Perpetuation of intergenerational trauma requires learned behavior and activation of genetic proclivities.

Intergenerational trauma can take the form of borderline personality disorder.

Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance likely plays a large role in borderline personality disorder.

A friend of mine recently asked, “Do you believe in intergenerational trauma?” My affirmative answerspurred his curiosity: “But how does someone’s, say, war trauma that happened to them get passed to another generation?” More wondering emanated from the passenger seat about next generations getting vicarious trauma from hearing war stories. Then something about perhaps genes can be altered by trauma to encourage hypervigilance and aggressive reactivity in offspring as a preemptive strike against potential trauma of their own.

Both of my compadre’s ideas are viable possibilities, vicarious trauma being a well-researched topic, and trauma-induced genetic alteration is an emerging area of research interest. Evidence does exist (e.g., Chou et al., 2024) that environmental stimuli “can be written into heritable material…and persist to the next generation,” which primes the new generation for how to respond to traumatically stressful environmental stimuli, sort of like my friend hypothesized.

In any event, it is not that someone’s specific traumatic experience gets passed down, like each succeeding generation has flashbacks of their great-great-grandfather’s World War I incidents. Rather, like most things in psychology, there is a complex interplay of nature and nurture lending itself to generational perpetuation of the pervasive chaos of one person’s long-ago trauma.

Borderline personality disorder as intergenerational trauma

My favorite illustration of this is borderline personality disorder (BPD). The foundation of BPD tends to be abandonment/rejection by an early attachment figure(s). As the person ages, their lives revolve around fear of abandonment/rejection. Numerous maladaptive behaviors/defenses follow, like reactive rage, self-destructive activities, identity disturbances........

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