Somatic Intergenerational Inheritance
One of the areas that continue to fascinate me is the area of epigenetics and also related ways in which our ancestral lines, our family’s unfinished business, can be transferred down to us.
Galit Atlas calls it emotional inheritance.
But, today, I was thinking about how we may inherit the nervous systems of our mothers.
Ooph.
That one was a hard one for me to face.
Especially when I consider my mother’s own dysregulated system - due to trauma, her own genetic inheritance, I’m sure, her depression and anxiety.
If this is true - then I am concerned.
Though I am grateful that I was her second child and not her first.
Because I can’t imagine how her own dysregulation also influenced and imprinted upon the nervous system of my brother.
When my mother had my brother, her post-partum depression was rough and my mother had severe insomnia for about a year after.
Insomnia is such a word that we toss around that has varying extremes.
But when I say my mother had insomnia, I mean that she slept for minutes in place for a whole night’s sleep for a year.
This obviously greatly impacted her physical and mental health.
Having a newborn is already exhausting, with their demands and the more normal sleep deprivation, but when you never sleep -
This is why my mother referred to this time period as “her dulling,” where it changed her. And she was different after it.
As such, he was a zombie and—at points—even incapable/incompetent to care for her my brother.
Undeniable, that influenced the development of my brother, but I don’t think that I can comprehend just how much so.
I think the issue is two-fold; our nervous systems are formed both from what was handed down to us and the interactions and norm’ing of how mother’s nervous system was.
I thought about this the other day when I read a post that read -
“That anxiety you feel might not be yours…it might be your mother’s nervous system living in our fascia.”
Because -
“The nervous system begins wiring itself in the womb—long before thought, language, or memory. From as early as the second trimester, your developing body was shaped by the chemistry, stress levels, and breath patterns of the one you were growing inside of. Her body set the baseline for yours.”
They referred to this as ‘limbic imprinting’ - where your emotional circuitry formed through what she felt, not just what she said. Your body learned its first lessons about safety by listening to hers.”
We are also influenced by he tone, vagus nerve, fascia, muscle tone, and the way your system learned to settle or not.
Britt Piper makes the point that long before we were self-regulated, we were co-regulated with our others.
Essentially - “your body became fluent in a language of survival that didn’t start with you.”
And this is called intergenerational somatic inheritance….it’s not memory you recall, but memory you became. You carry her stories and nervous system - through no fault of your own - epigenetics confirms this. You adapted based on her.
This sounds bleak and scary AF because some of us know that our mothers were traumatized and not regulated.
But the hope therein lies in this -
Neuroplasticity and we may “create new neurological maps.”
We can learn to practice safety and to reuglate our own nervous systems.
This is how generational trauma completes and we heal. Through the body.
It’s intense and overwhelming at first -
But it’s also such important work and also because we can heal not only ourselves, but what generations couldn’t.
In doing so, we rewire our lineage.
~paraphrased from Britt Piper.
Undeniable powerful stuff.
This is the hope - while trauma imprints on us genetically, but so does/can healing.
That’s the tool that we have not to be sentenced to a lifetime of pain and repetition of trauma and cycles.