Ashok Gupta explains that trauma experienced by parents or ancestral lineages can be transmitted across generations via epigenetic mechanisms: environmental factors interact with genes, altering biological responses that are then passed to offspring. He links this transmission to changes in the brain—specifically an increased perception of threat, making the nervous system more trigger-happy, cautious, and ready to respond.
Sometimes if a parent or a whole lineage before us have experienced trauma or intense events, we now know that those events can be passed down from generation to generation, or the nervous system responses to that can be intergenerational through epigenetic effects. So our genes are not just a fixed entity, but they actually interact with our environment. And, and then that shifts the genetic makeup and then gets passed on to the next generation. And in terms of the impact on the brain, what trauma does is it increases threat perception. So we start seeing more threatening things in our environment, which is natural, because if we have had repeated experiences of trauma, then the brain becomes trigger happy, but also very cautious and ready to respond to the next threat.
