A family body : We inherit and re-experience, stress, emotions and trauma in our cells

The follow excerpt follows on from the previous one I shared.  This is the first part of Chapter 2 in Mark Wolynn’s book on multigenerational trauma and outlines recent epigentic research and other body related research on biological changes to cells in those who experience trauma that is then passed down often leading to entrenched startle responses and other hyper reactivity.

The history you share with your family begins before you are even conceived.  In your earliest biological form, as an unfertilised egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother.  When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries.

This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body – three generations sharing the same biological environment.  This isn’t a new idea: embryology textbooks have told us as much for more than a century.   Your inception can similarly be traced in your paternal line.  The precursor cells of the sperm you developed from were present in your father when we was a fetus in his mother’s womb.

With what we are learning now from the Yehuda studies and others, about the way stress can be inherited, we can begin to map out how the biological residues of traumas your grandmother experienced can be passed down with far reaching consequences.

There is, however, a significant biological difference in the evolution of egg and sperm.  Your father’s sperm continued to multiply when he reached puberty, whereas your mother was born with her lifetime supply of eggs.  Once her egg cells were formed in your grandmother’s womb, the cell lining stopped dividing.  So twelve to forty or so years later, one of these eggs, fertilised by your father’s sperm, eventually developed into who you are today.  In either case, both precursor egg and sperm cells, science now tells us, can be imprinted by events with the potential to affect subsequent generations.  Because your father’s sperm continues to develop throughout adolescence and adulthood, his sperm continues to be susceptible to traumatic imprints almost up until the point when you are conceived.  The implication of this are startlingly vast, as we see, when we look at emerging research.

…. our genetic blueprint is merely the starting point, as influences from the environment, from as early as conception, begin to shape us emotionally, psychologically, and biologically, and this shaping continues thorugh our lives.

The pioneering cell biologist Bruce Lipton demonstrates that our DNA can be affected by both negative and positive thoughts, beliefs, and emotions  Dr. Lipton spent decades, as a medical schood professor and research scientist, investigating the mechanisms by which cells receive and process information… he demonstrated that signals from the environment could operate through the cell membrane, controlling the behaviour and physiology of the cell, which in turn could activate or silence a gene…. (his research shows)….. how cellular memory is transferred in the womb from a mother to an unborn child.

According to Lipton “The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, hope among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of her offspring.”  During pregnancy, nutrients in the mother’s blood nourish the fetus through the wall of the placenta.  With the nutrients, she also releases a host of hormones and information signals generated by the emotions she experiences.  These chemical signals activate specific receptor proteins in the cells, triggering a cascade of physiologic, metabolic, and behavioural changes in the mother’s body as well as the foetus.

Chronic or repetitive emotions like anger and fear, can imprint her child, especially – how the child will adapt to its environment…Lipton explains “When stress hormones cross the placenta… they cause fetal blood vessels to be more constricted in the viscera, sending more blood to the periphery, preparing the fetus for fight/flight behavioural response. In that sense, a child who experienced a stressful in utero environment can become reactive in a similarly stressful situation.”

(other findings show) that babies exposed to increased cortisol in utero, as early as seventeen weeks after conception, exhibited impaired cognitive development when they were evaluated at seventeen months old.

(The findings of Thomas Verney, psychiatrist show) that mothers under extreme and constant stress are more likely to have babies who are premature, lower in average weight, hyperactive, irritable and colicky.  In extreme instances, these babies may be born with thumbs sucked raw or even with ulcers.

Lipton stresses the importance of what he terms conscious parenting – parenting with the awareness that, from preconception all the way through postnatal development, a child’s development and health can be profoundly affected by the parent’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours.  Parents that did not wish to have a child, parents that are continuously concerned about their own and consequently the offspring’s survival, women who sustain physical and emotional abuse during their pregnancy all represent situations where adverse environmental cues surrounding the birth of their child can be passed on to the offspring.

With the knowledge that emotions can be biologically communicated and the fact that three generations share the same biological environment of the womb, imagine this scenario:  A month before your mother is born, your grandmother receives the devastating news that her husband has been killed in an accident.  With a new baby to prepare for, and little space to grieve the loss, your grandmother would likely submerge her emotions into the body she now shares with her daughter.  You and your mother would know something about that grief from a place deep inside you, a place all three of you share.

It’s within this shared environment that stress can cause changes to your DNA.

..scientists have discovered that chromosomal DNA – the DNA responsible for transmitting physical traits, such as the colour of our hair, eyes, and skin – surprisingly makes up less than 2 percent of our total DNA.  The other 98 percent consists of what is called noncoding DNA (ncDNA) and is responsible for many of the emotional, behavioural, and personality traits we inherit.

Scientists used to call it ‘junk DNA” (groan!!) thinking it was mostly useless, but they’ve recently begun to recognise its significance.  Interestingly, the percentage of noncoding DNA increases with the complexity of the organism, with human having the highest percentage.

Noncoding DNA is known to be affected by environmental stressors, such as toxins and inadequate nutrition, as well as stressful emotions.  The affected DNA transmits information that helps us prepare for life out of the womb by ensuring that we have the particular traits we will need to adapt to our environment.  According to Rachel Yehuda, epigenetic changes biologically prepare us to cope with the traumas that our parents experienced.  In preparation for similar stressors, we’re born with a specific set of tools to help us survive.

On the one hand, this is good news.  We’re born with an intrinsic skill set – an environmental ‘resilience’, as Yehuda calls it – that allows us to adapt to stressful situations.  On the other hand, these inherited adaptations can also be detrimental.  For example the child of a parent who, early in life, lived in a war zone may inherit the impulse to recoil in response to sudden loud noises.  Although this instinct would be protective in the event of a bomb threat, such a heightened startle response can keep a person in a highly reactive state even when no danger is present.  In such a case, an incongruity would exist between the child’s epigenetic preparedness and the actual environment.  Such a mismatch could predispose someone to stress disorders and disease later in life.

These adaptive changes re caused by chemical signals in the cells, known as epigentic tags, which attach to the DNA and tell the cell to either activate or silence a specific gene. “There’s somethng in the external enviornment that affects the internal environment, and before you know it the gene is functioning in a different way,” says Yehuda.  The sequence of DNA itself doesnt change, but because of these epigenetic tags, its expression does.  Research has shown that epigenetic tags can account for differences in how we regulate stress later in life….. certain epigenetic tags escape reprogramming process(demonstrated in earlier research to occur) and are in fact transmitted to the precursor egg and sperm cells that will one day become us.

To be continued.