What Gets Passed Down
What We Carry Without Realising
Families teach us how to be in the world long before we have language for it. We learn how to handle conflict, emotions, affection, boundaries, disappointment and belonging by watching the adults around us. We absorb what is spoken, and perhaps more importantly, what is not spoken. Some families communicate openly. Others survive through silence, avoidance, distraction or endurance.
Intergenerational trauma refers to the way experiences of stress, hardship or harm can echo across generations. Not because anyone is intentionally passing it on, but because the strategies that kept one generation alive or functional become the emotional framework the next generation grows up inside.
At a glance
- Person-centred therapy creates space for self-discovery through non-directive conversation and a compassionate presence.
- You’re in the driver’s seat — guided by your own pace, needs, and voice.
- I’m here to reflect and support — helping you find insight, clarity, and confidence as we explore what matters to you.
- This approach nurtures authenticity, awareness, and personal growth — helping you become more fully yourself.
Sometimes the pattern is subtle — a persistent sense of having to manage alone, or always needing to prove yourself. Sometimes it’s more visible: conflict that repeats, emotional distance, unpredictable affection, or relationships shaped around fear rather than safety. None of this is “just how families are.” These patterns have histories.
The Family System Finds Roles to Survive
In families where there has been trauma, loss, addiction, untreated mental health struggles, chronic stress, or emotional instability, certain roles often form. These roles aren’t chosen; they emerge as the family tries to stay functional.
One of the most painful roles is the scapegoat — the person who becomes the focus of blame, conflict, or frustration. The scapegoated family member is often the one who notices what others are avoiding. They may be more emotionally attuned, more sensitive, or more honest about what hurts. Instead of the family addressing the source of pain, the pain gets directed at one person. The message becomes: You’re the problem.
Over time, the scapegoated person may begin to absorb this as truth, even when it never was. The scapegoat is not the cause of the family tension. They are the carrier of what the family cannot hold.
When Loyalty and Love Get Tangled
Breaking out of intergenerational patterns can feel like betrayal. Even when something is painful, it may feel deeply tied to belonging. Many people carry a quiet ache: If I stop playing this role, who am I in the family? Do I lose them entirely?
Loyalty to the system can feel like the only way to stay connected. And yet that loyalty can cost you your own emotional safety. This is the core conflict: the longing to remain connected, and the need to stop being harmed in order to stay whole.
Therapy doesn’t tell you to cut people off. It doesn’t tell you to reconcile either. It helps you listen to the part of yourself that has been ignored for a long time, and decide what kind of contact, distance, boundaries or redefinition actually supports your well-being. It’s not about abandonment. It’s about choosing how closeness happens.
How Trauma Moves Through a Family
Trauma doesn’t always appear as dramatic events. It can show up as:
- emotional numbness or shutdown
- never talking about feelings
- always feeling “on guard”
- believing conflict must be avoided at all costs
- struggling to trust affection
- feeling responsible for other people’s emotions
- difficulty feeling “at home” anywhere
These patterns can continue even when the original reason is long past. A previous generation may have survived by suppressing emotion or pushing through without rest. Another may have coped through control, anger, avoidance, or secrecy. Those strategies made sense then. They may not make sense now, but they remain until consciously seen.
Understanding this is not about blaming those who came before. It’s about recognising what shaped you, so you don’t have to repeat it.
The Work of Unlearning and Replacing
Healing intergenerational trauma is less about fixing the past and more about becoming someone who no longer has to repeat it. This involves:
- noticing how your body responds in moments of stress or closeness
- recognising the voice you learned to speak to yourself with
- exploring where guilt shows up when you choose yourself
- allowing grief for what was missing, withheld, or never safe to express
It is slow work. It is gentle work. It is identity work. You are not just healing yourself. You are interrupting a pattern. That is a form of courage that rarely gets seen, but it matters.
The Beginning of a Different Story
Stepping out of old family roles doesn’t mean rejecting where you came from. It means choosing how your life unfolds from here. Sometimes that includes maintaining connection in a new way. Sometimes it means having less contact or more space. Sometimes it means finding or building chosen family — relationships where you are seen rather than shaped.
What you inherit does not determine what you must continue. You get to decide what stays, what softens, and what ends with you.
Therapy can be a place to work that out — without judgement, pressure or urgency — at a pace that honours what you have lived through. You do not have to carry this alone anymore.
