The Trauma Carried.

In this deeply personal and philosophical episode, we explore the unseen weight of generational trauma — how pain, silence, and unresolved grief are passed down across families, cultures, and nations. From the tragedies of 20th-century Europe to the enduring Palestinian struggle, we trace how inherited suffering shapes identity, choice, and freedom. Through the lens of thinkers like Jung, Nietzsche, and Camus, we ask: Who am I, if this isn’t mine? And how do we break the chain?Also in this episode: a special birthday tribute to Yalda — a soul of strength, love, and fearless curiosity — and the announcement of her upcoming podcast series.

Transcript

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What if the pain you carry didn't begin with you? What if your anxiety, your silence, your fear of being seen or heard was not a reflection of your weakness, but the echo of someone else's survival? What if pain could be passed down, not in words, but in silences of inherits. Yes, inherits, you hear correctly. Hi, I'm Reza Sanjide and this is another episode of Philosophy of Life. Today we're exploring something almost invisible to all of us and at the same time we are deeply familiar to so many of us, affect by deal, every single, without know where actually come from. We're talking about inherited pain. about the trauma that lives in families across decades, sometimes across centuries, the grief your grandfather never spoke of, the terror your mother swallowed instead of screaming, the stories your blood remembers, even when your mouth does not. This is not just psychology. This is not just history. This is philosophy. This is the question of who we are when so much of what we carry came before us. When most people hear the word trauma, they think of something loud, something sudden, a car crash, a violent attack, a moment that splits life into before and after. But that's not the only kind of trauma. Some of it is quieter. It doesn't scream. It lingers. It hides in habits, in fears, in silence. Trauma isn't just what happened to you. It's what stays with you long after the moment is over. It's what your body remembers, even if your mind forgets. It can live in the breath, in the shoulders, in the way you brace yourself, even when there's no danger. And here's the thing. Trauma come in many forms. So let's walk through them. Let's name them so we can start to recognize them in our own lives. One, personal trauma. This is the one we're most familiar with. It's the pain that happens directly to you. Maybe it was a violent event, an accident, abuse, neglect, a betrayal you never saw coming. It's the kind of wound that shapes your story. It leaves a mark on your identity. You find yourself thinking, I am this way because that happened. And personal trauma often speaks in the first person. I was hurt. I survived. I carry this. Two, psychological trauma. This one goes deeper, inward. It might be caused by outside events, but it changes how you feel on the inside. It rewires your nervous system. It shifts your sense of safety. It can make you distrust others or yourself. This is the trauma that shows up as anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation, shame. It makes everyday life feel like a minefield. Even when you're safe, Your body doesn't believe it. Three, cultural trauma. Now let's zoom out. Some trauma isn't personal, it's collective. Cultural trauma is experienced by entire groups of people, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations. Think of slavery, genocide, colonialism, forced migration, being stripped of language, land, or dignity. This kind of trauma doesn't just live in history books. It lives in holidays. in rituals, in family stories, and in the ache of not being fully seen or safe even today. Fourth generational trauma. This is the one we often miss, but it shapes so much of who we are. Generational trauma is the pain we inherit, not because we lived it, but because someone before us did and couldn't speak about it. So the trauma gets passed down another way, in silence. in the way love was withheld, in the rules that were never explained, but always enforced. It shows up in the way we flinch, in the way we mistrust, in how we sabotage ourselves, without knowing why. You didn't choose this kind of pain, but sometimes it feels like it's choosing you. Fifth, philosophical trauma. This one is rarely talked about, but I think it matters just as much. Philosophical trauma happens when your entire belief system breaks, when something or someone you trusted falls apart. When life loses its why, it's the kind of pain that comes from grief, exile, addiction, betrayal, spiritual crisis. It doesn't show up on your skin. It shows up in your silence, in your numbness, in that quiet feeling that nothing means anything anymore. It's not just what happened to me. It's why am I here? What's the point? Can anything matter again? Here's the important thing to remember. These kinds of trauma don't live in isolation. They overlap. They tangle. They echo each other. A personal wound can awaken a cultural memory. A psychological trigger can unlock a generational pattern. And behind all of it, a philosophical question waits. What do I do with this pain I didn't choose? That's where we go next. We'll explore how trauma, especially generational trauma, moves through families and how naming it might be the first step, not just toward your healing, but toward ending the cycle for those who came before you. The Palestinian people are a powerful living example of generational trauma, a struggle still unfolding before our eyes. But to understand their pain, we have to go back. Back to Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Germany. Back to Poland, Ukraine, and what was once Tsarist Russia, where a profound tragedy unfolded. Jewish people, Romani communities, and other minorities were targeted. stripped of rights, and murdered. Over 80 years ago, Jewish communities across that region endured a trauma so vast it shattered the world. They lost their homes, their dignity, their families, their entire identity, erased in the blink of an eye. And when it ended, when the war was finally over, instead of helping those communities rebuild where the damage had been done, in Germany, in Poland, in Ukraine. The British Empire offered them a different land, not a piece of Germany, not part of Britain, but Palestine, a land that did not belong to them, and a land that the British had no right to give away. This promise came in the form of the Balfour Declaration, a document issued on November 2, 1917, by Lord Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary. In it, he wrote, This was more than 20 years before World War II, long before the world would come to fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust, and yet the native population of Palestine, the Palestinians, were not asked. They were not consulted. They were simply displaced. And so another trauma began. A different people. A different pain. Born not from hatred alone, but from imperial convenience. The trauma of Palestine didn't begin with bombs. It began with erasure. It began with being made invisible. A people who had called this land home for generations were suddenly told they didn't belong. That they had no voice, no choice. And generation after generation has now grown up under the shadow of that silence. Palestinian children today inherit more than poverty or exile. They inherited uncertainty, statelessness, a grief so old it no longer needs to be explained. And that is generational trauma. This isn't about taking sides. This is about recognizing patterns. It's about understanding how unhealed trauma doesn't stay in the past. It keeps moving from one people to another, from one century into the next. Philosophy helps us step back. It gives us the language to ask, what kind of world are we passing forward? Because here's the truth. If we don't name what happened, if we don't speak it, we become part of someone else's trauma story. And maybe that's why we're here. To witness. To break silence. To end cycles. Because every inherited trauma eventually knocks at someone's door. And the only real question is, will we pass it on? Or will we be the ones to stop it? We like to believe we are free, that we are self-made, self-formed, that our thoughts are our own, and our choices come from within. But what if some of those choices, some of those fears, some of those patterns you can't explain, were shaped long before you were born? This is the philosophical dilemma of inherited pain. If the sorrow wasn't mine, why do I feel it? If the silence wasn't mine, Why does it live in my throat? It forces us to ask hard questions. How much of me is actually me? Am I responsible for what I did not cause? Can I heal what I cannot even remember? This is more than psychology. This is about identity. Are we truly individuals or are we echoes resonating with the wounds, dreams, and burdens of those who came before us. Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, offers us a path into this mystery. He believed that we are not isolated minds, but carriers of a deeper shared psychic field, the collective unconscious. According to Jung, each of us holds within our psyche the inherited symbols, traumas, fears, and longings of our ancestors, not as memories we can name, but as archetypes that live beneath our awareness. He would say, Nietzsche, might argue that we live through eternal recurrence, that patterns repeat until someone is brave enough to break them. Camus might remind us that even in an absurd world, rebellion is meaning that facing pain with awareness is the most human act of all. Inherited trauma challenges the myth of the isolated self. It suggests that the rawest parts of us are triggers Our mistrust, our yearning may not begin in our story, but they end with our choice. And so the real question becomes, what do I do with this pain I didn't choose, but now carry? Do I pass it on, silently, unknowingly, or do I transmute it into something conscious, something healing? That is the burden, and that is the gift of awareness. What remains unspoken repeats. The scream that wasn't allowed becomes the silence you inherited. The pain that wasn't grieved becomes the pattern you live inside. But it doesn't have to stay that way. Healing begins not with fixing everything, but with seeing. With saying, this didn't start with me, but it lives in me now. Naming is power. When you say, this is pain, You stop calling it your personality. You begin to see the pattern. And in seeing it, you loosen its grip. You realize, I hurt because someone before me was not allowed to. And maybe, just maybe, your life is the first in your lineage with the safety, the voice, and the awareness to break the cycle. Breaking the chain doesn't always look like a grand revolution. Sometimes it looks like asking a question your parents couldn't. Sometimes it looks like crying when your grandfather never did. Sometimes it looks like not passing down the same silence to your children. But sometimes it is a revolution. Let's take a broader example. China. For over a century, China was humiliated by foreign powers. forced to sign unequal treaties subjected to British opium occupied by Japanese forces and treated like a pawn on the global chessboard. That trauma, national, cultural, generational, ran deep. The loss of sovereignty, the shame of subjugation, the internalized inferiority. But China didn't remain frozen in that past. It named the pain. It studied its history. It remembered the century of humiliation. and turned it into fuel. It rebuilt, it reimagined, it reclaimed. You don't have to agree with China's politics to recognize the psychological shift, a wounded identity transformed into one that stood up and that said, we will no longer be defined by what was done to us. That's what it looks like to break the chain at scale. And we can do the same in our own lives each time we name a wound we give it boundaries each time we tell the truth we dissolve the shame each time we choose a wordness overreaction we give the next generation something we never had freedom from the fog you are not broken you are a bridge you carry what came before but you don't have to carry it alone and you don't have to carry it forever because maybe your life isn't just about healing yourself. Maybe your life is the beginning of a different kind of story. Because sometimes healing begins where the hurt was passed down. Sometimes what feels like the end is actually the beginning. That's why the final chapter of is I called the end and the beginning. Because to name the wound is to change its course. To feel it is to stop it. And to speak it is to start again. This is not just about understanding the past. It's about reclaiming the future. Today is July 4th, a day marked by independence, reflection, and resilience. And for me, is even more meaningful, because today is the birthday of my daughter, Yalda. Yes, she's a child of the fourth, and the living embodiment of resilience and strength. She's boldly open to the world, fiercely unafraid, well, almost. And like any devoted mother, her greatest softness is her children. It's in how deeply she loves them that she's come to understand how deeply she has always been loved. And here is something exciting. Yalda is launching her own podcast series, which I'm proud to announce right here. It's coming soon, and I'll be sharing more details in the near future. So stay tuned, because her voice, like her spirit, is something the world needs to hear. Yalda, happy birthday. I love you. Your life reminds me that love too is something we inherit and something we must protect, pass on, and grow. Thank you for joining me today on Philosophy of Life. I always want to hear from you. Your thoughts, your reflections, your disagreements, whether your feedback is positive or critical, I welcome it. Because the point of this podcast isn't perfection, it's conversation. And don't miss the next episode. an interview with a legend of business and a truly phenomenal personality. We'll explore what it was like to run a business when the tools we have today simply didn't exist. Here's the big question we'll be asking. Is it easier or harder to build something today than it was back then? Until next time, stay curious, stay awake.