How Unhealed Intergenerational Trauma Shapes Our Future; Neha Bhat Explains

In a society that often hushes discussions on the most fundamental aspects of human existence, Neha Bhat invites readers to explore the uncharted territories of their own desires. In Unashamed, Neha employs a unique blend of empathy, reflection and her considerable expertise to fearlessly tackle the intricacies of sex, sexuality, relationships, trauma and shame, while dismantling the stigma surrounding these. A mix of engaging anecdotes, relatable case studies, self-exploratory exercises, journaling prompts and Neha’s own experiences as a sex therapist, Unashamed provides a roadmap for individuals seeking to break free from the shackles of shame and embark on a liberating journey towards self-discovery.

Here's an excerpt from Neha Bhat's Unashamed: Notes from the Diary of a Sex Therapist

Each time a mother teaches her daughter about taking care of her sexual health, about expecting mutuality in relationships, about standing against interpersonal violence or about leaving abusive relationships, she gifts her daughter a lifetime of messages that impact the quality of the daughter’s life. When a father educates his son about the menstrual cycle after the son reaches puberty, about releasing his anger through exercise, about saying sorry to his wife in front of his children and meaning it, he creates decades of inner stability that the son will be able to lean on internally when life’s challenges come his way.

Now consider the opposite. When parents are actively violent towards each other and refuse to resolve conflict in an emotionally healthy manner, or when they make insensitive and crude comments about people different from them, they’re indirectly passing on those same values and ways of viewing the world to their children. When these children grow up, they often find themselves in relationships with similar patterns, behaviours and worldviews.

The six-year-old watching his father slap his mother may become a twenty-three-year-old who doesn’t know how to control his impulses when he is in conflict with their partner. The ten-year-old who took on the role of ‘mummy’s best friend’ is now an over-functioning forty-year-old who can’t see herself outside of her caretaking tendencies. Adult children might be exhausted and even chronically ill from never having learnt to say no, but they might continue because this is what they thought was ‘normal’ for the first decade of their life.

Intergenerational trauma is real

At fifty-one, Kusum had been through three long-term relationships, all of which had ended with her cheating on her partners. She had been to astrologers, gurus, coaches and therapists in an effort to understand why she couldn’t break her pattern of sabotaging her relationships. When she eventually consulted with me, I suggested she read Mark Wolynn’s popular book It Didn’t Start With You. The book’s main message was that trauma isn’t solely an individual problem, as the field of psychopathology has opined, but it is a type of wounding that can last for generations as feelings, sensations and genetic stress responses that can get passed on from one family member to the next.

This is what is defined as intergenerational trauma. Even though a person didn’t personally experience a particular type of trauma in their lifetime, they could be feeling its symptoms because their grandparents experienced a more severe form of it. The book explains the value of tracing one’s family line in connecting the dots to find out what could be carried forward.

The trauma of race and racism is passed on generationally and there is ample new research available on this, especially in the United States. The trauma of colonial oppression, religious displacement and oppression and caste-based oppression have similar narratives in India. When people are not given the opportunity to heal from trauma, they’re likely to live in a state of distress. This can lead to a range of negative outcomes for themselves and their descendants.

Intergenerational relating is hard

Their children may experience difficulties with attachment, disconnection from their extended families and culture and high levels of stress. This in turn can create developmental issues for the children, as we are particularly susceptible to distress at a young age. It creates a cycle of trauma in which the impact is passed from one generation to the next. Now, add to this the unique Indian familial setup of many generations staying together, or at least somewhat close together, and we have intergenerational trauma compounded with relational challenges, in a fast-changing social landscape, all butting heads simultaneously.

For Kusum, this sparked interest in her exploring the relationship and marital patterns of her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. At first, when she started asking her family members these intimate questions, she came across shame, embarrassment and judgement—and interestingly, a lot of secrets, mixed narratives and silence as well.

Persisting, Kusum discovered a series of abandoned marriages on her father’s side. Three generations of the men on her father’s side had married young and then suddenly left home around the age of thirty, leaving their wives and children behind without support. Kusum was flabbergasted when she realized that her first long-term relationship ended at thirty-one when she cheated on her partner with her coworker. While her family’s chronic history of relationship sabotage is no excuse for Kusum’s own infidelity, the knowledge that she wasn’t broken or alone in this pattern helped her greatly.

Intergenerational patterns have been studied quite deeply in children of alcohol addicts and smokers. The evidence-based research in the field is continually evolving and filling the vast gaps in knowledge that still exist. As mentioned earlier, verbal dialogue about intimate trauma histories is not a welcome language in our culture. Colonial trauma has been barely understood, even though Independence was over seventy-five years ago. Caste-based trauma narratives are often dismissed as invalid and irrelevant in mainstream upper and middle-class urban India. Thus, many of us are only starting to understand how our histories are not mere stories of the past that can be just put in a box and erased, but that ancestral legacies continue to live inside of us. This is precisely why open discussions on uncomfortable social truths are so important at this stage of our society.

Although there is an abundance of wisdom alluding to the concept of intergenerational trauma patterns and ancestral healing in many parts of Hindu folklore and scripture, the disconnection from them in the English-educated urban Indian mind is deep. Also, there hasn’t been enough work done yet in translating this indigenous knowledge into contemporary academia to allow greater understanding and contextualization of this knowledge within the fields of Indian and international psychological research and practice.

Young urban Indians are often given many messages of ‘breaking free from the past’, as if the past is one big dirty stain that needs to be eradicated for the appearance of a fresh, new ‘blank slate’ from which we will suddenly start to lead more authentic, sex-positive lives. I’ve seen innumerable advertisements, films and well-meaning sex-positive communities that follow this rather superficial narrative. While it’s valid to question older ideas and knowledge systems, our past does not suddenly just disappear if we apply the ethos of ‘cancel culture’ to it. As the concept of inherited trauma proves, the past gets carried forward into the present, which if left unexamined, shapes the future accordingly.

Extracted with permission from Neha Bhat's Unashamed; published by HarperCollins India