How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website.

Parental Feelings Of Unworthiness Are Hard To Keep Out

How To Identify It

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is both a family system problem and an individual one.

You can tell if you are suffering from it by the prevalence of these symptoms both in yourself and in your extended family of origin; including grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces:

• Core feelings of unworthiness
• Perfectionism
• Self-consciousness
• Toxic guilt and shame
• Fear of being seen
• Fear of negative evaluation by others
• Debilitating social anxiety
• Fear of rejection and abandonment
• Communication patterns that prioritise thoughts over emotions
• Lack of basic emotional connection in relationships
• Lack of empathic support expressed for each other when in distress
• Parents unwilling or unable to validate or even acknowledge their children’s emotions
• Withholding of feelings
• Adult children still afraid of upsetting their parents
• Mental illnesses such as generalised anxiety, chronic depression and schizophrenia
• Illnesses based on anxiety such as anorexia nervosa
• Unexplained chronic physical illness
• Putting religious beliefs and practices ahead of family relationships
• Relying on religious doctrines of sacrifice and salvation in order to feel worthy and loved
• Burnout
• Hypervigillance
• Poor boundaries
• Lack of trust in other family members and in people generally
• Fear of conflict
• Inability to resolve familial conflict in a win/win manner
• Lack of clear direction in life, or of courage to pursue it
• Judgementalism
• Stoic individualism
• Difficulty forming secure romantic relationships outside the family
• Narcissistic parents
• Controlling mothers
• Passive fathers
• Abuse of parental power passed off as discipline
• Medically unexplained headaches & migraines
• Using work, porn, alcohol or drugs to avoid all the aforementioned pain

How To Heal It

The first step in solving any problem is to identify what the root cause is, so the first step is to recognise that Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is your underlying problem.

Since this is essentially an emotional attachment issue, forming secure emotionally connected relationships with other people is a key part of healing it. This can be challenging given that the core of the problem is that such relationships weren’t the norm in your family system.

You may not even realise that your family relationships aren’t emotionally connected, nor know what it would look like if they were. Relating to people on the basis of empathy is likely to feel uncomfortable and awkward at first because you didn’t grow up with it. I highly recommend the books Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg and Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton as good starting points.

If you are the first in your extended family system to identify this issue, you may not get much support from other family members to heal it because it is too painful for them to face. In that case it’s best to find people outside the family to connect to. Men who are secure in themselves can become invaluable allies while secure female friends can be an ideal practise ground for learning to relate to women securely on an emotional level.

Beware that while we are still carrying unhealed trauma, we are likely to attract other people with similar issues until we get it resolved. On the one hand if these people are aware of their wounding and seeking to heal it in their relationships, this can be mutually beneficial.

However if they are still in denial or unconsciously looking for an outlet for anger or rage, these relationships can just perpetuate the destructive patterns we experienced in our family of origin. Practise setting healthy emotional boundaries with everyone and walk away from toxic relationships.

Learn to heal yourself so you can forgive everyone who taught you, both consciously and unconsciously, that you are unworthy. Truly forgiving your parents and other childhood sources of negative self-belief sets you free from their unconscious unworthiness.

Break negative thought patterns about not feeling good enough with physical movement, exercise, qi gong, yoga and laughter. This will help release the stress of feeling unworthy from your nervous system and rewire it so that you can be free to experience yourself as the worthy, deserving person you were born to be.

Being honest with other people that I was experiencing this issue was key to healing it for me. If this idea brings up too much anxiety for you, start by talking to a therapist.

For a more extensive solution to Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma, check out The Confident Man Program.