By Ashley Schumacher, MS, LAPC

There are things we inherit from family that have nothing to do with genetics.

We inherit stories or narratives we were never told. We inherit ways of relating, ways of protecting ourselves, ways of interpreting other people's emotions, and ways of making sense of suffering. We inherit what was spoken in our families, but we also inherit what could not be spoken. Sometimes we inherit the fear, the silence, the vigilance, the shame, or the emotional absence that belonged to generations before us.

And sometimes we become aware of these things only after they have already shaped us, and we are entrusted with the formation of another. How true this must be for new parents especially.

This awareness can be both liberating and excruciatingly painful. There can be an extraordinary sense of clarity that comes with recognizing: This did not begin with me. But there can also be anger and profound grief. We may begin to see how much our parents carried, how much their parents carried, and how much of that suffering eventually found its way into us. It would be natural to feel a sense of threat or foreboding about the next generation.

There is a particular kind of grief that can emerge when we begin to recognize intergenerational trauma. We may have spent years trying to understand why certain patterns felt so familiar, why certain relationships seemed to require so much vigilance, or why our own responses sometimes felt disproportionate to the moment in front of us. And then, slowly, another possibility comes into view: perhaps some of what we have been carrying did not begin with us.

There may also be relief in that recognition, but there can also be a profound disturbance. To see more clearly what shaped us is also to encounter what was not given to us, what was distorted, and what was carried forward before anyone had the capacity to stop it. In other words, not only our inheritance, but the good we may have also disinherited.

We may find ourselves grieving not only our own experience, but the suffering that preceded it and the layer upon layer of losses subsequent and consequent to it. And with that recognition can come a very understandable resolve: I will not become them, or I will be nothing like them.

Sometimes that resolve is necessary; certainly, it is understandable. There are patterns that need to end, and there are things we must learn to name, boundaries we must learn to hold, and ways of relating that we must refuse to reproduce simply because they are familiar.

But I wonder if there comes a point when healing asks us for something more, something perhaps even harder…

Not to question whether what happened was wrong, nor to soften what should remain clear, but to see whether we can perceive and hold the story with a larger imagination than the one formed in reaction to it.

Because there is a difference between knowing what we do not want to become and beginning to imagine who we might become instead. The former is focused on what went terribly wrong, and the latter on what can still go very right. Another way of framing this is that the former remains at the dimension of the Fall, and the latter at the dimension of redemption—not just for ourselves or generations to come, but for those who preceded us.

In this sense, moral imagination is enacted not merely for prevention or correction, nor even for singular generational redemption, but for intergenerational reintegration.

This is a participation of tremendous magnanimity in salvation history.

In this sense, the mature response to a wounded inheritance is not merely differentiation from what was wrong, but participation in the recovery and reclamation of what was good.

Perhaps this is one of the subtler movements of healing from intergenerational trauma: the movement from moral injury toward moral imagination.

Moral injury may be where we first recognize that something sacred in human relationship has been violated. Moral imagination begins when we can remain faithful to that recognition while allowing our vision to widen beyond the violation itself.

There is something morally significant about being able to say, This should not have happened.

And perhaps this is one place where the experience of intergenerational trauma intersects with moral injury. We can experience a rupture not only in relationship, but in our understanding of what relationships, family, authority, love, care, and human dignity were supposed to be.

Perhaps then, the question shifts. Not simply, how do I ensure that what happened before me never happens again? But what might become possible if I allow Christ to redeem even my relationship to what came before me?

This does not ask us to rewrite history. It asks us to reimagine history within a larger context and narrative.

For what is inherited is not only the wound. There may also be goods that were interrupted, capacities that were constrained, relationships that were never fully possible, forms of love that could not be received or given, and aspects of human flourishing that were diminished by what receded them. We can inherit not only what was done, but what was prevented from being done.

And perhaps this is part of what it means to speak of intergenerational reintegration. We are not merely attempting to prevent the repetition of what was harmful. We are participating in the recovery of what was good. This is deeply compassionate and just: humanizing those who came before us, honoring their full humanity and relational context, even as we seek to honor and heal our own and that of future generations. This preserves the telos of intergenerational reintegration, which is God. That none may be lost. (John 6:39)

Within this framework, as a disposition and interior posture, intergenerational healing can become an embodied participation in the longing of Christ's own heart: “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.” (John 17:21)

The generations before us need not be idealized in order to be reintegrated into our moral imagination. Nor do they need to be condemned in order for us to remain truthful about what they handed down. They can be held within the same mystery in which we ourselves are held: creatures bearing the image of God, wounded by the Fall, capable of both love and harm, and still within the reach of redemption.

This does not erase responsibility. It gives responsibility a larger vision.

Perhaps the deepest boundary between generations is not simply the line we draw to say, This ends with me. Perhaps it is also the threshold across which we say, Something new may begin here.

That is a different kind of inheritance, and it is a different dimension of freedom.

There is a kind of moral clarity that can emerge from naming what was wrong. But I wonder if healing eventually asks something more of us than simply becoming different from the people who came before us.

Often, and necessarily, our first movement is toward differentiation. This can be protective and good. We need the ability to recognize what was harmful and to establish boundaries around what cannot continue.

But if we remain organized primarily around what we are trying to escape, we can remain, in a sense, bound to it. Our lives continue to be shaped by the wound, even as we resist becoming like those who wounded us.

But what happens—what could happen—if “I don't want to be like them” begins to give way to “What if I could see more clearly what happened here and what can happen from here?"

This is where I think the movement from moral injury toward moral imagination begins.

Moral injury can help us recognize that something was wrong. Moral imagination allows us to begin imagining what might be possible beyond the wrong—not in spite of it, but, dare I say, because of it.

It does not require us to abandon moral clarity. It asks us to expand our capacity to see. It calls us into a much deeper, albeit more demanding, conception of redemption: one that is co-creatively regenerative.

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” (Isaiah 11:1)

Rather than seeing only the harm that was done, we may gradually become capable of holding the larger story: what was lost and inherited, what was adaptive and what became harmful, what was suffered, what remains our responsibility, and what might yet be redeemed. This is the difficult work of holding complexity without collapsing into either denial or condemnation—to see others as more than the worst thing they have done while remaining truthful about what they have done, and to see ourselves as more than what was done to us or what we fear we could become because of it.

Perhaps this is where self-compassion becomes something more than gentleness toward the self. It is the capacity to regard our own adaptations within the larger truth of our history, to have compassion for the person we had to become in order to survive, and, eventually, to extend that same mercy backward as well as forward.

Not because those who came before us were absolved of responsibility, but because they, too, were human beings formed within histories, wounds, limitations, relationships, and adaptations of their own—also living within the consequences of a world no longer as it was created to be.

Christian theology gives us language for this in the doctrine of the Fall: not that human beings are simply bad, but that something fundamental to human flourishing has become disordered.

Suffering, sin, fear, alienation, and rupture consequently become woven into the human story, moving through persons, families, communities, and generations.

We inherit consequences. But we may also participate in redemption. This, to me, is reminiscent of Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, Magdalene, John, most importantly, Our Lady, and even Didymus, the Good Thief—all were invited into and participated in the Redemption of Calvary.

Christ alone accomplishes the Redemption. Yet He does not accomplish it in a way that renders human participation unnecessary. He permits us to enter it—to carry, to witness, to remain, to receive, to suffer, to love, and even to be transformed by what we encounter at the foot of the Cross.

Perhaps intergenerational healing can be understood within this same mystery. We do not redeem the past by ourselves, nor do we redeem those who came before us. But we can participate in the redemptive work of Christ by allowing what has been handed down to become, in us, something other than what it was. Death becomes life through participation in His divine Life.

This shift in perception can also extend compassion toward previous generations. Rather than remaining organized around the posture of “I don't want to be like them,” we can begin to hold more compassionately the suffering of those who came before us and the lived consequences of the Fall as they have moved from generation to generation.

This does not mean minimizing what happened. It does not mean excusing harm, dissolving boundaries, or pretending that the wounds of one generation did not have real consequences for the next. Nor does it require us to reconcile with people who remain unsafe or to pursue an unbounded form of repair. Rather, it invites a recalibration of how we perceive generational trauma itself.

Perhaps the question is not simply, How do I make sure I never experience another rupture?

Maybe a deeper question is: What kind of person, family, culture, and community can we become in the presence of rupture?

What if, instead of organizing ourselves around the prevention of all rupture—even significant rupture—we cultivated an interior disposition and a communal culture of repair through presence?

In the current and not uncommon expression of boundaries through estrangement, this is part of what comes to mind when I listen to Jess Ray's Runaway. There is something profoundly beautiful about her image of love that does not deny the reality of wandering, suffering, or distance, but neither does it abandon the person who is wandering. The posture is not one of coercion or denial. It is a steadfast presence that continues to hold the person as beloved. I think there is something important and deeply relevant here for the healing of intergenerational trauma.

So often, when we begin to recognize what has been passed down to us, our first movement is toward differentiation: I will never be like them. I will never do what they did. I will never allow this to happen again. There is something necessary and even protective in that movement. We need the ability to recognize what was harmful and to establish boundaries around what cannot continue.

The people who came before us were not simply perpetrators of generational trauma. They were also human beings living within their own histories, wounds, limitations, adaptations, and encounters with the consequences of the Fall. Some of them may have been deeply harmed and then harmed others. Some may never have had the opportunity, language, safety, or community necessary to recognize what was happening within them. None of this removes responsibility. But it does restore something that trauma can cause us to lose: their humanity.

And perhaps this is part of what it means for Christ to redeem what has been handed down through generations.

Redemption does not require us to pretend that the wounds did not happen. It does not require us to call evil good or harm acceptable. Rather, redemption allows us to hold both the reality of suffering and the dignity of the person who suffered—and, yes, the person or persons who caused suffering.

The person(s) who harmed me can have harmed me deeply and still be someone made in the image and likeness of God.

The generation before me can have failed me and still have been a generation carrying wounds of its own.

I can establish a boundary without unintentionally remaining bound to a vision of the relationship that continues to organize itself around an “us versus them.” I can create distance without making distance synonymous with dehumanization or devaluation. I can refuse access without refusing interior presence. And I can allow the relationship to become, even in its distance or absence, something held differently within me.

I can grieve what I did not receive without needing to dehumanize the person(s) who could not give it.

I can refuse to repeat what was handed down to me without having to spend my life running from the people who handed it down.

This is where I think rupture and repair become so important.

Perhaps the goal of healing is not to create lives, families, or communities in which rupture never occurs. That may be an impossible expectation. Even before the Fall, Calvary and Easter Sunday were already held within the mystery of the Father's redemptive will. We are finite, wounded, imperfect human beings. Even relationships characterized by profound love will experience misunderstanding, limitation, disappointment, and rupture.

The question, then, becomes What we do next? How do we anticipate the human condition within our families and remain present to it with moral imagination?

Can we remain present without abandoning truth?

Can we tell the truth without allowing it to become an instrument of dehumanization and othering?

Can we take responsibility, make room for grief, repair what can be repaired, and maintain a boundary where repair requires distance?

Can we refuse to pass the wound forward simply because it was passed to us?

This is not an unbounded repair or a “let the chips fall where they may” posture. Presence does not mean unlimited access. Compassion does not mean the absence of consequences. Love does not require us to remain in situations that continue to cause harm.

Rather, it is a different posture toward suffering, toward rupture, and toward intergenerational trauma itself.

We begin to move from fear of suffering toward presence within suffering.

And perhaps this is part of what moral imagination makes possible: not the fantasy that we can finally arrange our lives so that rupture no longer occurs, but the capacity to encounter rupture without surrendering our humanity to it.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest forms of generational healing: not becoming people who never experience rupture, but becoming people who know how to remain human, becoming people who know how to remain human and how to remain present to each other and to both individual and collective human dignity in the midst of it.

We have the opportunity to become a culture of repair, not because rupture is inconsequential, but because our love and hope are stronger than our fear of it.

And perhaps, like the love expressed in Runaway, we learn that presence does not require chasing, controlling, or erasing the distance on any side. It means that even in the presence of wandering, rupture, and suffering, we refuse to forget the dignity of the person before us, and we still hold their personhood with dignity.

And we can trust that, because of Christ, even what has traveled through generations can become a place where redemption begins. The pursuit is an interior one, not necessarily external. It is a pursuit of the dignity and belovedness of those who would be ‘othered’, even in the name of healing itself.

Because we are not only the recipients of a history. We are also co-creative participants in what comes next. This is where intergenerational healing can become something more than breaking a cycle. It becomes an invitation to imagine what can be built from what we have received, both the good and that which was harmful, with the dignity of every human person in mind.

“No choice that you will make or path you take will change my mind.” — Runaway by Jess Ray. 

THIS, beloved reader, IS OUR TRUE Inheritance, bought and redeemed by the price of His blood for our own throughout every generation.