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Alison Stewart: Research shows that experiencing trauma can alter our gene expression and then transfer that trauma from one generation to the next. In her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma, psychologist Dr. Mariel Buqué provides tools for exploring where trauma originates, explains how it inhibits the nervous system, and offers tips for self-regulating when working toward healing.

She writes in her book, trauma itself, according to present-day clinical definitions, can fall into multiple categories, including post-traumatic stress, childhood trauma, complex trauma, race-based trauma, and now intergenerational trauma. Some of these representations of trauma have not yet made it into the diagnostic manual that clinicians use across the world, but you don't need a scientific manual to tell you that your experience is genuine, or that your lived experience is one that's been impacted by emotional hurt.

Author, Dr. Mariel Buqué, joins us today to discuss. She's a Columbia University-trained psychologist who focuses on holistic healing practices. Welcome to the show, Doctor.

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Thank you so much, Alison. It's such a pleasure to be with you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to invite you in on this conversation. What questions do you have about intergenerational trauma and healing? How often do you catch yourself doing something because of a story that's been told in your family? What patterns or cycles are you trying to rid yourself of? Do you talk to your family members about trauma and their mental well-being? If so, how often? What are those conversations like?

We want you to join our conversation. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in. Join us on air. You can also share your thoughts on social media @AllOfItWNYC. You can send us a DM on Instagram as well if you'd like to be anonymous. We do want to note that Dr. Buqué is joining us to share her expertise and some information, but what you hear today is not a substitute for therapy. Let's define terms just so everybody's on the same page, Doctor. What is generational trauma and what isn't generational trauma?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Well, generational trauma is the only type of trauma that actually gets handed down our family lines. It happens from grandparent to parent, parent to child, and at the intersection of our biology and our psychology. What that means is that within our biology, there's a genetic expression and encoding in cellular memory that gets translated forward. When parents conceive their child, they actually translate also some of those genetic messages, which can actually create somewhat of a predisposition to stress and trauma, or at least an emotional vulnerability to such.

Then the psychology part of it is where a person is actually experiencing the world, now having been a baby, a child, an adult. In their world, they actually experience a lot of emotional chaos, emotional instability, actual pressures from the world, maybe a misattunement with a parent or some bullying in school, or maybe a toxic relationship, or discrimination, or a pandemic. All of those things then create somewhat of a trigger effect and triggers their trauma responses, thereby making the trauma intergenerational. You have parents who were in their own trauma, translated some of those genetic messages forward, and then their children, now adult children, would have developed the trauma themselves.

Alison Stewart: When you began your studies, what is it that you wanted to learn about generational trauma? What were your questions that you had that you were seeking answers for?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: I was seeking answers to the healing aspect of it more than anything, given that I'm a clinician and I was seeing real time what was happening in the clinical space and the actual barriers that we had as clinicians, having not been actually trained around how to orient the conversations and the healing of intergenerational trauma, I felt that there were too many barriers, restrictions, and not enough training and training protocols to really help us to orient around trauma itself, but then none that actually really would help us around intergenerational trauma.

The questions really were from the perspective of how do I make the information that we have right now in the clinical and scientific world accessible to the general public so that we can have a greater understanding of intergenerational trauma? Then beyond that, how do I create some sort of a healing protocol that can actually create tangible healing in the now?

Alison Stewart: I think you answered this in your first answer, but I do want to tease it out very specifically, what distinguishes intergenerational trauma from trauma that people experience every day?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: The actual difference is the fact that it gets handed down the family line and the fact that there is a genetic component. When we experience trauma just in our generation, just in our lives, we can also have trauma symptoms. However, those trauma symptoms are only experienced by that one individual. Should that individual not resolve enough of the trauma symptoms in their lives and in their generation, and then conceive and have children, they risk passing on the genetic material, genetic expressions.

In addition to that, there's also a lot that is held within the family as far as behaviors and practices and even expressions of stress and trauma that also get translated forward and get inherited and get ingested by the children who then become adults that are also trauma sufferers. That's also the key distinction, is that there is modeling and there is biology.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dr. Mariel Buqué. The name of the book is Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. Listeners, we'd like to invite you into this conversation. What questions do you have about intergenerational trauma and healing? How often do you catch yourself doing something because of a story that's been told in your family? Do you and your family members talk about trauma and mental well-being within the family? If so, how often? What are those conversations like?

Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. You can DM us on Instagram if you want to remain anonymous for this conversation. We did get a question texted to us, "Does every family have generational trauma?"

Dr. Mariel Buqué: A lot of our families do have intergenerational trauma. Especially so in this generation, we are seeing that many of us really do have some of those remnants of the past that exist within our families, some to a larger degree than others, but what I'm seeing, not just through my own lens, my research, the conversations that I'm having with folks, even as I'm going around talking about this book and the work, is that everybody has some element of trauma that has existed in their family line, and many of us have had some sort of a replication or a recycling of those trauma responses within our families.

Alison Stewart: Now, when we're talking about past trauma, and the answer may be both, are we talking about individual traumas within families, or are we talking about people who descended from people who survived the Holocaust, or survived enslavement, or survived Native American extinction? Are we talking about big traumas like that, or are we talking about small traumas within families, or both?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: We're actually talking about the full spectrum of trauma. We're talking about every type of trauma that falls under the category of traumatic experiences that are internalized by folks, so it could be individual, familial, community-based, collective, and even global traumas. What we're understanding around trauma is the fact that we can have a very big trauma happen in our lives and have enough of an emotional foundation and support around us that it can make it so that long-standing trauma symptoms may not surface for us, or may not actually last a very long time.

Then we can also have what we might call smaller traumas, or perhaps day-to-day experiences that are still adverse, like losing a job and then entering into financial distress, or perhaps engaging in a relationship that really threw us off kilter. These are also experiences that can be appraised as traumatic. The accumulation of those experiences can also accumulate to feeling like a larger trauma or a massive trauma. The same goes for the collective experiences that individuals that have been targeted and marginalized experience as a collective whole within experiences that have been deeply traumatic and even threatening to their lived experience, or as day-to-day experiences that individuals experience as a collective, like ongoing discrimination.

Alison Stewart: What are some concrete examples of how intergenerational trauma and wounds might be reflected in our familial relationships?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: This is incredibly, incredibly variable, but some of the common ones would be shutting down at the slightest hint of stress, experiencing long bouts of sadness, which very often people go into a therapeutic space and they just get tagged with depression, and we don't really look into the root of what's causing this ongoing state of sadness. Having chronic pessimism or a negative outlook on life, or feeling chronically empty, or feeling jumpy and easily startled and hyper-vigilant, not being able to concentrate. Sometimes it can look like lack of focus, or sometimes be appraised as ADHD, when in reality, there's a trauma root.

A lot of these are the ways in which they can express themselves, those trauma responses in ourselves and in our families. When we start really pulling the threads and getting a sense of how have people responded to stress, how have they internalized their lived experiences, we start seeing a lot of these commonalities flow through our families and communities.

Alison Stewart: In the book, you talk about addressing childhood experiences, adverse childhood experiences, and you note there are three areas of focus, what happened to you, what happened before you, and what happened around you. Would you share an example of each and why these are important questions to consider?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Yes. Absolutely. We have what we understand to be is adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, which have been a wide array of questions, 10 in particular, but that have helped us to understand the ways in which childhood trauma actually can perpetuate adult unwellness, either physical or mental unwellness. What I started uncovering through my research and even through the data that I was gathering, even in my own therapeutic space, was that we have an understanding that what happened to you isn't the whole story.

What happened to you could have been that you had parents that had a very destructive divorce, or that you had one parent that was incarcerated, or you may have suffered theft at gunpoint, and those things would have been a part of your own lived experience, perhaps in childhood and maybe thereafter. What we know through some of the research is that adults that are parents that have also suffered childhood adversity have a higher risk of actually creating a very similar circumstance, or at least not being able to shield their children from the same types of adversities.

If we know that something happened before that child was even born, then it's important to also add that into the clinical picture. The question that I started asking was, what happened before you? Meaning, what happened to your parents? What happened to your grandparents? Did they suffer childhood abandonment by a treasured caregiver? Were they perhaps someone who was displaced because of war? We need to know those details of what happened before.

Beyond that, it's important to also understand what happened around you, meaning were you a part of a community where vicarious trauma was experienced because of your targeted identity? Was there a pandemic that everyone suffered around you, perhaps more extensively and pervasively because of just your geographic or identity-based situation and placement? We have to have an understanding of also what is happening around you that is further perpetuating trauma and making it so that trauma is more easily accessible into your home.

Alison Stewart: There are a lot of questions we're getting about the idea of this genetic transmission, would you address that?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Absolutely. The genetic element of intergenerational trauma is fairly complex, but to simplify it for us and to get a good grasp on it, what we understand is that in addition to just having genetics passed on at conception from both parents, and any one of those parents having been someone who was experiencing chronic stress or trauma, we also understand that when our grandmothers were actually pregnant, and they were five months pregnant with a fetus inside of their bellies, that was our parent, that we had already developed into a tiny precursor sex cell inside of our grandmother's wombs, and that we were once coexisting as three generations in one body, taking in a lot of the lived experiences of our grandmothers, which also included hormonal experiences and also included cellular memory and genetic messages.

Once we were actually born, we were additionally-- well, once we were actually in our mother's womb, we were additionally taking in a lot of our mother's experiences and experiencing a lot of those genetic mutations, if you may, for lack of a better term. There's a lot that happens on the genetic level or on the cellular level that ties us to our family members, our community members. Then when we're conceived, we're also inheriting a lot of those genetic messages.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jeffrey from Brooklyn. Hi, Jeffrey. Thank you for calling in.

Jeffrey: Hi. I'm a 73-year-old child of Holocaust survivors. I'm only now beginning to realize just how much of my trauma might be genetic. I have suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. I've been sober now for 30 years. As a young man, I was literally Holocaust-obsessed, reading all the literature I can get my hands on, but now, I see how my children have been affected by this.

I have a married daughter with two children who lives a very successful upper-middle-class life who suffers from anxiety, who's now seeing a somatic therapist to help her deal with this anxiety, this impostor syndrome I think she lives with. I have a very, very incredibly smart son who has chosen a rather mundane lifestyle because I think he's afraid of success. Also, without verbalizing it, speaks about must have his own sets of anxiety. I am pretty much convinced that this is all-- well, it's nature and nurture.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much, Jeffrey. You get into this in the book, Dr. Buqué, I should say, as well. It sounds like what Jeffrey's talking about, and please correct me if I'm not using the correct language, is epigenetics.

Dr. Mariel Buqué: That's correct. Yes. Jeff, the thing that we understand about epigenetics, at least our initial understandings, did come from studies that were conducted with children of Holocaust survivors. I think that there is a direct line to your experiences that have also made their way into scientific inquiry and helping us understand the fact that epigenetics are at play and can actually create a greater predisposition to trauma, particularly PTSD, as it's been outlined in the research.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing, intergenerational trauma with Dr. Mariel Buqué. The name of the book is Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. We'll talk a little bit about what you can do and what are some of the issues that Dr. Buqué says people can, things that they can do for themselves, as well as take some of your calls after a quick break. This is All of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Dr. Mariel Buqué. The name of her book is Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. I'm sure you've experienced this before, Dr. Buqué, there's a group of people who are very on board with this conversation, and then there are a group of people who are like, "I don't really get this. I'm not sure I'm buying into this idea of intergenerational trauma and epigenetics and all." Robert from Bergen County is calling in, who's a retired psychologist. Robert, I want to let you come into the conversation.

Robert: Okay. Thank you. My question isn't a challenge of the intergenerational part, but traditionally, trauma has been defined as a person experiencing a life-threatening event or thinking it's a life-threatening event or actually having other people around them experiencing it. It would appear that from the doctor's examples, she goes well beyond that. I'm not questioning what she's saying, but I'm wondering how it fits into the more traditional definition or, let's say, the older definition of trauma. I'll get off the line now. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Robert, thank you for calling in.

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Thank you, Robert. It's a great question, and the thing about intergenerational trauma is that it also includes that modeling element of how we actually absorbed behaviors from the individuals that were proximal to us, particularly so, adults within our childhood environment that actually modeled the ways that they may have dealt with stress.

If someone shut down at the site of stress and were emotionally unavailable or perhaps numbed their emotions through substances or other addictive behaviors or had other addictions, then it made it so that we also absorb that as data that we internalize as children as to how stress is to be dealt with. Even if it's from a very unconscious place, we tend to replicate those patterns. That's the thing about intergenerational trauma, that it has, of course, that intergenerational epigenetic component, but it also has a modeling aspect.

Alison Stewart: In the book, you talk about addressing some of the issues by caring for your ventral vagus nerve. Tell us what that nerve is responsible for. What does it look like to care for it? How does it factor into this conversation?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: I think it helps if we identify really the ways in which our nervous system functions, which is by way of helping us to stay alert to some threat that we perceive maybe in our environment. What that does is that it helps us to, in essence, protect ourselves, but it stimulates a lot of areas in our entire body system to the fact that something could actually pose a danger.

Beyond that, we have a part of our nervous system called the ventral vagus nerve, which is a cranial nerve that actually is primarily responsible for helping us to feel calm and relaxed after the stressor has passed or after we no longer perceive there's a threat in sight.

What we've learned through especially somatic therapies which are body-based therapies which help us to really integrate body-based practices into the healing of trauma, is that the ventral vagal nerve can actually be stimulated in multiple ways, including through deep breathing, through humming, through rocking, through other ways in which we can actually practice ventral vagal stimulation that can actually help us to feel more relaxed with greater frequency and is an actual tool that we can utilize in order to not only create relaxation in the moments when we need it most, but to actually train our bodies to experience greater relaxation in the long term because we are also creating synaptic changes within our brain and nervous system that are actually forming around the relaxation practice.

Alison Stewart: In your book, you talk about a patient named Nola, who didn't drink or didn't smoke or work in an environment that would be considered hazardous to her lungs, but had debilitating inflammation in her lungs, but you also noticed she had chronic depression as well. How did you go about helping her?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: With Nola, and with all of my clients really, I took on a very holistic approach. It meant that I had to integrate practices that would be pretty non-traditional to the therapy realm, which meant meditation, which meant progressive muscle relaxation, which is the tensing of the muscles in order to release the tension that's captured within them.

I also had to integrate a lot of other specialists into the process with me, individuals that could actually help me with an understanding of what nutrition needed to be incorporated into Nola's health in order to actually decrease the inflammation that was present there, but also be health-promoting, because we needed to not only be reactive to what we were seeing, but proactive to actually helping her absorb less stress and also have a healthier body and mind.

Alison Stewart: This reminds me of The Body Keeps Score, which is been hugely popular. This idea that our body keeps score on what happened in our lives and what happened in our ancestors' lives. Let's talk to, I think it's Jose from Montclair. Hi, Jose.

Jose: Hi. How are you? I've been listening to this and it's just stirred up a bunch of emotions. I lost a grandfather during the Spanish Civil War. He was removed from my grandmother's bed in the middle of the night, taken to be interrogated, shot in the head, and thrown into a mass grave. My mother was inside my grandmother's womb, five months. There was always this feeling in the family that was not discussed. It was just about almost like a shame and a loss. It was not until I went to that mass grave and stood there and looked and understood that a part of me was inside there, that I got it.

Fear of abandonment, issues of grief and loss. All of this stuff that I had seen, my grandmother, my aunts, my cousins, myself. It was not until I was there. I know that that's a bit sick wanting to be at this mass grave, but it was important for me. In the moment that I realized where I was and who was there, I figured out so much of me and my family that had been buried and dark and secretive and embarrassment and shame. Thank you for bringing this up because it's something that's one generation separated from me, but so close and near and dear to my heart every day.

Alison Stewart: Jose, we really appreciate you sharing your family's experience and your experience. I do want to get to JJ from Highland Park before we have to wrap because I think you'll think this is interesting, Dr. Buqué. JJ, real quick.

JJ: Just to give a little bit more concreteness to this idea. There have been studies that have shown that in famine that it has been passed on generationally that other people and organisms that have been exposed to famine later on in the third generation down have lived longer than other ones. A lot of this has been shown to be small RNA molecules that have been inherited from generation to generation. There is other more concrete ways that people may be able to understand how this works.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, JJ. We actually have a question. Somebody texted in asking about spirituality. If spirituality should enter this conversation.

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Spirituality can enter the conversation should you wish for it to. I offer any kind of spirituality-based tools as a way to integrate the kind of healing that a person desires to be a part of their healing journey. Now, what we do know about post-traumatic growth is that having some sort of a spiritual inkling, whether it is spirituality proper or just, at the very least, reconnecting to ourselves, reconnecting to others, to earth, to any kind of higher powers that we may believe in, that it can actually be a really important part of how we start shedding the pain of the past. It is a part that I can appreciate integrating into my work, but it isn't an exclusive part that needs to be a part of the healing process for anyone who doesn't wish to integrate it.

Alison Stewart: At the end of the book, you have a chapter called Leaving a Generational Legacy that notes that you can break the cycle by not passing on old patterns. Really quickly, we got about a minute. What's an example of a pattern that you've seen patients able to break?

Dr. Mariel Buqué: One of the more common patterns that I've seen and that I've seen people break has been the pattern of codependency, the pattern of seeing others as individuals that must help you to soothe your emotions rather than learning how to self-soothe and how to really process your emotions within yourself. That's one of the areas that I see cycle breakers really wanting to work on and successfully doing so.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. It is out now. Thank you to everyone who called in with your personal stories, and thanks to Dr. Mariel Buqué for sharing her work with us. Thank you so much.

Dr. Mariel Buqué: Thank you.

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Alison Stewart: Jazz, hip-hop musician, Kassa Overall will be at the Blue Note next Monday. Coming up next, he'll tell us about his latest album, Animals, which deals with themes of mental health and using music as therapy.

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