Healing Across Generations: The Role of Somatic Work in Intergenerational Trauma
Some of what we carry in our bodies and minds isn’t entirely ours. Fear, shame, grief, silence, and even hypervigilance can ripple through family lines, handed down as if they were part of our DNA. This is the territory of intergenerational trauma—the unseen stories and burdens that shape not only how we feel, but how we love, parent, and belong.
Trauma that isn’t resolved doesn’t simply fade; it is passed on in gestures, nervous system responses, beliefs, and unconscious loyalties. A child may grow up adapting to the unspoken grief or vigilance of a parent, carrying it forward into adulthood. Without awareness, those patterns can continue to echo into the next generation.
Why This Matters
Traditional cultures have long known that what is not acknowledged is inherited. Ceremony, ritual, and collective practices were ways of honouring grief and restoring balance, ensuring that burdens didn’t fall onto the shoulders of the children. Today, both neuroscience and epigenetics are affirming what ancient wisdom has always taught us: trauma can be biologically transmitted, and unresolved experiences are held in the body as much as in story.
Recognising these patterns offers us a profound opportunity—not just to heal ourselves, but to interrupt the cycle and gift future generations, an those around us, new possibilities.
The Somatic Pathway
The body becomes the archive for what was never spoken. Dissociation, protective parts, chronic tension, or collapsed postures can all reflect inherited pain. Words alone often cannot reach these places.
Somatic work invites us to gently tune in to the nervous system, to notice sensations and impulses, to bring form to unconscious contracts and loyalties. By remaining embodied and connected while exploring this territory, we begin to loosen what was frozen, and create space for grief, release, and repair.
Through this process, what was once carried in silence can be met, felt, and transformed. Healing is not only cognitive—it is lived, breathed, and embodied.
A Movement Toward Healing
Intergenerational work is about more than understanding the past. It is about creating a shift in the present so that the future is free. When we hand back what is not ours, when we allow our bodies to release inherited burdens, we open the possibility for new patterns of love, belonging, and connection. Somatic practices give us the tools to enter this delicate terrain with compassion and integrity—supporting not just individual healing, but the healing of entire family fields.
Using embodied healing practices around my own inherited trauma has been one of the most empowering and life affirming journeys I’ve experienced. When we heal old wounding and ways of coping, we stop inviting in repeating patterns that keep us stuck, and co-create meaningful lives from a place of freedom. Isn’t that what we all want?