Do you think trauma can be passed on genetically?

Is trauma passed on genetically? 🧬


  • Total voters
    108
No, but I do think geography, demographics, class, culture, religion, and lived experiences shape who we are and what we're capable of achieving to a significant degree. I think whatever personality traits and raw talent you are born with usually have a minority influence on your overall life outcomes.

That said, I think the distribution of people's life outcomes relative to all those factors I mentioned tend to follow a bell curve. Most people will wind up close to where they started on the social and economic spectrums. There will be a smaller number of people wind up much better or much worse off than their parents, but the farther out you go on either end of that spectrum, the fewer people you will find.
 
Hugh hefners great great great great great great great grandkid ~

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Imagine walking around rock hard 24/7 and not even understanding why?
 
Genetically? No, of course not.

If you could, imagine all of the trauma that each and every human would have built up
Over the last 300k years?

My ancestors survived spears, the next got snatched mid-harvest, and as a result I ended up on NeoGAF. Maybe there is some truth to generational trauma.
 
Enough generations of the same trauma may lead to innate fear of things. Like everyone having fears of spiders right out the gate.
 
No.

This is stupid.

Can a pregnant woman's trauma affect an unborn baby? Almost certainly yes, but that's still environmental.
 
No

I answered your actual question and not what you wrote in the OP which has nothing to do with genetics. I believe you are completely misunderstanding generational trauma their bud with the question in the title.
 
No

I answered your actual question and not what you wrote in the OP which has nothing to do with genetics. I believe you are completely misunderstanding generational trauma their bud with the question in the title.
It was already addressed on the first page with the concept of epigenetics.
Read the thread.
 
For those of you that don't know generational trauma in the context of sociology and economics refers to hardships being passed down through generations in marginalized communities. An example of this would be a community of African American's in a small southern town having a disproportionately low number of college graduates. This being due to most of their parents not having a bachelors degree which is do to their grandparents not being physically able to attend their local university back before the civil rights movement. This leads to a cultural idea that higher education isn't practical or realistically attainable as well as a lack of excess funds (low economic opportunities leads to a low inheritance and lack of financial support) to support an college education.

I know nothing of biology as a discipline, but how is this possible? Is it even possible? Did I miscomprehend something? How can something my parents dealt with be physically coded into their genetic traits after already being experienced?

It sounds like pseudoscience on the surface, but I want to be open-minded.

Oh it's absolutely real.

And regarding having 1000+ ancestors and collecting all that trauma... not quite the logic.

One thing science is catching up is that physical conditions and traumas are linked. So if you inherit certain gifts, you get the trauma dna memory linked as well. So if your dad had wartime PTSD, you might be easier to startle than most. If they became an artist driven by a desire to escape feeling the pain of reflecting on war, you might find your artistic ability awakens during moments of emotional avoidance. Weird I know.

Dr Andrew Huberman had a podcast on studies in ancestral trauma. Those particular studies he highlit found that hereditary trauma was a bias rather than an explicit handing down of full trauma code. So not so much the actual full trauma program, but more a higher reaction to the trauma stimulus and a bias toward the pained response. Basically efficiency coding for survival / protection.

Other avenues linked but not directly speaking to the above are how they've discovered that a grandmother has the egg data of a grandaughter within her system at fucking BIRTH. Whether or not she has a daughter is another matter.

I've seen so much anecdotal evidence of ancestral trauma patterns and behavioral expression from it, I can't ignore it, in myself and others.

If you really want to trip out, find a great family constellation event (Bert Hellinger is credited with bringing this practice over from the Zulu tribe where it was first observed). They are weirdly powerful (the good ones are anyway). If you're in L.A, I recommend searching for Hazel Williams Carter and her Wednesday events in Palms.
 
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