An honest page about families
Patterns run through families: ways of coping, of going quiet, of holding on. This page is about where those patterns come from, what they do across the generations, and how they start to change. It ends with a private reflection you can take at your own pace.
Private by default: nothing here is uploaded, there is no account, and you can stay completely anonymous.
These pages talk about childhood adversity and family trauma. Read at your own pace, skip anything, stop and come back another day. Support lines are at the bottom of this page.
Sound familiar?
If a few of those landed, keep reading. None of it means you are broken. It means there is a story, and stories can be understood.
Across the generations
The effects of childhood adversity run in families. That much is well established: children of parents who carry trauma face higher risks, through parenting, environment and biology combined.
Early research has even found biological markers that differ in the children of Holocaust survivors. That finding is association, not proven inheritance, and scientists are still working out whether and how such marks pass between generations.
What is not in doubt is the ripple: the effects of what happened reach past one lifetime, into the next one's childhood, relationships and health.
Research base: Felitti et al. 1998; Yehuda et al. 2016; Zhou and Ryan 2023.
What the research shows
In the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, 62% of adults reported experiencing at least one type of child maltreatment, and 39% more than one type. You are not the exception you might think you are.
The relationship is graded: the more categories of childhood adversity, the higher the risks of depression, substance use, heart disease and lung disease. On average, people with six or more such categories died almost twenty years earlier.
These are patterns across whole populations, never a prediction for one person. And that is exactly why mapping matters: seeing your own history clearly is the beginning of changing what it passes on.
Sources: ACMS 2023; Brown et al. 2009; Felitti et al. 1998; Merrick et al. 2019.
The inheritance nobody names
Families hand down more than names and birthdays. There are subjects that go quiet. Roles that get assigned early: the strong one, the peacekeeper, the one who does not need anything. Ways of coping that look like strength from the outside and cost a lot from the inside.
None of this is blame. The people who passed these patterns on were carrying their own. It is inheritance of a different kind, and like any inheritance, you get to decide what you keep.
The part that matters most
“The majority of people who experience childhood maltreatment do not develop PTSD. Recovery is the norm, not the exception.”
Prevention and connection work too. In trials of early childhood programs, rates of child abuse and neglect fell by around half. The evidence points at the same levers again and again: safety, supportive relationships, caring adults, and therapy.
The brain stays changeable across life. Researchers frame its responses as including resilience and compensation, not only damage. Your history is an explanation, never a sentence.
Research base: Widom 1999; Merrick et al. 2019; Teicher 2016; CDC protective factors.
What recovery looks like
Recovery usually happens in relationship: with a therapist, in your family, among friends. A steady, confidential relationship where the story can finally be told, at whatever speed feels safe.
The traumaroots app gives the story somewhere to go: an interactive family map you can build alone or with family, where the patterns become visible on the screen instead of circling in your head, and where a view can be shared securely with a therapist if you choose to.
Or start smaller. The reflection below takes ten quiet minutes and ends with words you can bring anywhere: into a session, into a conversation with family, or into the app.
A private reflection
Write as much or as little as you like. Everything saves automatically in this browser, so you can leave and come back.
Start with who was there. Only what you know, and gaps are allowed.
Now look across the generations. You are watching, not judging.
Finish by pointing at what you would like to see more clearly.
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