Inheriting Light

HEALING THE INVISIBLE WOUNDS OF GENERATIONAL TRAUMA

- Tanusha Nagrath

In many homes, pain is passed down not with malice but in quiet habit; silent dinners, clipped emotions, eyes that turn away instead of meeting. Generational trauma, or the inheritance of unresolved wounds, is a truth more people are now daring to name. It travels quietly: not in the stories we are told, but in the ones we were never allowed to hear.

Every generation inherits more than family heirlooms. We inherit ways of feeling, fearing, and surviving. Some of us are raised in atmospheres heavy with the unspokenwhere the past, though never addressed, hovers like a presence in the room.

WHAT IS GENERATIONAL TRAUMA?

Generational or intergenerational trauma is not just about what happened then, but how then lives in now. It originates from extreme distresswar, displacement, abuse, addiction, emotional neglect, and seeps into the behaviours and beliefs of children, grandchildren, and beyond.

Science is no longer silent on this: trauma doesn't just scar the psyche; it alters the stress response at a biological level. The body, it turns out, remembers.

But the trauma doesn't need to be tied to a historical catastrophe. Sometimes it begins quietly: a parent who never learned affection, a grandparent hardened by hardship, a home where love was conditional or absent. These legacies shape how we parent, trust, cope, and connect.

HABITS THAT OUTLIVE THEIR PURPOSE

Trauma is clever; it often disguises itself as personality. A family that teaches silence in place of vulnerability might think they're teaching strength. A child raised on caution might call it discipline, never realising it stems from generations who equated love with survival.