The complex dynamics we come from shape who we become as adults. Generational trauma isn’t just about the pain we endure—it’s the weight of the past pressing down on the present, shaping relationships before we even understand them. Reflecting on my past, especially the roles my parents and family members played, has been painful, but necessary.

What is Intergenerational Trauma (IGT)?

Intergenerational trauma is the passing down of emotional wounds from one generation to the next.
This can show up in different ways:

• difficulty expressing emotions
• anxiety or constant alertness
• trouble trusting others
• patterns of silence, shame, or conflict in families

It can also be influenced by larger histories, like war, displacement, discrimination, or poverty. Whole communities can carry these patterns, not just individuals.

It was a gift from my mother

We were close knit with Ursula, my direct parent, and her family. Grandparents who were in World War II carried its scars into their own parenting. Their four children, two brothers and two sisters: the oldest brother Alaric, then Hannah, Ursula, and the youngest brother Laurent, grew up in a household shadowed by survival, not softness. Survival shaped them. That pattern did not end with them.

In simple terms: pain that is not dealt with does not disappear. It is often passed on, unless someone chooses to face it.

When my grandmother died, I had just turned 17. Her passing exposed the dysfunction between the four siblings, deepening the divide that had always lingered beneath the surface. In turn, I found myself slipping quickly into a darkness I did not fully understand. I never truly wanted to die, but thoughts of death, of simply not existing, became too tempting not to entertain.

My self-harm was not physical but quieter, more isolating and insidious. It lived in self-destructive choices, in pushing emotional limits just to feel something, in reckless decisions that carried an undertone of self-neglect. I would delay being at home. That Queen’s Day, I vanished for three days. I tried to escape a world where I could never be me, a world too heavy to carry. I stopped trusting others, and myself. I resorted to maladaptive resilience. I was coping, but never thriving.

Dysfunction stalks

Jafar, the other progenitor, is a topic I would rather avoid. His father joined the military at a young age to support his teenage wife and their newborn son, Silas. Jafar came not long after. He embodied the worst traits of men: emotional unavailability, absence, misogyny. Even small things, like his fixation on women’s body hair, became tools for shaming and belittling.

During my parents’ dysfunctional marriage, which lasted nine years, I got a sister, Jacqueline, or Jackie. Me, with my middle child complex. Not long after, my brother Sacha. Hannah herself struggled and believed the world would have been better off without her, until she had Noel. The only good to come from that tangled web were my three younger brothers, whom I love with all my heart. That much is true, but even that love does not erase trauma. After the divorce, my youngest brother Athos was born. Three brothers. Different mothers, same father.

Grandfathers.

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When you are in a dysfunctional household, you may not realise it because cruelty becomes normalised. Intuitively, I knew something was wrong, but like many others I could not put my finger on it. I lacked the words and threatened to cut contact. Teenage angst, perhaps.

That break happened in 2018. I found myself trapped in a relationship with a cruel human being known as the Unman, built on many lies. The unravelling was relentless. That is the thing about generational trauma: it is not only what happens to you. It is the silence that follows. The way people look away, refuse to see, and allow the cycle to continue because acknowledging it would be inconvenient.

By 27, I had nowhere to go. My family was not an option; they had already blamed me for my own assault. In the process of leaving, I lost Sora, my tuxedo cat. I had promised to come back for her, but Ursula ensured that never happened. People tolerated it. Some accepted it. Some supported it. Others simply did not want to get involved.

Sora

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I know now I can be believed. I can be seen and heard. But healing is not linear. Living with high anxiety and a dysregulated nervous system is not a joke, though sometimes it shows up as humour anyway.

That is how generational trauma works. It silences. It isolates. It turns mourning into something private, almost like a crime.

I grieved parents who were not even gone yet.

But the cycle stops with me.