The COVID-19 pandemic punted many of us into a foreign world where our past adaptations failed. Suddenly, even grocery shopping felt like a high-speed game of Pac-Man, as we outran masked ghosts of former friends when they transformed into foes the moment they got within arm’s reach.
I could feel the collective anxiety grow all around me. Except for one place: my psychiatry clinic. People whom I’d been seeing for years for severe and persistent post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, complex trauma, addictions, chronic self-harm and suicidality, depression, and anxiety disorders, people who’d spent their lives hearing from society that they’re “too sensitive” or “overreacting.,” these were the people who suddenly thrived.
I should know, as I was one of them.
After years of treatment for my many anxiety disorders, turns out all I needed was to be dropped into a deadly pandemic—that is, an environment that matched the setting of my super-reactive threat alarm system.
I rocked Covid. At least at the start. I worked long hours of overtime leading a mental health response to support our frontline workers, creating and presenting stress first aid workshops to groups across my province, all while developing the daily ritual of clearing a smooth path of open doors from outside the house into the shower for my partner, a doctor working on the Covid wards, who stripped off every piece of contaminated clothes in the backyard shed.
It all felt oddly calm and normal. Yes, we were at high risk of dying, I thought at the time, but I was deeply at peace with it all. Finally, the rest of the world validated my anxiety. Finally, everyone else could see what I’d been preparing for my entire life: that the world was a terrifying place.
I struggled with the pandemic not at the start, not when we spent every free moment consumed by clips of New York and Italy’s devastation, calling on our community to “flatten the curve,” counting down the days or hours until Covid would hit us too. It was later that I crashed, when the first, and then the second, and third waves of Covid didn’t take shape in my community. Perhaps it was part luck, part living on a sparsely populated island, and part sharing spaces with people who supported masks, social distancing, and vaccines, but my community didn’t have the case counts of the rest of the world.
The pandemic became an abstract and uncertain threat, just like my years of free-floating anxiety, no longer the monster you can see and grab and conquer, but the subtle suspicion that something’s not okay, the quiet buzz in the background of a mosquito ready to bite, yet with no target to swat.
I’ve always been anxious. My kids came screaming out of the womb anxious. As I look through the generations on both sides of my family, I see different shades of mental health struggles, but their base tone is always anxious.
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I grew up living with my grandmother who was born right after her Ukrainian mother fled the violence and discrimination of Russia with six children in tow. She raised me on a steady diet of cabbage rolls, pickled herring, constant worrying, and interminable grief, as she first lost her husband, many friends, and then her only daughter when I was young. We didn’t talk much about our family history. But I trust that there must have been good reasons for our anxiety alarms to be set this way. The defining feature of trauma is that it goes unspoken; it’s not expressed in words as much as burnt into our bodies.
Instead, the stories I learned as a kid were of my grandmother’s resilience. How she left the family farm as a young teen to travel to New York alone to train as a hair stylist. How she came back to Canada and started her own business. How she thrived during the Depression and war, rowing her boat to work every day, training women to take over the roles of all the men who left to fight overseas. How she slept with such sturdiness as she let me cuddle right up to the heat of her hardened, cracked skin each night, when my fear of the world made her bed my only safe haven. Give my grandmother hardship, and she flourished.
The Transmission of Traumatic Stress Between Generations
The sensitivity of our anxiety alarm is set to adapt to both the environment of our own life experience and the learnings from our ancestors. Our ancestors’ experiences, including their exposure to physical and emotional stress, don’t alter just their own anxiety alarm set points, but those of future generations, says psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, founding director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University.
If our ancestors’ lives were exposed to discrimination, war, poverty, violence, colonialism, slavery, abuse, or anything that creates a lack of safety, then we are lucky to come out of the womb screaming and ready to fight such hostile environments. We don’t need to learn the hard way from our own experiences, as this could be fatal. Instead, our marvelous system can pass on adaptations through the generations.
Evolutionary psychologists say we’ve evolved to survive, not to be happy or calm. If we think back to our predecessors, living thousands of years ago, looking out in the distance, and thinking, “Is that a big, scary beast that can eat me or just a bush?” It wasn’t the chill, effortlessly confident ones who survived. Those naturally selected to become our ancestors were the stressed-out buzzkills who could imagine the worst in any situation. The most anxious, untrusting, and pessimistic people were the ones who managed to pass on their genes to the next generation.
We’re also wired for connection. Threats to our social status—getting kicked out of the tribe—are equally threatening to our survival. Feeling “not enough,” comparing ourselves to others, fears of rejection—these have also been naturally selected for survival.
But it’s not just the natural selection of anxious genes that’s at play. Rachel Yehuda, psychiatrist and director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, explains how traumatic stress is transmitted to children in a variety of ways: through epigenetics, in utero, and behaviorally.[1]
Epigenetics focuses on how we turn on or off our genes—without changing our actual DNA code itself—by adding or removing signals to our DNA in response to our environments.[2] We also pick up cues in the womb to help us adapt to our environments and survive long enough to reproduce ourselves. If a mother is living in a dangerous environment, her stress system will adapt by becoming more sensitive. Babies take cues from being exposed to their mother’s stress hormones in utero and adapt to have a more sensitive alarm system themselves to potential danger.[3] In this way, they arrive in what they predict to be a hostile environment ready to cope with its threats. They experience more anxiety and false alarms, yes, but since the odds of danger are probably high, it’s worth it.
Then they learn from their caregiver’s capacity to connect with them about how sensitive they need to set their smoke alarms.[4] If their caregivers seem preoccupied with safety or paying rent, they will adapt their system to help them survive this tougher world. If their caregivers appear calm and carefree, and thus able to attend to them in a more secure way, then they are cued that their stress response doesn’t have to be set so high, and they too get the privilege of being less reactive to stress.
One of the biggest challenges in acknowledging intergenerational trauma is that it could stigmatize the survivors’ descendants, as it changes the narrative from resilience and “survival at all odds” to one of being broken, says Yehuda. But what if these changes observed in future generations weren’t dysfunctional, but highly adaptive?
“The implications of these findings may seem dire, suggesting that parental trauma predisposes offspring to be vulnerable to mental health conditions,” Yehuda says.[2] “But there is some evidence that the epigenetic response may serve as an adaptation that might help the children of traumatized parents cope with similar adversities.”
Being free from anxiety is not a personal triumph; it’s a privilege. It means both you and your ancestors had the luck of living in secure environments, blessed with both physical and emotional safety. But there’s also a lot of intergenerational wisdom, passed on through our anxiety responses, that helps us survive our threatening world.