Inherited Trauma Quotes

... inherited collective mind-patterns ... have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.

The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.

Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Now that I think about it, maybe my own literary exploration of the dark secrets held by families could be traced back to V.C. Andrews.

So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents.

Posterity, thinned by the crime of its ancestors, shall hear of those battles.

I'm inclined to think we are all ghosts-every one of us. It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. Its all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that.

Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

People tend to fear the ghosts in their own family. You feel these family curses and think, 'If it happened to my father, it could happen to me.'

My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

No one is free from the history he has inherited.

It is the perpetual tragedy of all families: each of us believe our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us.

With the Israel stories, it was for me the most surprising way the title would fit in. I kept thinking about, for a lot of my Israeli characters, what it was like to inherit such a complicated and symbiotic relationship to America and to feel how tangled that is, and it's nothing that they chose to do themselves.

There's a genetic memory that stays on your bones. What you experience when you're young, I think it stays with you.

I was very worried about my mother, growing up - a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me.