How Generational Trauma Affected My Family

It ripples through time.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Generational trauma is a newer area of psychology. It has become clear that traumas do not simply go away; they ripple through generations to do their harm over and over again.

According to Wikipedia,

“This field of research is relatively young, but has expanded in recent years.[2] The mechanism for transmission of trauma may be socially transmitted (e.g., through learned behaviors), through the effects of stress before birth, or perhaps through stress-induced epigenetic modifications.”

Violence, war, alcoholism- these are all destructive forces that cause a constellation of harm throughout families. In my family, it started with the second world war. Both of my grandfathers served in Europe as young men, one of them in the Canadian Air Force and the other in the navy.

It started with World War II.

I will talk about my paternal grandfather first because he seems to have been horribly traumatized by the violence he witnessed when he stormed the beaches of Normandy. When he came home to Paris, Ontario in 1945, he was a damaged man.

My grandmother had spent the years he was away living with her parents in the hotel they owned in Paris. My father was a baby when…