Transgenerational transmission is the continued working of an unresolved event (a concealed death, a guilt, a loss) beyond the generation in which it happened: as a feeling, pattern, or symptom in children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren who never experienced the original event themselves. A child becomes sad for no reason. An adult sabotages every relationship the moment it grows close, without being able to find a reason in their own biography. The reason then does not lie in their own life, but two or three generations back. The term itself comes from trauma research; what it names, systemic constellation work has known for decades under a different name: entanglement. For Gwendolin Kirchhoff, this is bound up with a claim that reaches beyond psychology: that the individual is not a closed system, but part of a larger web of relationships that holds together across generations. Whoever wants to understand how a feeling can travel across generations must first ask who actually counts as part of this web. The answer reaches considerably further than everyday language about family would suggest.
#What is transgenerational trauma?
Transgenerational trauma is, in the non-clinical sense this entry uses, an unresolved, often concealed event in a family (a death, guilt, a loss, an experience of violence) whose weight does not stay with those who lived through it but is passed on to their children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Those born later then carry a feeling, a pattern, or a symptom for which they find no cause in their own biography. What is passed on is not the memory of the event but its unresolved tension, and it has its effect even when no one in the family knows of it. Systemic constellation work describes the process as taking on a burden: out of love, a child takes on its parents’ unresolved suffering, quietly convinced it can resolve it, and it cannot, because the suffering is not its own.
By trauma, this entry means an event that has not yet found its place in a family’s web of relationships. That is why systemic work, as this entry shows further down, starts not from understanding but from the recognition of what happened, and from an order in which every member of the family has their place, the forgotten and the excluded included. Where clinical symptoms are present, they call first for proper clinical assessment and care; the section on where philosophical accompaniment ends, at the close of this entry, deals with exactly that. If, on the other hand, you want to look at your own family history in this light, family constellation in Berlin is where Gwendolin Kirchhoff offers this work; it is not a treatment for the effects of trauma.
#What Is Transgenerational Transmission?
Transgenerational transmission differs from genetic inheritance at one decisive point: it transports no biological trait, but an unresolved relational event that works through a family’s lived behaviour, language, and silence, not through genes. In systemic constellation work, one relationship within the family system stages another, and the emotional charge of an unresolved event transfers onto someone born later who knows nothing of that event themselves. This is clearest with family secrets.
“A typical secret you find in very, very many families, one that gets passed on diffusely, is sex or abuse.”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Systemic Family Constellation (After Bert Hellinger), an Introduction — SYMPOSIUM, 2024
The word diffusely hits the matter precisely: no one has to know the secret for it to work. A concealed abuse, a disowned child, a debt never spoken aloud — all of this produces an effect that persists until someone names what happened. What gets passed on is not the memory of the event, but its unresolved tension.
This effect is only conceivable if the human being, as the philosophical tradition behind this practice assumes, is at their core a relational being: every feeling is a relation between two people in a shared space, not a purely inner-psychic state of the individual. If that is true, a feeling that arose within a family system cannot stop at the generational boundary. It travels to wherever there is still room for it in the web of relationships.
This also shifts the question of what even counts as family. In order work, a family system does not belong fully together only once someone was born and known. Every life that began counts, even if it was never spoken of. This explains why a grief with no cause in your own life can still be entirely real: it does not belong to the individual, but to the system they come from.
#How Does Transgenerational Transmission Work?
Transgenerational transmission works through a very concrete psychological process that Bert Hellinger called burden-taking: a child loves its parents so unconditionally that it unconsciously absorbs their unresolved suffering, in the quiet conviction that it can resolve it (cf. Weber, 1993). This taking-on is not a conscious decision and cannot be undone through education, because it arises out of love, not out of ignorance. But what the child takes on, it cannot resolve — it is, after all, not its own suffering but someone else’s (cf. Entanglement and Resolution).
This mechanism becomes clearest where an entire generation could not process an event — after war, displacement, or an act of violence within the family. Whoever is born a grandchild or great-grandchild into such a family often takes on a task they cannot solve at all.
“And that those born later often try to resolve things they cannot resolve, …”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Systemic Family Constellation (After Bert Hellinger), an Introduction — SYMPOSIUM, 2024
The pattern shows up in individual sessions again and again in the same shape: someone born later fights a battle that was already decided long ago, because no one in their family gave them permission to end it.
How far this mechanism reaches can be read from who, in systemic practice, counts as part of the family at all. It is not only the living with whom you have had contact.
“Quite classically, following Hellinger, that includes your father, your mother, and all your siblings. And that means the stillborn and the miscarried and the siblings given up for adoption too — they all count fully.”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Systemic Family Constellation (After Bert Hellinger), an Introduction — SYMPOSIUM, 2024
A child who was never born belongs to the system, on this view, just as much as a sibling who lived for fifty years. If this member is not mourned or mentioned, a gap opens that later generations unconsciously try to fill — with a grief that none of them can trace to themselves.
What matters here: the mechanism itself is neutral. What flows between generations is not necessarily a burden. Hellinger’s systemic view also knows the positive form of the same movement: the blessing passed from elders to the younger, with no obligation for anyone to give it back.
“And that is the blessing that moves forward between the generations, that gets lived out fully and completely in these roles.”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Systemic Family Constellation (After Bert Hellinger), an Introduction — SYMPOSIUM, 2024
Only when a secret, an exclusion, or an unatoned guilt interrupts this natural flow does transmission tip from blessing into burden.
#Does It Come from Childhood or from the Ancestors?
For Gwendolin Kirchhoff, most of what people have going on has less to do with childhood than with the fate of their ancestors. That fate, in turn, has to do with the power of empires. She says so in her conversation with Elisa Gratias on TransitionTV (October 2026): “That has to do with the fate of the ancestors,” and that in turn with “the power of the empires” (Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 43:22–43:35; transl.). The passage does not mention clinical conditions or diagnoses.
At this point she refers to Hermann Schmitz and his book Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle: for the Greeks, she says, feelings are in space. When Achilles is angry, anger has seized him, a force in space that takes hold of him. That, she says, is first of all a different way of handling feelings from that of a particular type of psychological individual who searches their childhood for everything (Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 42:53–43:22; transl.).
She describes the power of the empires as what has rolled over everyone on this planet, driven by whatever spirits. It affected all the lines in one form or another, and they had to take a stance towards it, by evasive moves or by taking the initiative; all of that was passed on (Kirchhoff, 2026, Wie frei sind wir wirklich?, 43:32–43:54; transl.). “We carry deformations,” she says, which come from this very, very old power structure in which we live (ibid., 43:53–43:59). Reducing all of this simply to childhood, as is very often done, is a major point of criticism she has of therapy culture (ibid., 44:00–44:07). This says nothing about whether psychotherapy is called for in a particular case; that is the subject of the closing section on where philosophical accompaniment ends.
In an earlier conversation with Elisa Gratias about Homer’s Odyssey (TransitionTV, September 2026), Gwendolin Kirchhoff speaks of the ancestors whom the great wars took hold of, from the Thirty Years’ War to the First and Second World Wars. Those conscripted into them were, as she sees it, “seized by a spirit” and carried off there (Kirchhoff, 2026, Das Schicksal ist größer als wir, 39:14–39:49; transl.). Many who, in hindsight, set themselves above their ancestors and their fate and think they know better about everything are, for her, at the point where “the deeper spirit of fate does not take hold in them.” They could “bow a little before them,” be far more modest and see that they, too, cannot prevent many things (ibid., 39:49–40:10). See also the entry on fate.
#Is Transgenerational Transmission Scientifically Proven?
At the psychological and behavioural level, transgenerational transmission is well established: that burdensome family experiences transfer to the next generation through upbringing, attachment behaviour, language, and implicit conduct counts as settled in trauma research. What remains disputed, by contrast, is a narrower and further-reaching thesis: that such experiences are additionally inherited literally, biologically, through epigenetic markers — passed to children and grandchildren through the germline, without those descendants ever having experienced the original event themselves. Individual animal models show effects of this kind across several generations. Whether this transfers to human beings, and through which molecular signalling pathways such an inheritance would even run, remains open among scientists; clear, replicated evidence for genuine biological inheritance of traumatic experience in humans is so far missing.
This distinction is more than a scientific fine point. It decides how seriously you may take your own history without overstretching it. That a child feels and carries its parents’ unresolved suffering is a psychological and systemic observation that keeps recurring in constellation work, regardless of whether a complete biological explanation is ever found for it. Whoever confuses scientific uncertainty on one level with arbitrariness on the other does a disservice to neither the research nor the people affected.
#How Does an Inherited Trauma Show Itself?
An inherited trauma usually shows itself not as a memory, but as a feeling with no recognisable cause in your own biography: a groundless fear, a grief larger than the current loss, a mistrust that pre-empts every new closeness. With transgenerationally passed-on suffering, it is often a feeling that does not spring from your own story at all.
Repetition is also characteristic: a relational pattern that shows up across several generations in a similar shape — the same kind of separation, the same withdrawal at the same point in a relationship, the same kind of loss. If you recognise this repetition in yourself, your parents, and your grandparents, you usually already have the most important clue: the pattern is older than your own life story.
Physical symptoms with no clear medical explanation also belong to this picture, as does a diffuse feeling of guilt that cannot be pinned to any concrete action of your own. Some of those affected also describe an unexplainable pull toward themes like war, loss, or guilt that has no basis in their own life story, as if the interest were finding them rather than the other way around.
None of these signs alone proves a transgenerational transmission. Only in connection with the family history — a concealed death, an exclusion, an unatoned guilt — does the individual symptom become a legible pattern.
#How Do I Resolve a Transgenerational Trauma?
A transgenerational trauma cannot be resolved through understanding. Most guides end here with the advice to seek professional help, without saying what actually happens in that help. Systemic constellation work offers a more precise answer: resolution happens not through diagnosis or explanation, but through recognition, and recognition is something other than reconciliation.
Reconciliation presupposes that someone forgives, or overcomes a moral judgement. Recognition does not. It merely establishes that something happened, and gives it back its place in the family’s history, without approving of it and without minimising it. Precisely with transmission across several generations, this difference is decisive: a great-grandchild cannot reconcile with a great-grandfather they never knew, and does not have to. But they can recognise what happened in the family, and stop unconsciously continuing it.
In family constellation work, this process becomes bodily and experiential. Representatives take up the positions of the family members involved (including those long dead), and the tension repressed within the family system becomes visible in the room, often startlingly clear to everyone present. Out of this visibility, resolving sentences are spoken: short, unexplaining phrasings such as I see you or I honour your fate, that bring what was silenced back into the order of the family. How such a session unfolds in detail is described in the piece on the individual session; what remains as inner movement afterward is treated in the piece on what happens after the constellation.
One reason constellation work approaches transgenerational transmission from a different angle than conversation alone lies in a premise that sounds unusual at first: in systemic thinking, the dead count as equally effective toward the living as the living do toward each other. A conflict never settled between a great-grandmother and her family can be recognised at the level of those who were involved at the time, even though none of them are still alive. This movement may contradict everyday logic. In Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s understanding, what is recognised among the dead reaches those born later: it releases them from a task that was never theirs to begin with.
Not every transgenerational burden needs a constellation. If you are asking yourself whether this applies to your own history, sometimes a clear look at your family history is enough: who in your family was silenced, excluded, or forgotten? Which story was never told to its end? Often, simply putting into words what previously only worked diffusely already changes something. But where the burden sits deep, or repeats across several generations, more than reflection alone is needed: then the burden needs to become visible in the room, not just understood in the head.
#Where Does Philosophical Accompaniment End?
Transgenerational transmission is not a clinical term, and working with it does not replace trauma therapy. Where a trauma shows up as an independent clinical syndrome (for instance as post-traumatic stress disorder with flashbacks, hyperarousal, or dissociative states), care belongs in clinical psychotraumatology, not in philosophical accompaniment or family constellation work. The systemic perspective and clinical trauma therapy do not exclude each other; they answer different questions. Trauma therapy asks how a person can process a suffered experience within their own lived experience. Family constellation asks what place an event has not yet found within a family’s web of relationships. Whoever shows acute clinical symptoms should first seek help where those symptoms are properly treated. Systemic work on the family history can be useful afterward or alongside it, but it does not replace clinical care. Naming this boundary is not a sign of caution — it belongs to the matter itself: whoever does not know where their own practice ends cannot work reliably within its limits either.
#Sources
- Hellinger, B. (1994). Ordnungen der Liebe: Ein Kurs-Buch. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme. English edition: Love’s Own Truths: Bonding and Balancing in Close Relationships, Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, 1998. On the ordering principles of belonging, rank, and balance in family systems.
- Hellinger, B. (1996). Anerkennen, was ist. Munich: Kösel. English edition: Acknowledging What Is: Conversations with Bert Hellinger, Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, 1999. On recognition as the precondition for resolution.
- Weber, G. (ed.) (1993). Zweierlei Glück: Die systemische Psychotherapie Bert Hellingers. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme. On burden-taking and the practice of constellation work.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Systemic Family Constellation (After Bert Hellinger), an Introduction” — SYMPOSIUM, 28 August 2024 [Kwd1x1RzNoE].
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “«Wie frei sind wir wirklich?» Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Fremdbestimmung, Wut & die Macht der Gedanken” (“How free are we really?”) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 10 October 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW7B162RPs (in German; quotes 43:26, 43:33, 43:53).
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “«Das Schicksal ist größer als wir» Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff über Christopher Nolan und das Leben” (“Fate is greater than we are”) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 18 September 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smlQFizE8Lg (in German; quotes 39:44, 40:00, 40:03). The Manova version Die Odyssee (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjtervR5tR4) has different timestamps.
- Schmitz, H. (1998). Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle. Ostfildern: Edition Tertium.
