If we all agree that a people can experience trauma on a large scale and that trauma can then pass onto the descendants, then the reverse must also be true – a people who have inflicted trauma on a large scale pass that experience onto the descendants.

Let’s start with attempting to define what generational trauma is. Here’s an okay medical source on it: https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-intergenerational-trauma

If you have ancestors or older relatives who went through a very distressing or oppressive event, their emotional and behavioral reactions could ripple through the generations of your family and affect you.

The exact causes aren’t clear. But some experts think the original traumatic event could affect your relatives’ relationship skills, personal behavior, and attitudes and beliefs in ways that affect future generations of your family.

How your parents talk with you about the traumatic event (or fail to talk about it) and the way your family functions seem to play important roles in whether trauma gets passed down. For example, a parent’s experience of trauma might affect their parenting skills and play a role in their children’s behavior problems.

Researchers are also looking into the possible role of “epigenetic changes.” The idea is that your environment could cause changes that affect the way your genes work, and these changes could be passed on to younger generations.

The last part doesn’t appear to be anything more than “looking into” so I think it’s safe to say we can consider that speculative at best and ignore it for now. So what we’re left with as the most agreed upon cause appears to look something like: traumatic thing happens -> people pass it down through a warped nervous system and worldview (perhaps by sort of reliving/recreating the stress levels of the traumatic event, which then traumatizes their descendants).

Not exact, but it’s something to go on. Then, how does this compare to inflicting trauma on others?

I think this question is going to depend a lot on what drove the, we’ll call them “oppressor” to make it simple, what drove the oppressor’s behavior and how did they experience the event? Were they also traumatized in some way by participating in a brutal/abusive/etc. act? Or was it more like that memey line from a movie “for me, it was Tuesday”? If it was the first one, then we’re probably talking about another form of generational trauma, just from a different end of it (starting point of the trauma being oppressor rather than oppressed). If it was the second one, I’d think the primary attachment they’re going to have is based on system level stuff; how they materially benefit, the belief systems they have that justify their position in the world, etc. Which can get passed down, but I don’t think sticks as easily as trauma does. Trauma can change how you react to a loud sound before you even have time to think. A belief system can change how you react to a loud sound after you have time to think, but probably not before.

That’s not to say physiology and belief are entirely separate. For example, if you have an anxious thought and you feed that anxiety, it might give you a physiological reaction. But if the worst of it is coming from what you believe in that moment and when the belief passes, you’re fine again, I don’t think that’s the same as trauma; consider here how someone could healthily enjoy a horror movie by suspending their disbelief and inducing temporary fear, but when the movie is over and the reality comes back that none of it is real, the reaction passes and they can go back to living their normal life. Comparatively, I would expect a traumatized person may have a hard time letting go. The reaction may linger for longer and need more soothing to get back to their normal, which might not even be the other person’s normal because they may be keyed up in general (ex: generalized anxiety). In other words, the healthy person’s regulation of their nervous system functions pretty well; the traumatized person’s nervous system is wounded somehow.

So what I’m trying to get at here is, are we talking about the simple passing down of beliefs and systems of privilege or subjugation, or are we talking about wounded nervous systems and their consequences. Though these surely have some overlap, I don’t think they are quite the same. As an example, some white people need only befriend a black person to start questioning racist views they have. On the other hand, a black person who has been traumatized by racist police may deal with the impact on their nervous system for the rest of their life, even with conscious therapy; they would hopefully be able to heal somewhat, but given everything I’ve heard about that stuff, I get the impression there’s a lot we just don’t know about how to actually fix the problem. That there are therapeutic techniques, but getting at the root of the problem can be hard. (If someone knows otherwise, of research in consistently healing the nervous system or standout cases of doing so, feel free to let me know. I myself have anxiety, so I have a personal interest in it, not just curiosity over what’s correct.)