My First Grader Handed Me A 9-Word Note. When I Read It, My Stomach Dropped.

"Motherhood complicates my own mental health because my responsibility extends beyond my own mind. My heart lives outside my body at all times - inside my little girl and my little boy. I feel their joy as much as I feel their pain. I feel what they feel, and I feel responsible for helping them understand their own emotions. That night, after I put both kids to bed, I fell into the internet hole every parent knows: the desperate search for answers to impossible questions."

"Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the term "emotional inheritance" - the idea that trauma can be passed down through families, even if we don't talk about it. It rang true for me, not in a clinical way, but in the way truth sometimes echoes in your bones. In this phrase, I felt my panic validated. In her book "Emotional Inheritance," psychoanalyst Galit Atlas explores how past experiences, from interpersonal rifts to large-scale tragedies, can echo through families,"

Motherhood entwines a parent's mental health with their children's emotional states, causing a parent to feel a child's joy and pain and to bear responsibility for teaching emotional understanding. Parents may search for answers and encounter the concept of emotional inheritance, where trauma passes across generations even without explicit discussion. Psychoanalytic perspectives describe past experiences echoing through families and shaping descendants' emotions. Neuroscientific research indicates trauma can leave chemical markers on DNA that alter gene expression and increase risk for depression and anxiety. These dynamics make parenting feel both all-encompassing and powerless.

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