Epigenetics

Epigenetics is a fascinating empirical field of science. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is an area of neuroscience and genetic research that has grown rapidly over the past decade. One empirical study after another has created a package of quantifiable evidence to show that the emotional trauma of animals and human beings (remember that we are animals too with close genetic ties to other animal species) is passed from one generation to the next, and it may even skip generations. This occurs through an increase in epigenetic methylation. Science refers to this transgenerational emotional transmission as epigenetic methylation or epigenetic inheritance.

Post Traumatic Stress

Findings suggest that this transmission can impact many generations without the descendant generations ever personally experiencing the original trauma. Many of the earliest studies were backed with funding to understand how and why Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms show up in descendants of those who have survived war, yet they weren’t there themselves, or those descendants who had family members who experienced devastating emotional events such as the Holocaust. They have discovered that these emotionally traumatic events don’t just impact the one who was there in person. There are findings that the gene expression of the children and grandchildren are being impacted as well.

Epigenetics and Systemic (Family) Constellations

Epigenetics happens to provide a way of understanding the dynamics behind systemic family constellations and begins to explain why they are so energetically effective in understanding family systems. Epigenetic inheritance links the knowledge that is rapidly being generated by neuroscientists, geneticists, and those in the psychological fields of brain research, to the mainstream, with possibilities for understanding emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, relationship, and financial wellbeing.

The Old Story

For generations, we were taught that our genetic makeup is static or unchanging. We learned that we were born with a specific arrangement of DNA and we were limited in what we could do or achieve by the genetic hand we were dealt. While that mindset holds certain truth, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The science of epigenetic inheritance is proving that beyond our DNA structure there is our gene expression. The expression of our genes alters continually in response to events and stimuli in our environment. This begins at the single cell level of our existence. This may happen moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, and at other times there is a shift over a longer period as the genes come in contact with the environment around them. We ignore this wonderful new field of study that is deeply interconnected with our wellbeing at great emotional peril to ourselves.

Cellular Shift

A key element that is frequently overlooked in contemporary medical or psychological diagnoses is that our behaviours and symptoms may be impacted or generated emotionally through “epigenetically inherited” trauma from our parents or the ancestors who came before us. This isn’t just through exposure to beliefs and behaviours of our parents or grandparents, but our genes chemically react, regularly switching certain markers or tags on or off when we are exposed to positive (joyful) or negative (challenging) emotional trauma in our environment. Depending on whether a particular event or activity was life-giving or traumatizing determined whether the markers for the expression of your ancestor’s genes were shifted on and off for different emotional reactions. This transformed our ancestors at the cellular level as they reacted emotionally to their external environment.

Gene Expression

The expression of our genes is impacted by the gene expression of our parents, grandparents, and many great grandparents before them. The unresolved emotional trauma of our ancestors may be underlying or maintaining our life struggles or un-wellness. The far-reaching extent of this huge phenomenon is hard to conceptualize. Be aware that the underlying cause of the symptoms or behaviours you manifest may be an emotional response of your ancestors that has been transmitted down to you as an epigenetic emotional energetic entanglement. As well, you may be impacted by your own stoically unexpressed emotions that you hold within you, echoing the emotional patterning of your parents and ancestors. The pattern then transmits down to any one of your descendants if it is left unresolved. Through systemic constellations we learn that family systems continually seek to heal their wounds or emotional trauma and they gather any missing family members lost, forgotten, or excluded due to traumatic events. The greater family system perpetually seeks to regain balance and wellbeing. Everyone has a right to belong.

Emotional Stoicism

If you are like me, you will have many stoic ancestors. I find this to be especially true if you live in North America. People immigrated and attempted to leave the past behind. You can appreciate the inheritance of this unresolved emotional trauma. Perhaps your ancestors were traumatized by starvation, persecution, violence, wars, slavery, or immigration. Perhaps they felt forced to react stoically in order to survive, much as their ancestors did before them. Individuals were told to get on with life, stop complaining, and just endure their pain and hardship, and to avoid foolish emotional displays or discussion about feelings. In the lingo of the youth of today, they were told to “suck it up.” So each time one of your ancestors experienced an emotional trauma or crisis, they may have been forced by circumstance, or they may have made a conscious choice not to express their emotions openly. They stoically suppressed the pain, anger, resentment, guilt, rage, shame, grief, fear, sorrow, or shock associated with any trauma into the depths of their unconscious mind – the cells of the body. It was left unresolved and smoldering beneath the surface. This constantly immersed the cells of their bodies in an unhealthy emotional soup.

Stoicism allowed our ancestors to survive great emotional adversity and tragedy. In these past eras, stoicism was looked upon as a virtue. This stoicism helped individuals survive and it may have helped them continue going about their daily routine, but it also brought them un-wellness and heartbreak. This emotional suppression did not serve them well emotionally, physically, psychologically, spiritually, financially, or relationally. An emotional pattern was created and stored, held, or imprinted in their gene expression. It may have been passed down to you. In this era of rapidly changing technology, our bodies are seeking new ways of adapting to these stressful times. Body focused systemic family constellations and many other forms of energy work are being developed to specifically help us transition and develop new ways of being.

Today, your body may be expressing symptoms of anxiety, fear, obsessive behaviours, cancer, addictions, chronic fatigue, Crohn’s disease, Lyme disease, depression, fibromyalgia, social alienation, or any number of other conditions. You may find you have certain behaviours that make you crazy, yet you just can’t seem to stop doing them. You may have patterns of behaviour that keep you from getting close or intimate with others. Epigenetic inheritance may be holding these patterns in place and that’s why your efforts to shift your life are not effective. It’s time to let go of the stoic behaviour you inherited from your ancestors and find your way to healthy emotional expressiveness.

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance

Psychologists have known for years that once the child is born, the mother’s hippocampus and amygdala of the brain act as the emotional and memory centres for the child until they reach about the age of 2 or 3, when the child’s brain is more fully developed. That’s why most individuals have little recall of their earliest years of life. The developing child is impacted by stress and emotional trauma that occurs in the life of the parent. In the human species, this is especially poignant for the time period while the child develops within the mother. From the moment of conception, emotional response strategies and patterns are set in motion as you absorb your mother’s emotional wellbeing, or lack thereof. What the pregnant woman is experiencing emotionally, the baby also feels and experiences. The child’s genes switch tags on and off for particular emotional responses or body symptoms.

Your Emotional Response Patterning

You experienced what your mother experienced emotionally while you were in the womb, during birth, and during early childhood. Was mother well supported by her partner – your father? Was the pregnancy welcomed? Was mother’s life calm or stressful? Did mother feel supported by her family? Was mother financially comfortable? Did anything traumatic happen while you were developing in utero? Did mother receive good nutrition? Did mother smoke or use drugs or alcohol? Did fire, floods, famine, accidents, death, abuse, fear, violence, or any other emotional trauma impact mother? Even if these moments of emotional trauma occurred before your conception, they may still be impacting your life today.

Three Generational Impact

What the maternal grandmother experiences emotionally when she is carrying her daughters and sons in the womb will be experienced emotionally by the developing child. If the baby is a female, when the developing child is 5 months old in the womb, she carries all the eggs she will carry for her lifetime. Those egg cells are impacted by the emotional experiences of maternal grandmother. The male child also picks up the emotional impact of the environment on his mother while in the womb. Any emotional trauma in mother’s life or maternal grandmother’s life may be drawing mother away emotionally with her own emotional pain. When this emotional pain goes unresolved by mother’s body, it becomes a template for your own life. While in the womb, the child will unconsciously sacrifice its own wellbeing to carry or share the emotional burdens of the mother. It is a survival mechanism. If mother is okay, I will be okay. “I will carry this fear for you mother.” “I will share this feeling of being unsafe with you mother.” This is where systemic constellations and language of the body exercises are effective in shifting these burdens back to their rightful owner.

Your First Relationship

Your experience of mother created your own emotional response patterns for life. Do you carry a feeling that you are loved and wanted, or not? Do you carry a feeling that life is safe and secure, or not? Do you feel alone in the world without support? Do you carry a feeling that life is meant to be difficult and not joyous, that it’s your role to suffer? Was your mother there for you physically, but not so much emotionally? Are you anxious or depressed without a known cause? Was mother emotionally needy and did you unconsciously step in to carry or share her burden? You may have inherited these emotional response patterns unconsciously from your mother. Remember that your mother may have inherited them from her mother and so on back in time. There is no blame or judgement when we look back at our parents or ancestors, only the creation of compassion for their emotional journey in life.

Twin Studies

Gene expression, the switching of the markers off and on, is why identical twins, living the same general life with the same general parenting, can have very different life outcomes. Even if they went through life holding hands and experienced everything together, they would be different because of gene expression and how their bodies absorb and interpret the environment around them. We get caught up observing the similarities for identical twins and we sometimes overlook many of the differences.

Inherited Fears

Letting go of fears is vital for health and wellness. Many of us are carrying fears that have long-overdue expiry dates. Each of these fears is imprinted onto the cells of the body and the memory of the unconscious mind is very long. These imprints travel from generation to generation through epigenetic inheritance. Your body continues to feel these fears even when the event or situation that created the fear in the first place is decades in the past. That’s why we sometimes have fears that don’t seem to be grounded with any event. If you don’t do your own healing work around the emotional issues that impact you, you pass it on to your children and grandchildren. Don’t panic though, if you have already passed it to the next generations, you can still do your own healing work and it will shift the dynamic for the next generation and change the way you interact in the future with your children and grandchildren. If you grew up in a stoic household, you can still teach your children and grandchildren to express their emotions.

How Does This Help Us?

It’s vital to do your own healing work around the emotional issues that impact you.  In this rapidly changing age of high technological advancement, genes that respond rapidly to their environment are instantaneously connecting with the body’s neurochemical systems. This means they are interconnected and impacting other genes. Our brain has the potential to shift and generate new neuronal pathways until the moment it physically dies. Science has proven that our brain can continue learning and changing as long as we continue to stimulate it. This means that we have the capacity to shift the expression of our genes and our epigenetic emotional inheritance, potentially having a great impact on the state of our wellness, until the day we physically die.