Transgenerational trauma passes through family systems — patterns, beliefs, emotions and physical symptoms that repeat across generations. Based on personal data and a questionnaire about family dynamics, dominant ancestral wounds are identified: loyalty to the family system, assumed roles, repeating patterns and unresolved losses. The analysis offers a path to breaking the cycle through Hellinger's constellation principles and concrete integrative practices.
Where it comes from
The idea that a family transmits more than genes has two separate lineages. One is therapeutic: Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy's contextual therapy from the 1970s worked with what he called invisible loyalties and family ledgers of obligation, and Anne Ancelin Schützenberger's genosociogram traced repeating dates and events across generations. The other is biological: epigenetic research on the Dutch famine of 1944 and later cohorts found measurable effects on the children of people who experienced severe deprivation, though what transmits and how far remains contested.
How the method works
The work begins with a family map going back three or four generations, marking not only births and deaths but migrations, early deaths, losses, secrets and the ages at which things happened. What the method looks for is repetition: the same age at which a marriage ends, the same kind of loss, the same role assigned to the oldest child. The interpretation is that an unmetabolised event in one generation tends to reappear as a pattern in the next, and that naming it is what stops it repeating unexamined.
What a reading covers
A reading gives the patterns that appear to repeat across the generations you can account for, the roles that tend to be assigned, what in your own life echoes them, and where the line can be drawn differently.
Common questions
- Do I need to know my family history?
- The more you know the more there is to work with, but partial information is usual. Gaps and silences are themselves treated as material.
- Is trauma really inherited?
- Epigenetic effects on offspring are documented; the claim that a specific experience transmits as a specific pattern several generations on is much weaker and still debated. The therapeutic use does not depend on the biology.
- Is this the same as family constellations?
- Related but not identical. Constellation work is a group method with its own disputed claims; this is an analytical mapping of what is known about the family.