Intergenerational trauma as a fractal

In the last few years there has been an increasingly open discussion about how personal trauma can affect the generations that follow, even though epigenetics and mainstream materialist science cannot explain the mechanisms of transmission, transfer or inheritance (Knudsen et al., 2018). In addition, no DNA link has been found for our innate traits (Christopher, 2017). So perhaps the way we look at things may not be able to reveal more about the truth that many mental health professionals now observe and ascertain “with the naked eye”, i.e. without the need for a microscope and laboratory experiments. This truth concerns the repetition of elements of an ancestor’s origin of psychological trauma in some of the offspring, in the same or similar form, with the same or similar outcome. Fractal[1] geometry can offer a way to explain and describe how an intergenerational trauma can be transmitted and manifested (Nikolitsa, 2024). I will attempt to tell a fairly typical story from my work as a Trauma Therapist from 2018 to the present, seeing in this light the repetition of a particular illness as the fractal of a recurring psychological trauma from one generation to the next.

A girl grows up in a poor family in a mountain village at the beginning of the 20th century. Both parents are brutally and relentlessly cruel to her and her siblings. They reject her for who she is; the living conditions, culture and poverty do not allow her to enjoy either her childhood or her adolescence. The parents marry her off too early without consulting her to a man they chose according to their own economic interest and political beliefs and left her in the hands of a stranger who neither loved her, nor respected her, nor truly cared for her. When thiw man wanted to “return” her to her father because she was difficult and “rebellious”, the father’s answer was to better “throw her into the river as he will not get her back.” Her value was therefore nil within her father’s family and the family she was given to, and consequently in society. After marriage she was forced to look after all the other members of her husband’s family and her 3 children, without being allowed to protest or she would be “thrown into the river”. No one ever really cared about her, she lived her life miserable and the only memories she wanted to remember were what she experienced as a teenager and young woman before she was married.

This girl with the “broken heart” gave birth to a boy and two heterozygous twins, of different sexes, whom she raised in the same and unmistakable way that her parents raised her. With brutal cruelty, judgment and rejection for who they are, failure to meet their emotional needs and constant aggression that prevented any sense of safety and kindness in the home for her 3 children. Rejection, criticism and mean-spiritedness towards her children was her self-evident right. She also encouraged violence towards them by pushing their father to be punitive towards them and equally harsh. Her great unhappiness was validated and blackened her entire existence until her old age, when her first-born son died of a medical error in his teens. Her heart was “broken” once again.

At old age she developed heart disease and underwent an open-heart surgery. After “opening her heart” in this violent but compelling way she initially became tougher towards her children. After a while she softened her cruelty to them somewhat but it was never really eliminated, nor did she express any remorse for what she had caused them. She lived to a ripe old age and died at 99 years old of natural causes and not of her heart, which had been “saved” by surgery.

Each of her twin children was born with a different temperament, and as different souls, they each manifested a different attitude towards their mother. The girl reacted and strongly resisted the psychological abuse and constant verbal abuse and control. At the end of her mother’s life she held an attitude of acceptance for the hatred and love she felt for the woman who gave birth to her and somehow managed to become familiar with and take responsibility for these conflicting emotions. The boy submitted to the mother’s dictates and never expressed his anger to her or reacted to her psychological violence and manipulation; instead, he unconsciously identified with her, keeping in mind only the father as the villain, who was submitting to the dictates of the cruel mother and applying violence to the boy as an inevitable and acceptable method of conditioning. The father’s attitude and behavior was also dismissive, cruel and violent but not towards both twins, mainly towards the boy. Neither the father nor the mother, until the end of their lives, acknowledged the harm done to their children, nor took responsibility for their mistakes, but continued to harshly criticize and reject any choice their children made in their adult lives.

Growing up, the twins developed different tendencies for different diseases as a result of a chronically overstimulated nervous system due to psychological and physical abuse. The girl developed mostly skin and respiratory sensitivity͘ – difficulty in excreting all the toxicity she suffered, from her body. The boy developed heart disease like their mother͘ – difficulty for the vitality of blood to flow unimpeded through the arteries and with it the love for others. The daughter married a man who had exactly the same hard and rigid personality, with narcissistic elements more evident than those of her mother. The son married a patient and inherently kind woman who endured all his psychological violence, rejection, spite and abuse as a character trait and who accepted him with kindness and dependence, unable to leave him. They gave birth to a son and that son gave birth to a son of his own.

This created two more generations of male offspring who grew up with an unconscious mental background of cruelty as the given relationship from parent to child. The cruel woman’s heartbroken son did not behave with such obvious physical violence and cruelty to his own son but certainly with the same emotional cruelty that he was conditioned with, something that was engrained in his own personality. At the end of his life he was rejected by his son as – just like his own parents did – he refused to admit the cruelty and selfishness with which he raised his child and did not admit his mistake.

At this point, one can imagine that this fractal – of “heartbreaking cruelty” that manifests itself physically as heart disease – can be perpetuated indefinitely in future generations, as a chain reaction. The original cause that formed it and set the primary stigma of cruelty to children lies far back in time and we have no access to exactly when this fractal was first created. In other words, the root of cruelty in the parent-child relationship may go back many generations to the ancestors of the original girl in the story. This perpetual sequence is aptly described in the following sketch. 

Image from the book of Rupert Sheldrake, 1981, p. 97.

One way to resolve, heal and transform this fractal of intergenerational trauma, into something healthier containing love and kindness, is to access the primary pain that created the need for cruelty. This pain (of rejection by the parent) is shared by all involved as this pain is the unresolved trauma, not the cruelty. Cruelty is the avoidance of this pain, the defense/survival mechanism so that this pain is never experienced again. Consequently this cruelty perpetuates the root of the pain (rejection) to the next generations. So in a paradoxical way what was created for the survival of the ancestor continues to abuse and perpetuate the pain on the offspring.

As long as one of the next descendants manages to endure to transform the origin of trauma and thus transform cruelty into kindness, then the fractal will also be transformed, will take a new form that will continue as another fractal in the next generations. This will be possible as long as this offspring allows himself/hersel to go deeply into the unbearable pain of rejection by the mother/parent, in all its breadth, to find meaning in it, and to go on with his life loving his children for who there are deeply and sincerely. In short, this trauma will be healed if one manages not to repeat the unconscious chain of cruelty to his own offspring. This is made possible not by a mere adjustment of behavior and/or intellectualizations that appear to be conscious choices, but through the lived experience of love that comes from the healing of pain and the love for the self that has arisen as a consequence of that healing. Then the tendency for heart disease in subsequent offspring will change. There will be no more “broken hearts”[2] in the lineage.

It is important to mention here that such a fractal may have the same manifestation, as a heart disease, from generation to generation, but its “signs” are not as obvious since the concept of cruelty changes as societies evolve. Fractal as trauma is an expression of Chaos Theory[3] and suggests that there will be slight variations from the original pattern (Nikolitsa, 2024). For example, cruelty leading to physical violence 3 generations back may manifest  in cruelty leading to covert rejection of a child’s temperament or innate gifts or tendencies in more modern circumstances (21st century) in contemporary offspring. What is important to keep as information is that the quality of the cruelty and the damage inflicted on the offspring is the same as that experienced by the ancestors. Pain, whatever we call it – vibration, emotion in the nervous system, electrochemical energy in the physical body, memory in the mind, “inter-information” (Laszlo, 2006, p. 67) or “morphic resonance” (Sheldrake, 1981, p. 95) is what remains common and unresolved

The influence of this fractal, intangible, immaterial element that is transmitted from one generation to the next will take different forms in the linear arrow of time, as the external factors (living conditions, habits, culture, etc.), the temperament and the soul of each descendant and the choices he/she will make during his/her life will determine the manifestation of the origin of pain in matter/physical body.

Book references:

Christopher, T., 2017. Science’s Big Problem, Reincarnation’s Big Potential, and Buddhists’ Profound Embarrassment. Religions vol.8, pp. 155

Knudsen, T.M., Reswan, F.I., Jiang, Y., Karmaus, W., Svanes, C., Holloway, J.W., 2018. Transgenerational and Intergenerational epigenetic inheritance in allergic diseases. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Vol. 142, issue 3, pp. 765-772

Κoulouris et al., 2009. Tako-Tsubo cardiomyopathy: The “Broken Heart Syndrome”, Hellenic Cardiology Review, Vol. 50, No 4 – https://www.hcs.gr/hellenicjcardiol/arthro-anaskopisis-24/myokardiopatheia-tako-tsubo-to-syndromo-tis-ragismenis-kardias/

Laszlo, E., 2006. Science and the akashic field. Publications “Archetype”

Νikolitsa, Α., 2024. The fractal of existence: body-mind-spirit in the healing of trauma. Private publication. ΙSBN 978-618-00-5487-3

Sheldrake, R., 1981. A new Science of Life: the hypothesis of formative causation. J.P. Tarcher publisher, LA