When Family Stories Continue to Live Within Us

Sometimes, certain forms of suffering seem to reach beyond what we consciously know about our own history. A persistent sense of guilt, an excessive feeling of responsibility, recurring relationship patterns, or anxieties that seem difficult to explain can leave us wondering where they truly come from.

In psychotherapy, experiences like these often raise a delicate question: does everything we carry belong entirely to us?

Of course, psychological life is rooted first and foremost in our own experiences. Our relationships, losses, disappointments, achievements, and personal history all shape who we become. Yet some patients describe a feeling that parts of their emotional world cannot be fully understood through the events of their own lives alone.

For several decades, clinicians and researchers have explored how experiences such as trauma, loss, displacement, silence, and adversity may continue to influence families across generations. Contemporary research on intergenerational trauma suggests that difficult experiences can shape family relationships, patterns of communication, emotional regulation, and the stories families tell about themselves.

The mechanisms involved remain complex. No single explanation can account for the many ways people inherit strengths, vulnerabilities, beliefs, or fears. Current research emphasizes the importance of considering biological, psychological, relational, cultural, and social factors together. These perspectives remind us that transmission is never destiny.

Long before many of these contemporary studies emerged, the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok proposed a powerful metaphor: the psychic crypt.

The crypt should not be understood as a proven psychological structure in the scientific sense. Rather, it is a clinical concept, a way of thinking about experiences that could not be fully processed or symbolized. A traumatic loss, an unbearable shame, a family secret, or a painful event may sometimes remain psychologically sealed off, as though placed in a locked room within the mind.

In this perspective, what cannot be spoken does not necessarily disappear. It may continue to influence family life indirectly, shaping relationships, expectations, or emotional atmospheres without ever being openly discussed.

Abraham and Torok also introduced the idea of the transgenerational phantom. This concept does not refer to anything supernatural. Instead, it describes the possible psychological effects of experiences that remained unspoken, unresolved, or unrepresented within a family. What one generation cannot put into words may sometimes reappear in another through recurring questions, persistent anxieties, family silences, or patterns that feel difficult to understand.

Interestingly, these ideas resonate with contemporary findings on intergenerational trauma. Recent research suggests that the transmission of suffering often occurs through multiple pathways, including family narratives, attachment relationships, caregiving patterns, emotional climates, and shared meanings. At the same time, these same pathways can also foster resilience, adaptation, and healing.

I think of a patient who felt intense guilt whenever a major personal or professional success occurred. Nothing in her immediate life seemed sufficient to explain the strength of this reaction. Over time, she became increasingly interested in the stories of the women who had come before her, several of whom had been forced to abandon their aspirations under difficult circumstances. This did not establish a direct causal link. Rather, it provided a meaningful framework through which she could better understand the tension she experienced between personal fulfillment and loyalty to her family’s history.

I also think of a man who felt responsible for the wellbeing of everyone around him. For years, he viewed this constant vigilance as a simple personality trait. Gradually, exploration of his family history revealed several significant losses that had rarely been discussed. Therapy did not uncover a hidden secret. Instead, it created space to reflect on how certain relational positions and emotional responsibilities may sometimes be passed from one generation to the next.

It is within this context that some therapists speak of invisible loyalties.

Developed most notably by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, the concept refers to the often-unspoken bonds that connect us to our family history. These loyalties are not inherently problematic. They frequently contribute to our sense of belonging, continuity, identity, and commitment to others.

Yet at times, an implicit loyalty to an unresolved suffering, a family silence, or an old wound may limit a person’s freedom to live fully in the present. Someone may find themselves carrying responsibilities, fears, or burdens that are only partly their own.

The aim of therapy is not to search systematically for hidden secrets, nor to assume that every difficulty originates in previous generations. Rather, it is to create a space where different possibilities can be explored thoughtfully and without certainty.

As Jean Laplanche suggested, some psychological experiences become thinkable only within the presence of another person capable of holding what remains enigmatic. André Green similarly described how certain aspects of psychic life first appear as absences, gaps, or discontinuities before they can be represented and understood.

From this perspective, therapy is less an investigation into the past than a process of meaning-making.

Sometimes what seemed like fate gradually becomes a story.

What once felt foreign becomes more understandable.

What remained trapped in silence begins to find language.

The crypt may not be a tomb.

Perhaps it is better imagined as a locked room whose existence had long gone unnoticed.

And sometimes, in the course of a therapeutic encounter, a small amount of light passes through the keyhole.

That light does not necessarily reveal the secret itself.

More often, it reveals the possibility of living more freely in the present, without remaining unconsciously tied to a story that is finally becoming possible to think about.

References

Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1978). The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis (N. T. Rand, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1978)

Beeghly, M. (2024). Toward a multi-level approach to the study of the intergenerational transmission of trauma: Current findings and future directions. Development and Psychopathology, 36(5), 2433-2438.

Boszormenyi-Nagy, I., & Spark, G. M. (1973). Invisible loyalties: Reciprocity in intergenerational family therapy. Harper & Row.

El-Khalil, C., Caculidis Tudor, D., & Nedelcea, C. (2025). Impact of intergenerational trauma on second-generation descendants: A systematic review. BMC Psychology, 13, Article 668.

Franco, F. (2023). Intergenerational transmission of trauma. Journal of Health Service Psychology, 49(4), 185-190.

Green, A. (1993). The work of the negative. Free Association Books.

Howland, M. A., & Glynn, L. M. (2024). The future of intergenerational transmission research: A prospective three-generation approach. Development and Psychopathology, 36.

Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on otherness. Routledge.