Abstract
The question of whether an individual's traumatic experience can be inherited, and in what way, has mostly been metaphorical, unscientific, or even biblical, referring to the concept of an inherited original sin. In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of evidence for a biological heredity of trauma, such as poor parental care or life-threatening events.
I deliberately emphasize biological inheritance because it has generally been assumed that similar experiences are transmittable, albeit unconsciously, "only" socially, i.e. by mirroring the behavior of parents or the community in which the individual lives. Traumatic experience can set off complex biological changes in our bodies that are passed on to future generations through our sex cells, not through specific mutations in the genome, but through genetic adjustments regulation.