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?

 

Review: the Netflix documentary Pray Away

 

This post is the second about media describing organizations that practice a hateful form of groupthink. The Netflix documentary Pray Away focuses on gay adult Christians who used to preach and embody gay conversion therapy ideals to other gay adults. They led various organizations with their destructive idea of family, faith, and freedom. (The film is not about gay “conversion” psychotherapy of minors, which is another, even more despicable manifestation of this movement). Many of such people have embraced the idea that homosexual urges are part of a psychological problem, a result of some trauma or of some negative relationship with a parent, rather than something natural.

Many of the people interviewed in this documentary fell hook, line and sinker into these teachings while hiding their own backstories of self hatred. They are given screen time to now confess to how all of it was a painful lie. 

The movie profiles several of those people who and acted as advocates to make people "ex-gay." John was a major public advocate for gay conversion who appeared in Newsweek with his “ex-lesbian” wife—and reveals here that it was all a charade. He couldn’t admit, even to himself, to his continuing attraction to other men.

Michael created Exodus, the first gay conversion organization in the late 1970's. The film showed an auditorium full of smiling young adherents to this group under a poster exclaiming, "Join the Movement!" 

Julie became a public speaker as a young woman, with her highly articulate stories about how she had successfully rid herself of her lesbian feelings, with seemingly logical arguments for her past efforts to do so. She did not stop doing this until confronted by certain misbehavior from her former cohorts, and eventually renounced them and married another woman.

Their institutions, similar to the ones described in my previous post about the book Stolen, prey upon people's self-loathing, self-denigration, and desires to be accepted by their families and their churches. Prey away!

The irony here is that the parents who previously rejected these children is that, if in fact homosexuality is somehow a bad choice, and/or is a result of a bad relationship with parents, then the parents who rejected them on these grounds are admitting that they were crappy parents who raised a child who made bad decisions! But as we all know, the definition of the word “contradiction” is: something which such people pretend they don’t understand.

 

Substance Abuse: Self-Destructive Behavior

 "The surest way to humility is humiliation” ~ commonly heard saying at Catholic 12-Step meetings in Ireland

 

It seems like the debate over whether or not substance abuse is a “disease” is never ending, as described recently by fellow blogger George Dawson. I really don’t want to get into the particulars of that, because the debate is almost always a waste a time due to the multiple definitions of the word disease that get employed and continually conflated in such debates.

 

I’d rather focus on one main issue: How much control do most addicts have over their drug use? My opinion is that the question can best be answered by re-classifying most, though maybe not all, substance addiction behavior as self-destructive behavior. Voluntary. If it were not voluntary, addicts would have next to no control over when and under which circumstances they chose to not indulge, no matter the consequences. Almost no addict is using 24/7 unless they are actively suicidal.

 

Now, some people might argue that substance abuse might be a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. When people with OCD who have compulsions do not engage in their compulsion, their anxiety level skyrockets. This may be due to clearly abnormal firing of some nuclei in their brain. While they can certainly choose to let their anxiety skyrocket, this choice is indeed very difficult.

 

However, skyrocketing anxiety can have another cause besides the clearly pathological firing of brain nuclei. It can also be caused by panic over anticipated consequences of engaging or not engaging in a particular behavior. If doing so might lead to massive invalidation by everyone a person knows and cares about, then doing so becomes very difficult because of kin selection and tribalism, two subjects I have previously blogged about extensively.

 

Although, due to our current state of knowledge about the brain – literally the most complicated object in the known universe – there is no way of knowing for certain if most substance abusers indulge because of feared consequences of not indulging, or because of abnormal brain firing of some sort. And of course there may be two different types of addicts, so either or even both possibilities may be true depending on which addict one is dealing with.

 

Based on my clinical experience with all sorts of self-destructive and self-defeating behavior in my psychotherapy patients, I’m going to come down on the side of feared consequences for most of them. So am I saying an addict’s family system needs them to continue to be addicts in some way? Well yes, that’s exactly what I am saying.

 

If this is the situation, it does not make sense to ask the question of whether or not the addict wants to be an addict, because in fact they would be ambivalent about it (intrapsychic conflict, the primary concept in psychoanalysis – what a novel idea!). While some substance use in moderation in some contexts is indeed pleasurable, the life of an addict is anything but. They hate what the drug does to them. Many no longer even get high from cocaine after extended use, for example. And if getting high really made them feel so good, then why aren’t addicts the happiest people around instead of some of the most miserable? The problem is that the feeling of existential terror due to kin group invalidation feels even worse. So they indulge. Self-destructively.

 

Now, the family groupthink issue which triggers any given family’s need to have an addict in their mist to remain stable is not always the same, so each family has to be evaluated individually on its own terms. But let me discuss the most common example of such an issue: Puritanism.

 

Puritans on the whole believe, to put it bluntly, that we are nothing but sinful piles of crap in God’s eyes, and that we have to be sinners because, well, all people are sinners who must therefore ask for God’s forgiveness. So, as clearly stated in the 12 steps, which are based on Protestant conversion techniques, our will must be a problem. If we are willful, we simply must come to a bad end. The only way out is to renounce our will and turn it over to a “higher power” - which is actually the group to which we belong. And do what they want us to.

Did someone mention willfulness there?

I’ve heard docs from 12-Step programs give talks at medical meetings during which they would tell the most humiliating stories about their own crazy behavior when they were using – a public version of what they do in meetings. Essentially, these folks are substituting a less harmful form of self-abasement for a more harmful one. Just like the Irish slogan at the top of this post says rather overtly. I suppose that’s the better of the two options, but it’s still self-destructive. But it makes their conflicted parents feel better about not acting on their own forbidden impulses. While having already received vicarious satisfaction of these very impulses watching their children indulge. Heaven forbid anyone might feel good about doing something selfish.