What generational trauma is
Generational trauma - also called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma - describes the way the effects of overwhelming experience can be transmitted from one generation to the next. The original event might be war, famine, displacement, abuse, or sudden loss. Even descendants who never lived through it can carry its imprint: heightened threat sensitivity, unexplained grief or shame, patterns of silence around what happened, or coping strategies that made sense in crisis but persist long after the danger has passed.
It is increasingly recognised in clinical psychology and is taken seriously precisely because it is observable in real lives and, in part, measurable in biology. Naming it is not about labelling a family as broken; it is about understanding why certain pain seems to echo where there is no obvious personal cause.