Moving memory from mind to body: somatic approaches to inherited trauma
Somatic approaches to inherited trauma are body-based therapeutic practices that address the physiological residue of intergenerational trauma — held tension, nervous system dysregulation, and chronic activation — at the level where it is actually stored: in the body's tissues, not the thinking mind. Bessel van der Kolk's landmark research, consolidated in The Body Keeps the Score (2014), established that trauma is encoded in somatic memory independently of conscious narrative, and that body-based practices are therefore primary — not supplementary — to trauma resolution. For inherited trauma specifically, this principle applies with particular force: the body carries patterns it did not personally generate, and it is the body that must release them.
Why your body remembers what your mind forgot
You have spent years trying to think your way out of a feeling that was never stored in your thoughts in the first place. In the quiet corners of my consulting room, where clients sit across from me and recount the generations behind them — grandparents who survived famine, parents who never spoke about what happened but somehow transmitted the shape of it anyway — the truth has become impossible to ignore: your ancestors did not leave you a legacy of words, but of tension. The body you inhabit today is partly an archive, and if you have spent years in cognitive therapy without the relief you hoped for, it may be because the filing system you have been trying to reorganise was never organised by thought in the first place.
The science of inheritance versus the shamanic reality of it
The US Department of Veterans Affairs, in its clinical summary of intergenerational trauma, acknowledges that epigenetic mechanisms — chemical changes that alter gene expression without altering the underlying DNA sequence — can be triggered by extreme stress and passed across generations, meaning the children of survivors may carry measurable biological markers of traumas they never personally experienced. This is useful. It names the mechanism, gives it institutional credibility, and has persuaded a medically literate public that the idea of inherited suffering is not simply metaphor. But the shamanic tradition, which has been working with this material for considerably longer than the epigenetics researchers, has always described what the VA now measures in terms of energetic imprint rather than genetic marker. Where science says altered methylation, the lineage work I practise says a soul that has not yet been released from its particular quality of suffering. These are not competing claims. They are descriptions of the same phenomenon arriving from different ends of the observatory. The body knows the static is playing. The argument is only about which department installed the aerial.
Why talking about it often makes the tension worse
There is a particular pattern I see in clients who have spent years in verbal therapy working specifically on ancestral or family-of-origin material. They can describe the architecture of their family system with extraordinary precision — the emotionally unavailable grandfather, the mother whose own grief was never metabolised, the generation that simply did not speak — and yet when they arrive with me, the knot in the solar plexus is still there, the shoulders are still up around the ears, the jaw still holds something that has no name. The capacity to narrate the wound is not the same thing as releasing it, and the reason is straightforward once you understand how somatic memory works: the trauma was encoded in the fascia and the nervous system, not in the part of the brain that produces coherent sentences. Asking someone to talk about an experience that was stored below the threshold of language is rather like trying to empty a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. The cognitive mind produces the account, the body sits there holding the original, and the two never quite meet.
Can trauma really be passed down through DNA or genes?
Yes, and the mechanism is now understood well enough to be taught in medical schools. Epigenetic research, including studies on Holocaust survivors and their adult children conducted by Rachel Yehuda and her team at Mount Sinai, demonstrates that extreme parental stress can produce heritable changes in cortisol regulation and stress-response sensitivity in children who were not themselves exposed to the original trauma. The VA's intergenerational trauma framework extends this finding to clinical populations more broadly. What this means in practice is that a person can walk into a session carrying a nervous system calibrated for a threat level their parents or grandparents faced — not the one the person themselves is currently navigating — a system set to high alert in a relatively safe environment, which is exactly as exhausting as it sounds. The inherited trauma is real, it is biological in its transmission, and it is not a matter of imagination or loose metaphor. The body received the instruction. It is simply still following it.
Identifying the ghost in your own nervous system
The question most clients ask at this point is how they might distinguish between their own lived responses and patterns they have received rather than generated. There are somatic markers I have found consistently useful in this work. The feeling of being frozen in an environment that is objectively safe — sitting in a quiet room and nonetheless finding the body has gone to the edge of the chair, scanning for exits. The quality of fatigue that is not ordinary tiredness but a bone-level exhaustion that sleep does not resolve, as though the system has been running a background process for years without a pause. A fear response that arrives at an intensity disproportionate to the visible threat, the kind that leaves the person afterwards wondering what just happened. There is also the quality of grief or shame that has no event attached — a sadness that feels ancient rather than personal, a guilt with no memory to explain it, as though you are carrying an emotional debt you did not incur. These are the fingerprints of a nervous system that is not entirely living in the present moment, because part of it was bequeathed a set of survival instructions by someone who needed them in a different time and place — a grandparent navigating famine, a great-grandparent surviving war — and the body has not yet received the message that the original emergency is over.
Moving the memory from the head to the breath
Somatic and shamanic work approaches this differently from verbal therapy, not because conversation has no value but because the stored material requires a different kind of attention than narrative can provide. The practice of conscious breathwork — specifically the circular connected breathing I use in session — allows the nervous system to begin discharging energy that has been held in the body as a kind of standing wave: the pattern of survival arousal that was never completed because the circumstances that generated it ended abruptly, without resolution. Peter Levine's work on somatic experiencing describes tremoring as the body's natural completion mechanism for exactly this kind of incomplete activation — the involuntary shaking that animals in the wild perform after a threatening encounter, and that human beings have largely been socialised to suppress, treating it as weakness when it is in fact the system doing precisely what it was designed to do. The shamanic frame extends this further: the breathwork is not simply a physiological intervention but an act of calling the displaced part of the lineage forward to be witnessed, named, and set down. The body is not a machine generating symptoms. It is an intelligence holding something on behalf of people it never met, and it will continue to hold it until someone creates the conditions for that material to move.
The moment the lineage breaks
I have sat with clients at the point when this release occurs and it is not dramatic in the way films would have you believe. It is quiet. A long exhale. A loosening in the chest that the person describes as something moving out rather than something moving in. One client, a woman in her forties who had carried a quality of pervasive dread since her early twenties without being able to connect it to any specific event in her own history, described the afternoon after her second session as the first time in her adult life she had walked down a street without her nervous system running ahead of her looking for danger. She slept that night with a depth she had not experienced since childhood. This is not the same as saying the work is finished — lineage is layered and the process requires sustained attention — but it is the moment when the body registers, perhaps for the first time, that the emergency which was never its own has now been acknowledged and placed where it belongs: in the hands of the ancestors who carried it first, rather than the descendants who inherited it without consent.
The body has been holding the answer to a question the mind keeps trying to solve. At some point the more useful move is to stop adding words to the file and start listening to what the body has been trying to say — which is not a thought at all but a sensation, a place where the breath goes shallow, a place where the shoulders don't quite drop, a place where something is waiting to be put down. That is where the work begins, and it is not something you can think your way into.
Your Lineage Ends Here. Your Healing Begins Now.
Dr Mark Demaine works with clients internationally. His doctoral research examined ancestral trauma transmission through epigenetic, psychological, and environmental pathways. He combines shamanic lineage work with somatic and breathwork practice. Read more about Mark.
