What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

Content Warning: This section contains mentions and descriptions of self-harm

This chapter examines the relationship between one’s history and current physical and emotional state, especially in the context of trauma.

Perry explains the difference between inheritance and transmissibility. Genetic inheritance refers to the passing down of traits through one’s biology, specifically through the traits encoded in one’s DNA. Transmissibility, however, refers to the ability of a trait to be passed from one person to the other irrespective of biology. Language is an example of a transmissible trait: a child growing up in a Spanish-speaking household will learn Spanish, but if the same child had been raised in a Japanese-speaking household, he or she would have learned Japanese. The ability to learn language is genetically coded into the human species; however, the specific language one picks up is dependent on exposure to that language in childhood. Speaking Spanish is not an inherited trait; it is a transmissible one. Similarly, Perry discusses how numerous other aspects of the human experience are transmissible: “Humankind […] can take the accumulated, distilled experiences of previous generations and pass these inventions, beliefs, and skills to the next generation. This is sociocultural evolution” (130).