What Intergenerational Trauma Looks Like in Adults
Written by Rachel Pham, RCC - Registered Clinical Counsellor (BCACC) · 10 min read
Some things in your family just are the way they are. No one explained them. No one questioned them. They were simply the rules: don't talk about that, don't cry, don't need too much, don't bring your problems to the table.
You may have absorbed these as your own without ever tracing them back to where they came from.
Intergenerational trauma describes what happens when the effects of one generation's experiences, including war, displacement, loss, poverty, or chronic fear, shape the emotional and relational patterns of the generations that follow. Not through explanation or deliberate instruction. Through the texture of how the family functioned: what was allowed, what was avoided, how emotions moved or didn't move through the household.
How Intergenerational Trauma Gets Passed Down
Intergenerational trauma is not transmitted through memory or story. It travels through:
The emotional climate of a household: what was safe to feel, what required suppression
The quality of parental presence and attunement, or the absence of it
What topics were unspeakable, and what the silence around them communicated
The ways stress, conflict, and vulnerability were modelled or avoided
Patterns of over-functioning, emotional distance, or chronic anxiety absorbed from caregivers
Physical expressions of tension or disconnection that children register before language arrives
Children learn what emotions are safe and what the consequences of having needs tend to be. They build their own emotional and relational patterns around what they observed. By adulthood, those patterns can feel less like something that was learned and more like simply who they are.
Understanding that some of what you carry has older roots, that it arrived before you did, doesn't diminish the difficulty of what it feels like in your own body and life. It simply gives it a context that makes it easier to work with.
If this work feels relevant to your experience, I invite you to book a free consultation to learn more about the process, and to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
Signs of Intergenerational Trauma in Adults
For adults carrying intergenerational trauma, the signs often feel like personality rather than something inherited and worth examining.
You might notice:
A chronic anxiety with no clear narrative source, a sense of impending loss or threat that has simply always been present
Difficulty with basic self-trust, or a persistent sense that your needs are a burden to the people around you
A tendency toward emotional suppression, a learned difficulty accessing or expressing what you actually feel
An over-identification with the family, taking on its burdens, its conflicts, its unfinished business
A difficulty separating your own desires and values from what the family expects of you
Patterns in relationships that echo the dynamics of your family of origin
A shame that feels inherited rather than earned, present before you can account for it
Family Trauma Patterns That Repeat
One of the most recognisable features of intergenerational trauma is the repeating pattern.
The same relationship dynamics appearing across generations. The same emotional unavailability, the same explosions, the same silence. The same difficulty with certain emotions, showing up in parents and grandparents and, perhaps, in you.
These are not coincidences. They are the downstream effects of unprocessed experiences moving forward through family systems.
Seeing the pattern is not the same as assigning blame. For the most part, people transmit what they themselves received, without awareness or intention. Understanding the source can shift the weight of what was inherited from something that feels like identity to something that can be examined and, over time, changed.
Intergenerational Trauma and Cultural Context
For many people, intergenerational trauma is inseparable from cultural history. Displacement, colonial violence, systemic discrimination, and the experience of navigating between cultures are all forms of collective and historical trauma that shape family systems.
The pressure to assimilate. The grief of language lost. The unspoken weight of what a grandparent survived. The particular exhaustion of holding cultural identity inside a context that doesn't fully recognise it. These shape nervous systems as surely as individual experience does.
At Pham Therapy, this context is part of the work. Trauma is never treated in isolation from the cultural, familial, and historical experiences that shaped it. For more on what culturally responsive care looks like in practice, see the culturally responsive therapy page.
How Therapy Supports This Work
Working with intergenerational trauma involves building a map of where certain patterns came from. Understanding them within the family system, within the broader cultural and historical context, and gradually developing the capacity to respond differently.
This is slow, careful work. It doesn't require severing connection with family or assigning blame. It requires building the capacity to see clearly, to understand what was inherited, and to make more deliberate choices about what you carry forward.
At Pham Therapy, intergenerational trauma is one of the central areas of focus. The intergenerational trauma therapy page describes the approach in more detail. For context on trauma more broadly, the What is Trauma Guide is a useful companion to this post.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is intergenerational trauma?
Intergenerational trauma describes the transmission of trauma's effects across generations, not through direct experience of an event but through the emotional, relational, and behavioural patterns it creates in family systems and caregiving relationships.
Can I have intergenerational trauma if I had a good childhood?
Yes. Intergenerational trauma operates in the texture of how a household functions rather than in specific events. A parent who was emotionally unavailable because of their own unprocessed history can transmit effects without any overt harm occurring.
What are the signs of generational trauma?
Common signs include chronic anxiety without a clear source, difficulty with emotional expression, relationship patterns that mirror family dynamics, a persistent sense of being a burden, and patterns of suppression or over-functioning that feel deeply embedded rather than chosen.
Can intergenerational trauma change?
The effects of intergenerational trauma can shift significantly with the right support. Therapy can help you understand where patterns came from, develop a different relationship to what was inherited, and create conditions for those patterns to become less automatic over time.
About the author
Rachel Pham, RCC is a Vietnamese-Canadian Registered Clinical Counsellor and the founder of Pham Therapy in Vancouver, offering trauma-informed, culturally responsive therapy in person and online across BC. She draws on ACT, /DBT-informed, somatic, IFS, and attachment-based approaches, and brings both clinical training and lived understanding to her work. Her registration can be verified with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors.
Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and does not constitute medical or psychological advice or replace care from a qualified professional.
