Intergenerational Trauma, Eating Disorders and Psychedelics
“The food of your ancestral lands will be the medicine of nourishment.
The songs of the ancestors will guide you back to the home of your heart.
The tradition of the ancestors will take you back to the ancient ways of the earth of your blueprint.
The healing of the ancestors will help you understand the intergenerational cycles and the medicine within.
It is the roots of the ones before us that will guide the clear path one may seek.
Back into the roots,
Into the roots that have brought you life,
That have prayed for you,
That have sang for you,
That hold the divine sacred of the Earth.
Returning to the home within,
Back to the Origin.” -Vianney of @medicinewithinspirit
Can you imagine your grandmother holding your mother? What is the quality of that holding? Can you see how your grandmother was gazing at your mother? What was reflected in her eyes?
Who we are in the world has been directly passed down through the lines of our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents. We are living out parts of their lives not only because of genes that they have passed down to us, but also from experiences that they have lived through which have left its own kind of mark.
Events in people’s lifetime can change the way their DNA is expressed, and these changes can be passed on to the next generation.
This is the process of epigenetics where the expression of genes is modified without changing the DNA code itself. Tiny chemical tags are added to or removed from our DNA in response to changes in the environment in which we are living. When these tags turn genes on or off, it gives us a way to adapt to changing conditions without inflicting a more permanent shift in our genomes.
This means that experiences during your grandparent’s lifetime – particularly traumatic ones – can impact subsequent generations in the family. However, it is does not have to be just trauma. The idea of epigenetics means that the environment in general very simply influences the way in which genes are expressed.
Epigenetic influencers
There are a growing number of research that now support the idea that the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics. It is not so much fear of a traumatic event that gets passed down but rather that fear in one generation leads to sensitivity in the next.
Even though epigenetic research is still in its infancy, it seems clear that the consequences of our own actions and experiences could affect the lives of our children – before they might be conceived. With this knowing, it puts a different spin on how we might choose to live.
Epigenetics and Eating Disorders
Traditional models that have looked at eating disorders have suggested that an individual with an eating disorder usually has “maladaptive personality traits”, including stubbornness, character weakness, or has a superficial concern with appearance. Research is now showing us that trauma in their lifetime as well as trauma from parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have an effect on one’s epigenetic susceptibilities that get “switched on” by a lifetime of environmental exposures. Including epigenetics improves caregiver and clinician sensitivity to their patients’ realities, and helps make treatment more palatable and humane.
Epigenetically-informed models of eating disorder development contribute positively to efforts of clinicians and caregivers in various ways:
We take the focus off the individual. It is never a single event or action that causes an eating disorder to develop. There are rather a sequence of life events that served to activate inherited susceptibilities toward eating disorder development that stem back into previous generations (e.g. great-grandparents surviving famine or war, the mother experiencing perinatal stress, the child’s school-related stresses etc.). Indeed, chronic exposure to malnutrition and dietary distress amplify psychological tendencies (e.g. compulsivity, anxiety) and metabolic adaptations (e.g. altered lipid metabolism) that help “lock” an eating disorder into place. When one finds it difficult to recover from an eating disorder, it is not about character weakness or stubbornness. Rather we can expand our understanding to include the extend to which epigenetic and biological processes anchor symptoms and behaviors into place based.
There is more room for self-acceptance. Some people feel shame or weak for developing or unable to overcome their eating disorder, and guilty for the distress their disorder causes relatives and friends. From an epigenetically-informed understanding, we can see that the eating disorder has been marinating and absorbing for generations, making it very sticky and challenging to “just get over it”. The eating disorder wasn’t something a person choose; it was almost given to them without a choice. Dr Richard Schwartz of Internal Family Systems calls these “legacy burdens” whilst Ruella Frank, founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, faculty at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, describes them as “physic heirlooms.”
From this viewpoint, it is easier to separate the person from the eating disorder. A epigenetically-informed model implicitly separates individuals from the factors that caused and perpetuate the eating disorder. This lens reminds us that there is an activation or deactivation of tags on certain genes due to real-life experiences. “Externalizing the eating disorder helps people overcome shame, and increases empathy on the part of family members, partners and friends. Additionally, because of the ego-syntonic nature of eating disorders, people sometimes identify positively with their disorder (particularly those with anorexia), or assume it as an identity. An epigenetically-informed perspective helps counteract such tendencies in that it indicates to the individual that they are not “an anorexic”.
Plant Medicine, Trauma and Epigenetics
Beneath all of us is such a complex, rich history. We carry deep wisdom about ourselves. We have vast knowledge about our cultures, and we have immense intergenerational wisdom from our ancestors and those who came before us. This is all carried inside of our bodies. We also carry intergenerational trauma, especially those who are descendants of ancestors who were oppressed and colonized. This is carried in our bodies too. By working through generational trauma, it is important that we do not separate ourselves individually from the larger systems that we are part of. It is important to keep the big picture in focus as those larger systemic factors influence the challenges people experience individually. This kind of healing, with the support of psychedelics, can help us connect more deeply with who we are as individuals and help us explore who we are in relation to one another and the world.
Dr Simon Ruffell and his team are currently epigenetic research on the effects of Ayahuasca and the healing of trauma and mental health disorders. Ayahuasca may impact the genetic expression of our DNA, relieve suffering from depression, and may be able to decrease emotional charge around trauma by helping us rewrite our narratives around what happens. Again, it is not about changing the actual genes but just the way in which the DNA is expressed. They have looked at a gene called Sigma One which is involved in many things, including neuroplasticity - the brain’s ability to make new connections- and it is also hypothesized to be involved in traumatic memory recall. This has lead the team to dive into the idea that Ayahuasca might allow people to access their very difficult memories and to frame them in a slightly different way that also decreases or changes the emotional charge attached to the event. Thus, the traumatic memory itself changed, but the perception of the emotional content seems to change.
There is also embodied stress that is part of one’s experience due to living under oppressive systems. Psychedelics can help us see how our bodies hold tension and stress, and help us deepen our capacity to be with what is difficult, and to connect more deeply with ourselves. This can change how we hold ourselves and tend to our bodies, redefining our somatic narrative, and ultimately our reality.
For people with eating disorders, they might view themselves through a lens of compassion for the first time. By processing things in new ways or seeing it from a different perspective, we can find new meaning in our lives, in relationships, with our communities, and with the world. Moving from patterns of avoidance to acknowledgement is the pathway to healing.
We must also remember the process of integration (aka the ceremony after the ceremony). Weaving insights gained from a medicine journey is how we can start engaging with the world in new and soul-supportive ways. After a lifetime or lifetimes of emotional injury, integration that include processing the information, making new actions, releasing of ways of being, and practicing these new patterns are how we can catalyze change in our life and beyond.
What could this mean for people with eating disorders? It seems highly possible that by working with Ayahuasca or other plant medicine, people will be able to access suppressed, repressed or painful memories (from their own life or from the lives of their parents or grandparents) that may have contributed to the development of the eating disorder and find a new perspective and relationship to it, finding empowered avenues of healing.
How Intergenerational Trauma Affects Child Development
People cannot consciously recall what they “learned” in the first few years of life because the brain structures that store narrative memory are not yet developed. But neuropsychological research has established that human beings have a far more powerful memory system imprinted in their nervous systems called “intrinsic memory”. Intrinsic memory encodes the emotional aspects of early experience. These emotional memories may last a lifetime but without a narrative. Without any recall of the events that originally encoded them, they serve as a template for how we perceive the world and how we react to later occurrences. The procedural (body) memories can result in someone being held hostage to these imprints and stress responses long after the early events have happened. Where there are no memories, we have to work with the body where the trauma is stored and impacts the person’s life unconsciously.
Is the world a friendly and nurturing place, or indifferent or hostile? Can we trust others to honour our needs, or do we have to shut down emotionally to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable? These are fundamental questions that we resolve mainly with our implicit memory system as very young children rather than with our conscious minds. Psychologist and leading memory researcher Daniel Schacter has written that intrinsic memory is active “when people are influenced by past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”
Despite best parental intentions, it’s not not their intentions that a baby integrates into their world view, but how parents respond to them. We are shaped by recognition or lack thereof by our attachment figures and society. So when a child falls asleep after a period of frustrated cries for help, it is not that they have learnt how to fall asleep, but rather they have escaped the overwhelming pain of abandonment, and the brain shuts down. The baby was expressing their deepest need: emotional and physical contact with the parent. The exhausted parent now has some quiet for the time being, but at the price of potentially harming the child’s long-terms emotional vulnerability, encoding the belief that the universe does not care about them.
For any person to stay emotionally open and resilient, young people must feel connected to adults from a young age. Supporting stable relationships with caring adults from birth through adolescence is a priority for the next generations to redeem their future.
In our Western culture, we tend to see people’s illnesses as isolated, accidental and unfortunate events rather than as the outcomes of lives lived in a psychological and social context. The body expresses our experiences and beliefs relating to self, to the world, and that date back to generations before us which have been somatically passed down. Indeed, it is not just stories and words that are handed down, but non-verbal cues including gaze, prosody, breath, proximity, gestures, facial features and movements. These cues can become habitual and incorporated into a family structure, creating a non-verbal narrative of how to be, act, and relate in the world. If not questioned, these elements get passed down and adopted from one generation to the next.
Indee, we all have thus learnt states of suffering. Habits of posture, expression, movement and gesture all reflect our personal and sociocultural history (trauma, attachment failures, relational strife, privilege/oppression, positive experiences etc.). Body postures prime certain emotions and so the habits of the body form habitual emotions. Even long after environmental conditions have changed, we are still are organized somatically in ways that were adaptive in the past. Once they become automatic tendencies (historically passed down), we no longer use cognitive, top down processes. These somatic blueprints anticipate the future, determine behaviour, communicate with others, and influence sense of self.
Such a holistic understanding informs many indigenous wisdom teachings. Indeed, the use of Ayahuasca arises from a tradition where mind and body are seen as inseparable. The plant spirit puts people in touch with their repressed pain and trauma, the factors that drive dysfunctional behaviours and that cause illness. By consciously experiencing, acknowledging and witnessing the pain, it loosens its hold on us. Plant medicine can help us get back in touch with our inherent goodness, wholeness and love. The sacred plant allies help us remember ourselves.
Viewing Generational Trauma is Energy
Generational trauma is energy that is passed down from generation to generation that builds and builds over time, increasing in size and potency. We are already swirling in collective trauma that is based on separation and so an eating disorder is a strategy or adaptation to try rectify that wound in order to feel like we belong in this fragile world. We can see this huge energetic mass of diet culture that dominates our society which has caused many individual trauma.
Additionally, generational trauma is something that is modeled in the household. What patterns did your parents and grandparents value and engage in around food, exercise and body image that you may have picked up on? There are patterns around food and body that they may have used to manage their own energy which could have been normalized in the household and by society but were actually harmful. There is an energetic signature to obsessive exercise compared to a more neutral approach exercise, and there is an energetic signature attached to healthy to unhealthy body image. These signatures get passed down and through. It is like the eating disorder increases in energetic size, gaining speed and weight over time, demanding to be heard and seen. It then carries over into an individual’s life in such strong ways that it can no longer be ignored, and because the energetic size of it is so large, we have to see it, and so it is then our responsibility to finally look at it in eye. We then have a conscious choice to break the pattern.
The generational trauma indicates enmeshment with a certain energy that gets passed down from one generation to the next, with the past influencing the present moment. Ask yourself, how has the fear of rejection/abandonment/not enoughness been passed down? Somewhere, it was learnt in our ancestral line that we can only be accepted if we are small. That is the injury and the belief that are passed down.
Finally, an eating disorder is also a way to protect and create safety; a way to block out dangerous energy from others and the world. It is a way to avoid judgement, expectation, rejection and betrayal from the world. And so we can also send compassion to the eating disorder that has manifested across time and space, and through generations, as way to numb out overwhelming feelings, soothe pain, and provide relief. The eating disorder can help us create boundaries and be with ourselves, and ourselves only, when the world has felt too much.
Healing from these eating behaviours takes time especially when it has been swirling in familial psyches for generations. Psychedelics and body-based, bottom-up approaches can help us get to the root and travel beyond time to access to wounds that want to be seen and transformed.