Most people will experience a traumatic event at some time during their lives, losing a loved one, being the victim of an act of violence or surviving a life-threatening natural disaster.

But what happens when the impact of trauma is indirect, the result of experiences of family and caretakers?

As part of our series, Race Matters, Ali Rogan sat down with

Inger Burnett Ziegler, author of Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, the emotional lives

of black women, to look at the effects of generational trauma. Dr. Burnett Ziegler, thank you so much

for joining us. First of all, can you explain what is generational trauma?

Generational trauma is trauma that's passed down from one generation to the next. Some of the ways in

which that can be experienced is individuals who have experienced a trauma, leave an imprint of that

trauma experience on their genes that can be passed down to future generations,

making them more vulnerable to mental health challenges.

That trauma experience can be passed down through the behaviors of individuals who have

experienced the trauma, particularly if that trauma has been unidentified and not resolved,

whereby some of the symptoms of trauma, such as anger, irritability, depression, are experienced

by future generations. And generational trauma can also be passed down behaviorally, whereby

individuals who have experienced trauma might then

either expose their children to other traumatic experiences through their intimate partners

or through community violence, or those individuals are more likely to get into relationships

or be in societal circumstances where there's more

poverty and they have more exposure to violence themselves. One common way that I've seen

generational trauma show up in the patients that I've worked with in individual therapy is I might

be working with a woman who has been exposed to their mother, for example,

being the victim of intimate partner violence. In that relationship, they may have also been

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