How Generational Trauma Can Destroy Families
If you were mistreated as a child, would it surprise you to learn that your parent or parents most likely suffered from that same form of mistreatment in their own childhoods?
People who have been mistreated by parents or other caregivers can live with those issues for the rest of their life. But in reality, those motivations to mistreat children didn’t come out of nowhere – the adults themselves might have been subjected to some form of trauma and never took the steps to heal from it, thereby transposing their own trauma onto their children. This is what’s known as generational trauma: one generation passing trauma on to another. It’s a cyclical pattern of issues used in examining family dynamics in counseling and social work. It’s also an extremely serious threat to the healthy emotional and mental development of kids, and if left untreated, can destroy families.