intentional and unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, demeaning, invalidating, and/or negative (racial, ethnic, homophobic, etc.) slights and insults toward people (of color, homosexual individuals, etc.).”
Understanding the genetics of trauma is imperative for our future generations to thrive, and allows the coordination of services to address the trauma properly. Women also need specified healing modalities to address the thousands of years of trauma that still lives in our DNA.
Women’s Trauma
No matter what race a female is, she is still considered subservient to any/all men throughout the world alike. White women have endured trauma at the hands of men for centuries, while women of color have had to deal with the trauma of being both non-white and female for just as long. Research shows that women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD. In addition to experiencing longer durations of posttraumatic symptoms, they also display more sensitivity to stimuli that remind them of the trauma. Naturally, these negative effects also have an impact on her children.
Depression, mood swings, panic and anxiety, eating disorders, addictions, flashbacks, and self-injurious behaviors are just some of the effects women endure. 55% of all men and women who are alcohol depended inherit it from parents; however, lifetime prevalence is 4.9% in women as compared to 8.6% in men. Additionally, women are more susceptible than men to the harmful effects of alcohol. Liver damage, heart disease, brain damage, and breast cancer are all proven to affect women at a greater rate than men who drink the same amount.
A woman’s brain literally differs from that of a male’s, but lack of research focused on women throughout history has left a significant gap in our current knowledge of this issue. What we do know is that women’s brains communicate more thoroughly than men’s because their corpus collosum is bigger and more symmetrically organized, whereas men’s brains communicate better locally (visuospacial skills).
Overrepresentation in medical diagnoses is far more prevalent in women than in men because women have been largely left out of medical research and recommendations since the inception of the medical institution. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institute of Health changed its policies to include women and minorities in its medically-funded research, but hidden and outward biases still keep them from being included.
Women are viewed as a hindrance in medical research, and that has a direct correlation with how they are treated. Medical diagnoses cannot be accurately made without proper science and research into the ways women differ from men. Women consist of 80% of all osteoporosis diagnoses, 2/3 Alzheimer patients, and 90% of all sleep-apnea diagnoses. There is no doubt that this overrepresentation plays into the higher rates of depression, PTSD, and anxiety disorders found in women than men.
Diseases often go misdiagnosed or missed altogether in the female population for this reason. Plato, the founder of the first institute for higher learning in the western world, believed that women had a “wandering womb” that could become angered and wreak havoc on the female body, especially if barren. With nonsensical thinking like this, it’s easy to see how genderism has become embedded in the medical arena.
Women have endured over 255 years of medical trauma alone. It’s time to alter the course of health and well-being to be gender-inclusive. Women makeup over half of the U.S. population, but are still treated as dispensable in every area of living and thriving.
“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.”
Michele Rosenthal
We all experience trauma in one form or another throughout life. That is simply life. Women, however, have been made to endure an unjust and unfair amount of that burden. It’s going to take a collective effort to change the current narrative about women before women can begin to truly heal.
The great thing about the study into epigenetics is that it also leaves us with a great deal of hope. We now know that we are in control of how we chose to respond to our environment, which ultimately impacts how things progress or regress. This means we can literally alter our DNA, and future outcomes, based on our current actions. Epigenetic research also reveals:
- genetics are controlled by our perception of our environment NOT genes
- genes adopt to your beliefs and identities
- genes cannot turn on and off by themselves; rather the organism adapts to the environment
Stress Inoculation Training is a method of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) used to treat PTSD. It takes a holistic approach to restoring the mind, as well as the physical and emotional bodies, to homeostasis. Deep breathing, deliberate positive-self talk, muscle relaxation training, role-playing, and consciously changing negative behaviors all are actionable, practical tools that women (and men) can use to address trauma.
It is possible to heal thyself, but first, you must know why you’re “sick”. Trauma is not your fault, but healing is your responsibility.