Like many folks, you probably had a grandmother that never talked about what happened before she came here. You knew not to ask.
Maybe it was the way she went quiet when certain things came on the news. The way she kept the pantry stocked past any reasonable need – bags of rice, jars of preserved things, enough to last through something. The way she held you a little too tightly sometimes, like she was bracing for a loss she’d already survived once.
You didn’t have a word for it then. You might not have one now. But something was being passed between you – not in words, but in the body. In the silences. In the things that were never said but somehow still shaped everything.
That is intergenerational trauma. And in immigrant families across Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, and Richmond, it is one of the most quietly pervasive forces in people’s lives.
What is Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma – sometimes called generational trauma or ancestral trauma – refers to the way the psychological and physiological impacts of traumatic experiences can be passed from one generation to the next, even when the people receiving it never lived through the original event.
This transmission happens in multiple ways. Some of it is epigenetic, emerging research suggests that extreme stress can alter how genes are expressed, and that these alterations can be inherited. But much of it is relational and behavioural: the way a parent who survived something catastrophic moves through the world gets absorbed by their children. Their hypervigilance becomes the baseline; silence around certain topics teaches that those topics are not safe; coping strategies – overwork, emotional suppression, an inability to rest without guilt – become the water their children swim in.
For immigrant families specifically, the layers compound. Many parents and grandparents who came to Canada – from South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, West Africa, and elsewhere – carried the weight of displacement, loss, discrimination, and sometimes violence. They often had no access to mental health support. Many came from cultures where emotional processing wasn’t named as such, where survival required moving forward rather than looking back.
They did what they had to do. And in doing it, they passed along not just their love and their sacrifice – but the unprocessed grief underneath it.
There are BIPOC therapists in Canada that understand this specific context, you can find them on our therapist directory.
How It Shows Up in Immigrant Families
Intergenerational trauma rarely announces itself clearly. It tends to live in patterns that feel like personality, like culture, like just the way things are in your family.
Hypervigilance that reads as love. A parent who survived scarcity or danger may express love through constant worry – checking in too often, catastrophizing small risks, struggling to let their children exist without supervision. From the inside, it feels like love. It is love. It’s also fear that was never given anywhere to go.
Emotional suppression as a family norm. In many immigrant households, the unspoken rule is: we don’t fall apart. Crying is weakness. Asking for help is embarrassing. You get up and you keep going. This is the survival logic of people who couldn’t afford to stop. But absorbed by the next generation, it can make it very hard to know what you feel, let alone how to ask for support.
Overachievement as safety. If your parents came here with very little, success may have been framed as the thing that makes the sacrifice worth it, and also the thing that keeps danger away. When achievement feels existential rather than aspirational, the pressure is a different kind of weight entirely.
Inherited grief with no original memory. You may find yourself grieving places you’ve never been, languages you were never taught, relatives you never met. This is real grief. It belongs to you even though it didn’t start with you.
Relational patterns that repeat. The way conflict was handled, or not handled, in your parents’ household gets absorbed. The way love was expressed. The distances that were kept. These patterns don’t disappear automatically when you become an adult. They surface in your relationships, your parenting, your sense of self-worth, until something interrupts them.
Why This Is Hard to Name in BIPOC Communities
Part of what makes intergenerational trauma particularly difficult to address in immigrant and BIPOC communities is the context it lives inside.
For many families, the survival itself was an achievement. To name that something was also harmful, that love and damage can coexist, can feel like a betrayal. Like you’re erasing what your parents endured to make space for your own pain.
You’re not. Both things are true. The sacrifice was real. The impact is also real. Naming the second doesn’t diminish the first.
There’s also the cultural context of therapy itself. As explored in our post on how to talk to immigrant parents about therapy, many BIPOC families grew up without access to mental health support, and in some cases, with an active distrust of systems that have historically caused harm to their communities. Seeking therapy can feel like a betrayal of that history, or an admission that the family failed.
It isn’t. It’s one generation deciding to pick up the tools available to them, and rewrite the story of hope while healing the pattern of trauma that might have got that story this far.
Finding Intergenerational Trauma Support in Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, and Richmond
Working with intergenerational trauma requires a therapist who understands that your presenting issue – anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, a vague but persistent sense of not-enoughness – may have roots that go back further than your own history. And that addressing those roots doesn’t mean pathologizing your family. It means understanding the full context of where you came from.
In Vancouver and the surrounding cities of Surrey, Burnaby, and Richmond, there are BIPOC therapists who specialize in exactly this work – practitioners who hold family systems, intergenerational dynamics, and immigrant experience as central to their practice, not as footnotes to it.
Additional Resources
Find an anti-oppressive BIPOC therapist in Canada that understands intergenerational trauma
- Find a therapist on our Therapist Directory
Related Reading
- First-Generation Immigrant Trauma
- How to Talk to Immigrant Parents About Therapy
- Third Culture Kids and Identity Crisis: When You Don’t Belong Anywhere
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour is a directory of BIPOC therapists and allied professionals across Canada who are committed to anti-oppressive values. We envision a world where BIPOC, in all our intersections, have access to therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
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