How Do You Process Trauma? Healing Inherited & Collective Burdens
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Dr. Thomas Hübl
Trauma That Didn’t Start With You
Some of what you carry didn’t start with you — and that is exactly why it can feel so stubborn, and exactly why it can be released.
You have done the work. You have read the books, maybe sat in therapy, maybe figured out exactly which part of your childhood explains which part of you. And still, there is a hum underneath. A drivenness you cannot fully account for. An anxiety with no obvious return address. A heaviness you have carried so long that it just feels like you. If you have ever wondered how you process trauma that does not seem to trace back to anything that actually happened to you — here is the short version: it may not have started with you.
My guest is Dr. Thomas Hübl, the trauma teacher and integration facilitator whose work bridges modern science and the wisdom traditions, with a focus on collective and intergenerational trauma. He is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the author of Healing Collective Trauma and Attuned, and the co-founder of The Pocket Project. His new book, Releasing Our Burdens, is co-written with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems.
We sat down to map healing as one continuum — individual, ancestral, collective — and to name what almost no one says out loud: that the anxiety, drive, or heaviness you cannot explain may be an echo coming down the pipe from people who came before you. Once you can see it, something loosens. You can stop fighting it and start releasing it.
“Trauma is frozen life. So who pays the electricity bill?” — Dr. Thomas Hübl, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Dr. Thomas Hübl: When my parents and my grandparents carried a lot of fear or stress, it might amplify — not only lead up to my own attachment process, but it might amplify what I experience.
Dr. Lisa: Have you ever had a reaction to something that was kind of out of context for what was objectively happening? You got a text or there was a tone of voice or a look, and suddenly you were flooded or furious or shut down. Here’s a new idea: your nervous system might be responding to a story that started a long time before you were even born — not because you’re being dramatic or your wiring is off, but because you may have inherited an emotional burden you don’t even know you’re carrying, and maybe you’re responding to a collective trauma rather than one you personally experienced.
Dr. Lisa: Today on Love, Happiness, and Success, my guest is Dr. Thomas Hübl. He’s a teacher and trauma integration facilitator who is an expert in exactly this — focused not just on the trauma or burdens we carry within, but on collective and intergenerational trauma that impacts us, sometimes without our even fully being aware of it. He is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and he’s here to share insights from his new book, co-written with the creator of Internal Family Systems, Dr. Richard Schwartz. The book is called Releasing Our Burdens.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Richard Schwartz and I have known each other for many years. The more we talked, we found out we were passionate about similar things — that eventually led to us co-teaching, and then we developed this book together. We all experience certain levels of trauma through our childhood experiences. To put it in simple terms: childhood attachment trauma mostly happens because our parents are also traumatized to a certain extent, and the trauma of my parents and my own attachment trauma are interdependent properties. They are not separate things — they belong together because they create each other.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: When we look back, most probably — like in my family, my grandparents were in the Second World War. They experienced it. They had their own trauma from that, that got passed on to my parents and to me. That’s a whole system. Let’s discern between the resourced or integrated experience of our ancestors — that is intelligence in us, resilience, capacity, skills. It’s what’s anyway flowing in our life. But the other dimension is what our ancestors could not integrate because it was too much for them. That also has been passed on, and it affects us.
Dr. Lisa: So we are, at least in part, a product of where we come from — the people who existed before us — and that legacy of intergenerational trauma means our parents, our grandparents, their parents lived through things that impacted them. Sometimes they did the best they could and just survived it. But there’s unfinished business we then inherited and need to resolve in the here and now.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Exactly. Unfinished business is passed on. So now it’s with us. Part of it we call my individual issues, my individual stuff that I need to work through. But it’s not only individual. There are tendencies — echoes — that come from our ancestors that are echoing in my life too. Some of the symptoms I experience don’t fully make sense in my life. When I open the map of healing from “very personal me” to “that me is a product of a long stream of living,” I see — ah, there are tendencies and echoes, like when you have a pipe and you hear the echo of the echo of the echo through the pipe.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Part of it is psychological, but part of it is also epigenetic — it’s in our cells. It’s information, a data stream through the ancestors. For many people, it’s relieving when we can do our personal work but also see, ah, there’s a possibility to work on this unfinished business — different ways to create more relief and heal basically backwards, but in this present moment.
Dr. Lisa: Personally to share — I had an experience a few years ago where I connected some of these dots in my own life. Like you, my grandparents were in Europe in World War II. I’m a first-generation American. They emigrated here with my father. Understanding their experience as immigrants — not speaking the language, the cultural differences, the values that came to me, but also the anxiety that comes with being an immigrant in this country. I was asking, “Why am I so driven to succeed?” Part of my ambition is an inheritance from people who were like, “Yeah, you’re actually being chased by wolves. You have to build it.” That was actually really helpful for me — it helped me understand myself better, and where this came from was that legacy. Is that the kind of example of what you’re talking about in your work?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Very much so. We know that fear and stress in our ancestors leads to the fact that we have more fear and stress receptors in our life. So we are actually more sensitive — we experience this more. And what you said: I want to 100% underline this because I’ve worked with different immigrant families, or people in our groups where we look at roots. Exactly what you described is a very typical pattern: immigrating into a society, not speaking the language, not belonging, needing to make it. The next generation takes that on, amplifies it. It takes some generations to really be able to ground oneself. There’s stress in there, anxiety and fears in there — many things.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Especially now, when immigration collectively is such a big topic that seems very hard to resolve as a societal dialogue. It becomes so polarized — and then we say, “Well, it’s so polarized because it’s left and right, Democrats and Republicans.” No. It’s because immigration, and the trauma of immigrating — for some people it was really traumatizing what they went away from. Why they really immigrated was not only, “Oh, I am the CEO of this company, I take my private jet, and now I’m the CEO of another company.” For many people, that’s not the story. And let alone the transatlantic slave trade and really traumatizing enslavement.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Then we see the inability to resolve a societal question. That, I think, is a deep collective trauma symptom — it’s not a political symptom. Deep down, it seems we cannot hold a relational space to resolve our views on immigration at the moment. The integration work is very important.
Dr. Lisa: In this framework, that fractured, polarized society — what that conflict does to relationships, and sometimes to relationships with our family members — it feels stressful and scary and distressing for everyone. No matter what side of the spectrum you’re on, there are such divides and a less and less functional system, that there’s a collective impact on all of us. So it’s creating new traumas in some ways, but it may also be an expression of unfinished business that all participants are bringing to the table.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: We’ve held groups where we literally explored the immigration waves to the US — from different parts of the world and different times — and how that impacts our experience as citizens, our experience of groundedness, of safety, of capacity to deal with challenges. There are very similar patterns in the different generations of immigration. The current crisis must be an invitation: beyond projecting this on different political camps, this is already a symptom of a much deeper unresolved collective dimension. When we really look at it and have a facilitated, community-based national dialogue where we develop the right relational spaces, there could be an enormous transformation and societal growth. Healing collective trauma becomes post-traumatic growth, becomes wisdom, becomes more expression, ethical growth.
Dr. Lisa: A quick plug for someone I’m a super fan of — Dr. Bill Doherty, who is leading the way with his organization Braver Angels. Anyone listening, look for the episode with Dr. Bill Doherty talking about that movement, how to have safe conversations across divides that do exactly what Dr. Hübl is talking about: increasing understanding, empathy, and moving back toward the center.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: One mission of our book was to open the map of healing. There are parts that we need to heal in our development that are very personal, and they need to be treated or integrated in that dimension of our experience. Some people try to bypass the personal part by going too fast to the collective or the intergenerational. There’s a real need to do that well — with therapy and all the healing modalities. There might be a dimension of my fears and insecurity truly related to my growing up as a child — feeling neglected, experiencing difficult situations — so that my attachment isn’t secure. When I need to make decisions, I’m undecided. I feel less connected to my body, it’s hard to feel my intuition. There’s definitely a dimension of my fears that comes from my childhood development.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: At the same time — it might also be like when you have Wi-Fi extenders or amplifiers that amplify your signal. When my parents and grandparents carried a lot of fear or stress, it might amplify, not only lead up to my own attachment process, but amplify what I experience. Even if I do my childhood development work, it will ease my struggle with anxiety or insecurity. But then the journey continues. Like a cup — when you fill it enough, at a certain moment it overflows. When we do our childhood development work and we heal more, I feel “I become more fluid, more self-confident, my creative expression is more fluid.” Then different layers of fear are not just in my own personal development. When I begin to feel into my ancestral relationships, there’s a whole other range of deepening — I feel even safer and more grounded, more connected to my roots when I open that up.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: For example, I once worked with a woman who was born at the end of World War II in Germany, in the last one or two years of the war, when there were tons of bombs dropping.
Dr. Lisa: That was my dad’s experience. He was a baby in the hospital, and they had to write a number on his back in case there was a bomb that went off in the hospital. The struggle was real.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Yes. When we worked on the very young experience, it reached a limit. Then I felt — oh, but the atmosphere of tension and fear and collective tension around that child… the ecosystem, how the ecosystem felt. When we opened the attention from the very early development into the ecosystem that the nervous system of that young child definitely felt, it deepened and accelerated the individual process by far. It created a huge release — because there was a witnessing through us and the group of the ecosystemic quality in which that child grew up. That released a lot of fear, and the body of the woman today became more open. You could really feel — ah — like one chronic tension in the system released.
Dr. Lisa: So you were able to facilitate an experience where this person was — in my mind’s eye, an 18-month-old baby surrounded by people who are scared out of their minds, bombs going off — and this little human is absorbing some of that without even recognizing it. You helped this person witness and process some of what they had absorbed during that phase of their life because of what was happening in their context.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: That’s right. The defense against that stress — a tension, a holding pattern, a chronic holding for decades in that person’s body — just through the fact that it has been noticed, co-felt. We could feel it together, even the group around us. It was as if we plug into 1944 in 2015, and we synchronize 1944 with the current moment. When the unfinished business is brought into the present moment and becomes a relational experience in the present moment, it’s released out of its prison in space and time and can become a movement again.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Many people feel tensions in their body. Some belong to the defense mechanisms of our childhood development, but some are much bigger. We did a lot of groups on the Holocaust past — in Germany and elsewhere. Whenever a group of hundreds of people comes together with an intention — “Okay, we look at this deeper” — and we do some base work, building a safe container and a resonant environment, then when we set the intention to go deeper, the first thing that usually comes up is the defense that suppresses that material collectively. There’s a reason why in the society we don’t suddenly feel all the pain of the Holocaust, or slavery and racism in the US, or the genocide in Rwanda, or colonialism in so many places — because it’s collectively suppressed. Many people can feel the collective defense as heaviness, as it’s hard to breathe. It’s collective — many people feel the same thing. If we honor that, if we don’t go against it but become aware of the defense, then the deeper content can emerge.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: I’ve seen this so many times — in that moment, you really feel the pain of the past coming up, but also a sense of: wow, there’s fresh air. The tension in the collective unconscious is our tension patterns in our body that are not part of our just individual development. They are shared architectures that live in us. Like a jigsaw puzzle — every piece has a part of the whole image. We are part of these collective fields that we suppressed over generations because they were so painful, we couldn’t digest it.
Dr. Lisa: So Carl Jung had a concept of the collective unconscious. Is that what we’re talking about right now?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Yes, it’s very related. Maybe collective trauma formulates some things a bit differently. But that’s exactly the dimension of life that has been suppressed. There’s anesthesia, numbness, absence — all kinds of symptoms. Exactly. So that’s why I love Carl Jung’s work. It’s very related.
Dr. Lisa: Take us into this part. You were talking about that level of protection — the numbness, the blankness, the unknowing that people develop because it’s too big to process. What are examples of how that protection manifests in us, and what is the consequence of that?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: That’s beautifully framed. What’s the consequence of not doing healing work? I often say: trauma is taking a loan from the future. What I mean is — in the traumatic event, we need to activate an intelligence that protects us in very adverse situations. It’s more intelligent to have that trauma response protect us than without it, because without it, it would be even more devastating.
Dr. Lisa: Is this where we’re tying into Dr. Schwartz’s work — internal family systems, parts of self that when you live through trauma, these protective parts of yourself become mobilized because you need them?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Exactly. What Richard says: no bad parts. When we look at ourselves, even if it looks dysfunctional or difficult, there’s always an intelligence active inside. Once we reveal that intelligence — why these things are there, they’re not there by accident — whatever is in us has a reason. When we connect to that intelligence, we can grow. That’s also what Richard describes in a bit of a different language.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: When that trauma response kicks in, I often describe this through metaphors. What’s your freezer doing while we are having this conversation?
Dr. Lisa: Humming along, doing what it always does.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Exactly. It’s keeping the food frozen. And who pays the electricity bill?
Dr. Lisa: I do.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Exactly. So when we speak about trauma — trauma is frozen life. It’s not just frozen and that’s it. It’s being frozen, like the freezer in all our households. It’s freezing the content and the pain ever since. It’s an active process.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah — and consuming resources to keep it cold.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Right. It’s consuming electricity, life energy, to keep it. All our defenses, per definition, are non-sustainable properties of our experience. That’s very important. The cost is that we burn more life energy to keep that which was difficult — individually, ancestrally, and collectively. There is a lot of shadow investment of life energy to keep that stuff where it is right now, in the freezer.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Healing is, in a way, melting that frozen past. We invest less electricity because we don’t keep it frozen. We thaw whatever is in there, we melt it, and then we get back the content. Even if it’s painful at the beginning, it’s life energy or developmental energy that comes back — as wholeness, expression, grounding, safety, whatever it becomes. It’s actually a massive gain of energy. When we talk about sustainability in our societies — climate change sustainability — I would argue we cannot live sustainably because our software, our collective software, is based partly on non-sustainable states. Healing is actually a way into the creation of a sustainable society. The more we heal, we use less resources to keep the past split off and frozen and numb and absent, and we allow some of the past to slowly come back, transform itself, be digested, transform itself into a bigger life — a bigger life for us and for our children.
Dr. Lisa: Taking the stuff out of the freezer, letting it thaw, metabolizing this old trauma that we didn’t even realize we were putting energy into keeping locked down — on an individual level and a societal level. Can you give us some examples of what having a lot of resources going into keeping things frozen looks like for a person?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: For example — in an intimate relationship, my partner says something and suddenly I feel it’s tight in my heart, tight in my throat, I get a headache, I feel tight in my belly. Symptoms show up. We say, “Because my partner talked to me like this, I feel like that.” But what my partner points to — however my partner talks to me — is what is already frozen inside, what is already held in tension inside. My partner doesn’t have the remote control for my heart. When I get triggered, then I feel tight or I don’t know what to say, or I feel mute, or I get very angry and enraged — and I cannot anymore be part of the relational conversation. So on an individual level, the symptoms — suddenly I feel distant or indifferent or not connected anymore — these are all symptoms where we meet the stuff that’s in the freezer.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: The same or similar colleagues at work trigger me again and again — that’s a pointer to my freezer. My own recurrent inner critic, the way I look at myself: I look at myself often through what’s not right, what needs to be fixed, what’s not good yet. Those inner patterns are preformed pathways where my past is constantly reproducing my current experience. It’s not emergent, it’s not curious. I look at myself through a spin — a spin that is not the present moment. That’s how I internalize certain criticism. That would be, on an individual level, symptoms that point me toward frozen stuff.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: On a societal level — let’s take immigration, or COVID, or any kind of bigger societal impact. Regardless of which political camp I see myself in: what’s my best contribution? How do I contribute best to a mutual ecosystem we create together that is most beneficial for all of us? In an ecosystem, if one of us throws poison into it, it affects all of us. The best example is microplastic. First we thought, “Okay, we’re throwing that stuff out somewhere.” In a global village, suddenly there is no “out.” It’s all in. It ends up in our brain. That strategy doesn’t work.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: When we go deeper, we see it’s actually the inability to stay related to one another when we have differences. When the disagreement creates tension and I reject that tension — you become “another.” You are the other.
Dr. Lisa: So if a circumstance touches on some of that old frozen stuff, and the response is to avoid or suppress, that turns into rejecting or vilifying another person as part of that defense.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Exactly. Person or group or part of society. In a time where the data speed of life becomes faster and faster, sometimes when you’re in a car that accelerates in a coherent way, you don’t feel the acceleration. The data speed keeps growing — the world’s getting faster. Our nervous systems plus our collective nervous systems need to be able to process more material in a shorter time. The combination of data speed and unresolved individual, ancestral, and collective trauma creates a lot of heat and amplifies — on social media, in the political sphere, in society — the valleys between us where these collective defense mechanisms reside that we don’t see we grew up in. The important thing with collective trauma is: it’s the water that we grew up in. We grew up in a world that was already collectively traumatized before we landed. For us, that’s normal. Some of it is emergent world, and some of it is the world when it’s hurt. I grew up in Vienna and I asked myself very often — well, it’s heavy. Something is heavy. I didn’t know as a child what I was pointing to. Only later, having seen so many groups going through these processes, I understand now what I felt. There was something like a blanket on top of everything — I couldn’t make sense of it.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: An integrated nervous system can update itself and adapt to the developmental process of the world. We can grow with the world that is growing. But the parts of me in the freezer — they don’t want to learn. They cannot learn, because trauma is stuck. Trauma is a non-updatable area in my experience, in my inner world, and in our collective inner world too — the collective trauma that we didn’t digest yet is frozen. It cannot be updated. It still lives like 200 years ago. In a world that becomes so fast — AI and technology — it bumps against these invisible structures in the collective unconscious. That creates heat and pressure, and we see the symptoms on the surface of the society. Some of what’s happening is individual, but some are also collective detox mechanisms of fears — including in the generation that asks, “Is it really worth living? What is my future?” Climate anxieties. Collective anxieties.
Dr. Lisa: The youngest generations — Gen Y, Gen Z — they are experiencing existential angst, asking “Why do I even want to participate in any of this?” There’s objectively a lot, and a lot of things feel broken and like a mess. I’d love your thoughts about where we go with this. What does the work look like? Your thoughts about the path to healing, individually and collectively?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: It starts with a little bit of a reframe. I believe that a certain capacity of healing is a citizen’s responsibility. We have been born into a world where what former generations couldn’t digest, couldn’t integrate, is kind of like: you wake up in the morning, you had a huge party in your house, everybody is sleeping somewhere, and you wake up and there’s a huge mess in the living room. Either we all say, “Let’s move out of this house because it’s a mess,” or we say, “Let’s all clean up this house and make it a nice house again.” Even if I wasn’t really part of it, what my grandparents experienced in the Second World War affects my life. If I don’t take care of it, I affect my environment, and maybe I pass on part of it to my children.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: We have enough understanding of trauma and collective trauma — it’s like when we delivered babies with our bare hands and we didn’t know there were germs on our hands. Once we discovered that washing our hands makes a huge difference, continuing not to do it is not responsible — because now we know. We know enough that we have been born into a legacy, and that legacy really affects us. There are trauma issues and complex PTSD that really need very trained therapists, a medical system, a psychological system. Yes — we need that.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: We also need — because we cannot work through the intensity of some of the collective trauma that resides in our societies through one-on-one treatments — that’s not possible. It’s too big. It overwhelms the highly trained professionals to serve the people that really need them. If we combine the highly trained layer in our society — those who know how to treat complex trauma — with an architecture of healing collectives, where we come together and create community spaces dedicated to this healing process and we teach collective skills, we can do the cleaning up of our living room together as well. We bring in teams of therapists into groups of hundreds of people. If people need one-on-one support, they can have it. As a mature citizen, part of my responsibility is also to help clean up the living room I was born into.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Like this, we de-ice — we slowly melt the collective unseen frozen stuff — and we harvest the enormous energy that is bound in our collective unconscious and use it for development. In this fast-paced world, the falling apart of old identity structures that no longer make sense — they made sense evolutionarily hundreds of years ago, but now, as we said, with plastic, there is no “out.” In a global village there is no “out.” We cannot throw anything out anymore. We need to find a way to live more sustainably and collaboratively together — and that means we heal together, and healing becomes a collective capacity. For more complex things, of course, we need professional support. Combining these two creates a real societal change — one that fits the current evolutionary moment, where we have large-scale problems: climate change, wars, inequality, mass migration. We need collective skill-building and collective resilience. As a mature citizen, I do my piece. I don’t need to do more than this, but I need to contribute my part.
Dr. Lisa: Even though I didn’t make this mess necessarily — I live here, and I need to contribute to the cleanup. What you’re really doing with your work is shining a light on the fact that we have another problem we haven’t thought about in the same way. In addition to civil unrest or climate issues or political polarization, there is this need for emotional and psychological cleanup that is really at the foundation of creating a lot of these problems — and also currently obstructing the solution. If we can understand what the work is in a different way and really change the story of what we need to be doing together in order to resolve it, we can start understanding ourselves and the world, and doing the work of healing collectively that will unlock all this emotional and psychological energy we could then apply toward working together to clean up the mess.
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Beautifully said.
Dr. Lisa: Dr. Thomas Hübl, where do people find you?
Dr. Thomas Hübl: Yeah — thomashuebl.com is my website. Pocketproject.org is one of our grassroots NGOs in Germany. The Global Restoration Institute — globalrestoration.org — is our Washington DC-based, more government-oriented NGO where we also do collective trauma work. Through these websites, people can find out much more. Thank you very much. This was a very resonant and beautiful conversation.
Dr. Lisa: Dr. Hübl’s book, Releasing Our Burdens, co-authored with Richard Schwartz — check it out.
What to take with you
Not all of it is yours.
Much of what feels like a personal flaw is inherited or collective — which makes it more workable, not less.
Trauma is frozen life.
Your defenses quietly burn energy to keep the past cold. Healing thaws it and gives that energy back.
Your triggers are a map.
When your body locks up, it is pointing at what is already frozen inside you — not at what the other person did.
It lives in the body, not just the story.
Inherited stress shows up in the nervous system and, research suggests, even in epigenetic markers.
Releasing is relational.
The past comes unstuck when it is witnessed and felt with another person in the present.
Healing scales.
What you release in yourself ripples outward into your relationships and the world you share.
How Do You Process Trauma? Healing Inherited & Collective Burdens
You have done the work. You have read the books, maybe sat in therapy, maybe figured out exactly which part of your childhood explains which part of you. And still, there is a hum underneath. A drivenness you cannot fully account for. An anxiety with no obvious return address. A heaviness you have carried so long that it just feels like you. If you have ever wondered how do you process trauma that does not seem to trace back to anything that actually happened to you, here is the short version. Some of what you carry did not start with you. That is exactly why it can feel so stubborn, and it is exactly why it can be released.
This is the conversation I had with Dr. Thomas Hübl, the trauma teacher who co-wrote the new book Releasing Our Burdens with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems. It is also the kind of work we do every day in our personal growth coaching practice. I want to give you something you can actually use, so let us get into it.
Here is the thing about an article like this one. I can give you language for what is happening, and I will. But most of the people who find their way to our team have already read the articles. They already have insight. Insight was never really the problem. The problem is that your nervous system has been running the same pattern for thirty years, and a paragraph, even a good one, is not going to override that at 9pm on a Tuesday when the old feeling comes roaring back.
So read this as a map. The actual territory — the part where you do it differently with a real person who knows your specific patterns — that is what coaching and therapy with my team actually is. The map is useful. It is just not the same as walking the ground with someone beside you.
How do you process trauma that didn’t start with you?
You start by widening the lens. The fastest way to process trauma that did not start with you is to stop assuming the whole thing began and ended inside your own biography. Thomas describes healing as one continuum that runs from the individual to the ancestral to the collective. These are not three separate problems. They create each other. Your attachment wounds and your parents’ wounds are, in his words, interdependent properties. They belong together because one shaped the other.
That reframe matters because of what it does to shame. When you believe a struggle is one hundred percent your personal failing, you fight it, and fighting it tends to lock it in tighter. When you can see that part of it is inherited — an echo coming down the pipe from people who came before you — something loosens. You can get curious instead of self-critical.
This is also where a lot of the real movement happens in coaching. Most people I work with have already done a fair amount of learning to let go of the past on their own. What they have not had is a person to help them tell which part is theirs to carry and which part they can finally set down. That sorting is hard to do alone, from inside your own life.
What is intergenerational trauma, and how does it affect you day to day?
Intergenerational trauma is the transmission of unintegrated stress from one generation to the next, and it shows up less as a memory and more as a baseline. It is the anxiety that runs a little hot, the body that braces before there is anything to brace against, the drive that never quite lets you rest. Thomas puts it simply. What our ancestors could not integrate gets passed on, and it affects us.
There is real science underneath the felt sense. A major review in World Psychiatry lays out how the effects of trauma can be transmitted across generations, including through epigenetic mechanisms that influence how stress genes are expressed (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). In one well-known study, Holocaust survivors and their adult children showed parallel changes in methylation of a stress-regulating gene, the first demonstration of this kind of preconception effect in both parent and offspring (Yehuda et al., 2016). None of this is destiny. It is a tendency, an amplifier, and tendencies can be worked with. If the family-cycle side of this is what you recognize, we go deeper into breaking generational cycles in a companion conversation.
Day to day, this often looks like an attachment pattern you did not choose. You brace for abandonment, or you go numb when things get close, or you cannot quite trust the ground under you. Those patterns are learnable in reverse, which is the whole premise of learning to heal an attachment wound. The point is not to blame your parents or their parents. It is to notice that you inherited a setting, and settings can change.
Why do I feel anxious or empty for no reason I can name?
Because the feeling is real even when the cause is not in your conscious story. When you feel anxious or empty for no reason you can name, you are usually meeting something that was frozen before you had words for it, either early in your own life or further back in your lineage. Thomas would say the symptom does not fully make sense inside your biography, and that is the clue, not a contradiction.
He has a useful image for the inner voice that comes with this. We tend to look at ourselves through a spin — a preformed lens of what is wrong with us and what needs fixing — and that lens is not the present moment. It is the past reproducing itself. If that resonates, you might recognize your own version of it in how to quiet your inner critic. The critic feels like truth. It is usually just an old recording.
One more practical thread. When you are carrying frozen stress, it gets harder to feel your own intuition, your gut sense of what is right for you. Thomas named this directly. Learning to tell intuition from anxiety is part of thawing, and it is a skill, not a personality trait. Naming the emptiness, rather than performing your way around it, is where the work with a coach or therapist on our team usually begins.
Trauma is frozen life. What is it actually costing you?
It is costing you energy, constantly, in the background. Thomas asks a question I have not stopped thinking about since. What is your freezer doing right now while you read this? It is keeping things cold. And who pays the electricity bill? You do. Trauma, he says, is frozen life. It is not frozen once and done. It is being actively held, and that holding runs on your life energy the way a freezer runs on power.
This is where his work meets Richard Schwartz directly. In internal family systems and parts work, there are no bad parts. The part of you that froze something did it for a reason — to protect you when protection was the most intelligent thing available. So the work is not to fight that part. It is to thaw what it has been guarding, gently, so the energy bound up in keeping it cold can come back to you as expression, steadiness, and aliveness.
That is a genuinely different definition of healing. Not fixing what is broken. Melting what is frozen, and reclaiming the warmth that was trapped in there the whole time.
Our free What’s Holding You Back quiz gives you a personalized read on the dimensions where you’re stuck — thinking, emotions, behaviors, relationships, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be — plus action steps to start moving forward.
Take the Free Quiz →What is collective trauma, and how does it show up in everyday life?
Collective trauma is the shared, unintegrated pain of a whole group or society, and it shows up in everyday life as a heaviness we mistake for normal. Thomas grew up in Vienna feeling something he could not name, like a blanket over everything. Only later did he understand he had been sensing the unhealed residue of history. We are born into water that was already, in his phrase, collectively traumatized, so it just feels like the way the world is.
In daily life this looks like the inability to stay in relationship across difference. When a hard topic touches something frozen in us, we tend to reject the tension by rejecting the other person. They become the other. Speed it all up with the constant acceleration of information and you get a culture that is reactive, polarized, and exhausted — which then lands back on each of us as our own stress.
The hopeful part is that this is the same machinery as personal healing, just scaled. When collective pain is witnessed and integrated, it can become wisdom and growth — what researchers call post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). The reason I bring this into a personal-growth conversation is that your own healing is not separate from the world’s. The steadier you get inside, the more you can stay in the room with people who see things differently. That is not a small thing right now, and it is a big part of what people are really working toward when they come to us.
Why reading this article probably isn’t enough
I want to be honest with you about something. The ideas here are real and they work. People release things they have carried for decades. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article believing that reading it was the work.
Here is what almost always happens. You read something like this, something clicks, you feel a little hopeful, and you make a quiet note to do it differently next time. Then next time comes, your nervous system does what it has done for thirty years, and you are back in the same loop wondering why nothing changed. You are not unmotivated and you are not broken. You are trying to override a deep pattern, by yourself, in the exact moment that pattern is loudest. That is the hardest possible time to do something new, and it is nearly impossible to do alone.
What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who can help you notice the freeze in real time and debrief after the hard moment instead of bracing for the next one. That is what working with our team is. Not lectures, not generic advice — just a real, ongoing relationship with someone paying close attention to your life. If something here landed somewhere specific, that is the signal. You can schedule a free consultation, which is genuinely just a conversation — no pressure and no commitment — to figure out what you are carrying and whether what we do is a fit. We work with coaches and therapists across a wide range of experience levels and price points, including newer coaches in our practicum, so there is usually an option for almost any budget.
How do you start releasing inherited emotional burdens?
You start small, and you start relationally. The first step in releasing an inherited burden is not excavating your family tree. It is doing your own personal work well, and then, when that reaches a limit, gently widening your attention to what you may have absorbed from the people and the world around you. Thomas is clear that the personal layer comes first and that the deepest material often needs trained, professional support. Release happens when something frozen is finally witnessed and felt with another person, in the present. That is what takes it out of its prison in time and lets it move again.
It also helps to know the shape of the road. There is a reason we map out the stages of emotional healing for people — because knowing where you are makes the process feel less like wandering and more like progress. And if you are not sure what you would even say in a first session, here is a gentle place to begin thinking about what to talk about in therapy.
Here is the one thing I would leave you with. Some of what you are carrying did not start with you, and it can be set down. You do not have to do that part alone. If any of this named something true for you, that is worth saying out loud to a real person, and a first conversation with our team is exactly for that. We will help you figure out what is yours to release and what becomes possible once you do — for you and for the people around you.
XO,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Dr. Thomas Hübl
Dr. Thomas Hübl is a teacher and trauma integration facilitator whose work bridges modern science and the wisdom traditions, with a particular focus on collective and intergenerational trauma. He is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and has taught on resilience and collective healing at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Healing Collective Trauma and Attuned, and the co-founder, with the artist Yehudit Sasportas, of The Pocket Project, an NGO devoted to integrating collective trauma worldwide. His new book, Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma, is co-written with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems. Together they map healing as one continuum and offer practices for releasing what no longer serves us.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18.
- Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bierer, L. M., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E. B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372–380.
- Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: Putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.
- Hübl, T., & Schwartz, R. C. (2025). Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma. Sounds True.
