How Multi-Generational Stress is Passed On

Just read this article in the New York Times on the possibility how stress, soft-wired into a mother's DNA, can be passed on to subsequent generations of her children:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/can-children-inherit-stress.html?_r=0

Certainly a lot of food for thought when applied to the burden of 20th century history from WWI to WWII to the Cold War and Vietnam.

 

These results seem to confirm what Bruce Lipton believes about DNA developing into different proteins according to what environment it finds itself in, doesn't it, Forest? These results also seem to upset what Lipton calls current medical dogma: i.e. that the only sequence of development runs from DNA to RNA to protein in a very deterministic way.

As Inna Gailer-Solomon and his colleagues report in the NY Times article linked above:

"Traditionally, scientists have understood that the ova transfer only genetic information (that is, DNA) from parent to child. But our hunch was that the ova were also transferring “soft-wired” information — specifically, information about the stress experience — by way of the molecule coded by the gene. And indeed, we found that at birth, the offspring of stressed female rats already had more of this same molecular product in their brains than did the offspring of controls. This suggested that they may have 'inherited' the effect of their mothers’ stress."

From this, it sounds to me as if DNA possesses what might be described as a sort of rudimentary but very sophisticated form of adaptive intelligence. These new findings are indeed intriguing when applied to man's historical development as a social animal. 4000 years of war as a form of organized aggression must have impacted all our behaviors for generations. No wonder the young ex-patriots like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris after the bloodletting of WWI were labeled the "Lost Generation"!

 

You find the best stuff, Bruce. This one on non-DNA stress is really fascinating.

Mothers can carry stress for generations and their infants inherit them.

I know my mother was under a lot of stress, and so was her mother.
Both came here from poverty in Austria to poverty in America.

 

Makes you wonder too how much collective stress passed on for generations via changes in the DNA shape the national characteristics of a race, a people or a whole nation, doesn't it? How much of what we call the American character or personality has really been shaped by the stresses generated by the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War may not be just a dry academic exercise in intellectual history but a biological fact as well. In any event, this article really gets you thinking, doesn't it?

 

This is one of my favorite topics, good job Bruce. It could determine many things and bring about many answers about everyone being tied together through karma or creation, or both, or more. Sins of the father type thing.

 

Did you ever see that B&W 1930s movie, "Bad Seed", Steve?

This article sounds a lot like it confirms such vitalist theories as those of Henri Bergson about the existence of an Élan vital, a creative intelligence driving and linking all life. People scoffed at Bergson at the time, but it doesn't sound too far from Bruce Lipton's discoveries about the way DNA adapts and changes according to its environment or what Inna Gailer-Solomon and his colleagues have noted. Certainly there are different national characters that have emerged out of collective traumatic events in history. This sort of speculation is endless!

 

That article in the New York Times on generational stress is very interesting. It can go way back.

 

"In Adam's fall we sinned all"?

There is little doubt that German National Socialism, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism all had deep roots in the previous generation's traumatic experiences in the trenches of World War I. But most explanations for this have been political and economic. Perhaps, heredity and genetics played a part too?

 

Fascinating!

 

This explained to me why infants and young kids got cancer. I missed my niece.
Thanks for sharing Bruce.

 

Great article. Thanks, Bruce.

 

Oh, Forest….you mentioned something that has saddened my mama's heart. Every time I see my daughter reach for a heating pack ("I slept on my neck wrong!") or the time my boy had severe shin splints (my worst and most persistent TMS symptom), I have thought about the "contagious" aspect of TMS. My oldest, who never complains of pain, developed pink eye…after having had a cold. At the time he HATED his job and even told me he liked being sick so he didn't have to go to work. He got a lesson in TMS at that time.

As I work on retraining my brain, I try to speak into my kids as much as possible. Thankfully, they don't have the years of training (complete with the misguided help from so many medical professionals) that I've had and they are more receptive to mindbody connections.

 

You just made my day, Forest. THANK YOU and a big hug too

 

When I got out of the army serving two years between the Korean and Vietnam Wars,
I lived for a while with an army friend and his wife in Madison, Wisconsin, in a condo.
One day while going to our unit I saw into the living room of the neighboring unit.
A young father and mother (from Germany) were on the floor with their young son and daughter,
all listening to classical music on the phonograph. I thought how wonderful, the parents were
introducing their kids to beautiful classical music, maybe to balance the rock and roll (but I never
heard that from their unit).

It makes me think how great it would be for parents and kids if they did meditation and
deep breathing together. The kids could learn calming and relaxation and mindfulness.

Parents might have to drag their kids to join a family quiet hour or even 15 minutes,
or chain them down, but wouldn't it be helpful for everyone?

 

One of the great benefits of having a good coach or a guru.

 

Certainly true for alcoholism too, Forest.

Makes you wonder too, Forest, about alcoholism and drug addiction in parents and alcoholism and drug addiction in their children too, doesn't it? I know they've tried and tried again - largely unsuccessfully - to find a alcoholism gene or an addiction gene that's passed on generation to generation. But perhaps it's this previously unknown multi-generational stress transference process that accounts for alcoholics and addicts having alcoholic and addicted kids? Of course, there's a lot to say for mimetics at work too: kids imitate the superego role models they encounter in the home. But there certainly is a long string of alcoholics on my maternal side of the family - stretching back as far as I can tell to Denmark and Norway in the 1860s - that had no immediate contact with each other, separated in fact by thousands of miles of ocean. The link? Their mothers who were the daughters of alcoholics and womanizers. They came to America to erase history in the "brave new world", but couldn't erase their DNA's reaction to stressors earlier in the family history?

 

Bruce, I come from a long a distinguished line….of alcoholics. I've told my kids from a very young age that they need to be aware of their family history as they get closer to drinking age. (It sickens me that so many kids will hit the bars on their first day of being the legal drinking age like it's some rite of passage. Thankfully, as far as I know, none of my kids friends are drinking.) I've read a lot on the nature/nurture views but the bottom line is there are no clear answers. Why did so many of my siblings fall into alcoholism/drug addiction and I didn't?

So many variables…personality, relationships, opportunities, etc. The genetic component is a fascinating one to consider. Especially in light of Bruce Lipton's work.