Connecting this to intergenerational trauma, I imagine my mom and her family being raided by the Khmer Rouge, ransacking their house, stealing all their shit, hitting my grandpa, and forcing everyone to get outside and load onto the cars to take them to the camps for slavery and possible death. Recollecting those memories, I don’t think I ever told anybody about those dreams. They never got inside the house, but it was still pretty scary. My parents were pretty cautious about that too, but we used to have people break into our backyard and steal shit from our shed. Since having those dreams, I would check on the back door to make sure it was locked every night. Then I would wake up panicking, sweating, and wondering wtf that was about because that has never happened to me or anything like it. I just remembered fighting for my life, but the two men each had a foot and was pulling at my back door. I would have no context to what was happening. When I was about 6 years old until maybe high school, I used to have nightmares about two men dragging me from my feet at my old house in Oakland. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence (definition by CDC). ![]() Trauma literally lives through our bodies epigenetics, the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. We carry the wounds of our ancestors before us. As I continue on my own internal work on myself, I’m learning how to better understand my parents and my ancestors of what they have been through and how that has impacted me. I sometimes wonder why I have anxiety, depression and certain things trigger me. My parents’ trauma of surviving the genocide under the Khmer Rouge, my grandparents’ trauma of moving from China or through Cambodia, and whatever else my ancestors’ trauma have experienced has been passed down to me. Intergenerational trauma (sometimes referred to as trans- or multigenerational trauma) is defined as trauma that gets passed down from those who directly experience an incident to subsequent generations. I found out about intergenerational trauma last year during covid when I was listening to more podcasts about racism and history.
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