My parents are fairly anxious people. They are always 10 minutes early to every event and are typically sitting at the airport terminal 2 hours before boarding a flight. My brother and I inherited this trait and have dealt with anxiety for most of our childhood and adult lives.

It’s easy to recognize that anxiety can be passed down to us from our parents, whose parents (my grandparents) were probably also somewhat anxious like their parents before them. But recently, researchers have been interested in the generational transmission of more serious types of stress, or what some might call trauma. This isn’t the type of stress that just makes you chronically early for appointments; I’m talking about the type of stress that results from threats of death, serious injury, or sexual violence—stress that can affect someone’s mental health for their entire lives.

Although the term was first coined back in 1966, you hear a lot about generational trauma in the headlines lately. Generational trauma is the psychological and emotional effects of traumatic events passed down through generations, impacting people who did not directly experience the original event. The term was first used in the 1960’s when researchers observed the high rates of psychological distress experienced not just by Holocaust survivors, but also by the children of Holocaust survivors, who weren’t even conceived until after the end of World War II. How is this possible? How does trauma get passed down over the course of generations?

There are actually a lot of ways this can happen. The most intuitive is through parenting........

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