Healing at the Roots: How Somatic Therapy Supports Intergenerational Trauma
Intergenerational trauma is often described as wounds passed down through families—patterns of fear, shutdown, hypervigilance, or emotional disconnection that don’t always make sense in the present, yet live vividly in the body. Many people feel like they are reacting to life with intensity that doesn’t match the situation, or find themselves repeating relational patterns they consciously want to change. These are not personal failings. They can be the echoes of experiences that earlier generations were never able to process or resolve.
Somatic therapy offers an effective and compassionate way to work with these inherited patterns—not just by talking about the past, but by helping the nervous system to understand what it has been holding.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma refers to the emotional, relational, and physiological patterns that are transmitted from one generation to the next. It can originate from experiences such as:
War, displacement, or migration
Systemic oppression or chronic stress
Abuse, neglect, or family violence
Parental burnout, overwhelm, or unresolved grief
Cultural or family norms around silence and suppression
Even when stories are lost or never spoken aloud, the nervous system still receives information through tone of voice, facial expressions, tension patterns, emotional availability, and attachment behaviours.
The result is that children can nherit a nervous system shaped by their caregivers' survival strategies.
Why Somatic Therapy Is Particularly Effective
Intergenerational trauma does not live only in memories—it lives in physiology. The body is often the first to respond: tightness in the chest, chronic bracing, stomach knots, numbness, a frozen quality in the face, or persistent overactivity and restlessness.
Somatic therapy meets trauma where it actually lives: in the autonomic nervous system, the muscles and fascia, and the body's implicit responses.
Somatic therapy helps by:
Releasing survival energy that was never completed in previous generations
Creating new patterns of regulation so the nervous system does not default to inherited fight, flight, or freeze responses
Restoring a sense of safety (which some clients may have never fully experienced in their bodies)
Rebuilding connection, allowing individuals to experience relationships without the shadow of old protective strategies
The Body as the Bridge Between Past and Present
Some clients describe feeling as if they are reacting to more than the experiences from their own life—almost as if they are carrying emotions or fears that do not belong solely to them or do not entirely fit in the context of their life. Somatic therapy approaches offer a curiosity using body awareness to help consider what may be connected to the the client’s own life experiences and what could result from inherited patterns from others.
Some core somatic principles include:
1. Tracking Sensations
Clients learn to notice subtle cues—tightening, softening, temperature changes, impulses to move. These sensations often reveal the body’s protective or unresolved responses before the mind understands it.
2. Completing Unfinished Protective Responses
Trauma often interrupts the body’s natural instincts to run, reach, protest, or protect. Somatic work helps the body complete these impulses symbolically or physically, releasing stored active energy from these responses.
3. Expanding the Capacity for Regulation
Through breathwork, grounding, orienting, and gentle movement, clients increase their ability to stay present with emotions rather than defaulting to protective strategies, like protecting, collapsing or go becoming overwhelmed.
4. Repatterning Through Co-Regulation
Healthy attunement—feeling seen, understood, and safe with another person—helps rewrite nervous system expectations that were shaped by earlier generations’ stress or emotional unavailability.
Breaking Cycles: What Healing Looks Like
Healing intergenerational trauma is not only about reducing symptoms. It’s about becoming a new generation of experiencing safety, regulation, and emotional presence in the body—and then passing that forward to your next generations.
One of the most beautiful things about somatic work is that even small shifts ripple outward. When one body becomes more regulated, it impacts partners, children, and future generations.
Somatic Practices That Support Intergenerational Healing
Here are practices often woven into somatic therapy sessions:
Orienting to safety: Noticing what feels stable or comforting in the environment
Pendulation: Gently moving between areas of tension and areas of ease
Grounding through contact: Pressing hands into thighs or feet into the floor to build stability
Boundary exercises: Using the body to sense “yes,” “no,” and “too much”
Resourcing: Finding internal sensations or images that evoke safety or strength
These practices build internal pathways that trauma once interrupted.
A New Inheritance
Intergenerational trauma is not a destiny—it is a story written in the body, and stories can be changed. Through somatic therapy, people learn to transform inherited patterns into new possibilities, offering themselves and their families a different way of being.
Healing becomes a form of legacy.