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A study of pregnant women in New York who suffered PTSD from witnessing September 11 found that at nine-months-old their babies also showed symptoms of PTSD (specifically, low cortisol). These epigenetic markers are then passed on to children, even though they themselves did not experience the trauma firsthand. While trauma does not alter the actual gene itself, it does appear to change the chemical tags that switch genes on or off in response to your environment. Scientists are still only beginning to understand how trauma can change our gene expression – part of the field of epigenetics. Intergenerational trauma is passed down in two ways. While the Very Bad Thing that didn’t happen to you, the effects shaped how you were raised, your core beliefs about the world and yourself, and how your brain and body respond to perceived threats, big and small. This is the burden of intergenerational trauma, whether caused by abuse, war and displacement, the legacies of colonialism and slavery, poverty, abandonment. If I decide to have a child, they’ll be more likely to have “negative developmental outcomes” from birth to adolescence. I feel acutely aware that chronic anxiety – a brain and body in long-term fight, flight or freeze – increases my likelihood of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, even osteoporosis. It’s made me a touch paranoid about my mental state. Sometimes, I have felt doomed by the things that happened before I was even born.
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