JOHN YANG: Most people will experience a traumatic event at some time during their lives, losing a loved one, being the victim of an act of violence, or surviving a life threatening natural disaster.

But what happens when the impact of trauma is indirect, the result of experiences of family and caretakers?

As part of our series Race Matters, Ali Rogan sat down with Inger Burnett-Zeigler, author of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: the Emotional Lives of Black Women," to look at the effects of generational trauma.

ALI ROGIN: Dr. Burnett-Zeigler, thank you so much for joining us.

First of all, can you explain what is generational trauma?

DR. INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER, Author, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen": Generational trauma is trauma that's passed down from one generation to the next.

Some of the ways in which that can be experienced is individuals who have experienced a trauma leave an imprint of that trauma experience on their genes that can be passed down to future generations, making them more vulnerable to mental health challenges.

That trauma experience can be passed down through the behaviors of individuals who have experienced the trauma, particularly if that trauma has been unidentified and not resolved, whereby some of the symptoms of trauma, such as anger, irritability, depression, are experienced by future generations.

And generational trauma can also be passed down behaviorally, whereby individuals who have experienced a trauma might then either expose their children to other traumatic experiences through their intimate partners or through community violence.

Or those individuals are more likely to get into relationships or be in societal circumstances where there's more poverty and they have more exposure to violence themselves.

One common way that I've seen generational trauma show up in the patients that I've worked with individual therapy is I might be working with a woman who has been exposed to their mother, for example, being the victim of intimate partner violence.

In that relationship, they may have also been the victim of childhood abuse and neglect.

Because of the trauma that person has experienced firsthand there's more of an urgency to leave that home environment to get to a place of safety.

But by leaving home as a teenager, they're more vulnerable to themselves being in an impoverished environment and more vulnerable to be entering into an unhealthy relationship themselves.

And I see that often pan out where the individual leaves the home early, move the home as a teenager.

They then get into a relationship where there's abuse, and the cycle then continues.

A child is born of that relationship, and the cycle of generational trauma continues in that root child's life.

ALI ROGIN: Many people in the United States experienced traumatic events, but Black women in the U.S. are more vulnerable to traumatic events and PTSD.

Why is that?

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: Yeah.

So about 7 in 10 people in general will be exposed to a trauma at some point in their lifetime.

And those estimates for black women are about 8 in 10.

Black girls are more likely to experience childhood abuse and neglect, including sexual abuse and physical abuse.

And black women are more likely to experience intimate partner violence and other forms of sexual violence.

Across the trauma spectrum, which can include many things outside of sexual violence and intimate partner violence, black women are more vulnerable because of the social and economic conditions that many of us live including being more likely to live in poverty, where rates of community violence are higher.

Being more vulnerable to chronic stress, which is associated with experiences and exposures to trauma, and having less access to the healthcare system, whereby those individuals who have been exposed to a trauma are then more likely to develop PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder because they haven't gotten the necessary mental health care needs in order to reduce their likelihood of that progressing into a traumatic condition.

ALI ROGIN: There's also research that indicates black women are less likely to receive treatment even though they experience trauma and PTSD at higher levels?

What do communities of color, in particular black communities, need to know about how these sorts of traumas present themselves in order to spot the signs and access the care that they deserve and need?

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: I think one barrier that's particularly salient in terms of individuals getting the necessary treatment for trauma is recognizing when they've been exposed to a traumatic event.

So when we talk about trauma, it could be childhood abuse, it could be intimate partner violence, it could be community violence, but it could also be dealing with a significant health condition that has led one to confront a life threatening circumstance.

It could be the traumatic loss or separation of a loved one, like a parent, to incarceration or death.

It could be something like the COVID-19 pandemic, or experiences with direct racism and discrimination.

And so when we think about the broad spectrum of traumatic exposures, a lot of people who have been exposed to trauma don't even recognize that exposure in themselves.

And they don't recognize the way some of those symptoms show up.

They don't realize that anger, that irritability, the difficulty sleeping, the being anxious and nervous and on edge might be related to their history of trauma exposure.

So in terms of helping people get the care that they need, it's one identifying when individuals have been exposed to trauma, Understanding how some of those symptoms might be showing up in their daily lives, and then helping them to make a warm handoff to treatment providers.

Additionally, it's important to recognize the ways that stigma related to having a mental health condition, as well as participating in treatment, might be a barrier to one engaging and helping to normalize some of those activities.

ALI ROGIN: Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, author and lecturer at Northwestern University, thank you so much for joining us.

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: Thank you.