The Trauma You Didn’t Know You Inherited—But Live With Every Day
We don’t just inherit our eye color or our laugh.
We inherit pain.
The silent kind. The heavy kind that lingers.
The kind that lives deep inside your body, quietly shaping everything you do—often without you even realizing it.
Sometimes trauma comes from a single event. Sometimes it's the accumulation of experiences over years. And often—though not always—it's trauma carried forward through generations, known as generational trauma.
When trauma remains unnoticed, we continue to live inside it.
And—without realizing it—we also pass it on to future generations.
I Didn’t Know What Was Wrong—But I Knew Something Was Off
I was the youngest of five, born to immigrant parents in an arranged, and deeply unhappy, marriage. My mom was just 16. My parents didn’t know it at the time—but in addition to their own struggles, they carried a lot of generational trauma into raising us—trauma that was unknowingly passed onto them from prior generations.
My upbringing was a complicated tangle of love, joy, silence, and suppression.
• I was loved—yet I never truly learned to love myself.
• I was protected—yet never taught to raise my voice.
• I was seen—but never truly heard.
• I felt deeply —yet I never had an outlet to express my emotions.
• I was recognized for my hard work—yet I never learned self-care or self- compassion.
Like so many women I coach today, I had no idea this was generational trauma.
What Generational Trauma Really Is
It’s not just the aftermath of war or tragedy.
It can come from any deep pain or hardship that was never healed.
This includes experiences like abuse, childhood neglect, poverty, discrimination, or family dysfunction.
Even if you didn’t live through these events yourself, their emotional and psychological impacts can still be passed down—especially from mothers to daughters—through pain no one ever talked about or understood.
It’s the wound beneath the wound. The heartbreak beneath the heartbreak.
If your mother never felt safe, seen, heard, or unconditionally loved and nurtured... if she never believed in herself, never healed her own pain… you likely inherited her fears, her patterns, her silence.
Not because she meant for you to.
But because she didn’t know it was happening.
How Generational Trauma Shows Up in Your Life
It seeps in everywhere:
• People-pleasing that drains you dry.
• Boundaries that feel impossible or scary to hold.
• Appeasing and avoiding conflict to keep the peace—at the cost of yourself.
• Believing love requires pain, perfection, sacrifice, or proving yourself.
• Constantly feeling like you’re “too much” or “never enough” in your relationships or career
• Feeling unsafe to express yourself, your opinions, your emotions.
These patterns live inside you until you gain the awareness to see them—and the courage to heal them.
In this powerful 8-minute YouTube video, world-renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bessel van der Kolk—and author of the groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score—explains how trauma embeds itself in the body, influencing our emotions, decisions, and relationships until it's brought to light and healed.
I Carried Many Patterns Like Quiet Emotional Weights
For years, I walked through life doing what I was conditioned to do, and for a long time, it seemed normal.
After all, it was all I knew. I was raised that way:
• Exhausted from over-doing and over-giving, never able to shut it off.
• Paralyzed by boundaries I didn’t know how to set.
• Terrified of conflict and confrontation because I witnessed too much of that pain growing up.
• Equating my worth with how much I did, pleased, and gave—not with who I was.
• Searching for constant approval on the outside, while feeling empty and confused on the inside.
• Relying on others for decision-making because I was often told what to do, seldom asked.
• Living for everyone else, but not truly living for me.
Sound familiar?
Too many women live like this every single day— carrying generational patterns that were passed onto them—often without even realizing it’s trauma that needs to be healed.
How I Broke the Cycle
My healing began when I decided to face my struggles head-on, get curious, and look within.
I learned:
• The unhealthy patterns I was carrying were inherited, they weren't created by me.
• The cycle of struggles I was facing weren't mine; they came from generations before me.
• That I had the power to stop carrying—all of them.
Through trauma-informed healing which included inner child work, compassionate reparenting, and Internal Family Systems, I reclaimed my voice, my truth, my power—my worth.
It was life-changing.
I no longer carry the patterns that were passed down to me.
I healed them—all.
I no longer people-please. I have clear, firm boundaries. I speak my truth with confidence and humility. I face conflict and confrontation with courage, peace, and understanding. And I freely express myself and my emotions, and I have self-trust—a deep inner knowing that guides most of my decision-making.
I no longer over-do or strive for perfection.
I seldom repeat the same struggles.
And I unlocked the blueprint to build healthy, thriving relationships—rooted in respect and honor.
And, to add to all of this, my 16 yr. old son will never inherit the generational trauma that was passed on to me—I broke the cycle.
My most powerful life achievement was saving my son from the immense emotional pain and confusion I endured for decades.
Why This Matters for You
If you’re reading this, maybe your life looks fine on the outside—but feels heavy, exhausting, or hollow on the inside.
You’re doing “all the things,” but inner peace feels just out of reach.
You can’t understand why the same struggles keep repeating—in relationships, at work, or inside your own mind.
This isn’t failure. This is trauma.
And it's not your fault.
But it is your responsibility to heal. Because no one else can do it for you.
Most Women Don’t Know They’re Carrying This Pain
I’ve coached hundreds of strong, successful women who believed they just needed to read more books, listen to more podcasts, meditate more, attend more retreats—or do more talk therapy.
The reason none of it ever worked was because the healing they needed was on the inside—not on the outside.
What they needed was to look deeper within themselves to heal their generational trauma—to heal the patterns that kept them stuck in:
Unhealthy relationship cycles
Neglecting themselves to please others
Always giving too much of themselves
Frequent or sneaky self-doubt
Feeling a lack of belonging in relationships, social groups, and at work
Boundaries laced with guilt
Avoiding using their voice to keep the peace
Feeling as though they never quite measure up
Finding themselves often competing and comparing with other women
Does this sound painfully familiar?
How to Get Started On The Path of Healing
Once you begin your healing journey, you might be surprised at how quickly your personal story begins to make sense—as you start connecting your upbringing with your present-day life.
That awareness, in itself, will start to set you free.
My Mother Wound Awakening™ Program offers a compassionate, step-by-step path to help you uncover these connections, deeply understand your patterns, and begin your journey to healing with live coaching and guided support.
And once you heal, everything changes.
You see everything with heightened clarity, including your self-awareness.
If you’re ready to start uncovering the generational trauma you might be carrying, take my free Mother Wound Quiz. It’s a gentle, insightful tool that helps you begin recognizing the invisible patterns you inherited—so you can take the first steps on your healing journey.
Start getting curious about yourself:
• What painful patterns keep repeating in your life, relationships, parenting, career?
• What triggers keep showing up in your relationships, marriage, family, or work?
• What self-limiting lies do you carry about yourself that were never really yours to carry?
Then seek support through a trauma-informed coach:
• Trauma isn’t healed through willpower or verbal conversation alone. It’s healed within the body.
• Consider working with a compassionate trauma-informed coach—like myself—who's completed the training, done the inner work, and can guide and hold you with grace and compassion.
End the Cycle With You
Remember, if you don’t heal, your generational trauma silently moves on to the next generation—relentlessly and invisibly.
But when you heal?
You break the chains—you break the cycle.
Healing changes everything. It transforms...
You. Your relationships. Your children. Your life.
Get started in unpatterning the patterns—and reclaim your truth, peace, and power.
Get Started Today
Take the Mother Wound Quiz to start uncovering the generational patterns and mother wounds you may be living.
Learn about The Mother Wound Awakening™ — a transformational, six-week live group coaching experience to help you uncover your generational trauma and start your journey toward healing.
Schedule a free Clarity Call to walk through your quiz results and discuss the right next step for you.
More to Explore:
Understanding Generational Trauma: Breaking the Cycle – A helpful overview from Holly Hill Hospital.
Adult Daughters of Emotionally Immature Mothers by Lindsay C. Gibson - Powerful insights on understanding and healing from the impact of emotional immature of mothers.
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kirstin Neff - A Powerful guide to cultivating compassion toward yourself during the healing process.
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Heidi Carlson
Mother Wound Coach
Heidi Carlson Coaching
heidi@heidicarlsoncoaching.com
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