Healing What Was Inherited: A Brainspotting Approach to Generational Trauma

There’s a pattern I see again & again in my practice.

Someone comes in carrying something they can’t quite name. A way of responding to the world that doesn’t fully make sense to them. An anxiety that fires in situations that shouldn’t feel threatening. A belief about themselves that they’ve tried to talk their way out of for years & it just won’t shift.

And somewhere in the conversation, they say something like: my mother was the same way. Or: this is just how everyone in my family is. Or: I don’t know where this comes from. It’s always just been there.

What I want to say to every single one of those people is this: there’s a very good chance it didn’t start with you.

What Is Generational Trauma?

Generational trauma, sometimes called intergenerational or ancestral trauma, is the idea that the effects of trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. Not just through behavior or parenting patterns, although that’s part of it, but through the nervous system itself.

Research in epigenetics has shown that traumatic experiences can actually change how genes are expressed & that those changes can be inherited. In other words, your body may be carrying the physiological imprint of experiences that happened to your parents, grandparents or even earlier generations.

This doesn’t mean you’re destined to repeat what came before you. But it does mean that some of what you’re carrying may have arrived before you had any say in the matter.

And that changes everything about how we approach healing.

Why You Don’t Always Know Where It Came From

One of the most disorienting things about generational trauma is that it often doesn’t come with a story. There’s no clear memory attached to it. No single event you can point to & say: that’s where this started.

It just shows up as a pattern. As a way of being in the world that feels automatic, almost like it’s just who you are.

You might startle easily in environments that are objectively safe. You might shrink when you’re about to be seen, even when you’ve worked hard for the moment. You might carry a low-level sense of not being enough, or of the world being fundamentally unsafe, that no amount of positive thinking has been able to touch.

If you’ve ever felt that, I want to offer you something that has genuinely changed how I understand healing:

A pattern without a clear origin story is often a pattern that didn’t originate with you.

And a pattern that didn’t originate with you can still be released from your nervous system. That’s the part most people haven’t been told.

How Generational Trauma Lives in the Body

Trauma of any kind, whether experienced directly or inherited, doesn’t live in the thinking brain. It lives in the subcortical brain. The brainstem & limbic system. The parts that govern survival responses, body sensation, emotion & implicit memory.

This is the part of the brain that doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in feelings. In body responses. In the tightening of the chest before you’ve even registered what’s happening. In the automatic recoil from something that, logically, you know isn’t dangerous.

This is why talking about generational patterns, while valuable, often doesn’t move them. You can understand intellectually that your grandmother survived something that shaped how she related to safety & love & scarcity. You can trace the pattern through your mother & into yourself. You can have enormous compassion for all of it.

And the pattern can still be right there. Still firing. Still running the show at a level below your conscious awareness.

Because understanding lives in the neocortex. And the pattern lives somewhere else entirely.

Why Brainspotting Reaches What Other Approaches Miss

Brainspotting, developed by Dr. David Grand, works from the bottom up. It bypasses the analytical thinking brain & goes directly into the subcortical brain, where generational patterns & survival responses are actually stored.

It uses the visual field to find a specific eye position, called a Brainspot, that directly corresponds to where the nervous system is holding the activation. That position becomes an access point. And when you hold it, the subcortical brain gets a direct channel to process & release what’s been stored there.

The remarkable thing about working with generational trauma through Brainspotting is that you don’t need the full story. You don’t need to know exactly which ancestor this came from or exactly what they experienced. The nervous system holds the pattern regardless of whether the narrative is there.

What we work with in a session is the body’s experience of the pattern right now. The sensation that arises when we focus on it. The feeling in the body that has been there for as long as you can remember but never had a clear explanation.

That’s enough. The brain knows where to go from there.

What Generational Brainspotting Sessions Can Look Like

In Generational Brainspotting work, we often begin by noticing a pattern the client wants to explore. Something that feels bigger than a single experience. Something that shows up across different areas of life. Something that has the quality of being inherited rather than learned.

From there, we locate the Brainspot by finding the eye position that activates the body’s response to that pattern. The client doesn’t need to narrate. They don’t need to perform insight or arrival at understanding. They just stay present with what comes up in the body.

What often emerges is a processing that feels layered. Images or sensations that don’t belong to the client’s own memories. A sense of something older than their own experience moving through. Sometimes grief for what was carried. Sometimes a profound sense of release, not just for themselves, but for the line they came from.

Clients frequently report after generational sessions that something feels different in a way they can’t quite articulate. Lighter. More spacious. Like a background noise they didn’t know was there has quieted.

This Is Not Just Your Story

If you are someone who has wondered why you carry what you carry, why certain patterns seem to repeat no matter how much work you do, why some beliefs about yourself or the world feel ancient in a way that doesn’t match your own experience, I want to gently offer this:

Some of it may not be yours. It may have been handed to you, the way so many things are, without anyone intending harm. Through a nervous system that learned to survive. Through a body that passed on what it knew.

And it can be released.

Not because you erase where you came from. But because you get to decide what you carry forward. What patterns complete with you, so they don’t continue into the next generation.

That’s one of the most meaningful things I’ve witnessed in this work. And it’s available.

If this is resonating, I’d love to talk about what generational Brainspotting work could look like for you. Sessions are available via Zoom or in person in Stoughton, WI.

Heather Corbet is a Certified Brainspotting Consultant, Specialty Workshop Presenter & Occupational Therapist with over 25 years of experience. Her specialty areas include generational & somatic healing, grief & loss, neurodivergence, spirituality & medical anomalies.