Childhood Can have an inherit awareness of the trauma our parents experienced?

[biaaw677]

As part of my exploration of the aetiology of root trauma I have come to perceive that we might inherit awareness of the trauma our parents experienced. I'm wondering if this might be one thing that predisposes us to later being vulnerable to developing CPTSD when we are exposed to our trauma incidents? Does our inherent knowledge of trauma that are parents suffered act like reference by which we identify when we are suffering trauma? Just how as an infant or child under five do we identify that we are in danger and our life is being threatened?

 

[IamFree]

One thing I believe is that are parents are a part of us so we feel what they feel

 

[mumstheword]

I think you can. I believe I was. I feel that time in the womb was traumatic. My birth was traumatic. Both my parents had trauma histories. And because they were both severely traumatized, they couldn't protect me or attend to me to prevent me from getting severely traumatized, as well.

 

[biaaw677]

I think you can. I believe I was. I feel that time in the womb was traumatic. My birth was traumati...

This sounds like me. I'm thinking that a trauma my mother experienced somehow translated into me recognising a similar trauma that happened to me in the womb.

My late mother may never have consciously recognised what I'm calling her trauma experience (because if it happened she would also have been in the womb at tge time), but that likely trauma might have affected her in-utero development, her premature birth and might be an original cause of her congenital impairment. My mother's congenital impairment is recognized as being an hereditary condition, but there is no evidence of it occurring previously in any of my mother's ancestors.

I am wondering whether in are genes, besides having hereditary physical characteristics, we also have hereditary traumatic memory or whether alternatively somehow our mother's emotions, fears, and trauma re-experience events during the pregnancy, can be passed to the fetus via the placenta.

 

[Kintsugi]

There's quite a lot of research coming out about epigenetics and generational trauma that points to trauma being recorded and stored at the genetic level. Most fundamentally, developing fetuses do receive cues from their mother's stress levels, which I believe can predispose infants to higher levels of anxiety/cortisol.

Both my biological and my adoptive mother suffered from trauma. I don't know about my biological mother's mother, but my adoptive mother's mother was schizophrenic and also had a traumatic history as did her father. I think all of these factors influenced me as I grew up in addition to the trauma of being separated from my natural mother as a newborn and being sexually abused at an extremely young age. For example, my adoptive mother was neglectful of me, and it has been shown through studies that mothers who were neglected as infants tend to be more naturally disconnected from their own children (not a hard and fast rule, just a trend in the natural world, the study I read included mice and humans), which will stress out a baby.

 

[biaaw677]

One thing I believe is that are parents are a part of us so we feel what they feel

Yes, we inherit our genes from our parents, and as we usually live with them from birth and rely on then until adulthood they usually influence us with their nurture, but does it go beyond that?

I am asking if our parents' ancestry, our parents' experience prior to our birth, and our parents' trauma related emotions etc. pass on to use in the womb, neonate, infancy and early childhood periods.

I'm talking about what influences us before we develop our own conscience. As I understand it, from reading psychology research on the subject of child development, prior to them reaching seven years of age, our children cannot make independent decisions for themselves, by themselves. So what influences a child, from conception onwards, before they develop an independent conscience?

As is almost certainly obvious to any readers on this site, our personal trauma experience influences our emotional and physical development, but what else influences us?

 

[biaaw677]

There's quite a lot of research coming out about epigenetics and generational trauma that points to trauma being recorded and stored at the genetic level. Most fundamentally, developing fetuses do receive cues from their mother's stress levels, which I believe can predispose infants to higher levels of anxiety/cortisol.

This is interesting, thank you. I'm not a biologist or a chemist so I had to explore the term epigenetics but I've vaguely heard of generational trauma. I was lead to this by some earlier research I have done about how earthquakes that occur in the first trimester of pregnancy seem to lead to premature births e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/793464.stm and http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008200 , but until I read the referred to BBC article today, and briefly explored the definition of the term epigenetics I had not seen any generational trauma studies or anything that specifically concentrates on fetus experience predisposing the child to PTSD/CPTSD or what mechanism creates a situation where the baby has a predisposition to developing PTSD/CPTSD.

In my trauma story I'm exploring whether an earth tremors that occurred when I was a first trimester baby affected both my mother and me. My research further identified that my mother during her time in her mother's womb might also have been effected by earth tremors. I'm thinking that, at the time of my earth tremor experience, my mother might have had a trigger to her own fetal trauma and thus her emotions affected me both via the placenta and via her generational trauma influenced genes.