Break the Cycle

1. You Are a Cycle Breaker

If you’re reading this book, chances are you are a cycle breaker.

Choose a different legacy. A cycle breaker actively decides to shift inherited family and community patterns, creating a new legacy of healing. This is a courageous, long-term decision.
Ripples of healing. Your personal healing quest has collective motivation, sending ripples backward and forward through your lineage and community. It's a heavy but liberating task.
Innate knowing. Many cycle breakers possess an inner knowing that things must be different, guided by intuition, faith, and courage to correct their course.

2. Intergenerational Trauma Is Inherited

Intergenerational trauma is the only category of emotional trauma that transcends generations and could be experienced by multiple members of your family.

Biological and social transmission. Trauma passes down through altered gene expressions (biology) and through experiences like misattunement, invalidation, oppression, and harmful behaviors (psychology/social).
Multilevel emotional injury. It wounds the mind (thoughts, emotions), body (physical suffering), and spirit (disruption in inner knowing and connection). Healing must be multidimensional.
Holistic healing. Addressing mind, body, and spirit together is essential for full healing, unlike traditional Western models that often treat them separately.

3. Your Body Remembers Trauma

Emotional trauma can cause physical bodily damage.

Allostatic overload. Chronic stress from intergenerational strain overwhelms the body's capacity for balance, leading to wear and tear on neurological and immune functions.
Mind-body connection. Stress impacts both mind and body; conversely, healing the mind benefits the body, and vice versa. This bidirectional link is crucial for sustainable healing.
Inflammation link. Chronic stress and adverse experiences are linked to inflammation, contributing to various chronic illnesses like heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and depression.

4. Unhealed Trauma Manifests in You

When a physical body wound is left unhealed, it continues to cause pain and becomes vulnerable to infection.

Spreading pain. Unhealed emotional wounds contaminate other parts of life and can hurt others, devastating families and communities.
Trauma responses. These are chronic reactions to stress, learned adaptations to stay safe, which can be helpful or unhelpful and are often passed down.
Recognizing inheritance. Realizations like repeating toxic patterns, feeling chronic emptiness, or noticing family secrets can signal inherited trauma.

5. Trauma Is Wired in Your Biology

Your family’s trauma has become both a biological and a social inheritance that eventually made its way to you.

Genetic transmission. Trauma can alter gene expressions (epigenetics), making descendants more vulnerable to stress, a process observed in studies of trauma survivors' descendants.
Cellular memory. Stress is registered in cells, influencing how they respond to stimuli, potentially impacting cognitive development, emotions, and the nervous system even before birth.
Mirror neurons. These neurons fire when experiencing someone else's world, and over time, can lead to absorbing others' emotions, creating a collectively wired nervous system in families with intense emotional exchanges.

6. Your Intergenerational Nervous System Reacts

A nervous system that is stuck in a state of survival mode is not achieving this calm state with enough frequency.

Survival modes. The nervous system has sympathetic (fight/flight) and dorsal vagal (freeze/fawn) responses to threat. Unresolved trauma keeps it stuck in hyper- or hypoarousal.
Ventral vagal system. This part promotes safety, calm, and connection, inhibiting impulsive responses. Toning it helps regulate the nervous system and expand the window of tolerance.
Intergenerational triggers. Traumatic retentions are unlocked by triggers (internal/external), activating memories and nervous system responses, sometimes linked to memories beyond one's lifetime (cellular, procedural, intuitive memory).

7. Inner Child Wounds Are Passed Down

If those formative relationships were safe and supportive, then you were better able to build a secure attachment style and healthy trust, and you are able to maintain closeness in relationships.

Attachment styles. Early caregiver relationships shape attachment. Unsafe environments lead to insecure attachment and inner child wounds, impacting adult relationships.
Critical periods. Stress responses become hardwired during critical developmental periods (in utero, early childhood), affecting the developing nervous system and brain.
Parenting cycles. Harmful parenting beliefs and practices, often normalized cultural values, are passed down, perpetuating inner child wounds and insecure attachments.

8. Cycles of Abuse Perpetuate Pain

Survivors of toxic abuse are often very psychologically attuned to others.

Repetition compulsion. Traumatized individuals may unconsciously repeat harmful relationship patterns because the familiar chaos feels like home.
Cycle of abuse. This pattern involves tension building, incident, reconciliation (honeymoon), and calm stages, often characterized by power imbalance and control.
Toxic traits. Recognizing harmful personality characteristics (manipulation, control, gaslighting, blame) is crucial for breaking cycles, whether you are a victim or perpetrator.

9. Collective Trauma Enters Your Home

Understanding intergenerational trauma healing requires that we not just look closely into your family dynamics but that we also dig into the external factors that bring intergenerational trauma into your home in the first place.

External influences. Collective trauma stems from harmful cultural values, systemic oppression, and natural disasters, creating collective memory and psychological reactions that mirror individual/family symptoms.
Cultural norms. Practices like physical punishment, parentification, or secret-keeping, often rooted in historical trauma like colonization, perpetuate emotional injury across generations.
Diseased systems. Institutions built to oppress marginalized groups (racism, classism, sexism) cause insurmountable distress and perpetuate collective trauma like post-traumatic slave syndrome.

10. Grieving Your Traumatic Lineage Is Necessary

Breaking cycles requires digging into the family shadows and acknowledging the mental health issues that different family members have been suffering from.

Shedding the past. Healing involves shedding antiquated expectations, old ideas about yourself, and expired perceptions, stepping into a new reality.
Intergenerational loyalty. A sense of duty or comfort in the familiar can keep individuals tied to dysfunctional family dynamics, even when they are hurtful.
Breaking up with shame. Shame, a deep feeling of inadequacy often internalized in childhood, is a core emotion to address. Releasing it requires accepting the reality of your "true family" over the "false family" you wished for.

11. Embodying Generational Resilience

Intergenerational resilience refers to the endurant strength, healing, and adaptation of the people that we descend from and the ways in which, in our lifetime, we have inherited and built upon their strength to prevail within our own circumstances.

Innate fortitude. You inherit not just trauma vulnerability but also resilience, biologically and socially equipped to navigate hardship, a strength you use daily.
Building strength. Resilience can be strengthened through holistic practices (meditation, time in nature, body movement) that promote nervous system recovery and expand the window of tolerance.
Post-traumatic growth. Intergenerational post-traumatic growth involves finding new meaning and abundance after trauma, building safer connections, developing new possibilities, becoming spiritually grounded, and helping others heal.

12. Leaving a Generational Legacy

You are the alchemist of your family’s intergenerational legacy.

Generational privilege. Knowing about intergenerational trauma and having the tools to disrupt it is a privilege that allows you to choose a new legacy.
Becoming an ancestor. Embodying your healing and intentionally leaving wisdom behind impacts future generations, shifting history through your courage.
Parenting forward. Cycle-breaking parents prioritize self-care (Parenting Back) to be emotionally available and model healthy behaviors (Parenting Forward), regulating their children's nervous systems and fostering secure attachments.

Last updated: July 4, 2025