Humanity's Unmourned Wounds: White Ancestral Trauma, the Limbic Brain, and the Making of America's Crisis
Part I. A Personal Split in the American Psyche
This article is a follow-up to the piece I published in early September titled The Unconscious Roots of MAGA Rage: Why Winning Feels Like Losing. There, I began unpacking how inherited trauma and suppressed grief shape much of what we call politics in America. This piece continues that line of thought, but widens the lens.
This is a bit of a long read for an article on Medium. But that is because trauma is long, and because pain is dense. And I wanted this essay to be published as one complete piece, because fragmentation itself is the wound beneath our troubles. This is not just something to be read. It is for feeling, remembering, and integrating. And for those of you already on this journey, I hope you come away feeling like you are not alone.
What follows is not only about American conservatism, or even just white Americans. It is about how history gets stored in the body. But in this moment, the lineage I’m focusing on, the most urgent branch of the collective nervous system, is white America.
I ground this perspective in my own body.
I am what this country calls “biracial,” though that term, like race itself, is a social construct. Still, the experience of culture — of being racialized — is real. My mother is Black. My father is white. My maternal grandmother was born in Jim Crow Arkansas in 1939 to a farming family of 15 siblings, including her. One of my ancestral grandfathers that I know of, Thomas Turner, was born in 1876 to parents who had been enslaved. His son, one of my great uncles, Bridges Alfred Turner, earned his doctorate in industrial education from Penn State in 1941, making him the first Black man in the U.S. to do so.
My paternal lineage is Swedish, German, and British. My ancestral grandfather Gustav Gustavsson (for real, that was his name) immigrated from Sweden in 1903, settling in Minnesota. Given the timing, it’s unlikely that the Swedish side of my family directly participated in slavery in America. But the trauma line is not drawn only through perpetrators directly. It is also drawn through proximity, silence, complicity, and inheritance.
In fact, one of my great-grandfathers on my Black side was also biracial. It’s most likely that the lineage of white people who owned enslaved people in my family came through my Black line. This is the brutal entanglement of American history: the oppressor’s DNA survives in the oppressed.
My father, though technically barred from participating in politics due to his religious beliefs, has still absorbed right-wing rhetoric through osmosis. He is extremely intelligent, but never finished high school. I am certain he is neurodivergent, and he found it difficult to conform to the rigid logic and routines of the American educational system. He does not fully understand that I, his daughter, walk through the world and am received as a non-white person. He sees me through his own lens, but not through mine.
I was born into a high-control, fundamentalist religion. It has only been a few years since I began living beyond that framework. Because of this, I understand the deep psychological role Christianity has played in this long American saga. I understand the way it so often sanctifies domination and wraps trauma in scripture.
I share this because it is where I write from. I am a living crossroads. And from this vantage point, I see white supremacy not purely as hatred, but as a profound, ungrieved trauma — passed down through nervous systems, institutions, and mythologies.
I share these personal photographs because when we discuss the difficult history of America, we often dwell in abstraction. But this story lives in specific faces and in real bodies. It lives in us.
And I am America’s contradictions incarnate.
I speak from deep, personal pain — and from love — for both sides of this historical chasm. And I must, because both sides are me.
There is a vacuum in this conversation. It’s always framed as a war: accusation and defense, blame and guilt, us vs. them. A binary that re-traumatizes everyone. It is my intent to introduce a third force — the only force that can possibly heal such a long and intractable split. The force of sovereign love. Not sentimental love. Not a forget-and-forgive kind of love. But the fierce, clear-eyed, unflinching love that’s willing to see the entirety of the pattern — the brutality, the complicity, the kindness of a grandfather, the genius of a great uncle — and hold it all at once, without collapsing into the old categories.
I love my Black ancestors enough to honor their struggle and tell their truth. I love my white grandfather enough to see his humanity, distinct from the system he inhabited. I’m learning to love my father enough to understand the powerful rhetorical trap he’s caught in, rather than despising him for it, and despite the fact that I feel like he’s never fully seen me. And in doing so, I am trying to love you, the reader, enough to offer a way out. Out of this war. Out of this binary. Out of this inherited script that demands we annihilate some part of ourselves in order to understand the rest.
But loving this complexity, truly loving it, means I have to look deeper. Not just into history, but into how history becomes body, how power becomes pattern, how unresolved trauma metastasizes across generations. I cannot heal the wound if I only look at one side of the scar. And if I myself am both, then I must ask:
What happened to white Americans?
Not as a defense. Not to excuse. But to understand the system that created them — created us — and why so many remain caught in an emotional loop that feels impossible to exit. So the central premise of this essay is simple but rarely said out loud, and poorly understood:
Much of white America is caught in a neurobiological trauma loop.
MAGA is not just an ideology. The MAGA movement, and white supremacy as a whole, is a survival mechanism. A protective adaptation, rooted in unintegrated generational violence, cultural amnesia, and a system that punishes vulnerability.
This is not a justification. It is a diagnosis. We can never heal what we are too afraid or unwilling to name. So what follows is not a partisan argument. It is a map. We will trace the pattern through history, neuroscience, somatics, and narrative to expose how white trauma operates, how it hides, and how it feeds itself.
If we are to interrupt the cycle, we need more than facts and politics.We need understanding. Not to coddle. But to liberate us all.
Part II. The Plantation Child & The Traumatic Origin of Internalized Supremacy
I mentioned before that I was born into a high-control religion. From that context, I learned many wholesome values that shaped me into the person I am today. But growing up in the context of the Jehovah’s Witness faith also suppressed my authenticity and tethered me to a life of constant fear. Fear of outsiders. Fear of the apocalypse. Fear of being myself.
There were so many things I wasn’t allowed to do. Even spending too much time on your own hobbies was viewed as taking time away from God. Higher education was taboo. You could be soft-shunned for the smallest cultural infraction. From a very young age, you are taught — and pressured — to “dedicate your life to Jehovah” (a proxy, of course, for the Watchtower organization). You are indoctrinated into this contract before you’re old enough to understand what a contract even is. I was baptized at age 11.
You don’t realize until adulthood that you’re simply not allowed to leave. If you walk away after being baptized — even if quietly, even if only because you’ve decided it’s simply not the path for you — you will be excommunicated. They call it “disfellowshipping” or “being removed”. It is a form of shunning so absolute, so total, that it severs every relationship you hold. Your friends. Your family. Everyone. If you speak publicly about your experience, they will label you an “apostate” — worse than dead. They will say you are “being controlled by Satan and his demons”. They will say you have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit.
I never formally resigned, so I could still technically be disfellowshipped just for writing this article. Just for telling the truth of my own story.
That is the quandary I faced a few years ago. I began noticing inconsistencies, discrepancies, between values and actions. I voiced my concerns. They were not addressed. I witnessed injustice. I wrestled with the idea that a “god of love” could only save humanity by destroying all 8 billion people on the planet except for Jehovah’s Witnesses. (Yes, that is the belief, though it is never said so plainly to outsiders.) I had to decide: was it worth staying in the context — holding onto my loved ones, my community, the version of “me” I had built in that world — or was it worth walking away to fully explore who I was meant to be?
I chose to walk away. But it was not without great cost.
I grieved. I sobbed. I spent night after night imagining God destroying me with a fireball in the apocalypse for my decision. I chuckle at this, writing this now, but it wasn’t at all funny at the time. It was terrifying. It put me in the hospital at one point for a week. I was diagnosed with religious trauma PTSD.
Not all Christian religions are this extreme, but it’s important to understand that Christianity and white supremacy are deeply intertwined. And for those born into these contexts, they both instill the same foundational programming: staying with the group is your survival. If you leave, you are dead.
Because of that programming, I have done things that I am not proud of. I shunned and othered people. That is what I was told I was supposed to do in order to “keep clean from the world.” I shunned my best friend, whom I had known since I was 9 years old, whom I had always loved very much, when she left the Jehovah’s Witness organization. I was told that that was the loving thing. That that was how she would see the path back to salvation. This happened at a time when she was facing a lot and deserved to have the friend she had known since childhood supporting her. I shunned her for 13 years. I look back at that now, and I ask myself, how? How could I not see that that was not loving? How could I not see that it was cruel and abusive? How could I not see that it was social ostracizing, manipulation, coercion…that it was imposing social death on a person? Some former Jehovah’s Witnesses have taken their own lives because of how damaging this is to a person. I look back on this with a great deal of shame. But that is the thing about inherited and programmed survival algorithms. When you are inside of them, you don’t see them. They just seem like…the only way to survive. It isn’t until you work up the courage to really look at them, and step outside of them, that you begin to see that you aren’t really living at all.
I used to be hard on myself for staying so long. My most excellent therapist, Dr. Ryan Lee — also a former Jehovah’s Witness — once said to me when lamenting about this: “You were born into a prison of the mind. Most people don’t escape it. You should be proud of yourself.”
Please sit with that for a moment. Born into a prison of the mind.
There is no more accurate way to describe it. I thought I had “The Truth”. I was taught from birth that the rest of the world was dangerous, wicked, and blind. I didn’t know there was anything else. It was the only world I knew.
Now, I ask you to take that and apply it to the dual context of Christian indoctrination and white supremacy. Don’t think of adults parroting oppressive language. Think of white children. White children born into a prison of the mind. Because that is what this is.
Now hold that key.
Take it further.Imagine a white child born during the era of slavery.On a plantation.
Now, take that key and open the door, and really look around. The child does not ask to be born into this world — a world already written in blood, hierarchy, and “holy” justification. This child does not yet know power. Does not yet know race. Does not yet know right or wrong. This child simply is. Innocent, open, and wired for love and empathy like all children.
But soon, the child will witness things it’s tender mind cannot comprehend. A whip cracking flesh. A girl his age taken in the night. A baby sold. A mother screaming for her child as the wagon disappears. The child will watch his father strike and beat men in front of him. He will be told that this is masculinity. That it is manhood. He will see the quiet complicity of his mother as she turns away. He will hear prayers offered up to God, not in apology, but in thanks for their “orderly” home and “possessions”.
The child’s nervous system will begin to fragment. Because if he names it all as wrong, then nothing is safe. He is not safe. If he says “this is all evil,” then his father becomes a monster, and his mother a coward, and God himself becomes a lie. No child can survive that level of rupture. So the child folds. The child will internally rationalize the system by internalizing its logic. Because to do otherwise would be to admit that the child is perpetually in existential danger, and that his own parents themselves are an existential threat. So he learns that to survive here, empathy must be amputated. He is told it is righteous to strike another human. He is told to call that man boy. He is told that this is God’s will. And so his mirror neurons, the seat of empathy — once alive with recognition — begin to calcify.
He dissociates when forced to beat another child. He dissociates when he witnesses the violation of a woman’s body. He is told that to violate a woman’s body is business and that it is his duty. He learns not just to obey violence, but to equate it with belonging. That if he performs correctly, he will be praised. If he hesitates, he will be shamed. He’ll be compared to them. Or worse, treated like them. This child is indoctrinated into a system that teaches that protection comes from domination, that silence is virtue, and that questioning authority is sin. His morality is inverted. His spirit, contorted.
This child grows into a man. This man has a family. And sometimes the memories of childhood confusion tug at his soul, somewhere distant and faint that has long been bottled up and suppressed. But to look now, to confront it all now, would not just be to confront a traumatized inner child. It would be to confront his own complicity in a system his soul knew was wrong, but his body believed was the only way to survive.
And one day, far from the cotton fields, long after Emancipation and into the polished veneer of modern America, his descendants begin to feel something stir. Shame. Confusion. A feeling of a memory they can’t quite place. A discomfort they can’t explain. A tightening in the chest when the topic of race comes up. A flush of heat when someone says the word “slavery.” A wave of rage when dissociative comfort is challenged.
Because to confront history now would not just be to confront a nation. It would be to confront the self. It would be to admit that what was passed down was not just land or money or pride — but psychic and somatic inheritance. Unspoken rules. Fragmented empathy. An internalized demand to never, ever look too closely. A cutting off from life’s rhythm.
This is what so many white Americans carry in their bones and blood.Not just trauma from this form of victimhood — but trauma from collective coercion and complicity. The trauma of being born into a system that required their disconnection from their own humanity to preserve it.
And so the loop continues. White fragility is not just defensiveness. It’s a nervous system bracing against collapse. White grievance is not just entitlement. It’s a displaced mourning for a self that never got to fully form.The persecution narrative — “we are the real victims now” — is the echo of a child who was never allowed to say, this is wrong, without fear of losing everything. Who knows it’s all wrong now, and is still afraid of losing everything.
This is not about absolution. It is about truth. Because if we can finally name what has been buried…if we can finally grieve what was sacrificed on the altar of supremacy…then maybe, just maybe, this cycle can break.
But only if we’re brave enough to feel it. All of it.
Part III. Epigenetics & How Social Context Becomes Biology
But how does this trauma persist? How does something so old, so ancient, still echo in bodies today? It’s not just memory or history in old books. It’s biology. Because here is what we now understand: the body keeps the score — but not just one body. Generations of bodies. This is where we need to talk about epigenetics.
You don’t need to be a biologist to grasp this concept. Imagine your DNA as sheet music: the notes themselves don’t change, but the soundboard controls which notes are played loud, which are muted, which are repeated or suppressed. The epigenome is that soundboard — a network of chemical switches (like methylation and acetylation) layered over DNA, turning genes “up,” “down,” or “off”.
When a person experiences trauma — war, famine, chronic racism, poverty, violence — the body adapts for survival. Epigenetic switches flick. Then genes controlling stress hormones, immune responses, metabolic cycles, and even fear-learning are dialed for emergency. These marks are not just fleeting. They can be passed on to children and grandchildren, as biological memory.
The evidence is overwhelming:
Rachel Yehuda’s research on Holocaust survivors and their children showed uniquely altered methylation in genes like FKBP5, responsible for cortisol regulation. Descendants displayed lower baseline cortisol, an adaptation to prolonged, ancestral danger.
Studies on the Dutch Hunger Winter found children and grandchildren of those who survived famine had metabolic changes: greater insulin resistance, higher risks of diabetes and obesity — a body chemistry rewritten for scarcity by their ancestor’s starvation.
Jim Crow-era racism’s legacy is traceable in Black American families to this day — higher hypertension, entrenched fear circuitry, shortened lifespans — epigenetic scars of state-sanctioned violence replayed in biology.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study found early trauma dramatically raises risks for heart disease, addiction, depression, even early death—wounds that echo not just in one life, but across generations.
These aren’t just personal outcomes. They are cultural outcomes made biological. So we must ask:What happens to a culture that demands the suppression of empathy?What happens to a body that is told not to feel?What happens to a nervous system punished for naming harm?
The answer is that it adapts. It calcifies, dissociates, braces. It learns not to live, but to survive. And this is what whiteness has done. It’s not just a story or a social construct, but a living, recursive stress algorithm. Passed from body to body, century to century. When a culture normalizes violence, silence, and denial, it is not merely shaping social norms. It is shaping nervous systems, sculpting genetic tags, repatterning bodies. Bracing, shutting down, performing, and denialism then all become the new normal, inherited until interrupted.
That is, until someone dares to name it. Because trauma does not end with time. It ends with truth. And when truth is buried, trauma loops.
I can already hear the objections. I heard some of them in response to my previous article. “This isn’t biology, it’s culture.” As if culture happens outside of bodies. Or, “It’s not genetic, it’s psychological,” as though neural pathways and gene expression do not co-create each other.
So I will say outright in response to those previous rebuttals:The mind is not separate from the brain.The brain is not separate from the body.The body is not separate from the nervous system.The nervous system is not separate from our social environment.
These are not distinct systems. They are one, dynamically recursive system across time.
You cannot have culture without bodies.You cannot have trauma without a nervous system.You cannot have psychological patterns without neural pathways.And you cannot have neural pathways without gene expression shaping their architecture.
This is why the old idea of “linear cause and effect” that we are stuck in falls apart and is failing us. Human development is not linear. It is recursive and cyclical. Evolution is not just genes creating behavior. Evolution, reality, existence itself, is a feedback loop:
Environment shapes experiences.
Experiences sculpt thoughts and beliefs.
Thoughts and beliefs tune and shape the nervous system.
The nervous system modifies gene expression.
Gene expression prepares the body for survival in the world it inherited — and hands those modifications down to the next generation.
I am not speculating here. This is biology. This is evolution in motion. Not just natural selection, but rapid, epigenetic tuning so the next generation can survive our world. The world we are shaping now. And if the world is violence? If culture punishes empathy and rewards domination? If we demand silence, performance, and emotional disconnection?
Then the body will adapt to that too. And we pass on those adaptations.
A child born into whiteness — especially in a culture that denies its own trauma and history — doesn’t escape the loop. They inherit it. They adapt to survive it. And until someone is brave enough to break the silence and name it, the trauma loops.
That’s why whiteness, as a system, replicates even when the individuals inside it “mean well.” Trauma that is unnamed becomes normalized.What’s normalized becomes invisible and, what’s invisible becomes inherited.
So yes, it’s culture. Yes, it’s psychology. Yes, it’s epigenetics. Yes, it’s neurology. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, it’s social stress. Yes, it’s family pressure. These are not separate truths. They are the same truth. Culture is biology. Biology is psychology. Psychology is epigenetics. Epigenetics is evolution. The loop is the legacy that intertwines them all in one body and gets passed on to another.
Part IV. The Body Remembers What the Mouth Cannot Say
Let’s pause and ask: why do our deepest wounds return again and again — across generations, across societies, even as we try so hard to change with policy and procedure? Why are our shadows so persistent, even when we “know better” in our higher minds?
The answer, as trauma specialist Mark Wolynn teaches, is that trauma is stored in the body, in the limbic brain. It is “somatic”, and it is preverbal. When something too overwhelming happens, especially in childhood or within our ancestry, the part of the brain that gives us language (our frontal lobes, our prefrontal cortex) is overridden by the older, survival-oriented limbic brain, like the emergency brake yanking control from the driver mid-ride. The result is that the wounds live on as bodily sensations, images, repetitive patterns, and reactive behaviors forged in the nervous system that we cannot always name, but that never quite go away.
I learned this first hand from my own experience deconstructing from religious trauma. Dr. Laura Anderson talks about this extensively in her book When Religion Hurts You. She explains that our beliefs are not just ideas that we hold in our minds, in the brain. The brain and the nervous system are wired together. Our thoughts shape our nervous system. Healing from traumatic experiences literally requires the brain and the nervous system to rewire. It is a process that causes actual pain in the body. This means healing from trauma is an embodied process. It starts by bringing trauma into our higher awareness by naming our fears and what happened to us.
Wolynn refers to this as “trauma language” or “core language” — the emotionally charged fears, sensations, words, anxieties, or phobias that echo or hint at unresolved inherited generational trauma. This act of naming is not just talk therapy. It is the healing threshold itself. Why? Because when these fragments are made conscious — when they are spoken aloud, written, or witnessed in community — the prefrontal cortex (PFC) slowly begins to “hold the hand” of the limbic brain. It causes greater neural interconnection between the PFC and the limbic brain. Over time, naming, storytelling, and new images can literally rewire the old fear circuitry, opening the possibility of peace in the nervous system.
This is what Jung alludes to with “integration of the shadow.”
People tend to mock me with ridicule for employing what they call “Jungian tropes”. But well before neuroscience understood these mechanics, Jung realized that the psyche will use metaphor, myth, and archetype to try and reflect its own hidden depths back to itself. It’s ironic that people make fun of me for quoting Jung, because the very metaphors Jung championed now form the bedrock of psychological understanding. Greek tragedy has become critical psychological trope (think narcissism, Cassandra, Electra and Oedipus complexes), and unspoken family pain is often experienced as dreams, rituals, or personal myths. The very word “psychology” comes from the Greek term psyche, meaning “soul”, “spirit” or “mind”. Our collective stories — ancient and modern — are really the human brain and the nervous system using externalized language and stories to make sense of what cannot yet be fully seen and integrated inside.
This is critical to human development and healing, because as aforementioned, the limbic brain stores trauma in ways words cannot reach. That’s why pain reenacts and repeats instead of resolving. When someone explodes in anger at outsiders or at the prospect of change, what we’re often seeing is a preverbal panic in the face of fear of identity loss — a flash of extinction encoded in the body before there’s even a conscious threat.
Nowhere is this more visible — or more damaging — than in our systems of culture and belief. Dr. Laura Anderson’s research on high-control religion lays bare how trauma seeps into the nervous system. I can confirm this from my own experience recovering from a cult. Fundamentalist faith doesn’t just teach rules. It wires moral absolutism, obedience, and black-and-white thinking right into the body. These are not neutral teachings. They’re survival strategies for an environment perceived as hostile, policed by the ever-watching “God as overseer,” where sin means disobedience to order and difference is existential risk. I lived most of my life in constant fear and dread, I still struggle with body and sexual shame, and I am still working on putting a wicked case of OCD into remission because of it.
This is not just theology. It’s the psychological and neurobiological legacy of “plantation theology”. This is the inherited belief system that equates obedience with worth, hierarchy with order, and punishment with justice. It’s the religious worldview that sanctified slavery and still shapes American moral logic today. These are the same somatic strategies that animate cults, and yes, MAGA itself is one of their political offspring. At the root, all of these are structures built to shield the limbic brain from change that it perceives as the terror of annihilation, and to protect the fragile nervous system from the pain of truth that has, until now, been unspeakable.
And yet, all hope is not lost. What is unnamable can, in time, become symbol. What was symbolic can become story. And when story is finally spoken — when trauma is named — what was once subconscious can be brought into the light. Integration becomes possible not just for the individual, but for the whole collective field.
Part V. Exported Wounds: The Inherited Nervous System of Empire
We like to believe that America’s story of supremacy and violence began with colonial conquest. But look more closely, and you will see: white-on-white violence is the true prelude to empire.
Long before lines were drawn on American soil, violence was the method by which European identity was forged. The Vikings, the Romans, and the architecture of medieval Christianity were all cultures of conquest, of spectacle and public torture, of war as the crucible for belonging and citizenship. Monarchy imposed order with whip and sword. Loyalty was harvested in blood. What changed with colonization, then, wasn’t the invention of violence. It was its export.
Europeans turned their internal brutality outward, branding dominance as destiny and law. This shift allowed old pain to take on a new, sanctified form — power recast as providence, conquest renamed as civilization. The traumas that had been inscribed on their own bodies and lands were now projected onto others, codified into a system we now call “whiteness.” Race itself was invented as a myth, a protection scheme for a traumatizing hierarchy viewed as necessary for survival.
This is not just interpretation, but well-documented in the historical record. Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson describes caste as the psychological infrastructure of racism. In the language of trauma, it is a system that enforces superiority as a dissociative mask for a hierarchy born of the deeply wounded. Beneath the rhetoric of civilization lay a legacy of medieval violence and class stratification — a sense of precariousness that could only be soothed by stratifying someone else even lower still.
The plantation trauma loop was set in motion. Violence gave way to silence, then to rationalization, then to projection. A trauma cycle where violence is normalized, dissociated from, then justified through narrative, and finally displaced onto new targets. Every time an unprocessed wound is denied, it must find a vessel. In the American case, that vessel became the Black body, the Indigenous body and land, and the immigrant “outsider.” The demonization of immigrants and the desperate grip on “law and order” are just the latest iterations of this centuries-long dance. Whenever the system feels threatened, the limbic, preconscious loyalty to inherited safety scripts rises up to the surface and runs, compelling people to defend systems against their own interests, simply because those systems are old, familiar, and buried deep in the somatic memory.
Is it any wonder then that today, faced with the uncertainty of a changing nation, so many cling to the old scripts? From Jim Crow to “MAGA,” the body keeps the score not just for individuals, but for nations. When you see white Americans today defending the indefensible, rallying behind policies that harm themselves along with others, you are witnessing the survival impulse of centuries of inherited, unspoken fear.
The modern manifestations — the scapegoating, the cynicism, the armored demand for ‘order’ and punishment — are echoes of trauma that precede us all. Trauma is both individual and collective, rippling through bodies, psyches, and policies. Until we are willing to see it, name it, and grieve what we inherited, the cycle will continue to spiral. Violence giving rise to silence, silence to myth, myth to projection, projection to new violence. This is the trauma loop. This is because history is not the past. It is here now, in us. It is the nervous system’s unfinished song, a broken record looping until someone chooses a different note. One of truth, of grief, and repair.
Part VI. MAGA: How Trauma Becomes Politics
MAGA is not just a political philosophy. It is an inherited trauma script, running through the American nervous system. If we want to understand why this movement is so persistent, so immune to fact and argument, so easily mobilized into loyalty and rage, we must look beyond slogans and policies. We must look at the ancient circuitry of fear, memory, and belonging.
At its core, MAGA operates as a loop wired deep within the limbic brain. Its loyalty is not just to a leader, but to a structure of power bequeathed across generations — an echo of the safety scripts and hierarchies handed down since the earliest days of whiteness as law. For many, MAGA loyalty is not cognitive, but somatic — a felt, preconscious experience of “this is what keeps me safe.” Once this kind of identity and status is threatened, the nervous system shifts into survival mode. Fear of social extinction lights up the amygdala, and a sense of existential vulnerability becomes rage at anyone marked as “outsider” — those who might, in some way, unmask the inherited myth of belonging.
Research and metaphor anchors this understanding. Jonathan Haidt describes the mind as an “elephant” (emotion) with a small “rider” (reason) trying to steer it. Reason can rationalize, but only after the body has decided what is true. When the social order is disrupted, the nervous system’s ancient response is not abstract; it’s primal. This isn’t a new discovery. Decades earlier, Theodor Adorno’s landmark studies of authoritarianism found that those raised in rigid, punitive environments — where obedience is prized and dissent is punished — develop a template for belonging that requires conformity and scapegoats outsiders. Anxiety and panic around inherited status create fertile ground for punitive movements, and “outsiders” are blamed for every discomfort. People whose nervous systems are wired in this type of environment are more susceptible to supporting fascism.
Neuroscience fills out this picture further. Threat perception diminishes the capacity of the prefrontal cortex (our seat of judgment, flexibility, and empathy) and spikes amygdala activity, putting the body and society on a war footing. The result is not strategy, but a physical experience: urgency, contraction, the desperate hunt for a safe authority to follow, a group to huddle with, and a fantasy enemy to fight.
Look around, and you will see that this is the lived biology of “law and order” obsession. It is the thread running through the “white victim” complex, and the endless proliferation of conspiracy theories — narratives that offer the illusion of control in a world that feels ever more unmoored.
What we are witnessing in the MAGA movement is not unique to America, nor new in human societies. It is the legacy of trauma looping — not just through the mind, but through the nervous system, the family, the culture, and the story of who “we” are. Until a new story is made safe to inhabit, the old loop will repeat itself, generation after generation. This loop is due to “limbic loyalty” — the nervous system’s attachment to the familiar, even if that familiarity is harmful and self-destructive. It manifests not as rational strategy, because it is not governed by the prefrontal cortex. It is amygdala hijack: defensive rage, idolizing fantasy, and blame. It is a survival algorithm of the subconscious.
The way out is not to win an argument, but to change the body’s relationship to belonging.
Part VII. Why Trauma Therapy Often Fails or Is Nonexistent
The following is a sad truth that is rarely discussed, but cannot be ignored. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has, for decades, resisted the official recognition of the deepest cuts in the human psyche. Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) was proposed for the DSM in 1994, and Developmental Trauma Disorder in 2009 (DTD is a proposed diagnosis for childhood trauma). Both were rejected — not because the evidence was lacking, but because acceptance would have forced a reckoning with the fact that our society is profoundly and pervasively wounded and dysfunctional. This, despite the fact that the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study provided a roadmap, showing that addressing developmental trauma as a public health issue could:
Cut depression in half
Reduce alcoholism by 2/3
Lower IV drug use by 78%
Reduce suicide by 75%
Improve workplace performance
Drastically reduce incarceration rates
But the DSM — the “bible” of American psychiatry and psychology — is not just a scientific or medical tool. It is first and foremost a legal and insurance document, shaped more by the politics of reimbursement and institutional protection than a quest for truth and healing. If C-PTSD or DTD were universally recognized, we would be forced to admit that most mental illness is not an individual’s chemical “glitch” — it is a logical, embodied, even evolutionary response to an insane social environment. The blame would shift, then, from the isolated patient to our collective, toxic structures. From “what’s wrong with you” to “what happened to us.”
Imagine what that would do — not just to medical economics, but to the entire social contract. It is far easier to pathologize the individual than to treat the culture.
This is why trauma healing, as Bessel van der Kolk argues, is more than personal — it is political. Every therapist is part of the same traumatized world as their client. Most professionals have not fully faced their own histories. To acknowledge the scale of trauma — and its intergenerational transmission — is often existentially threatening to the very people charged with healing it. If you let yourself see trauma everywhere, you must ask: “Am I complicit? Am I, too, enacting my own unhealed wounds in the therapy room, in policy, in daily interaction?” Suddenly, the “objective, clinical distance” many rely on is revealed not as science, but as a dissociative survival strategy. It is far safer, emotionally and systemically, to cast the patient as the broken one — to focus on symptoms, prescribe treatments, and keep one’s own pain unexamined.
But real trauma healing requires that the guide has already faced their own terrain. You cannot accompany someone through the fire you have never walked yourself. Trauma is not just about the mind, and not just an abstract set of symptoms. It produces actual, physical pain in the body during integration.
Perhaps that’s what you’re feeling right now, reading this. The weight of a truth that is so profound it presses on your chest and enters your bones. To accept it fully is to accept that the roots of our pain are not “out there,” waiting for a new pill or policy. They live in our bodies, our family systems, and our collective DNA. True acceptance demands a depth of responsibility and grief that most nervous systems resist with every fiber. It requires facing that everything is built on a dysfunctional foundation.
Facing trauma is not an intellectual exercise. It is felt. Grief, rage, and fear all live in the body, in the limbic system, that ancient instinctual brain which, as Bessel van der Kolk shows, often dominates the more nuanced, integrative powers of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). To integrate trauma is excruciating, and to avoid it is the nervous system’s default, because the limbic brain is instinctively wired to resist physical pain as its default survival strategy to protect the body in its current state. It cannot readily see that working through the change and pain of trauma integration is actually critical for long-term survival and health.
The very structure of our institutions — with their fragmented diagnoses and siloed expertise — is a monument to this resistance. Our institutions mirror our inner fragmentation.
The artificial divide between psychology and neurology is evidence of this. It is a cultural defense. Our institutions act as though consciousness and brain structure are separate, as though the mind can be pure and untouched by the body it emerges from. This split keeps us trapped — unable to heal trauma and mental distress as the neuropsychosocial phenomena they are: not one thing or another, but all at once. Trauma is subjective, contextual, and recursive. The experience of trauma depends entirely on one’s own subjective experience of pain, meaning-making, and interpretation. It defies the linear, reductionist, “objective” logic we try to impose.
Human suffering is not “A causes B.” It is a living ecosystem — A links to B, interacts with C and D, and D loops back to A and B. It reverberates through families and societies, and circles back to shape the next generation. Depression is not simply “a serotonin problem.” It is the echo of unwept ancestral grief, childhood rupture, and community neglect, all encoded in the neural plasticity of the HPA axis and limbic circuits that regulate stress and connection.
So the collective diagnosis is this:We are a species with C-PTSD and a culture with a dissociative disorder.We have compartmentalized the truth to survive it. But survival is not the same as healing. And we will remain frozen until we, as a culture, find the collective courage to feel, to grieve, and to integrate what our systems have denied for generations.
Part VIII. A New Evolution: Integration, Not Reenactment
You may wonder, if there’s so much evidence — mountains of studies, from Holocaust survivors’ descendants to ACEs, from plantation trauma to the nervous system scans of the chronically stressed — if the causes of our suffering are this clear and this old, why does it fall to me, now, to bring them all together? Why hasn’t this synthesis come before?
The answer is that our scientists, our clinicians, our researchers — people like Rachel Yehuda, Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda, Bessel van der Kolk — have given us the “what.” They document, with rigor, how trauma shapes individuals and the structures around them. But science, as currently practiced, as an institution, rarely lets us move to “so what” and “what now?” It keeps the focus on the parts: the single patient, the box to check, the list of diagnostic codes. Rarely does it map directly onto the great, living nervous system that we call society — one woven of history, politics, biology, and culture, all at once.
To do this — to connect the methyl group to the myth, the ancestral wound to a MAGA rally, the plantation ledger to the spike in hypertension, the Jungian shadow to immigration policy — you must refuse to be siloed. You must see that our symptom, our story, and our system are one recursive body.
Such synthesis is, in fact, discouraged by the very institutions built to “know.” You do not get grants, tenure, awards, or job security for refusing to mind the boundaries of law, medicine, history, and neuroscience. You are told you are “unscientific,” “too broad,” “not rigorous.” You are pressured to use the broken system’s own tools to prove it is broken, and to interpret your results only as far as the silo’s walls will allow.
I operate outside that system’s rewards and punishments. I have lost everything more than once — family safety, belonging, identity. Having lived through nervous system collapse and reintegration, I have become my own experimental subject and data set. What I describe is not just studies, but the architecture of survival and possibility, written into my own body and psyche.
And the pattern I see is this:Fear, violence, oppression and trauma — habits of amygdala dominance — became, by default, our evolutionary algorithm as a species. Not because they were wise, but because they “worked” for some in the short-term. Colonialism and white supremacy emerged as maladaptive trauma responses, not reasoned philosophies. They now eat the world, and will eat us, unless we see the loop for what it is.
This is not the logic of the rational, creative prefrontal cortex (PFC) — it is the logic of an exhausted amygdala, replaying ancient security scripts at all costs, even to the point of cultural self-destruction. That’s the ultimate sign of a trauma loop: the system would rather self-destruct than update its code for long-term survival. That is self-sabotage. That is amygdala logic.
So what is the way out? It is not new “content,” but a new process — a new shape for human evolution.
The path forward is:
Collective awareness: Recognizing, together, that trauma is not just personal but the evolutionary root of our brokenness.
Somatic awareness: Truly understanding that trauma integration happens in the body, that the limbic system is the body’s control panel, and healing must begin there.
Naming the scripts: Speaking aloud the patterns, the ancestral stories, the forgotten contracts that keep us cycling pain.
Community grief rituals: Making space to mourn, together, what was lost and what was chosen — beyond shame, to shared humanity.
Redefining belonging: Creating new foundations for inclusion that are not built on domination, but on honest connection and mutual vulnerability.
This is not about shame. It is about grief. It’s about grieving what was done and what was chosen by those who preceded us, those who could not find the strength and courage inside of themselves to override the system’s inertia. It’s about realizing that most of us were born inside prisons of the mind. Born into survival algorithms. To stop repeating this cycle, we must feel it, name it, and support each other as we break free.
Because true integration is the only way out of the loop. This is not philosophy. It is neurobiology, history, and love, all braided together. This is what it means to evolve on purpose. Consciously.
Part IX. Conclusion: If You Do Not Grieve, You Inherit the Wound
I know this was a long read. Thank you for staying with me. Let me draw this full circle, from evidence and history to the ground of my very own body. I hold both Black and white lineage — descended from people who survived the lash and the chain, and from others who once wielded them, or stayed silent and complicit. For years, I lived in that fracture, trying to make sense of conflicting family stories, drawn and quartered by trauma I inherited but did not choose. Only later, after my own collapse and painful integration, did I begin to see with clarity that the wound is not just old. It is alive in every one of us. I have shared with you my own grief and shame to make it visible.
Trauma, for millennia, was evolution’s sharpest tool. It kept us alive against predators, through famine, through elemental hardship by narrowing the mind, hardening the heart, and raising the shield. Then through othering, dominating, and conquest. In our time, these same trauma scripts — white supremacy, domination, a politics of fear — have become not adaptation, but maladaptive and gangrenous loops, rewiring the nervous system for endless threat even when we are now at a point where we could choose to create collective safety. As epigenetic science, neurology and psychology now confirm, if a wound is not grieved, it is not truly over. It is simply uploaded to the next body, the next gene, the next story.
Integration is the only exit: bringing the implicit, preverbal language of pain into awareness, giving what was once unspeakable a place in language and community. This is why healing demands space for grief, for full embodiment, and for holding each other accountable with love. Belonging must be rewritten — not as the reward for silence or domination, but as the birthright of all who are willing to meet the truth with courage and love.
I have learned through science, through family, and through loss that personal healing is inextricable from collective transformation. If you do not grieve, you inherit the wound, and you pass it forward. This is not poetry. It is biology. As Bessel van der Kolk observes: “the body keeps the score.” What isn’t acknowledged and integrated is destined to be replicated. In order to heal, we must be willing to name the pain, feel through it, grieve it, and consciously choose a higher path.
We do not need more shame or blame. What we require now is spacious, embodied truth. The gift of agency is what emerges when the loop is seen, the story is named, the limbic algorithm is interrupted and the prefrontal cortex — the seat of reason, compassion, vision — can then take its place as steward and driver. The pain is deep, and it is real, but so is the capacity for repair.
A trauma-literate world would be one where grief is not a private prison but a public rite. It would be worth surviving for — because it would be the first world in which the evolutionary story is not a one-way inheritance of wounds, but the conscious and deliberate turning of those wounds into collective wisdom and healing.
That’s the vision. Not freedom from the past, but freedom through honest relationship with it. Because in the end, if we do not do this grief work together, the wound will live on, over and over, as history’s unfinished sentence, until it finishes us in extinction.
For Further Reading & Listening:
To read my thesis on the neurology of this evolutionary bottleneck, please also see my article entitled, Collapse Wasn’t Inevitable: We Locked Ourselves Out of Evolution: https://medium.com/@elizabethrosehalligan/collapse-wasnt-inevitable-we-locked-ourselves-out-of-evolution-d9101dc34c1c
Where the River Knows Our Names: a historical fiction exploring the context and trauma of the “plantation child”: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238297320-where-the-river-knows-our-names
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mountain-is-you-brianna-wiest/1141829837
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn: https://markwolynn.com/it-didnt-start-with-you/
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
White Trauma / White Supremacy: Reparations 4 Slaveryhttps://reparations4slavery.com/white_trauma_white_supremacy/
A Different Type of Property: White Women and the Human Property Regimehttps://michiganlawreview.org/journal/a-different-type-of-property/
Can the legacy of trauma be passed down? (BBC) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics
Complex Racial Trauma: Evidence, Theory, Assessmenthttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10186562/
Epigenetic Modifications in Stress Response Genes Associated With Intergenerational Trauma. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6857662/
The Intergenerational Impact of Structural Racism and Cumulative Adversityhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9373857/
Racial Disparities in Childhood Adversity Linked to Brain Structural Differenceshttps://www.mcleanhospital.org/news/racial-disparities-childhood-adversity-linked-brain-structural-differences-us-children
Transgenerational Trauma and Biological Embedding of Stress [PDF]https://www.walshmedicalmedia.com/open-access/transgenerational-trauma-and-biological-embedding-of-stress.pdf
Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in humanshttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
Intergenerational transmission of trauma effectshttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/
How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Childrenhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/
How trauma’s effects can pass from generation to generationhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01433-y
Transgenerational Epigenetics of Traumatic Stresshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187711731830053X
Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics
Transgenerational Inheritance and Systemic Racism in America https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37293142/
Mark Wolynn: Becoming Aware of Inherited Family Traumahttps://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/mark-wolynn-becoming-aware-of-inherited-family-trauma/
Dealing With Inherited Family Trauma: “It Didn’t Start With You” (Summary)https://www.myndlift.com/post/dealing-with-inherited-family-trauma-it-didn-t-start-with-you-summarized
Tami Simon with Mark Wolynn, “Healing Inherited Family Trauma”: https://www.dailygood.org/story/2641/mark-wolynn-healing-inherited-family-trauma-tami-simon/
“007: Inherited Family Trauma with Mark Wolynn” (podcast): https://connectfulness.com/episode/007-mark-wolynn
Dr. Laura Anderson, “An Abusive Relationship With God”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-abusive-relationship-with-god-w-dr-laura-anderson/id1373939526?i=1000614297981
Wise Jezebel: Dr. Laura Anderson On When Religion Hurtshttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wise-jezebel-dr-laura-anderson-on-when-religion-hurts/id1553334816?i=1000642468652
Laura Anderson | Religious Trauma Experthttps://drlauraeanderson.com
Trauma-Informed Care for Healthcare Professionals https://mthf.org/wp-content/uploads/5-Trauma-Informed-Care-for-Healthcare-Professionals.pdf
APA Guidelines for Working with Adults with Complex Trauma https://www.apa.org/practice/guidelines/adults-complex-trauma-histories.pdf
Trauma Redefined in the DSM-5: Rationale and Implications for Counseling Practicehttps://tpcjournal.nbcc.org/trauma-redefined-in-the-dsm-5-rationale-and-implications-for-counseling-practice/
The Epigenome: On the Transgenerational Effects of Racismhttps://academic.oup.com/book/26050/chapter/193975120
Hidden Burdens: a Review of Intergenerational, Historical and Transgenerational Traumahttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7163829/
PTSDreams: Healing Nightmares from Trauma ([book summary])https://www.continuingedcourses.net/active/courses/course160.php
Racial Differences in Adverse Childhood Experiences: Timing and Psychiatric Outcomeshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749379725000315
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