Intergenerational Transfer of Trauma: The Unrecognized but Essential Mechanism

In my last post about the internal family systems therapy model, I discussed how some newer models (ones that come close to my own) seem to completely ignore the ongoing nature of repetitive dysfunctional family behavior even after the children grow up. Or as the book It Didn't Start with You by Mark Wolynn sometimes does, what happens with an adult child’s interactions with parents in the present.

I have championed the idea of the intergenerational transfer of dysfunctional family “rules” that are due to a previous group or individual trauma. I am very happy to report that this subject seems to finally be getting the attention it deserves. In my very first book, originally released way back in 1988, I proposed very specific mechanisms through which this occurs. 

While there is a genetic component to this such as changes in the body's stress response reactions (e.g., release of cortisol), why do we think these have to be permanent? If they were, then treatment or therapy would do precious little.

Perhaps the reason they do not change is that they are continually reinforced in the present. Neural plasticity tells us that brain circuits are strengthened or weakened depending on how much stimulation they get, and relevant interactions with parents do not stop at age 18, or even at age 3-5 as  some analysts used to think. Especially since the circuits are created and then reinforced (or not reinforced) by attachment interactions in the first place.

The subtitle of the book under review here is How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. The author mentions that in many many cases traumatized parents and grandparents avoid talking about what happened to them, mostly out of shame. I completely agree. However, that does not mean that there is nothing that can be communicated through a variety of other behaviors in ongoing interactions.

Wolynn gets ever so close to understanding what’s going on, but is IMO missing the continuous drama. When he notices that sometimes parents have not discussed the trauma, he in fact does wonder how then the trauma might be passed down. He over-emphasizes genetics.

It is true that if a mother were traumatized, that can affect how she interacts with a kid, which can itself be traumatizing. This can lead to epigenetic changes (genes being turned off and on) in the child that affects their reactivity and perhaps their proneness to certain medical and psychiatric disorders. But that’s as far as it goes. He mentions that epigenetic changes occur mostly through a chemical process called methylation, but seems to think they are not reversible. If a gene that regulates other genes can be methylated, it can be unmethylated.

He gives an example of a boy named Jessie who at the age of 19 suddenly developed severe insomnia accompanied by freezing, shivering and an inability to keep warm. He had no major problems sleeping before this. He had to drop out of college because of these symptoms. Doctors could find nothing wrong. Jessie later revealed to Schwartz that he had only recently became aware of the fact than an uncle he never knew he had froze to death – at the age of 19. 

So does this mean that this was some sort of genetic effect? Even the author seemed bit skeptical. Let’s face it: genes do not and cannot contain specific memories like dates when traumas occur. Maybe the father, whose brother it was, started acting strangely in some way when his son reached that age.

Wolynn also falls for an aspect of the heritability fraud when he agrees that all children grow up in the same family, so this must be a “shared” environment. But somehow he is also aware of the Murray Bowenesque understanding that parents can relate to each of their children much differently than to the others for a variety of reasons. This is especially common in so-called dysfunctional families.

Not to mention the fact that siblings can all be affected by the family trauma in very different ways despite the specific nature of the mother’s traumas and any resultant internal conflicts. And some of children may not affected much at all. He never addresses the clear contradiction in these ideas. What distinguishes those who do from those who don’t? Are their genomes that different? 

Another thing that Wolynn does not seem to be aware of is similar to the lack of understanding by Richard Schwartz in internal family systems therapy that I described in my last post. He does not quite seem to get that a lot of the people he writes about are not protecting themselves, but are in fact self-destructive. The case of “Elizabeth” on page 205 illustrates this clearly. According to the author, she felt rejected by her mother and so feared that everyone else was going to reject her. She would then feel left out and all alone.

But her response to this? Isolating herself. Left out and all alone. The very thing she claimed to fear! At her job she almost completely separated herself from co-workers and would barely talk to anyone all day.  She was not described as being anywhere near stupid enough to not see the rather obvious results of what she was doing.

In this case as a therapist, I would ask a modified version of the Adlerian question to find out who she was sacrificing herself for: If I had a magic wand and could make you accepted and popular, and prevented you from screwing that up, who might be negatively affected?

 

Internal Family Systems and Marital Therapy

 

As most of my readers know, I believe in a family systems view of the way patients who are repetitively self-destructive or self-sabotaging are acting. I do not think it’s “all in their heads,” but that it serves some sort of purpose for the members of their families as a whole. 

Furthermore, this is ongoing and continues to take place in the present, not only when they may have been initially traumatized as children. The family continues to interact over the trauma, because most people continue to have relationships with their parents. If they don’t seem to, it’s often because they are communicating through third parties. In this and the following post, I’m going to illustrate how the field does not take this into account, even when they look at systems issues.

I have also been writing about how the psychotherapy profession has seemingly given up on family systems theory, except for some masters level family therapists, because of a variety of social factors. Some readers may argue with me about that because of the growing popularity of Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy. I really had not read much about it because I always wondered why he was dealing with internal models of the family system and not the actual living family members. Sort of like Schema Therapy or working on one’s “inner child.”

I finally got around to reading a book he wrote for lay readers in 2008 called You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For. Although I think the kind of treatment described therein can indeed be helpful in many situations in which interactions with one’s parents are not too complicated, I do not think it would have helped most of my patients with severe personality disorders.

And even in cases in which it does work, IMO it would be even more effective if it paid attention to some other factors which the author seems completely unaware of, as illustrated by an extensive case example he wrote concerning a narcissistic doctor he names “Kevin” and his wife “Helen,” who was described as a bright woman with a career of her own. I will talk about this case in a moment.

One thing about the IFS model that I’m not enamored with is his descriptions of peoples’ personality “parts” — protectors, controllers, exiles, critics and tor-mentors. I would like to believe he is speaking metaphorically, but he seems to be following along with the tradition (in my opinion inaccurate) of dividing up a personality into little beings running around inside someone’s head with thoughts, desires, and feelings all their own – not unlike the animated characters inside a girl’s head in the Inside Out movies. Just like the psychoanalysts used to refer to id, ego, and superego as if they were parts of the brain. I find the concept of a “false self” to be much more useful.

A bigger problem is that he sees the problematic behavior of people as trying to protect themselves from reliving past hurts. He says they scan the environment looking for threats and run away at the slightest hint of one. 

That wasn’t at all what I saw in my patients. 

People who couple off with people in a dysfunctional relationship were not only not looking for red flags, they were actively ignoring them! If anything, they seem to be attracted to certain dangers, like a woman from an alcoholic family who marries one alcoholic after another.

I see them as protecting their parents and the ongoing systems dynamics, not themselves per se. I fail to see how being self-destructive can be selfish, unless someone is unbelievably unintelligent. I will give a possible explanation of Kevin’s and Helen’s behavior in that case, consistent with this idea, so back to that.

According to the author, for thirty years Helen had put up with Kevin’s “carping about her taste in clothes, her child rearing, her political opinions, her education, her intelligence, and her logic.” He frequently dissed her in public. She also was said to hate his long work hours and felt neglected. And now she suddenly said if he didn’t straighten up and fly right, she was outta there.

Wait…she put up with this behavior for thirty years before the ultimatum? Why so long? And how did Kevin interpret her staying despite the fact that he must have repeatedly heard many of her complaints during that period. The author attributes Helen’s sudden attack of courage to their youngest child graduating high school, but many people with kids still at home get divorced. 

Furthermore, the book does not mention any ongoing interactions during the marriage with parents and in-laws, despite the fact that he attributes Keven’s behavior to his parent’s behavior towards him when he was a kid. Did the parents just evaporate? Did Helen possibly get brave because they - or her own parents -  died? We don’t know.

According to the book, Kevin’s father left his mother when he was seven, after a fight between them in which the dad hit his mom. The Dad remarried and never saw Kevin again. Mom then went on to have a series of problematic relationships. Sometimes, she seemed to not want to have Kevin around. Kevin handled this by throwing himself into academic and professional success and becoming fiercely independent. I believe this was meant to demonstrate to his mother that he did not “need” her or anyone else. 

After some individual and couples counseling with the very empathic Doctor Schwartz, and when he is starting to get in better touch with himself, Kevin remembers blaming his mother for his dad’s leaving and making her cry just after the breakup when he was seven. He says the “little boy” inside him would rather die than upset her again.”  That sounds like, in his mind at least, he is protecting her - not himself - and feels guilty about what he did.

What I would hypothesize is that the mother indeed felt very guilty about the Dad leaving her and how it affected Kevin, and was blaming herself. This is why she became uncomfortable when he was around and seemed to prefer he be gone and be independent of her “bad” (in her view) influence on him. So he tried to make her feel less guilty by being successful without any need of her. And later maybe displaced the anger he felt towards his mother onto Helen (while displacing his anger at his abandoning father onto his co-workers). 

So perhaps Helen’s “job” was to stabilize him by allowing him to do this displacing. Her initial attraction to him was probably due to something similar to this dynamic going on in her own family.

When he got better, he was able to be more empathic with his mother’s behavior because he realized she felt she did not really deserve any love. I agree that understanding a parent’s problematic behavior helps people feel better about themselves – and about the parents. But of course this aspect of her mother’s behavior just kicks the question of the reason for all this back another generation. Why was she like that?

Schwartz comes quite close to understanding of the dialectical way dysfunctional couples interact, with each enabling the false self of the other and punishing any evidence of each's own true self. Each denies that they need this help themselves even as they give it to the other. They have motives for doing so that have to do with stabilizing their parents, but they also hate that they have to be like this. They are ambivalent. So they also complain about it. Mixed messages!

Schwartz gets away from these ideas by instead thinking that "vicious circles" of interactions are present- just as systems therapists also suppose. But then he also calls it a dance. In a dance one member of the couple may be leading, but simultaneously, the other is closely following. If either fails to do their part, there is no dance.

Once a couple gets in touch with these patterns, however they do it, this means that there is another issue (apart from ongoing interactions with living parents) that arises that may further greatly complicate making changes. Even if, say, the wife is ambivalent about her role, she has thought all along that her husband wanted and needed her to perform it. So if he suddenly says he no longer wants this without acknowledging his ambivalence, at first she won’t believe him. 

But if he somehow convinces her he is sincere, the wife is still prone to think to herself, “Hey wait. I have been sacrificing for him for all this time, and only now he tells me that he did not want me to! And he no longer wants to enable me?” She feels betrayed. This of course also comes out as a double message as her true self really wants the change too. Schwartz talks about members of the couple being triggered by the other, but misses this very important reason why.