Healing Intergenerational Trauma with Nature Experience
Healing Intergenerational Trauma with Nature Experience
Because intergenerational trauma is inherited across generations, it can be fully healed by creating an environment where additional trauma does not occur for multiple generations. It can be healed even in the context of continuing stressors with the tools, inner resources, and support needed to care for symptoms and heal the root cause of the intergenerational trauma on physical/somatic, emotional, mental, cellular, and ancestral levels.
Support and resources for trauma survivors and those living with intergenerational trauma are essential for preventing future traumas.
This means both providing education about trauma, trauma responses, and intergenerational trauma to providers, teachers, and parents, as well as addressing systemic issues that perpetuate trauma.
It also means acknowledging how intergenerational trauma impacts those who have not personally experienced a traumatic event. This understanding is the first step in treating intergenerational trauma in individuals as well as preventing future intergenerational trauma.
Advisability of Reimagining Systems
Intergenerational Trauma Informed Care; A Natural Systems Framework
Intergenerational trauma is when traumatic effects (a result of; relationships, environment, accidental, natural disaster, cultural, or historical events) are passed across generations without exposure to the original event (Kleber, 2019; Sophie et al., 2021). Intergenerational trauma is commonly referred to as the transmission of intergenerational stress.
Edge Science/Fine-Mapping
Key benefits of taking treatment into nature with a focus on environment first are in the details. Nature provides opportunity to gain in depth self-awareness, gaining skills to change patterns that lead to dysfunctional patterns of health at a physiological level that imprints habit of behavior, neurological impulse, and genetic expression. Malinakova et al. (2020) found that differentiating between guilt and shame through self-awareness helps manage emotional response; applying this concept to systemic work in nature furthers the development of building a detailed level of self-growth. Traditional treatment alone often leads to a shame cycle that continues re-traumatization and perpetuates intergenerational stress/illness as individuals settle into complacency, accepting their role of sickness as their lot in life. Working from a foundation of natural systems theory applies principles of self-differentiation to begin to change patterns of health that are passed through the generational system at a very detailed level. For example, the Transgenerational Script Questionnaire (TSQ; Gayol, 2004) helps untangle the family tree to understand how narratives both negative and positive have been passed through the generations and assigned as roles to individuals unconsciously, which may be impacting the way individuals view them self and the identity role they assume. Processing through these narratives using experience in nature can bring greater clarity and awareness of harmful patterns and provide choice, and confidence of what to accept as an identity role; not blindly accept whatever dysfunctional identity one has been given.
Nature experience solidifies understanding and confidence of self to gain confidence and move forward from unhealthy inherited patterns and roles. Tools such as the Differentiation of Self Inventory (DSI; Orazietti et al., 2022) are used to understand levels of self-differentiation as it relates to levels of healthy functioning within contexts of attachment, relationships, and emotion regulation. This helps gain an understanding of how the impact of individual stress impacts historical family patterns and how environment can reduce the impact of individual stress to improve family patterns of health. Čepukienė & Neophytou (2024) found that higher levels of differentiation of self as it relates to an individual’s family system and relationship can increase healthy self-functioning in children. Opportunities for gaining self-differentiation are plentiful with nature experience. Differentiation of self-promotes a healthy balance between autonomy and togetherness within the family and cultural system, with an ability to express oneself and move through healthy developmental stages, moving past stuck development that is a result of the social and family transmission process. This helps to encourage new pathways of confidence that are created with a conscious effort towards a differentiation of self. This type of life course intergenerational development improves health intergenerationally, which significantly impacts the transmission of inherited patterns of health.
Nature based research helps to understand how reducing systemic barriers, gaining inclusive nature experience, and reducing the impact of systemic trauma can improve health. Co‐production principles and collaboration between multiple levels of care help develop nature based intergenerational trauma‐informed services with a focus on prevention of re-traumatization within the family, societal, and healthcare delivery system. Our goal is to seek grant funding for projects to better understand how collaborative efforts between individual, community, and public service levels can help build best practices, to implement intergenerational trauma informed nature based care on a wider scope; specifically, to gain leverage within the healthcare delivery system, to enforce prevention of re-traumatization due to systemic injustice. Our goal is to bring awareness for the need to increase efforts of nature based intergenerational trauma informed care within the hospital system, with a wider reach at the organizational level; to address systemic barriers and empower professionals the capacity to implement nature based intergenerational trauma informed care in a way that does not cause harm. We work to address structural and systemic barriers that maintain systemic oppression. Our research focuses on performance-based relationships as it relates to implementing nature-based intergenerational trauma informed practice to reduce the transmission of intergenerational stress within multiple levels of care using a natural systems framework.
Significance
Social determinants of health can influence chronic disease in positive and negative ways. When opportunities are limited to make healthy choices, risk factors increase. When individuals have healthy choices available to them and barriers to health care and education are reduced, the chance of developing a chronic condition decreases. Oak Mountain Outdoor Health Care provides opportunity for healthy choice to promote wellness and education. We also continue to decrease barriers to health by providing support services and access to quality care and education through policy, system, and environmental improvements compared to traditional treatment alone.
Chronic diseases are defined as conditions that last for longer than 1 year; that limit daily living and quality of life and require ongoing medical attention. Chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. They are also leading drivers of the nation's $4.5 trillion in annual health care costs. Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease, and 4 in 10 have two or more chronic diseases. Many preventable chronic diseases are caused by behaviors such as; poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and excessive alcohol use (CDC, 2024).
More research is needed to gain a better understanding of the epidemiology of chronic conditions, mental illness, and multiple chronic illnesses by providing estimates of overall burden and identifying high risk subgroups as well as competent, BFST focused interventions.
Bowen Center for the Study of Environment, Epigenetics, and Self-Differentiation
Increase intergenerational self-awareness by promoting development of differentiation of self to increase individual, social and relational health outcomes to reduce perpetuating cycles of illness using the foundation of education, environmental accommodations, nature and natural systems theory.
Phenomenological Study
(1) An increase in a differentiation of self, decreases impact and transmission of intergenerational trauma effect in context to mental illness and chronic disease? (2) Interventions from a natural systems theory perspective combined with spending time in nature increases differentiation of self and improves opportunities for new healthy neural pathways.
Grounded Theory
Studying 10-day nature-based expeditions in a variety of contexts helps to understand how to increase nature-based care delivery and competence in treatment combining traditional treatment with nature modalities. 10-day nature-based expeditions can increase efficiency and effectiveness in prevention and management of chronic disease by increasing the intensity of treatment while minimizing disruption of everyday responsibilities. 10-day nature expeditions would require missing only one week of work which may be beneficial to consumers, employers, and insurers.
Calls to Action
We believe the environment is crucial in reducing the risk of reinforcing disease. Our aim is to understand physical and mental chronic illnesses and how we can improve opportunities of healthy choice through the study of epigenetics, intergenerational transmission process of trauma/stress, nature experience, and natural systems theory.
References
Anderson, J. R. (2020). Inviting autonomy back to the table: The importance of autonomy for healthy relationship functioning. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 46, 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft. 12413
Fishbane, M. D. (2019). Healing intergenerational wounds: An integrative relational–neurobiological approach. Family Process, 58(4), 796–818. https://doi org.library.capella.edu/10.1111/famp.12488
Krippner, S., Barrett, D. (2019). Transgenerational trauma: The role of epigenetics. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 40(1), 53-62. https://library.capella.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly journals/transgenerational-trauma-role-epigenetics/docview/2235644653/se-2
Marx, V., & More, K. R. (2022). Developing Scotland’s first green health prescription pathway: A One- stop shop for nature-based intervention referrals. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 817803. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.817803
Neil, A.L., Pryor, A., Kneebone, J., Flies, E.J. (2023). Outdoor mental healthcare: What, who, why and where to? Australasian Psychiatry. 31(6):798-805. doi:10.1177/10398562231211110
Papero, D., Frost, R., Havstad, L., & Noone, R. (2018). Natural systems thinking and the human family. Systems, 6(2)https://doi.org/10.3390/systems6020019
Sophie, I., Andrea, M., Goodyear, M., & Foster, K. (2021). Intergenerational trauma and its relationship to mental health care: A qualitative inquiry. Community Mental Health Journal, 57(4), 631-643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00698-
