Abstract

"Transgenerational trauma represents one of the most clinically significant and scientifically dynamic frontiers in the field of complex trauma and dissociation. This webinar addresses the transmission of traumatic experience across generations — neurobiologically, epigenetically, and through attachment — and explores what this means for clinical practice today.

Drawing on more than four decades of clinical experience in the assessment and treatment of complex trauma and dissociative disorders, Michaela Huber presents a comprehensive framework for understanding how unresolved trauma does not end with the individual who experienced it. War trauma, organized violence, chronic interpersonal abuse, and collective catastrophe leave biological and psychological imprints that manifest in subsequent generations — often in the form of dissociative symptoms, affect dysregulation, attachment disruption, and somatic presentations whose origins remain opaque to both client and clinician.

This webinar integrates emerging epigenetic research — including evidence on DNA methylation patterns, glucocorticoid receptor gene dysregulation, and stress-responsive neurobiological systems — with established clinical knowledge on structural dissociation, internal working models, and phase-oriented trauma treatment. Particular attention is given to the specific challenge of treating clients whose trauma is inherited rather than directly experienced: how does the clinician recognize transgenerational transmission in the consulting room? How are implicit traumatic memories held outside conscious awareness accessed and processed? How does the therapeutic relationship become the site of intergenerational healing?

Huber draws on her unique European perspective, including direct clinical experience with survivors of the Kosovo and Ukraine wars, to illustrate how collective and political trauma travels across generations and across cultures — and what this demands of trauma clinicians today. She presents a clinically grounded treatment framework that bridges the biological and the relational, the historical and the present, the individual and the collective.

A founding figure of modern trauma therapy in the German-speaking world, Huber was the first woman and first non-American to receive the International Distinguished Achievement Award of the ISSD. She has authored foundational works in psychotraumatology including the standard reference *Trauma und die Folgen* (6th ed., 2020) and the edited volume *Transgenerationale Traumatisierung* (2012), and has trained thousands of clinicians across Europe and internationally.

This webinar is directed at clinicians at intermediate to advanced levels who work with complex trauma and dissociation and seek to deepen their understanding of the multigenerational dimensions of their clients' presentations."

Potential to Distress: Yes