Trauma can be passed from one generation to another. This statement is self-evident; the question is how it happens. The Bible states that the iniquity of the fathers will be visited upon the sons. In the Horacian odes, we are told: “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer”. Even Shakespeare agreed; ‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children’. Thanks to deeply entrenched historic sexism, no mention is made of mothers and daughters, but the principle applies to us all, as laid out so eloquently by Philip Larkin in This Be The Verse:

The prevailing wisdom is that if a person suffers trauma, their particular neuroses will be passed on to their children, thanks to their behaviour, and to the transference of their deepest fears. The age-old tug of war between nurture and nature has always explained this kind of transference as follows: Mary-Jane is neurotic because she has a neurotic mother. She imbibed her mother’s neuroses along with her mother’s milk: because her mother is constantly fearful and regards the world as a frightening place, she has transferred these fears to her daughter, without even voicing them. Mary-Jane’s mother jumps at loud noises, is suspicious of strangers, she keeps the door locked, doesn’t like the dark, and is afraid of her own shadow. Mary-Jane intuits from her mother’s behaviour that the world is dangerous and there is much out there to be feared. Mary-Jane grows up to be similarly fearful, and is likely to pass that fear on to her own children, and so the cycle continues down the generations.

The cycle of trauma is even more fundamental than that. New research shows that the effect of trauma can affect the genome. Severe trauma can alter your DNA, so that the next generation is affected by that trauma, whether they like it or not, whether they are aware of it or not. Even if children are taken from their biological parents at birth and are brought up by in the most idyllic of environments; let’s say by Mary Poppins in Disneyland, the damage is done even as they are conceived. If the parent has suffered trauma, the children will inherit this trauma, which manifests itself in multiple ways.

On one level, the idea is thoroughly depressing, as it dooms Homo Sapiens (and indeed all other sentient beings) to a kind of genetic bondage. Let’s say you’re Jewish, a member of a race which has been systematically persecuted throughout history, to the extent that millions of your kinsmen have been violently erased from the face of the earth. The horrors of the Holocaust are reverberating to this day. Or, you’re of African descent, and your people were enslaved; forcibly taken from their homes and communities, sold as commodities; where their children were born into captivity; where they were not considered fully human, rather were regarded as a kind of humanoid biped, the legal property of a free man (or woman) who could buy or sell them at will. They were deprived of nurturing care during infancy, of education while a child, and of free will as an adult. They were treated as if they were animals, punished for the slightest of transgressions, real or imagined, and were worked so hard in such appalling conditions that their chances of making old bones were slender at best. Then they had to watch their own children suffer a similar fate, assuming they were not forcibly taken away… how can this kind of trauma not be passed on to the next generation?

Or, you’re a woman, subject to social conditioning, sometimes so subtle that you don’t even notice that you’re perpetuating this very same conditioning onto your own daughter. Swathed in pink from birth. Taught from infancy that your intrinsic value as a person depends on your looks. Expected to do more around the house and the kitchen than your brother. Prevented from taking part in boisterous activities that are not considered ‘ladylike’ which the boys are free to indulge in, taught to pander to men, that ‘boys will be boys’ and if they mistreat you then somehow it’s your fault, as you were ‘asking for it’. Even if you recognise these injustices, it’s hard not to internalise the countless overt and subliminal messages and signals that women receive throughout the course of their lives that inevitably distort their own thinking and behaviour.

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she argued that women only appeared to be inferior as they were not given the same education as men. Now mainstream, her ideas at the time were regarded as crackpot in the extreme. In 1869, John Stuart Mill was pressing for the liberation of women, arguing in his essay, The Subjection of Women that denying half of humanity the rights afforded to the other half was a huge impediment to human development as a whole. He pointed out the inconsistency of forbidding women the right to do things that men are more naturally suited to do, either because of their greater physical strength or their supposedly superior mental capacity: ‘What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing’. Smart man. Further, echoing Wollstonecraft, he argued that it wasn’t possible to gauge the true depth of women’s nature or their possible potential, as their true talents had been stifled for centuries, they had consistently been denied training and educational opportunities, and very few women had ever had the freedom to choose or act for themselves.

As an MP, Mill was an active campaigner for women’s rights, and was president of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. He was a man far ahead of his time, regarding his own wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, as an equal partner in life, and giving her full credit for her work. He worked closely with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, a noted feminist and social activist. One can only wonder what this far-sighted trio would make of baby outfitters providing blue baby outfits for little boys emblazoned with the legend ‘Smart Like Daddy’ and pink ones for the girls, bearing the slogan ‘Pretty Like Mommy’. This is just one example of powerful social conditioning which has to be actively challenged by all of us, not just women, and this conditioning doesn’t confine itself to sexism. It is actively present in all the ‘isms’. Mill was a utilitarian, which meant he was in favour of policies which promoted ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Clearly this means allowing everyone, no matter what their sex, race, religion, age, wealth or social status the right to education and opportunities, and to offer them the freedom to advance and express themselves in whatever way they choose, so long as they do no harm to others. In advocating happiness, he was promoting the increased health of the human genome (whether he realised it or not.)

New insights into the genome lead to new understanding: it explains why some unfortunate souls suffer from crippling anxiety and depression, even in the absence of a discernible cause. Perhaps they are the unlucky inheritors of past trauma.

We depend on our ancestors for far more than our physical characteristics. Our happiness depends on their outlook and experiences too. Before we become depressed about the fact that we can’t change the past, we can seek to understand, and to seize on the opportunity to change the present and the future. Far from being stuck in genetic bondage, we can improve upon and even repair our genomic heritage. In effect, it’s our duty to be as happy as possible, as we can then pass this capacity for happiness on to our children. Unless we take Philip Larkin’s advice, of course.