Breaking the chains of generational trauma.

My name is Andrea and this is Adult Child.

Welcome back to Adult Child, where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

And today, we are diving deeper or rather diving deeper into the generational nature of family dysfunction.

We have talked about this all throughout the pod and it is such an important concept to the adult child topic at large.

How the disease of family dysfunction does not just pop out of nowhere.

How this shit gets passed from generation to generation, how our parents aren't evil but just a product of their own dysfunctional upbringing,

and how we will pass our shit onto the next generation if we don't heal our shit.

So today, I want to go a little bit deeper and talk about epigenetics.

I am hoping that your eyes did not just roll over but epigenetics has been a buzzword as of late and it is the study of how your behavior and environment can cause external modifications to your genetics.

Now, these modifications do not actually change our genetics but they change how our cells read our genetics.

They change how we express our genetics.

Now, what the hell does that mean?

No fucking clue.

But I think what we need to understand for the purpose of our conversation here is that our behavior and environment can cause alterations to our genetics

and then these modified genetics can then be passed on to future generations.

And trauma is one of these environmental factors that can cause these modifications.

Now, research over the past five to ten years has shown that you can actually carry symptoms of trauma in your life that you didn't even experience.

Not just emotionally and psychologically but also genetically.

That trauma from past generations can impact us on a biological molecular level.

Now, there was a super interesting study. The results came out in 2016.

But it looked at the genetics of Holocaust survivors and their children and they compared this to the genetics of Jewish parents who lived outside of Europe during World War II and their children.

...