Generational Trauma Quotes

“Jesus can always reject his father,
But he cannot escape his mother's blood.
He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers,
But he'll never escape what he's made up of.”
― Ethel Cain

“If people bear the trauma of their ancestors, doesn’t it follow that they also bear their rhapsodies? If there is generational pain passed down, mustn’t there also be generational joy? If there are family curses that drop through time, mustn’t there also be family blessings that do the same?”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“That I can’t protect you from my terrible places that I still go, can’t help but go because no one protected me, no one saved me, no one ever held out their hand and walked me away. But I’m trying to save you, Sunshine. I’m trying in my broken way.”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her.
Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she's never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.”
― Rivers Solomon, Model Home

“when your mother is your first love, you can search to the ends of the earth and never find any love comparable.

when your mother is your first heartbreak, no love will ever fill the void of feeling so unloved by her”
― Rose Brik, My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage

“I was now coming to realize that my ability to receive love from others was linked to my ability to receive my mother's love.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“I had always craved a close relationship with my father, yet neither he nor I knew how to make it happen.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“To these things she belonged and would always belong by right of those past generations of Gordons whose thoughts had fashioned the comeliness of Morton, whose bodies had gone to the making of Stephen. Yes, she was of them, those bygone people; they might spurn her--the lusty breeders of sons that they had been--they might even look down from Heaven with raised eyebrows, and say: 'We utterly refuse to acknowledge this curious creature called Stephen.' But for all that they could not drain her of blood, and her blood was theirs also, so that do what they would they could never completely rid themselves of her nor she of them--they were one in their blood.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“Not every wound makes noise. Some bleed into the soil, into the stories we pass down. Healing begins with listening.”
― Lawrence Nault

“All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us all the time. Happiness is not an individual matter. As long as the ancestors in us are still suffering we can't be happy, and we will transmit their suffering to our children and their children.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

“We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.”
― Carmel Mc Mahon, In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

“So many of us have histories of trauma that come from generations of people forced from our land, bent and twisted by patriarchy, slavery, and genocide. If we simply fire those unable to carry those histories, those who perpetuate harmful lessons they were forced to learn, we will lose.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“My mother was a storm
a sky filled with dark clouds
she could threaten
or just burst open”
― Diana Ferrus, I've Come To Take You Home

“I was now cow coming to realize that my ability to receive love from others was linked to my ability to receive my mother's love.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
― Terry Real, Relational Parenting, Raising Healthy Boys and Girls

“أحيانًا يثبت الآباء أنهم في حاجة إلى تربية جديدة”
― Naguib Mahfouz, قشتمر

“It’s often observed that individuals within the same family bear striking resemblances, passing down features such as the curve of a mouth or the hue of hair, even the warmth of a smile from one generation to the next. Curiously, though, mortals very rarely inherit the memories of their ancestors. This absence of memories makes it all too simple, at times, for one to overlook or disconnect from their heritage, as if the threads of lineage and legacy can be easily loosened by the passage of time. And the essence of one’s forgotten heritage continues to flow within each person’s veins like poison.
Excerpt from The Book of Betrayal, Müneccimbaşı Sufi Chelebi’s Journals of Mystical Phenomena ”
― Ova Ceren, The Book of Heartbreak

“I mean what the fk I say and say what the fk I mean! They hate me because they ain’t me! I’m like a toddler and an elder put together! I SAY WHAT’S ON MY HEART AND MIND. IT’S LONELY BEING COMPLETELY HONEST ALL THE TIME! HOWEVER, THOSE GENERATIONAL CURSES WILL DEFINITELY END WITH ME AND MINE!”
― Constance Delores Burrell

“I will be the architect of my destiny."

Poem : Breaking the Cycle”
― Raji Naidu, I am enough - My observations on the journey back to me

“During the terror era there were hundreds of ways in which people of color could commit a social transgression or offend someone that might cost them their lives. Racial terror and the constant threat created by violently enforced racial hierarchy were profoundly traumatizing for African Americans. Absorbing these psychosocial realities created all kinds of distortions and difficulties that manifest themselves today in multiple ways.”
― Bryan Stevenson

“Remembering your past and dealing with it will no doubt be expensive. But I'm telling you, forgetting costs more.”
― Tabitha Bird, A Lifetime of Impossible Days

“Jede Familie hat ihre Geheimnisse, denke ich. Ihre Mythen, Legenden, Traumata. Manches bleibt unausgesprochen, anderes wird aufgeblasen oder falsch erinnert. Wir können nicht immer mit hundertprozentiger Sicherheit sagen, dass alles stimmt, wie es erinnert, wie es erzählt wird. Wir können uns aber entscheiden, Fragen zu stellen, uns die Version der Erinnerung anzuhören, die unsere Verwandten bereit sind zu erzählen. Mehr bleibt uns nicht. Und am Ende geht es vielleicht mehr um den Moment des Erzählens dieser Geschichten. Darum, einander begegnet zu sein, den Schmerz und gleichzeitig das Glück, am Leben zu sein, zu teilen, miteinander, in dem Moment.”
― Sarah Levy, Fünf Wörter für Sehnsucht

“Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing-the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter's private parts, soiled her daughter's thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. *She* might have to work in the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If her love took on the contours of patriarchy and white supremacy, if her love was violent or brutal, so was the world in which she was trying to help me survive... still, I understand how abuse and violence can turn into grotesque proxies for love.”
― Julia Lee

“It would be foolish to say that the mutiny that led to the massacre of hundreds, their limp bodies lying across Matilda's corridors, began with Aster, who after all was only a woman, a small and largely unliked woman, whose heart was no more prone to thoughts of violence than any other who'd endured the decades of trauma that characterize all who lived in the low decks. She was stubborn and recalcitrant, but so were many. Like any tidal matter, a mutiny only had a middle.

The night in question, the night a storyteller might falsely call the beginning, Matilda percussed. Aster couldn't shut away the ship's metallic effervescence as she traveled back to her quarters from the Bowels, so instead she feed off the resultant overstimulation. There were worse things than being a motherless child. Without a past, Aster was boundless. She could metamorphose. She could be a shiny, magnificent, version of herself.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Educating White People (Sonnet 2272)

The average colored person is ten times
smarter, wiser, braver, and stronger,
than most white people, not because
we are genetically superior,

but because, when an entire planet
is rigged in favor of white colonials
over the black, the brown, the latino,
arab, indian, chinese, turk, and what not,
we have to be exceptional to survive.

White people can be mediocre,
and still respected, glorified even,
but rest of us have to be Ramanujans,
Rumis, Naskars, just to be regarded as human.

Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites,
not because it's genetic, but because, like
white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes,
or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational
persecution, and any brain forced to endure
persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse
of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites, not because it's genetic, but because, like white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes, or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational persecution, and any brain forced to endure persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“The cycle ends with me. I am the interruption hell didn’t see coming.”
― Dr. Angela L. Hood

“Those stolen girls are dead now. One killed herself a few years after coming home. The other girl, your maternal grandmother, had Maggie. When you hear the words 'historical trauma' or 'generational trauma,' it's because of places like this. And people in power today who still won't acknowledge the things that happened there.”
― Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind

“Ultimately, it’s not enough to simply understand where we’ve been. We also have to consider where we are going. If we want to heal, that means we must learn to move beyond the roles of victim and perpetrator.”
― Lorena Saavedra Smith, Awaken Your Roots: Reclaim Your Ancestry and Sovereignty by Heeding the Jaguar’s Call