My First Grader Handed Me A 9-Word Note. When I Read It, My Stomach Dropped.

Motherhood complicates my own mental health because my responsibility extends beyond my own mind. My heart lives outside my body at all times — inside my little girl and my little boy. I feel their joy as much as I feel their pain. I feel what they feel, and I feel responsible for helping them understand their own emotions.

That night, after I put both kids to bed, I fell into the internet hole every parent knows: the desperate search for answers to impossible questions. I wanted to understand how to help Millie and how to help myself. Was this just a feeling? Or something deeper?

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the term “emotional inheritance” — the idea that trauma can be passed down through families, even if we don’t talk about it. It rang true for me, not in a clinical way, but in the way truth sometimes echoes in your bones. In this phrase, I felt my panic validated. 

In her book “Emotional Inheritance,” psychoanalyst Galit Atlas explores how past experiences, from interpersonal rifts to large-scale tragedies, can echo through families, shaping the emotional lives of next generations.

Another expert, neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda, adds a biological dimension to the phenomenon. Her research shows that trauma can leave actual chemical markers on DNA, altering how genes are expressed and predisposing future generations to conditions like depression and anxiety, even if they haven’t lived through the trauma themselves. Apparently, trauma can be biologically encoded in the body’s molecular code. If this is true, it complicates matters for my own motherhood. Trauma may not be just what my children hear or witness — it could also be what they are made of.

As a parent, I often feel both entirely responsible for my children’s emotional well-being and completely powerless to protect them from the weight of what they may have inherited.

“Everything that’s ever happened to a person shapes their parenting,” author Emily Adrian writes in “Daughterhood.”

That’s a terrifying thought. But also a motivating one. Because if trauma can echo through generations, maybe healing can, too.

Some days I turn to my personal “motherhood doula,” Dr. Becky — a clinical psychologist, mom of three, and my favorite Instagram follow for parenting truths that don’t make me feel worse about how I’m momming. 

She says things like, “Your child’s big feelings don’t make you a bad parent. They make you a good one.” Usually, when I am parent-spiraling, her phrases help pull me back to center.

One thing she advises that I keep coming back to is: Don’t protect your child from hard feelings. Make space for them. Normalize them. Name them. I believe this is how we raise kids who are resilient, not because they never feel pain, but because they know how to feel it and keep going. This is true regarding big, capital-T trauma, but also the everyday annoyance we encounter.