Dr. Don WoodResolving Your Trauma-Based Challenges So You Can Unlock Peak Performance

Is Trauma Hereditary?

10 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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1:25

Dr. Don Wood explains his view that trauma can be inherited via genes/DNA, describing genetic information as a "book" that contains chapters of trauma passed from parents and earlier generations. He argues that inherited trauma may remain inactive unless triggered by an individual's own traumatic experiences (nurture), and offers a personal anecdote about his family to illustrate the point.

Chapters

Your DNA and your genes are basically a book of information. It's a book of information about your mother, a book of information about your father. So that information that they pass on to you is going to be used to process who you are. So that can be eye color, hair color, all the different things. But it also is a book of trauma. So if they had a lot of trauma in their life, there's going to be those chapters in the book on trauma. Now you experience trauma, your brain, your DNA, is now encoding your experiences, but it's also using the experiences from that book to respond to it. There's where the trauma is hereditary. It does get passed down from your parents and other generations. And it's going to definitely have an effect on your physical and emotional health. I believe that as long as you didn't have any trauma, your trauma that got passed on through your genes may not get activated. I'm a perfect example. There was a lot of trauma earlier in my parents life, at least my mother's life that I know about, but it didn't activate in me because I didn't have really trauma. So I believe that the nurture was more important than the nature. I believe that the nature activates if the nurture is interrupted. And then the system says, what do we know about these kinds of experiences? And then it pulls up the old information hereditarily passed on to you, and then it uses that to respond to.