Three Ways Trauma Echoes into Parenthood
A traumatic experience ripples between generations. One of the main reasons is that PTSD can have a big effect on how someone eventually raises their own children. It can affect our ideas of what is “good” vs “bad” and how we can empathize with others. Post-traumatic stress can also make it harder to regulate emotions or channel them in a healthy way. One might react with a sudden outburst of anger, or contrarily, may become emotionally distant from what’s happening around them. In turn, these patterns can impact a child’s development, and later, the children of that child.
These patterns end when the cycle is eventually broken after the trauma finally fades, or because someone found a healthy way out of it.
This is quite well known. What gets less attention, are specific pathways through which post-traumatic stress transfers from one generation to the next. We often think children who end up copying the behaviors of their traumatized parents. That certainly happens. However, someone can also rebel against their parents’ behavioral patterns and swing to an opposite extreme. This brings a different set of problems into their own parenting skills and outcomes.
The "Middle Road" misconception
We’re tempted to conclude that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but even the pursuit of “balance” can become a kind of obsessive overcorrection on its own. You can “radicalize” toward demanding of yourself to be unreasonably good, too careful, inhumanly mindful. You end up with a whole other set of difficulties that are rarely talked about.
So how do we identify the potential pitfalls for parents who carry post-traumatic stress?
- Copy
- Rebel
- Radicalize
When someone grows up with traumatized or unstable parents, they carry subtle, invisible patterns with them into their own adult life – especially once they become parents themselves. Many people imagine there are only two paths. Either you repeat what your parents did, or you swear you’ll do everything differently. But in reality, radicalizing is a third pattern that rarely gets discussed.
Copy
We all need examples to learn from and model ourselves after. A bad example is still an example. When repeated long enough, a behavioral example gets normalized. Even when someone is aware of how unhealthy their upbringing was, they may find themselves repeating the tone, habits or emotional style they grew up with. It’s worth noting though, that research shows most people with traumatic backgrounds do not end up copying their parents as much and as literally as popular belief likes to assume. It still happens often enough to matter.
Rebel
Some parents move in the opposite direction. They raise their children as a direct counterreaction to the way they themselves were raised. Sometimes they even explicitly decide “I’m going to do everything differently from my parents”.
But swinging to the other extreme can lead to its own issues. A child raised by emotionally distant parents might grow up determined to be endlessly comforting and available to the point of neglecting their own emotional or even physical boundaries. Someone raised in chaos might become rigid, domineering and controlling. Someone who grew up under authoritarian discipline might tend to avoid all structure completely.
It’s still, in the end, a reaction to the past.
Radicalize
The one hardly talked about: becoming radical in the pursuit of healthy balance.
Instead of allowing yourself to move around the center and learn from mistakes, you start obsessing over hitting the exact sweet spot for being a perfect parent. It’s as if healthy parenting is a tightrope requiring constant micro-adjustments. It goes beyond a healthy amount of self-reflection. You read every parenting book, second-guess every decision, and worry endlessly about whether you’re “good enough.”
It looks like striving for harmony at first glance and even tends to be admired by others, but when going overboard, it quickly becomes actually another form of instability. It’s a fear-driven need to correct every possible flaw before it might ever affect your child.
A Shared Thread
What all three patterns have in common is that they are centered around managing your own fear, history, or discomfort. That’s completely human. After all, we all parent with the tools we have. But children thrive not when a parent is chasing this ideal image or reacting to the past, but when that parent feels grounded, present, and connected.
Finding that space is less about perfection and more about permission. It’s permitting yourself to walk rather than tightrope, to adjust rather than overcorrect, and to let yourself be human while raising another one!