By Prerna Menon, LCSW, CCTP, co-founder of Boundless Therapy
Many people move through life with a familiar but hard-to-name feeling: Something hurts, but I can’t fully explain what or why. They describe a pain, a deep ache, a looming dread, a quiet, persistent nag. Sometimes it lives in their chest. Sometimes it settles in their throat. Often it moves through their gut – like a weight they’ve learned to carry. A familiar and yet unknown companion.
We often try to reason with this feeling, seeking to uncover its origin. It must be rooted in a breakup! A career stressor! Some events I can’t remember from last week! A recent failure! But for many – particularly those from historically marginalised and traumatised communities – this pain they carry does not neatly trace to a moment or event in their lifetime.
Instead, it manifests as a score to their life’s soundtrack: grief without a specific loss, hypervigilance without a clear threat, guilt without any wrongdoing, worry without any stressors. This common yet underresearched experience is best understood through the lens of generational grief.
Generational grief is grief that is not personally incurred but rather, historically inherited. It consists of emotional pain that existed amongst older generations and is carried down by nervous systems, families, and cultures. It is not hyperbole, or imaginary, or symbolic, or exaggerated. It is real, scientific, embodied, and moulded by history.
So, What is Generational Grief?
Generational grief is the emotional residue of losses experienced by previous generations that were never addressed, processed, or mourned. These losses may include, but are not limited to, violence, poverty, famine, displacement, forced migration, colonisation, forced abandonment of culture, war, and severing of land, community, and language. When the priority is survival, grief that is postponed doesn’t disappear – it is deferred for later.
How Grief Is Inherited Through Behaviour and Belief
Generations that follow often inherit this grief not as a crystallised memory, but rather as a pattern or unconscious influence. This may manifest as hyper-responsibility, cultural guilt, fear of instability and change, emotional restraint, second-guessing, and a sense that safety, rest, and pleasure must always be “earned”.
The Invisible Weight of Unnamed Grief
Unlike personal bereavement of a loved one, generational grief is ambiguous and unnamed. One might say, “Nothing bad happened to me! So I’m good!” while living their days with chronic stress, guilt, agitation, fatigue, or numbness. This low-grade humming of panic, stress, and danger is what is outlined as generational grief.
When Grief Is Suppressed, It Becomes Transmitted
Transgenerational (Generational) grief commonly arises when previous generations lacked the luxury of time, permission, or even resources to grieve, resulting in a cumulative, repressed grief passed down through family systems (Grief Recovery Method, 2018).
Transgenerational Grief and Intergenerational Trauma: How They Connect and Overlap
Transgenerational grief is intertwined with intergenerational trauma, though the two are not synonymous. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines intergenerational trauma as “the transmission of trauma or its psychological consequences from one generation to the next. This transmission can occur through relational dynamics, belief systems, emotional regulation patterns, and possibly epigenetic mechanisms that affect gene expression rather than DNA itself” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2023).
Shared Symptoms, Shared Survival Patterns
What matters is not debating definitions, but rather recognising outcomes. Symptoms of intergenerational trauma, like chronic stress and anxiety, shame, hypervigilance, depression, attachment struggles, and hyper stress-reactivity, often overlap with the lived experience of generational grief. Grief becomes ingrained in how families handle emotions, how they communicate, and what is considered “allowable” to feel and experience.
How Unspoken Grief Becomes Family Law
In many immigrant and marginalised families, grief is rarely ever named or discussed. Instead, it is woven into social and familial rules: be grateful, work harder, rest is earned, make that emotion smaller, don’t complain, just keep going, don’t pause.” Although these rules once had a protective function, over time, they become suffocating.
Generational Grief Across Communities
General grief is not localised to one specific culture or region. It emerges from silencing or neglecting collective trauma rather than facilitating repair.
Historical Trauma in Black, Indigenous, and Jewish Lineages
Black Communities
In Black communities, segregation, the legacy of slavery, and present-day structural racism have been correlated to chronic stress and grief that goes beyond individual lived experiences into collective experiences (Cleveland Clinic, 2022).
Indigenous People
Indigenous peoples continue to live with the consequences of forced displacement, cultural erasure, and colonisation.
Jewish Families
Jewish families also have a long documented history of the emotional and psychological impact the Holocaust caused across multiple generations.
The Shared Legacy of Unheld Grief and Inherited Resilience
Across these diverse communities and contexts, there is a common theme: grief that was never given space. Grief that could not be safely held long enough to be processed, and instead was passed down to present-day generations. Descendants of these communities now bear both unresolved pain and hard-won resilience.
How Generational Grief Manifests in South Asian Communities
In South Asian households, generational grief is normalised and often forgotten. Many of us are raised with stories that emphasise duty, obligation, endurance, and sacrifice. On the other hand, things like emotional expression, vulnerability as a foundation for connection, dedicated mourning, and openness are undervalued. The qualities outlined below are not shortcomings, but rather adaptations to collective trauma and suffering.
Generational grief might show up as:
- A chronic sense of guilt when prioritising rest, pleasure, play, or fun.
- A lingering fear of instability despite identifiable external successes
- Emotional detachment and distance
- Fear of vulnerability
- Pressure to be: “Rational, logical, practical.”
- Struggles with identifying personal goals and ambitions outside of familial expectations
Exploring the Historical Roots of Generational Grief in the South Asian Community
The Partition of 1947 is the most significant perpetrator of generational grief in South Asian families. Now you might be thinking, “But that was so long ago!” But was it? It has been less than 100 years since this occurrence, and the ripple effects are felt today in first- and second-generation families. The violent, hasty, and completely unplanned division of British India displaced over 14 million people and resulted in widespread loss, terror, and hardship. Families pushed out of their homes, forced to abandon land, and rebuild lives in a new region, all amidst disarray and unpredictability.
How Historical Trauma Lives On in Descendant Generations
Research on this period of history suggests that the trauma experienced by those who lived through partition did not end with them. Rather, its traumatic imprint appears in descendants and subsequent generations as emotional repression, a fear of instability, and an overemphasis on survival over expression (Qureshi et al., 2023). Layer onto this famine, migration stress, the pressures of diaspora life, colonial exploitation, global assimilation – many first-gen immigrants carry immense grief rooted in loss of homeland and identity, and continue to have little space to process it due to the need to just survive.
Layers of Displacement, War, and Diaspora Stress
South Asian intergenerational trauma also has roots in other repeated large-scale upheavals—Partition (1947), the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), the Sri Lankan Civil War, the expulsion of South Asians from East Africa (1972), and multiple wars in Afghanistan. Despite this, there’s been relatively limited research focused specifically on how these collective traumas get transmitted within South Asian families.
Now For Some Relief: Breaking the Cycle – What Healing Actually Requires
Healing the wounds of generational grief does not look like rejecting culture, resilience, family, or tradition. It looks like expanding our definition of resilience. Expanding it to include vulnerability, grief, tears, sadness, helping, being helped, and connection.
Naming the Inherited Pain
Breaking the cycle starts with demystifying generational grief and naming it for what it is. Recognising that not all of our suffering stems from personal failures, shortcomings, or pathology. Therapy is one way folks can begin to distinguish between earned guilt and unearned guilt.
Healing Without Blame or Re-Traumatization
Most importantly, healing does not have to look like identifying blame or reliving trauma. It involves building emotional language, engaging in meaning-making, increasing one’s window of tolerance for feelings and vulnerability, and building new relational dynamics in the present day.
Simple, Accessible Ways to Loosen the Grip of Generational Grief
This process doesn’t have to be instantaneous or dramatic. It is a series of small steps, repeated over and over again.
This might look like:
- allowing sadness without rushing to rationalise it.
- questioning inherited norms and rules that pair rest with laziness or weakness with emotion.
- recognising guilt as a mere signal, not a comment or command to act.
These recommendations may feel insignificant, but they are not. They symbolise a departure from living in survival mode toward a more intentional, peaceful, and humane way of living.
From Survival to Compassionate Awareness
Generational grief reminds us that being human is more complex than just existing, that mental health does not exist in a vacuum, and that we are moulded by our families, histories, cultures, and collective experiences that go far beyond memory.
Healing as Evolution, Not Erasure
Naming this reality can be profoundly liberating. It allows us to approach our inner and outer worlds with more compassion and less self-criticism, and empowers us to pursue healing as a non-linear journey that is not a rejection of the past, but rather, an evolution of it.
References:
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Intergenerational trauma. APA Dictionary of Psychology.
- Bay Area CBT Center. (n.d.). Healing generational grief.
- Cleveland Clinic. (2022). What is generational trauma? And how you can break the cycle.
- Grief Recovery Method. (2018). What is transgenerational grief?
- Integrative Psychotherapy. (n.d.). When the grief you’re carrying is not your own: Epigenetics, family constellations & inherited family trauma.
- Psychology Today. (2025). The Partition of 1947 and intergenerational trauma: Exploring the psychological impact on generations of South Asians.
- Innate Counselling & Psychotherapy. (n.d.). Echoes of partition: Generational trauma in South Asian families.
- Qureshi, F., Misra, S., & Poshni, A. (2023). The partition of India through the lens of historical trauma: Intergenerational effects on immigrant health in the South Asian diaspora. SSM – Mental Health, 4, Article
