Breaking the Cycle of Inherited Trauma: Healing What Isn’t Yours to Carry

By Dr Euan McMillan | WellWellWell Sydney

Sometimes the pain we carry doesn't originate with us.

It can live quietly in posture — in the way the shoulders stay raised, the jaw stays tight, the breath stays shallow even when nothing threatening is happening. It can show up in emotional responses that feel disproportionate to the situation, or in a low-level sense of dread that has no obvious source. It can look, from the outside, like anxiety or chronic tension or simply a person who can never quite relax.

What's less often considered is that some of what we carry in our nervous system has been there since before we had a say in the matter. Passed down not through deliberate instruction but through something more fundamental — the way a parent held their body, regulated (or couldn't regulate) their emotions, and transmitted their own unresolved experience through the ordinary texture of daily life.

This is what researchers now call intergenerational trauma: patterns of stress physiology, emotional response, and nervous system organisation that travel across generations. It's not a new idea — many cultures have understood this intuitively for centuries. But modern science is beginning to map the mechanisms behind it, through epigenetics, nervous system research, and developmental psychology, in ways that make it increasingly impossible to ignore.

How Trauma Moves Through Families

The mechanisms are multiple and they operate at different levels.

At the most immediate level, a child's nervous system co-regulates with a caregiver's from birth. If a parent's system is chronically activated — running a stress response, locked in hypervigilance, or shut down in the dissociated quiet of unprocessed trauma — the child's developing nervous system learns to mirror that baseline. Not through choice, but through the fundamental biology of attachment. The child's nervous system takes the parent's nervous system as its model for what normal feels like.

This is why certain patterns seem to run in families without anyone intending to pass them on. A family that doesn't express emotion isn't necessarily withholding — they may simply never have learned that expression was safe. A parent who responds to stress with control or withdrawal isn't necessarily cold — their nervous system may have learned long ago that vulnerability led to harm.

At a biochemical level, emerging research in epigenetics suggests that significant stress experiences can influence how genes are expressed — changes that may be heritable across generations. The children and grandchildren of people who experienced severe trauma show measurable differences in stress hormone regulation that weren't caused by their own direct experience.

And at the level of story and meaning, families transmit frameworks — often unspoken — for understanding what the world is like, whether it's safe, what emotions are acceptable, and what must be endured in silence. These frameworks shape nervous system development as surely as the biochemistry does.

How It Shows Up

Inherited nervous system patterns tend to have a particular quality: they feel like you, and yet they also feel like they don't entirely belong to you. There's often a mismatch between the intensity of a response and the circumstances that triggered it.

It might look like:

• Chronic vigilance in situations that are objectively safe

• Emotional reactions that feel larger than the moment warrants — as if you're responding to something older than the current situation

• Relationship patterns that repeat despite your conscious intention to do something different

• A diffuse sense of responsibility or guilt without a clear source

• Physical symptoms that reliably accompany emotional stress: tension through the upper back and neck, shallow thoracic breathing, digestive sensitivity, a jaw that never fully releases

None of these are character flaws. They're the nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do — organising around the patterns it learned earliest, maintaining the strategies that once provided safety, continuing to protect against threats that may have long since passed.

The important word there is learned. Because what's learned can also be unlearned, updated, and replaced with something more current.

The Body Is Where This Work Happens

Intergenerational trauma doesn't primarily live in explicit memory — which is why talking about it, while valuable for context, often isn't sufficient to resolve it. It lives in the body: in the set of the muscles along the spine, in the default pattern of the breath, in the speed and intensity of the stress response, in the posture that collapses inward or braces outward without conscious instruction.

This is why somatic approaches — those that work directly with the nervous system through the body — tend to be central to this kind of healing rather than supplementary to it.

In Network Spinal Care, we work at the level of the spinal cord and the connective tissue surrounding it, using gentle, precise contacts at specific spinal gateways. What this does, neurologically, is introduce new information into the system — signalling that it's safe to shift out of the defensive organisation patterns it's been maintaining. The respiratory wave that often emerges in response is the nervous system finding its own release strategy: not something imposed from outside, but the body's own intelligence reasserting itself when given enough safety to do so.

Over time, what patients often describe is a gradual updating of their baseline. The vigilance softens. The breath deepens without effort. Emotional responses begin to feel more proportionate to present circumstances rather than calibrated to past ones. The body, in short, begins to distinguish between then and now.

What You Can Do Between Sessions

The nervous system consolidates change through repetition and context. What happens in a session needs somewhere to land in ordinary life.

A few practices that support this:

Notice the pattern before trying to change it. When the breath shortens or the body contracts, simply name it — not with judgment, but with curiosity. There it is again. Recognition without urgency is itself regulating.

Use the body to signal safety. A hand placed at the base of the sternum or the lower back, combined with a slow exhalation, gives the nervous system direct sensory information that contradicts the threat signal it's been running. This is not relaxation technique — it's neurological re-signalling.

Understand the context. Learning something about your family's history — what your parents or grandparents endured, what was never spoken about, what had to be survived — often dissolves the self-blame that comes with patterns you didn't consciously choose. The pattern makes more sense when you can see where it came from.

Allow the fuller range. Joy, play, creativity, genuine rest — these aren't indulgences. They're evidence that the nervous system is reorganising toward life rather than defence. They're worth protecting deliberately.

You Are Where the Pattern Can Change

Intergenerational trauma sometimes carries an implicit fatalism — as if the inheritance is fixed and the best you can do is manage it. That's not what the research suggests, and it's not what I observe clinically.

The nervous system is plastic throughout life. It's designed to update its models of the world when it receives reliable new information — primarily the information that comes through direct experience, through the body, through relationship. Healing at this level doesn't require heroic effort. It requires consistent, patient engagement with the places in the body that are still running old programmes.

Every session that helps the spine move more freely, every breath that reaches lower in the lungs, every moment of genuine ease that the nervous system learns to tolerate — these are not small things. They are the mechanisms by which inherited patterns are interrupted and something different becomes possible, not just for you but for the people around you and, in time, the generations that follow.

If This Resonates

If you recognise yourself in any of this — if the patterns feel familiar even if the language is new — I'd welcome a conversation.

Network Spinal Care offers a way to work with these patterns directly, through the body, without force and without requiring you to relive what you'd rather leave behind. What it does require is a willingness to pay attention to what the body has been trying to communicate — and some patience with a process that unfolds in its own time.

Your first visit includes a full assessment and your first session. That's usually enough to know whether this is the right fit.

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Dr Euan McMillan is a chiropractor practising Network Spinal Care at WellWellWell Sydney, Suite 301, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney CBD.