The Fear That Was Not Mine

I am a clinical psychologist. I have spent years studying fear - how it forms, how it travels through a life, how it can be gradually metabolised and released. And still, when I walked into the Australian embassy to renew my passport, my body did not feel safe.

I knew, rationally, that I was fine. I am an Australian citizen. The building was calm, well-lit, unhurried. There was no one watching me in any threatening sense. And yet my chest had tightened the moment I stepped inside. My breath had gone shallow. Something old in me had already decided, before I had a chance to weigh in, that this was not a safe kind of place.

The body does not always know the difference between the past and the present. Sometimes it is still living in a world that no longer exists.

What my family carried

I grew up in Ukraine, in the long shadow of the Soviet Union. My great-grandfather was an educated man - a school principal who believed, genuinely, in learning as a form of dignity. He was declared an enemy of the state. He was sent to Siberia. He disappeared.

My family carried that disappearance for generations - not as a story told at the table, but as a kind of atmospheric knowledge, absorbed before language. An understanding, encoded into how we moved through the world, that visibility was dangerous. That speaking too clearly, needing too openly, standing out in any direction was something that could cost you everything. Don't draw attention. Stay small enough to survive.

Nobody said this to me directly. You don't have to say it directly. Children feel the shape of what is true in a family long before they have words for it. I felt it in the particular alertness my parents carried around officials, around bureaucracy, around anyone with institutional power. I felt it in the way my mother made herself quiet in certain rooms. I felt it in myself - in the instinct to stay invisible, to preemptively shrink, to be careful about being too seen.

What I was carrying was not really mine. But it was in my body as completely as if it had been.

What the research shows - carefully

Epigenetic research over the past two decades has shown something that was once considered impossible: the physiological effects of extreme stress can be transmitted across generations. Studies with descendants of Holocaust survivors, and separate research on maternal prenatal stress and offspring outcomes, have found measurable differences in cortisol regulation and stress reactivity in people who did not directly experience the original trauma.

It is worth being precise about what this research does and does not demonstrate. It does not establish that specific memories are transmitted - that is not how epigenetics works. What it points toward is that the body's calibration, its baseline readiness for threat, can be shaped by experiences the person did not personally live through. The mechanism appears to involve changes in gene expression - not the genes themselves, but how they are read - that can persist across generations under certain conditions of extreme stress.

What this means clinically is that some presentations of chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, or freeze responses are not fully explained by the individual's own history. They make more sense, and can be more fully addressed, when the history of the family is brought into the frame.

The body doesn't know the difference between then and now

Standing in that embassy, my nervous system was not responding to the present environment. It was responding to something much older - to a calibration that was set in a context I had not lived in but that lived in me. The fear was entirely disproportionate to the actual situation. And it was entirely coherent, if you understood where it came from.

This is one of the things I find most useful to understand about intergenerational trauma: the fear is not irrational. It is mislocated. It belongs to a real threat, faced by real people, in circumstances that were genuinely dangerous. The tragedy is not that the fear exists - it is that it has survived into a context where it no longer serves the person it is trying to protect.

The body cannot update automatically. It needs new experience, accumulated over time, to gradually revise what it has been told is true about the world.

What the work looks like

Working with intergenerational material is slow. It does not resolve through understanding alone - though understanding is part of what makes the work possible. Naming what belongs to whom - what was inherited versus what was personally experienced - creates a kind of differentiation that is important. It allows a person to see the fear as something that arrived from outside, rather than as something that is fundamentally true about who they are or how dangerous the world is.

But the naming is not sufficient on its own. The body also needs new experiences. Repeated moments of institutional safety, of being seen without harm following, of being visible without punishment. These accumulate slowly. Each one is small. Together, they begin to revise the calibration.

I have spent years working with this - in therapy, in somatic practice, in the patient process of giving my body new evidence, over and over, until the old signal loses some of its authority. It does not resolve cleanly. The fear still arrives sometimes. What has changed is my relationship to it.

I can feel it arrive now and recognise it for what it is: not a current threat, but an echo. Something passed down through bodies that had good reason to be afraid, by people who could not have done otherwise, in a world I did not live in but that still, in some real sense, lives in me.

Healing intergenerational trauma is not about forgetting where you came from. It is about choosing, with full knowledge of that history, what you carry forward. The visibility my great-grandfather was punished for - I am still learning to claim it.