Intergenerational Trauma and Wildfire
By Emily Boyle
“This family has death in its blood.” - Wildfire
“Our parents are important, regardless of whether they are good at parenting or not. There’s no way around it: The family story is our story. Like it or not, it resides within us.” - Mark Wolynn
When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, you, in your earliest biological form as an unfertilized egg, were already present inside your mother’s ovaries. The other half of you, the precursor cells of your father's sperm were present in your father when he was a fetus in his mother’s womb. Epigenetics tells us that three generations all share the same biological environment and are all susceptible to the same trauma. Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next; trauma does not just affect the person who directly experiences it but also their descendants.
Over a century ago Sigmund Freud, in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, identified a psychological pattern he called “Traumatic Reenactment” in which those who had experienced trauma unconsciously replay these past experiences to ‘get it right’. Carl Jung took Freud’s finding further noting that “what remains unconscious does not dissolve but rather resurfaces in our lives as fate or fortune.” In other words, both Jung and Freud said that whatever is too difficult for us to process does not fade away but is rerouted to our subconscious. Today, with our understanding of genetics and DNA, we know that trauma or extreme stress experienced by a mother can leave a chemical imprint on the DNA in her eggs. This imprint can be passed down to subsequent generations through the eggs and sperm. Therefore, a grandchild may carry the emotional and physiological imprint of trauma that their grandparents or parents experienced, even if they never directly faced that trauma themselves. This then influences how the children (and even grandchildren) of trauma survivors respond to stress, emotional challenges, and relationships.
When David Paquet set out to write Wildfire, he wanted to explore the notions of ‘curse’ or ‘fate’ within many Greek tragedies, so he wrote about a family where the pain and tragedies of one generation cyclically affect the next. Some may call this a family curse or fate but perhaps, today we can understand it as the effects of intergenerational trauma. As Paquet shows us, the answer to our pain may not lie within our own story as much as in the stories of our parents and grandparents.
Published December 2024