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July 4, 2025 19 mins

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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.

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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
What if the pain you carry didn't begin with you?
What if your anxiety, yoursilence, your fear of being seen
or heard was not a reflection ofyour weakness, but the echo of

(00:23):
someone else's survival?
What if pain could be passeddown, not in words, but in
silences of inherits.
Yes, inherits, you hearcorrectly.
Hi, I'm Reza Sanjide and this isanother episode of Philosophy of
Life.
Today we're exploring somethingalmost invisible to all of us

(00:44):
and at the same time we aredeeply familiar to so many of
us, affect by deal, everysingle, without know where
actually come from.
We're talking about inheritedpain.
about the trauma that lives infamilies across decades,
sometimes across centuries, thegrief your grandfather never
spoke of, the terror your motherswallowed instead of screaming,

(01:08):
the stories your bloodremembers, 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 weare when so much of what we
carry came before us.

(01:34):
When most people hear the wordtrauma, they think of something
loud, something sudden, a carcrash, a violent attack, a
moment that splits life intobefore and after.
But that's not the only kind oftrauma.
Some of it is quieter.
It doesn't scream.
It lingers.
It hides in habits, in fears, insilence.

(01:58):
Trauma isn't just what happenedto you.
It's what stays with you longafter the moment is over.
It's what your body remembers,even if your mind forgets.
It can live in the breath, inthe shoulders, in the way you
brace yourself, even whenthere's no danger.
And here's the thing.
Trauma come in many forms.

(02:18):
So let's walk through them.
Let's name them so we can startto recognize them in our own
lives.
One, personal trauma.
This is the one we're mostfamiliar with.
It's the pain that happensdirectly to you.
Maybe it was a violent event, anaccident, abuse, neglect, a

(02:39):
betrayal you never saw coming.
It's the kind of wound thatshapes your story.
It leaves a mark on youridentity.
You find yourself thinking, I amthis way because that happened.
And personal trauma often speaksin the first person.
I was hurt.
I survived.
I carry this.

(03:00):
Two, psychological trauma.
This one goes deeper, inward.
It might be caused by outsideevents, 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 othersor yourself.

(03:21):
This is the trauma that shows upas anxiety, hypervigilance,
dissociation, shame.
It makes everyday life feel likea minefield.
Even when you're safe, Your bodydoesn't believe it.
Three, cultural trauma.
Now let's zoom out.

(03:41):
Some trauma isn't personal, it'scollective.
Cultural trauma is experiencedby entire groups of people,
ethnic groups, religiouscommunities, nations.
Think of slavery, genocide,colonialism, forced migration,
being stripped of language,land, or dignity.
This kind of trauma doesn't justlive in history books.

(04:01):
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 painwe inherit, not because we lived

(04:23):
it, but because someone beforeus did and couldn't speak about
it.
So the trauma gets passed downanother way, in silence.
in the way love was withheld, inthe rules that were never
explained, but always enforced.
It shows up in the way weflinch, in the way we mistrust,

(04:44):
in how we sabotage ourselves,without knowing why.
You didn't choose this kind ofpain, 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 happenswhen your entire belief system

(05:06):
breaks, when something orsomeone you trusted falls apart.
When life loses its why, it'sthe 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, inyour numbness, in that quiet

(05:27):
feeling that nothing meansanything anymore.
It's not just what happened tome.
It's why am I here?
What's the point?
Can anything matter again?
Here's the important thing toremember.
These kinds of trauma don't livein isolation.
They overlap.
They tangle.
They echo each other.

(05:48):
A personal wound can awaken acultural memory.
A psychological trigger canunlock a generational pattern.
And behind all of it, aphilosophical question waits.
What do I do with this pain Ididn't choose?
That's where we go next.
We'll explore how trauma,especially generational trauma,
moves through families and hownaming it might be the first

(06:11):
step, not just toward yourhealing, but toward ending the
cycle for those who came beforeyou.
The Palestinian people are apowerful living example of
generational trauma, a strugglestill unfolding before our eyes.

(06:35):
But to understand their pain, wehave to go back.
Back to Europe, particularlyEastern Europe and Germany.
Back to Poland, Ukraine, andwhat was once Tsarist Russia,
where a profound tragedyunfolded.
Jewish people, Romanicommunities, and other
minorities were targeted.

(06:56):
stripped of rights, andmurdered.
Over 80 years ago, Jewishcommunities across that region
endured a trauma so vast itshattered the world.
They lost their homes, theirdignity, their families, their
entire identity, erased in theblink of an eye.

(07:16):
And when it ended, when the warwas finally over, instead of
helping those communitiesrebuild where the damage had
been done, in Germany, inPoland, in Ukraine.
The British Empire offered thema different land, not a piece of
Germany, not part of Britain,but Palestine, a land that did

(07:38):
not belong to them, and a landthat the British had no right to
give away.
This promise came in the form ofthe Balfour Declaration, a
document issued on November 2,1917, by Lord Arthur Balfour,
the British Foreign Secretary.
In it, he wrote, This was morethan 20 years before World War

(08:14):
II, long before the world wouldcome to fully grasp the horror
of the Holocaust, and yet thenative population of Palestine,
the Palestinians, were notasked.
They were not consulted.
They were simply displaced.
And so another trauma began.
A different people.

(08:35):
A different pain.
Born not from hatred alone, butfrom imperial convenience.
The trauma of Palestine didn'tbegin with bombs.
It began with erasure.
It began with being madeinvisible.
A people who had called thisland home for generations were
suddenly told they didn'tbelong.
That they had no voice, nochoice.

(08:58):
And generation after generationhas now grown up under the
shadow of that silence.
Palestinian children todayinherit 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.

(09:20):
This isn't about taking sides.
This is about recognizingpatterns.
It's about understanding howunhealed trauma doesn't stay in
the past.
It keeps moving from one peopleto 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

(09:44):
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 traumastory.
And maybe that's why we're here.
To witness.
To break silence.
To end cycles.
Because every inherited traumaeventually knocks at someone's

(10:06):
door.
And the only real question is,will we pass it on?
Or will we be the ones to stopit?
We like to believe we are free,that we are self-made,

(10:28):
self-formed, that our thoughtsare our own, and our choices
come from within.
But what if some of thosechoices, some of those fears,
some of those patterns you can'texplain, were shaped long before
you were born?
This is the philosophicaldilemma of inherited pain.

(10:48):
If the sorrow wasn't mine, whydo I feel it?
If the silence wasn't mine, Whydoes it live in my throat?
It forces us to ask hardquestions.
How much of me is actually me?
Am I responsible for what I didnot cause?
Can I heal what I cannot evenremember?

(11:11):
This is more than psychology.
This is about identity.
Are we truly individuals or arewe echoes resonating with the
wounds, dreams, and burdens ofthose who came before us.
Jung, the founder of analyticalpsychology, offers us a path
into this mystery.
He believed that we are notisolated minds, but carriers of

(11:33):
a deeper shared psychic field,the collective unconscious.
According to Jung, each of usholds within our psyche the
inherited symbols, traumas,fears, and longings of our
ancestors, not as memories wecan name, but as archetypes that
live beneath our awareness.
He would say, Nietzsche, mightargue that we live through

(12:21):
eternal recurrence, thatpatterns repeat until someone is
brave enough to break them.
Camus might remind us that evenin an absurd world, rebellion is
meaning that facing pain withawareness is the most human act
of all.
Inherited trauma challenges themyth of the isolated self.

(12:44):
It suggests that the rawestparts of us are triggers Our
mistrust, our yearning may notbegin in our story, but they end
with our choice.
And so the real questionbecomes, what do I do with this
pain I didn't choose, but nowcarry?
Do I pass it on, silently,unknowingly, or do I transmute

(13:07):
it into something conscious,something healing?
That is the burden, and that isthe gift of awareness.
What remains unspoken repeats.

(13:28):
The scream that wasn't allowedbecomes the silence you
inherited.
The pain that wasn't grievedbecomes the pattern you live
inside.
But it doesn't have to stay thatway.
Healing begins not with fixingeverything, but with seeing.
With saying, this didn't startwith me, but it lives in me now.

(13:51):
Naming is power.
When you say, this is pain, Youstop calling it your
personality.
You begin to see the pattern.
And in seeing it, you loosen itsgrip.
You realize, I hurt becausesomeone before me was not
allowed to.
And maybe, just maybe, your lifeis the first in your lineage

(14:16):
with the safety, the voice, andthe awareness to break the
cycle.
Breaking the chain doesn'talways look like a grand
revolution.
Sometimes it looks like asking aquestion your parents couldn't.
Sometimes it looks like cryingwhen your grandfather never did.
Sometimes it looks like notpassing down the same silence to

(14:37):
your children.
But sometimes it is arevolution.
Let's take a broader example.
China.
For over a century, China washumiliated by foreign powers.
forced to sign unequal treatiessubjected to British opium
occupied by Japanese forces andtreated like a pawn on the

(14:58):
global chessboard.
That trauma, national, cultural,generational, ran deep.
The loss of sovereignty, theshame of subjugation, the
internalized inferiority.
But China didn't remain frozenin that past.
It named the pain.
It studied its history.
It remembered the century ofhumiliation.

(15:20):
and turned it into fuel.
It rebuilt, it reimagined, itreclaimed.
You don't have to agree withChina's politics to recognize
the psychological shift, awounded identity transformed
into one that stood up and thatsaid, we will no longer be
defined by what was done to us.

(15:42):
That's what it looks like tobreak the chain at scale.
And we can do the same in ourown lives each time we name a
wound we give it boundaries eachtime we tell the truth we
dissolve the shame each time wechoose a wordness overreaction
we give the next generationsomething we never had freedom

(16:05):
from the fog you are not brokenyou are a bridge you carry what
came before but you don't haveto carry it alone and you don't
have to carry it forever becausemaybe your life isn't just about
healing yourself.
Maybe your life is the beginningof a different kind of story.

(16:32):
Because sometimes healing beginswhere the hurt was passed down.
Sometimes what feels like theend is actually the beginning.
That's why the final chapter ofis I called the end and the
beginning.
Because to name the wound is tochange its course.

(16:55):
To feel it is to stop it.
And to speak it is to startagain.
This is not just aboutunderstanding the past.
It's about reclaiming thefuture.
Today is July 4th, a day markedby independence, reflection, and
resilience.
And for me, is even moremeaningful, because today is the

(17:19):
birthday of my daughter, Yalda.
Yes, she's a child of thefourth, and the living
embodiment of resilience andstrength.
She's boldly open to the world,fiercely unafraid, well, almost.
And like any devoted mother, hergreatest softness is her

(17:39):
children.
It's in how deeply she lovesthem that she's come to
understand how deeply she hasalways been loved.
And here is something exciting.
Yalda is launching her ownpodcast series, which I'm proud
to announce right here.
It's coming soon, and I'll besharing more details in the near

(18:01):
future.
So stay tuned, because hervoice, like her spirit, is
something the world needs tohear.
Yalda, happy birthday.
I love you.
Your life reminds me that lovetoo is something we inherit and
something we must protect, passon, and grow.

(18:22):
Thank you for joining me todayon Philosophy of Life.
I always want to hear from you.
Your thoughts, your reflections,your disagreements, whether your
feedback is positive orcritical, I welcome it.
Because the point of thispodcast isn't perfection, it's
conversation.
And don't miss the next episode.

(18:43):
an interview with a legend ofbusiness and a truly phenomenal
personality.
We'll explore what it was liketo run a business when the tools
we have today simply didn'texist.
Here's the big question we'll beasking.
Is it easier or harder to buildsomething today than it was back
then?
Until next time, stay curious,stay awake.
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