Laura Katz (She/Her)

Signs of multigenerational trauma can vary from person to person, but here are some factors that might indicate inherited trauma has impacted your life. 1. Feeling disconnected from other people: You might experience emotional distance in relationships, keeping people at arms length as a way to protect yourself from potential loss 2. Hypervigilance: You may feel the need to continually look for signs of threat, even visualizing disastrous outcomes in a way that interferes with your ability to feel safe and in the present moment. 3. Hyperindependence: As a child, you may have received covert messages telling you that your needs were unimportant, or that your parents’ needs outweighed your own. In response to these unmet needs, you may have learned to stop asking for help, knowing that if you asked, help would not come. You may have even been praised as a child for how well you were able to handle things or take care of yourself, albeit at an early age. 4. Difficulty forming secure attachments: Inherited trauma can impact our sense of trust in others, thereby affecting our relationships. This may show up as persistent worry about relationships, temperature-taking, a constant need for reassurance, ambivalence toward intimacy, avoidance of conflict, or trouble expressing needs, among others. 5. Problems with memory: Trauma inhibits the formation and recall of memory. As such, you may experience memory gaps or difficulty recalling specific events, especially in childhood. 6. Dissociation : You may sometimes feel numb and disconnected from your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. As children, you may have needed to shut down parts of you in order to survive.