From “Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma” by Ellen Corcella
In our home, “Danny Boy” was not only the Irish national anthem and a Catholic spiritual, it also signaled my mother was drifting into drink, desolation, and despair. Her stories of betrayal, heartbreak, and sorrow poured forth until pain and anguish consumed her body and soul. And her core heartbreak was the slow, excruciating death by cancer of her own mother. I cannot image the depth of her loneliness and her sense of impotence as she watched her beloved mother, Nellie, waste away until death.
It makes sense to me now, in a way that did not make sense to me then, that my mother heaped her resentment at stymied ambitions and unrelenting grief upon me, the named legacy of her beloved mother whose formal name was Ellen Goode. Slowly but surely, her stories seeped into my soul and were encoded in my DNA. In time, her dreams became my dreams, her ambitions my ambitions, her demands my demands, and her debilitating pain my debilitating pain.
My siblings and I inherited more than names, physical traits, and stories from our parents. We inherited their trauma. Strange as it sounds, recent scientific discoveries show DNA or genetics does more than pass physical traits from one generation to another. While immigrants, including my parents, were determined to leave behind the traumatic devastation of their lives due to poverty, war, or rebellions, they unknowingly and unwittingly transmitted their trauma to their offspring.
Epigenetics is “the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause small genetic changes that affect the way your genes work.” Trauma researchers using the science of epigenetics, have shown that trauma experienced in one generation can be transmitted to the next generation. Dr. Rachel Yehuda discovered this phenomenon when she studied children of Holocaust survivors, finding that their children suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder even though they had not experienced the Holocaust. In other words, the physical and psychological impact of trauma of parents is literally embedded within their children.