At Tabula Rasa Retreat, our ibogaine and psychedelic treatment centre located in the Alentejo region of rural Portugal, we recognize the profound impact of early conditioning and intergenerational trauma on individuals’ lives. Our approach integrates insights from thought leaders like Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Nicole LePera and highlights the role of ibogaine and psychedelics in addressing intergenerational trauma.
As has become clear in recent years, psychedelic therapy has been shown to modulate the default mode network (DMN), a brain network associated with self-referential thoughts and behaviours. By reducing activity in the DMN, psychedelics can disrupt rigid patterns of thinking and behaviour, allowing individuals to access new perspectives and insights. This modulation may help individuals break free from ingrained patterns and behaviours rooted in childhood conditioning.For us at Tabula Rasa Retreat, it is clear that many of our behaviours and beliefs are shaped by early conditioning and the unconscious absorption of our caregivers’ patterns. Alternative therapies such as those involving ibogaine and psychedelics have helped individuals in addressing intergenerational trauma. Furthermore, therapy with ibogaine and other classic psychedelics has also proven highly effective in addressing issues like substance addiction, behavioural addictions, depression, PTSD, and halting the progress and symptoms of some neurodegenerative issues like Parkinson’s disease and MS.
Furthermore, oneirogens like ibogaine have been found to promote the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that supports neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections. This enhanced neuroplasticity can further aid in the restructuring of thought patterns and behaviours that were previously rigid, allowing individuals to adopt healthier habits and perspectives.
Expanding the Definition of Trauma
In recent years, authors like those mentioned above have profoundly expanded our understanding of trauma. Their work reveals that trauma isn’t confined to catastrophic events but often stems from subtle, cumulative experiences, particularly during childhood.
This blog will delve into these contemporary definitions, synthesising insights from these thought leaders, to explore how early conditioning and the unconscious absorption of caregiver behaviours shape our adult patterns. Furthermore, we’ll examine how plant medicines such as ibogaine and psychedelics can play a role in illuminating these ingrained patterns, helping distinguish our authentic selves from inherited intergenerational traumas.
Understanding Trauma and Its Broader Implications
Trauma is often defined as the result of profoundly distressing experiences, such as severe neglect or abuse, which can leave an indelible mark on an individual’s life. To assess the impact of such experiences, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) questionnaire, a tool widely used in psychological assessments.
This questionnaire comprises ten items addressing various childhood adversities, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, as well as exposure to domestic violence or having an incarcerated family member. Each affirmative response adds one point to the total score. Research indicates that higher ACE scores are associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes, such as substance abuse, suicidal behavior, and chronic health conditions.
While the ACE framework provides valuable insights, it doesn’t encompass the full spectrum of trauma. It often overlooks the emotional and spiritual wounds that arise from consistently suppressing our true selves—a reality many face. Additionally, the ACE assessment may not fully consider the myriad ways external environments, such as societal influences, can inflict trauma.
This broadens the understanding that traumatic experiences aren’t always overt. Our perception of these events holds as much weight as the events themselves. This is particularly pertinent during childhood, a phase marked by vulnerability and dependence. Trauma can manifest when we habitually compromise our authenticity for acceptance, are repeatedly made to feel inadequate or unworthy, leading to a disconnection from our genuine selves. Such experiences can instil a core belief that our emotional survival requires us to abandon our true identity.
The Role of Caregivers in Childhood Development
Caregivers play a pivotal role in a child’s development, serving as mentors who provide a stable foundation as children navigate life’s challenges. An ideal mentor is accepting, allowing the child to express their true self, and acts with mindfulness and insight. This approach, when present, enables the child to face the natural outcomes of their actions without unnecessary interference, nurturing the development of self-reliance. The mentor’s trust in the child’s ability to handle life’s challenges instils confidence, offering a secure base to return to during difficult times.
However, when caregivers have unresolved traumas, they may struggle to navigate their own lives, making it challenging to serve as reliable guides for their children. Even well-intentioned caregivers, influenced by their unconscious wounds, might resort to controlling or coercive behaviours toward their children, rather than offering genuine guidance.
These behaviours, though perhaps rooted in a desire to protect the child from similar pain, can inadvertently dismiss the child’s individual needs and desires. Many individuals have been raised by caregivers who, due to their own unresolved childhood traumas, found it difficult to manage their emotions. This unresolved trauma can lead to patterns of emotional unavailability or misattunement, affecting the child’s development and attachment style.
Unresolved childhood traumas, when left unaddressed into adulthood, can trap individuals in persistent behavioural or cognitive loops, often without understanding their origins. Plant medicines such as ibogaine and other psychedelics play a key role in illuminating these deeply ingrained patterns, facilitating the processing of intergenerational trauma and promoting healing.
Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
Trauma can be transmitted from one generation to the next through conditioning—the unconscious absorption of behaviours and beliefs from those around us. Children instinctively imitate observed behaviours, internalizing what is modelled by primary caregivers. Early attachments shape subconscious programming, influencing perceptions of relationships, self-care, and worldview. Consequently, we inherit not only our caregivers’ genetics but also their beliefs, habits, and coping mechanisms.
Reflecting on Inherited Behaviours and Personal Choices
Recognizing our behaviours and observing our relationships are essential steps toward understanding how much of our lives are shaped by deliberate choice versus inheritance. Many patterns adopted in childhood persist unconsciously into adulthood. For example, we might continue to celebrate holidays as our families did, without considering alternatives.
This prompts deeper reflection: how many aspects of our lives result from conscious decisions, and how many are simply inherited?
Ibogaine and other psychedelics such as psilocybin are known for their ability to open up a channel of communication between the subconscious—where all of our emotional trauma is stored—and the conscious mind—where our self-awareness resides. In doing this, ibogaine and psychedelics are well suited to addressing the role of intergenerational trauma and deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour, moving them from the subconscious mind and into our conscious awareness.
Socialization during formative years significantly shapes behaviours and beliefs. Primary socialization within the family imparts language, cultural norms, religious beliefs, and societal values, influencing self-concept and worldview.
Observational learning, as described by psychologist Albert Bandura, suggests individuals, especially children, learn behaviours by observing and imitating role models. Thus, many habits and attitudes are acquired unconsciously through observation.
Introspection helps distinguish between inherited behaviours and consciously chosen ones. Reflecting on daily routines, traditions, and responses can reveal patterns rooted in upbringing. This awareness allows deliberate choices about which behaviours to maintain or modify, fostering a more authentic and self-directed life.
The Archetypes of Childhood Trauma
Growing Up with a Parent Who Struggles to Regulate Their Emotions
Emotional regulation involves fully experiencing emotions, allowing them to flow without resorting to avoidance strategies like excessive screen time, substance use, or emotional suppression. This process includes recognizing and naming emotions—such as stating “I feel angry” or “I feel sad”—and employing grounding techniques like deep breathing to manage them until they naturally subside. Mastering this skill helps individuals remain stable amid life’s inevitable stressors and return to a balanced physiological state.
However, many of us were raised by caregivers who lacked the ability to identify or manage their own emotions. When faced with emotional overwhelm, they often reacted impulsively, unable to process or regulate their feelings effectively. Some externalized their distress—raising their voices, slamming doors, throwing objects, or abruptly leaving situations. Others internalized it, shutting down emotionally and withdrawing, sometimes resorting to the silent treatment as a form of disconnection.
Children who witness caregivers either exploding outwardly or retreating inwardly, instead of constructively handling their emotions, often lack models for healthy emotional processing. Consequently, they may grow up without the necessary tools to regulate their own feelings, struggling with emotional resilience and effective coping mechanisms in adulthood. Research indicates that children of parents with symptoms of depression are less likely to learn strategies for regulating their emotions and are at risk of inheriting mood disorders.
Having a Parent Who Fails to Model Healthy Boundaries
Boundaries delineate personal limits, helping individuals understand where they end and others begin. While children naturally assert boundaries, not all adults exhibit the same clarity—often due to their upbringing. Consequently, many are raised by caregivers who lack a firm understanding of boundaries, leaving them ill-equipped to model appropriate limits.
Repeated boundary violations in childhood can normalize blurred boundaries in relationships. A child may grow up believing that disregarded boundaries equate to closeness and love, making them more likely to tolerate similar patterns in future relationships.
A particularly harmful example occurs when a parent shares inappropriate personal matters with their child—often venting about the other parent. Many recall being burdened with private details about parental conflicts, such as financial struggles or infidelity. This happens when a caregiver fails to recognize that their child is not an emotional equal, using them for support beyond their capacity. Placed in this position, a child may feel overwhelmed and conflicted, caught between loyalty to both parents while processing adult concerns they are not developmentally prepared to handle.
Such dynamics can lead to enmeshment, where personal boundaries are diffused, and over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomous development. Enmeshed children may lose their capacity for self-direction, becoming trapped in roles that serve parental needs rather than their own development.
Recognizing and addressing these patterns is crucial for breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma and fostering healthier relationships.
Growing Up with a Parent Who Fixates on Appearance
Caregivers who place excessive importance on outward appearance may unintentionally impose their own desire for approval onto their children in various ways. Sometimes, this is overt—a parent frequently commenting on their child’s weight, insisting they always look polished, or scrutinising minor details like their hairstyle. As a result, children quickly learn which aspects of their appearance are deemed acceptable and which are not. This conditioning fosters a deep-seated belief that love and validation are dependent on maintaining a particular outward image.
This pattern also emerges when a parent is excessively preoccupied with their own physical presentation, demonstrating behaviours such as extreme dieting, meticulous grooming, or rigid exercise routines. A child absorbs these cues, internalising messages about body image through observation rather than direct instruction. Labelling certain foods as inherently bad or fattening, making critical remarks about the bodies of friends, family members, or public figures—all of these reinforce an image-centric mindset. Even if such remarks aren’t directed at the child, they still absorb the unspoken lesson: that self-worth is tied to appearance.
On a broader level, children also notice when their caregivers present different personas in different environments—acting one way in public and another at home. This inconsistency teaches them that social acceptance may require a curated, inauthentic version of oneself, reinforcing the idea that personal value is contingent upon external approval.
When a Parent Lives Through Their Child, Shaping Their Identity
Parents who attempt to live through their children, often termed “stage parents,” push their offspring into pursuits like acting, sports, or predetermined careers which they primaprily think appropriate, to fulfil their own unmet aspirations. This behaviour, while sometimes stemming from pride, can burden children with expectations that suppress their individuality. Consequently, children may sacrifice personal desires to conform to their parent’s vision of success. In adulthood, this loss of identity can lead to indecisiveness or an obsessive drive for achievement, as individuals strive to prove their worth. Ultimately, such parental behaviour reflects caregivers projecting their unfulfilled needs onto their children, hindering the child’s independent development.
This phenomenon aligns with the concept of “parentification,” where children assume roles to meet their parents’ emotional needs, leading to emotional distress and identity issues.
Having a Parent Who Does Not Acknowledge You
The adage “children should be seen and not heard” reflects a past parenting approach where providing basic necessities—food, shelter, medical care, and education—was deemed sufficient, often neglecting a child’s emotional needs. This lack of acknowledgment can lead to emotional disconnection between child and caregiver. While sometimes manifesting as outright neglect, it more commonly appears subtly, such as when a parent is overwhelmed by their own emotions, burdened by chronic stress, or emotionally unavailable. Alternatively, a parent may be mentally preoccupied, performing daily tasks on autopilot, unable to be fully present with their child. Without genuine attentiveness, emotional connections remain shallow, leaving the child feeling unseen.
The pain of being unheard is as profound as being ignored. When a child realizes they must suppress their true self to receive love and acceptance, it creates confusion and emotional distress. Recognition and validation are fundamental human needs. When a child’s thoughts are dismissed, they feel their mind is unimportant; when their self-expression is overlooked, their sense of self diminishes. This lack of acknowledgment can also manifest insidiously—for instance, when a child’s future is predetermined before they can explore their own passions and desires.
Research indicates that children who experience emotional neglect may develop insecure attachments, leading to difficulties in forming relationships, emotional regulation, and self-esteem. These children often struggle with understanding and expressing emotions, which can persist into adulthood. Addressing these issues requires recognizing the impact of emotional neglect and seeking therapeutic interventions to heal and develop healthier relationships.
When a Parent Repeatedly Denies the Child’s Reality
When caregivers consistently dismiss or invalidate a child’s feelings, it can lead to emotional dysregulation and low self-esteem in the child. This pattern of invalidation teaches children to suppress their instincts, eroding self-trust and leading them to rely on external validation. For example, if a child feels uneasy around a relative and expresses this discomfort, but the parent insists the relative is just being nice and urges politeness, the child’s feelings are dismissed, causing confusion and self-doubt. Similarly, when a child shares an upsetting experience, such as being excluded by friends, and the parent responds with, “Don’t worry, you’ll make new friends,” it can inadvertently invalidate the child’s emotions. These dismissive responses often stem from the caregiver’s unresolved emotions and discomfort with distress, leading them to downplay the child’s feelings to avoid their own emotional pain. Over time, this minimization teaches the child that their emotional experiences are unimportant or untrustworthy, fostering self-doubt that can persist into adulthood.
Navigating Our Traumas Through Coping Mechanisms
In 1984, two pioneering psychologists in the field of stress and emotion, Professor Richard Lazarusv and Professor Susan Folkman, introduced a framework for understanding coping with stressors and discomfort. They defined it as “constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and internal demands that exceed a person’s resources.” In essence, they proposed that coping is a skill we develop to manage the discomfort that stress induces in both the mind and body.
Lazarus and Folkman distinguished between two primary coping strategies: adaptive and maladaptive.
Adaptive coping involves actively engaging with a challenge to restore a sense of safety and control. This might include addressing a problem directly or reshaping negative thought patterns. The defining characteristic of adaptive coping is conscious effort—acknowledging discomfort and taking steps to work through it. However, when individuals are not exposed to these strategies during childhood, they may struggle to implement them later in life.
Maladaptive coping, on the other hand, offers temporary relief but ultimately deepens disconnection from the self. These strategies are often inherited from caregivers and provide only a fleeting escape from emotional distress. For example, someone might use alcohol at a social event to dull anxiety or suppress their emotions entirely to avoid discomfort. While these approaches may provide short-term avoidance, they reinforce long-term patterns of detachment and unresolved pain.
Ultimately, the way we cope is shaped less by our external environment and more by the ingrained strategies we have learned to handle stress.
Common Maladaptive Coping Strategies:
- People-Pleasing – Meeting others’ expectations to momentarily alleviate stress.
- Anger or Rage – Discharging overwhelming emotions onto others as a release.
- Dissociation – Mentally detaching from a distressing experience to avoid fully processing it.
These coping mechanisms serve to shield us from re-experiencing past traumas. However, when emotional needs are consistently unmet, the pain accumulates over time, leading to a cycle of self-preservation that eventually turns into self-betrayal. Many people find themselves trapped in this loop, unconsciously repeating patterns that prevent healing and authentic self-connection. In their mechanisms of action, both ibogaine and classic psychedelics can help shed light on these forms of self-betrayal so deeply rooted in ingrained patterns of behaviour which result from intergenerational trauma.
The Possibility of Transformation
Each of us carries unresolved trauma in some form. As we’ve explored, it’s not always the intensity of an event that leaves a lasting impact, but rather how we respond to it. If we were never shown healthy ways of processing difficult experiences during childhood, we may have never developed the necessary tools to navigate them. However, by actively working through our trauma as adults, we have the capacity to cultivate resilience.
Experiencing trauma does not mean we are condemned to a lifetime of pain or dysfunction. The patterns ingrained in us during our early years do not have to dictate our future. With conscious effort, we can break free from these cycles, allowing ourselves to move forward and heal.
While trauma is a shared human experience, its effects are deeply personal. It influences the entire being—impacting the nervous system, immune response, and overall physiology in unique ways. The journey towards healing begins with awareness—recognizing the unresolved wounds we carry. The next crucial step is understanding how these experiences have shaped our long-term responses and acknowledging the coping mechanisms that may be keeping us trapped in old patterns. By bringing these unconscious influences into conscious awareness, we create the opportunity for true transformation.
At Tabula Rasa Retreat, we understand that unresolved childhood traumas can perpetuate cycles of unconscious intergenerational trauma. Our therapeutic approaches, including the use of ibogaine and other psychedelics, aim to address these deep-seated patterns and the effects of intergenerational trauma. By modulating the brain’s default mode network (DMN), these plant medicines facilitate a break from ingrained behaviours, allowing individuals to reconnect with their authentic selves. This process not only aids in overcoming childhood conditioning but also empowers individuals to break free from the loops of inherited trauma. We invite you to explore how our programs can support your journey toward healing and self-discovery.
