Survival is in Our Bones: Understanding the impacts of generational trauma

When we talk about generational trauma, we usually start with the generations we knew—our parents, our grandparents. Trauma feels more manageable when it lives within living memory. But trauma doesn’t begin where memory begins. It begins where survival was required.

If we zoom out far enough, we can see something else entirely: the sheer force it took for our lineage to exist at all. Not just to live, but to endure.

Irish immigration and generational trauma: survival patterns carried across the Atlantic and passed down through families.

My maternal lineage traces back to Scotland and Ireland. One of the largest drivers of Irish immigration to the United States was the Great Famine of 1845–1852, when Ireland was under British rule. Potatoes were the mainstay of the Irish diet. When the crops failed, catastrophe followed. But under colonial rule, food that was available continued to be exported. Millions of Irish people starved to death while watching food leave their country.

Most Irish Catholics did not own the land they farmed. When rent couldn’t be paid—famine or not—they were evicted. Homes destroyed. Villages emptied. Laws restricted voting, property ownership, and education. Language, customs, and faith were shamed. Families lived with the constant knowledge that what little they had could be taken at any moment. Authority was not safety—it was something to fear.

This kind of life shapes a nervous system. It teaches silence. Endurance. Obedience. It teaches people how to survive when survival is never guaranteed.

Those who came to America knew it would not be easy. But they also knew it was the only option. There was no widespread famine. There was paid labor—on railroads, in factories, in cities. They arrived carrying generations of being treated as “less than,” carrying shame imposed on their language, their beliefs, their bodies. They expected discrimination.

They formed tight-knit communities with fierce loyalty. Not because they were closed off, but because loyalty had kept people alive when systems did not. Suspicion of outsiders wasn’t hostility—it was protection.

For the atrocities they escaped in Ireland, they exchanged them for a different kind of brutality in America.

Most Irish immigrants settled in port and industrial cities like New York and Boston. They lived in tenements—crowded, dark, and unsafe. Multiple families often shared a single room. There was no indoor plumbing. Waste accumulated. Fires were common. Buildings collapsed. Privacy was scarce. Safety was never assured.

They took the jobs no one else wanted. They dug canals. Built railroads. Worked factory floors for brutal hours. Wages were low and unstable. Injury often meant starvation. “No Irish Need Apply” was not metaphor—it was policy. Irish people were openly dehumanized, blamed for crime, disease, and moral decline.

Disease spread quickly. Cholera, typhus, tuberculosis. Infant and child death was common. Many women buried multiple children. Grief became routine. Loss was expected. There was no room to fall apart when survival demanded you keep going.

Men endured constant physical danger and were expected not to speak of it. Alcohol became a culturally accepted way to numb pain that had no language. Women worked as maids and laundresses, vulnerable to exploitation, while becoming the emotional backbone of their families and suppressing their own distress. Children learned early not to take up space, not to need too much, not to show weakness.

Over time, patterns took root. Overwork became virtue. Emotional restraint became love. Conflict avoidance became safety. Loyalty to family became absolute—even when relationships were harmful. These were not character flaws. They were strategies.

Sound familiar?

When we talk about generational trauma, we often stop with our parents or grandparents. But what about their parents? And theirs? We are not as far removed from this history as we imagine. My lineage is Scotch-Irish. My great-grandfather worked for the railroad. My grandmother was born during the Great Depression. Alcoholism and self-abandonment run deep in my family history—on both sides.

It’s tempting to locate the origins of my own self-abandonment in my parents alone. But that explanation is too small. I am not simply the product of parents who chose self-abandonment. I am the product of generations who did what they had to do to survive—people for whom tending to the self was a luxury they could not afford.

This is why the current awakening around generational trauma matters. When we understand that these patterns were once necessary, we can stop shaming ourselves for carrying them. We can see our behaviors not as personal failures, but as inherited survival responses that no longer need to run the show.

We are here because our ancestors endured all of this and lived. We are descendants of people who had nothing—who came seeking a better life and were used and abused because of who they were. Survival got us here. But survival doesn’t have to be the only thing we pass on.

Healing generational trauma isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about honoring the survival that made our lives possible—and choosing, with intention, to build something gentler from it.