Intergenerational and Transgenerational Traumas, Epigenetics, and Reincarnation

Von Ward (2008) states, “For a psychologist, the concept of personality means a consistent set of psychological patterns that shape the individual’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It may also be thought of as the combination of the cognitive, feeling, interpersonal, and creative aspects of being human” (p. 95). If a psychological and emotional trauma and its resulting suffering is not resolved, studies have shown that it can transfer through one or several generations to the next through emotional resonance and, eventually, genetic memory.

For the journalist Tori DeAngelis (2019), who wrote the article “The Legacy of Trauma” on the website of the American Psychological Association, the individual receives from her family a conscious and unconscious heritage. This legacy can pass on horizontally through intergenerational transmission and vertically through transgenerational transmission. Intergenerational traumas transfer from members of the same family who know each other and are still alive, whereas transgenerational traumas are more invisible because they come not only from family members whom the individual did not know, but also from family secrets. This includes not only missions, beliefs, habits, expectations, but also visible and invisible family loyalties. According to Yael Danieli (2016), a senior psychotherapist and founder of the International Center for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, the lack of resolution may “Render immediate reactions to the trauma chronic. In the extreme, survival strategies generalize to a way of life and become enduring posttrauma adaptational styles. These adaptational styles will thus shape the survivor’s family life and, in turn, their children’s upbringing, emotional development, identity, and beliefs about themselves, their peers, their societies, and the world … [subsequently] the parent’s fixity becomes the child’s biopsychosocial milieu.” (p. 2)

According to DeAngelis (2019), “depending on how they are transmitted through silence, hope, fear, hostility, mistrust, minimization of suffering, or victimization … the transgenerational effects are not only psychological, but familial, social, cultural, neurobiological and possibly even genetic as well” (p. 36).

Genetic memory is “an emotional or behavioral disposition that is transferred across generations genetically, through epigenetic influences on gene expression” (Matlock, 2019, p 294). According to Joël de Rosnay (2018), the French biologist and futurist, epigenetics concerns what is beyond genetics and what influences the genes (p. 8). “Genetic information is the DNA sequences inscribed on the genes, the environment is outside the organism, and epigenetics is all the information inside the organism that enables it to read the genes” (Gouyon et Al., 2018, p. 130).

However, epigenetics shows that the environment is as important as heredity: if the individual wants to change, she has to change what she has power over in her life. Thus, epigenetics precisely studies how the genome can be transformed by external, physical and/or psychic stimuli, like nutrition, physical exercise, stress management, pleasure, and the social and family network (De Rosnay et al., 2018). If the individual includes and improves on these elements on a regular basis in her daily life, she can expect to see her behaviors and life change beyond her heredity. However, according to De Rosnay (2018) “it is the combined effect of these five factors, much more than any one of them alone, that will lead to powerful changes in gene expression or stabilize already established epimutations” (p. 31).

Based on theories of epigenetics, these transmissions can take place through transgenerational jumps, which means that there are genes that will make the trauma active or not in the life of the individual. These non-coding genes regulating the functioning of the genetic process represent 90-95% of the total. But, for Von Ward (2008),”Psychoplasm coheres, maintains, and carries forward more than just the patterns contained in the ten percent of our DNA known as the genome. (The genome DNA is only encoded for and used by the body to make its vital proteins.) [He] argue[s] that the psychoplasm – perhaps using some of the other ninety percent of the body’s DNA – is encoded for and predisposes our mindsets, the stance of our egos, our interpersonal style, and our creative expressions. Embedded in this theoretical package are the codes for knowledge and expertise developed over many lifetimes. The codes include memories, tastes, and habits that remain active and useful to a new physical incarnation.” (p. 183)

For Von Ward (2008), these codes would be transferred from one life to the other through microscopic wormholes, discovered by Russian physicists Vladimir Poponin and Peter Gariaev, and which contain interactions with energy of light fields.

Such a wormhole could be the route through which the psychoplasm entangles itself with the physical reproductive process. Through this entanglement, it would modify the sperm and ovum’s holographic DNA patterns to also reflect those of the psychoplasm) what we might call the soul-genome’s legacy. Drawn to one another by energetic vibrations not yet understood, the parental genome and this soul legacy interpenetrate and shape the newly forming embryo or fetus. (Von Ward, 2008, p. 76)

The implications of epigenetics are thus compatible with Von Ward’s theory of the transformation through reincarnation via genotype and phenotype formulas.

The genotype consists of the stable set of patterns that are passed from generation to generation. The phenotype is the outward appearance of the genotype that reflects influences during a person’s life. In the reincarnation hypothesis, the legacy genome provides a set of basic physical patterns. However, as a child grows, its diet, health, and lifestyle interact with the environment to adapt those basic patterns. Thus, the phenotype may visibly change over time. (Von Ward, 2008, p. 91)

This is especially true when epigenetics is taken into consideration as a way that are “environmentally driven molecular processes that can turn genes on or off” (DeAngelis, 2019, p. 36), depending on a wide range of internal and external factor. But, for Von Ward (2008), “the psychoplasm [which] posits the transfer of a template that involves all physical characteristics included in the genotype” (p. 83) can “manipulate the[se] on/off switches” (pp. 75-76).  He goes on to suggest: “If reincarnation works at the present evidence suggests, this cumulative, multigenerational legacy, modified by each lifetime of experience, becomes the inheritance of the psychoplasm’s next incarnation” (Von Ward, 2008, p. 78). Thus, there is a continuum of past-life and present memories.

References

DeAngelis, T. (2019). The legacy of trauma: An emerging line of research is exploring how historical and cultural traumas affect survivors’ children for generations to come. American Psychological Association. Vol. 50, No. 2. pp. 36-44
Gouyon P.H., De Rosnay J. et Al. (2018). La révolution épigénétique. Albin Michel (translation)
Von Ward, P. (2008). The soul genome: Science and reincarnation. Fenestra Books.