It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are | Hacker News Reader

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are

scienceandnonduality.com

99 pointstomhoward27 comments

I'm skeptical that there isn't some undercurrent of suggestion in the way the therapist keeps pulling in family history. There's something of a just-so-story in how each of his patients seems to have some "inherited" trauma. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that this is the case, but the vignettes in the article involve no small amount of magical thinking.

I'm in agreement with jschwartzi, nearly completely. Skeptical bells pealing, in my head, as I read Jesse's story. Sympathetic to the idea, and also willing to concede this determination/diagnosis helped Jesse, mentally and emotionally. Causation? Or an effective treatment, with an unnecessary patina? I'd prefer more data.

The problem I see here is the over reliance on Freud and Jung and epigenetic. Freud's misconceptions aren't needed to explain how behaviour and anxiety can trickle down from a generation to the next and epigenetic has nothing to do with skeletons in the closet. Behavioural therapy, CBT and `modern` approaches do a much better job at modelling all this. (I wouldn't be surprised if we see more epigenetic and less quantum physics buzzwords in the coming years in those kind of books).

More importantly there's the question of whether it really helps to analyse the past in details to find a nexus point that would explain the patient's problems or not. Behavioural activation show some promises and good results and it almost doesn't explore a patient's past.

To be clear: I am not saying trauma can't make ripples through generations (on the contrary, I am inclined to believe it, based on literature and personal experience) but the model described in that article has shortcomings, relies on refuted theories and modern models explain things better.

On the other hand we know that when a problem is well defined (it's cancer, let's fight it!), external (I'll kick this SOB away so hard it won't ever come back) and random (I failed the interview because I was just out of luck) then the patient/person has a much better chance to rebound. So maybe the whole Freudian approach works as well for some as voodoo works for others. This is the placebo realm though and modern therapies have much better results than psychoanalysis anyway.

Freud's biggest contextual problem was outlined by Alice Miller in most of her works, notably "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and "Drama of the Gifted Child".

It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the perspective that the parent was innocent and the child was guilty, especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly misbehaved children.

Unfortunately, this continued to be the main perspective in psychoanalysis and child development until the late 1970's/early 1980's

She gives an explanation in its simplest form in a 1987 interview with OMNI Publications International:

Traditional analysis, says Miller, duplicates the parent-child relationship with the conventional analyst in the position of power. [...] The child undergoes a long inner struggle “between the fear of losing the person he loves if he remains true to himself, and panic at the prospect of losing himself if he has to deny who he is. A child cannot resolve a conflict of this nature and is forced to conform because he cannot survive by himself. Therapy should not repeat this condition.”

fascinating read if anyone's interested, especially when she describes the first time she discussed this to a conference of psychoanalysts:

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll get around it this weekend. Have you heard of Jacques Van Rillaer ? He wrote the black book of psychoanalysis which stirred things up in Europe some years ago.

The Black Book seems like a fun read. I'm having a problem finding a copy in english (spanish, french, and chinese so far) but it's definitely now on my finding/reading list!

I'm not sure I would even call it an undercurrent:

> I listened closely as Jesse spoke. What stood out for me was one unusual detail—he’d been extremely cold, “freezing” he said, just prior to the first episode. I began to explore this with Jesse, and asked him if anyone on either side of the family suffered a trauma that involved being “cold,” or being “asleep,” or being “nineteen.”

This is pretty much indistinguishable from the sort of cold reading technique used by "psychics" and "mediums" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading#The_Forer_effect_...

"A boy may have his grandpa’s long legs and a girl may have her mother’s nose, but Jesse had inherited his uncle’s fear of never waking"

Wait.. what??

How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born?

This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

There's evidence on experiments with mice that they inherit their parent's fears epigenetically.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/15/mice-inhe...

At least there's a plausible route and mechanism there. How do you see this applying to an uncle?

Many people are naturally scared of spiders and snakes. Some evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman claim that some fears like these are coded into our genetics because of the many of our ancestors before us who were killed by them.

That doesn't explain phobias of totally non dangerous things though so it feels like a "just so story."

What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise caution around spiders, which conferred a survival advantage in their particular context. In our context it's maladaptive (evolution is very slow), and so considered an irrational phobia.

>What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

Inherited instincts and emotions.

magical thinking

These two words describe most of psychology. It's not a science[1]. I've always thought that people who study psychology are just trying to figure themselves out.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-...

>How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born?

Is it much different from elephants being born with 'genetic memory' of migratory routes that their forefathers took

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/13/conservat...

That link just contains a throw-away mentiin if migratory routes "imprinted on their genetic memory", no evidence that it is factual.

How did this pseudomedicinal rubbish get so much votes? At least tell me you didn't read up to the obviously bunk parts before you upvoted. :[

(The strange thing is, there is sometimes an opposite trend here to consider the whole science of psychology nonscientific.)

I don't understand why we even bother teaching Freud anymore except as a cautionary footnote. Dude basically just made a bunch of shit up and called it theory.

My grandparents were taken away during the Cultural Revolution so my parents grew up alone. They never had any role models for how to raise children. At least that's why my aunt tells me whenever I complain about my parents.

Just leaving this here...

http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html

Appreciate the context; thank you RichardCA.

What did I just read?

Ohm = mc^2 ?.... seriously?

Glad to see this reach the font page today! it's little talked about, but how we grow up and the skills we develop to navigate childhood basically defines how we use and develop technology. it begs the question, what kind of technological and security environments will flourish as familial and childhood trauma become individually resolved on a mass scale?

Fascinating read. I always thought there could be some kind of link between the social trauma of The Black Death and the eruption of The Reformation.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

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