16/09/2025
When I first began my training as an Educational Psychologist, I thought my job would be about collecting data, understanding the picture that was emerging, and offering practical solutions. What I didn’t realise then was how deeply trauma runs through the lives of children, families, and even entire communities, including my own life.
I remember working in an emergency accommodation hostel for teenagers who didn’t quite fit anywhere else—too old for children’s services, too young for adult ones. Some of my colleagues had been there for over twenty years, and they’d say things like, “We had her sister four years ago. We’ll see her daughter here in fifteen.”
That comment chilled me. It wasn’t said with malice, but with resignation—as if cycles of inter-generational trauma were inevitable. And yet, I couldn’t accept that. I kept asking: Is this really the best we can do?
Over time, I learned that every young person—and indeed every adult—walks into a room asking three questions, whether they know it or not:
1. Am I safe?
2. Do you care about me?
3. Can I relax enough to be present and learn?
If the answer to the first two is “no,” the third never happens. It doesn’t matter how many strategies, worksheets, or lectures we throw at someone—if they don’t feel safe and connected, their brain simply can’t learn.
I once worked with a boy who had explosive meltdowns some mornings but not others. It took weeks of detective work before we realised the trigger: whether the computer monitor in the room was covered or not. We didn’t know if it was the sound, the sight, or a memory—but we knew one simple adjustment made all the difference.
That taught me that trauma is often invisible, and healing begins not with sweeping reforms but with small, consistent acts of care.
What can really challenge us is when someone has been let down over and over, they test us. They push away just when things start to feel safe. Because safety has never been safe before, it has often turned out to be the route to harm and pain.
The only way through is millimeter by millimeter. Boundaries help—not because they punish, but because they create safety. And when a young person begins to believe, deep down, “You won’t leave me, even when I push,” that’s when the possibility for transformation arises.
For years, I thought trauma was either in the environment (nurture) or in the DNA (nature). But the new science of epigenetics shows something remarkable: environment can literally switch genes on or off. Trauma and toxic stress can shape biology. But here’s the hopeful part—so can care, love, and support.
Healing isn’t just possible; it’s measurable in the body itself.
There’s a young man whose words stay with me. He stood up during a poetry project and read about his foster carer:
“She knows how to do safe bomb disposal of my heart. Since meeting her, the anger in my heart has halved. The other half is now full of happiness because of her.”
His foster carer wasn’t a scientist in the traditional sense. She wasn’t an expert in neurobiology. But she embodied exactly what he needed: presence, care, and calm. That, more than any programme or policy, changed his life – a pathway to healing inter-generational trauma.
Breaking intergenerational trauma isn’t about heroic one-off gestures. It’s about consistency. It’s about creating spaces where children, families and we all feel safe, connected, and important. It’s about refusing to let resignation win, and instead planting seeds of hope, millimeter by millimeter.
If every child could answer those three questions—Am I safe? Do you care about me? Am I ready to learn?—with a resounding “yes,” what would our world look like then? Seems so simple, simple is not always easy, but where there is the will, there is always a way.
