Carl Jung wrote in his memoirs: “I have a very strong feeling that I am under the influence of things left unanswered by my parents and grandparents — as if there were an impersonal karma passing from parents to children.”
He was describing something that most of us sense long before we have words for it. That some of what we carry doesn’t feel entirely ours. That certain fears, certain patterns, certain ways of relating to love or money or safety seem to arrive pre-installed, running quietly in the background of everything we do.
There’s a name for this now. And it turns out Jung was more right than even he knew.
What Science Is Finally Catching Up To
Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New York, has spent years researching the descendants of trauma survivors. What she found is striking: the children and grandchildren of people who lived through severe trauma carry measurable physical and emotional symptoms of experiences they never lived through themselves.
Epigenetics, the study of how environment shapes gene expression, is now showing us that trauma doesn’t just wound the person who lived it. It changes them on a cellular level. And those changes can be passed down.
Family constellations therapy, developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, maps this differently. His work shows that tragedies within a family system — an unexplained suicide, a child who died too young, a member who was excluded or shamed — send shockwaves forward through generations. The people living now carry the unresolved weight of stories they were never even told.
Depression that doesn’t respond to treatment. Anxiety that seems to have no origin. A pattern in relationships you’ve tried to break a hundred times. Sometimes the source isn’t in your story. It’s in theirs.
The Patterns We Inherit Without Knowing
A daughter with an abusive father will often, without consciously choosing it, end up in a relationship that mirrors exactly what she grew up watching. Not because she wants that. Because that’s the blueprint she was handed for what love looks like, and the nervous system moves toward what it recognizes.
Psychogenealogy, the study of how family history shapes individual psychology, points to what’s sometimes called the victim-rescuer-persecutor triangle: three roles that tend to pass between generations in families with unresolved trauma, each person unconsciously filling a slot in a dynamic that’s been running for decades.
The seven-generation framework used in some therapeutic traditions maps this even further back. Each generation is understood to carry its own layer of influence: parents shape the body and early beliefs, grandparents shape the intellect and talents, great-grandparents shape our sense of security in the world, and so on, back through ancestors we never met and may never know anything about.
Which means the work of healing runs deeper than we usually think. And it runs in both directions.
Healing Yourself Heals More Than You
Here’s the part that changes how I think about all of this.
When you do the work of healing, you’re not just doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for the people who came before you and couldn’t. And for the ones who come after you, who won’t have to carry what you’ve put down.
The chain breaks somewhere. It can break with you.
That doesn’t mean blaming your parents for what they passed on. They were living inside their own inherited patterns, with the awareness they had, in the circumstances they were given. Judgment doesn’t break the cycle. Understanding does. Forgiveness does. Not because they deserve it necessarily, but because the resentment you carry is the very thing that keeps the pattern alive in you.
The first step is always awareness. Noticing that something is repeating. Asking where it actually started. Getting curious about the story behind the story.
A Letter Worth Writing
One practice I return to often: writing a letter to your ancestors. Not to perform anything, not because they can read it, but because something in the act of writing it shifts things internally in a way that’s hard to explain and easy to feel.
Here’s one I’ve come across that I find genuinely moving, offered as a starting point rather than a script:
Today I want to honor my entire family, and especially my ancestors.
I come from you. You are my origin. By arriving before me, you made the road I’m walking a little easier.
I give a place in my heart to each of you — to those who did well and those who caused harm, to those who stayed and those who left, to the ones I knew and the ones I never will. I honor all of you.
I’m sorry if I ever broke the law of love. If I didn’t respect you enough, or love myself enough.
From here, I reclaim my right to be a healthy, loved, and whole person. I will carry your names with respect and gratitude.
I bring light to the grief that existed generations before me. To the anger, the early departures, the unspoken names, the repeated tragedies. I give them consciousness now.
Here and now, I plant new hope, new joy, new love.
May seven generations behind me and seven generations ahead of me be covered in healing light.
With infinite gratitude — thank you.
