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when Anika’s mother became increasingly focused on
proselytizing the cult message, managing cult affairs,
and establishing herself as a senior figure within the
cult. This lack of attention increased Anika’s sense of
distance from her mother. It reinforced feelings of
abandonment as her mother’s focus turned to nurturing
the cult and cult members rather than Anika.
Anika existed in an almost constant dissociative
state because of cult trauma, intensive chanting and
meditation, and her focus on anxiously striving to
meet the cult’s goals. Therefore, when she became a
mother, Anika’s primary focus on pleasing her leader
interfered with her ability to center on her son, David.
This dynamic blocked her from the possibility of
emotionally connecting to her baby through soothing
responses. Anika was unable to show the right-brain-
to-right-brain response of empathy and soothing
(Shore, 2001 Shore, 2011) despite her conscious desire
to be a present mother to her son. Instead, she became
anxious, hypervigilant, and constantly diligent in
adhering to the cult’s harsh rules set by the cult leader
(i.e., left-brain behavior).
When she became a mother, Anika vowed not to
abandon her child as her mother had abandoned
her. Since she remembered her sadness about her
abandonment, she remained physically close to David.
She believed that by being physically present, she was
protecting him from the experience of maternal loss.
However, due to her dissociated state and anxious need
to center her attention on the leader, she emotionally
abandoned David instead of providing him with
nonverbal empathic responses when comfort was
needed. Thus, David experienced her as cold, receiving
the same abandonment messages Anika had received
in childhood. Moreover, as with his mother, David
dissociated from overwhelming feelings of distress in
an attempt to reach a state of calm.
Beebe (2014), researching mother-child interactions,
hypothesized that early dissociative experiences of
not being “sensed, met, known, and recognized,
particularly in times of distress, can lead to dissociative
experiences during distress in later life” (p. 62-63).
Schore (2011) emphasizes the centrality of the right
brain structures, which are the implicit, unconscious,
and emotion-processing modes of communication that
dominate human experience. In moving contemporary
theory from its traditional emphasis on “left-brain”
verbal and cognitive processes to “right-brain”
emotional and relational processes, he recognizes the
importance of embodied and somatic states. Implicit,
nonverbal, psychobiological communication processes
occur in the earliest interactions between the mother
and child. These right-brain-to-right-brain processes
include facial, auditory, tactile, and “emotionally
charged attachment communications” (p. 79). Schore
(2011) explains that in forming an attachment
bond through somatically expressed emotional
communication, the mother needs to synchronize and
resonate with the infant’s arousal levels of negative
and positive states. Implicit communication from the
mother enables the baby to feel acknowledged and
understood. Schore (2011) discusses the potential for
intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma-
related difficulties with self-regulation when this
implicit positive communication fails to occur.
Bowlby (1965) describes the primary need for a child to
have a secure base that establishes secure attachment,
which is related to later social development. These
early relational patterns become internalized and set
the stage for later patterns of relating to others.
According to Ainsworth (1967), attachment is built
into the nervous system through interactions with
the mother. Healthy attachment develops from dyadic
(interactive) regulation (Sroufe, 1996). Regulated
interactions create a sense of safety and curiosity in the
baby. Healthy attachment influences not only outward
behavior but also internal states.
Trauma is linked to compromised attachment. In
exploring this observation, Salberg (2015) points out,
Attachment is the oxygen of our emotional
lives, serving to create a feeling of safety and
security, allowing us to learn how to be socially
human and operationally teaching us how
to self-regulate our affective lives. It is because
of attachment’s primal aspect in our psyches
that trauma and its impact constitute massive
disruption and disorganization of the parent-
child bonding system. When trauma revisits
us transgenerationally through disrupted
attachment patterns, it is within the child’s

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empathic attunement and bond that the mode
of transmission can be found. (p. 37)
When Anika was pregnant with her daughter and David
was four, the family moved from the cult facility. Anika’s
focus then began to shift to her children. Although she
remained a cult member, with time away from the
cult facility, her dissociative state began to lessen as
she felt less “watched,” and so her daughter grew up
experiencing Anika as a more empathic parent.
Anika has a warm memory of the first time she had
the freedom to take her four-year-old son to the park,
where they could play. Her description of the pleasure
in spending time playing with her son is indicative of
the responsive mother that she could have been if not
for the cult. At that time, she recalls feeling relieved to
no longer be on constant alert about the cult leader’s
whereabouts and how she might gain the leader’s
benevolent attention or have her child gain that
attention.
Sroufe et al. (1997) conclude that early trauma has a more
significant impact on the development of dissociation.
They write, “The vulnerable self will be more likely to
adopt dissociation as a coping mechanism because it
does not have either the belief in worthiness gained
from a loving and responsive early relationship or the
normal level of defenses and integration that such a
belief affords” (in Ogawa et al., p. 875).
Intergenerational Trauma Resulting from
Dissociation in Child-Rearing
Anika learned that her grandmother had been distant
towards her mother in her mother’s upbringing. She
wonders if her mother was repeating this pattern with
her, and this was intensified in the cult. As a child, to
Anika, her mother did not appear to be conflicted about
separating from her to spend long periods working for
the cult and traveling to India.
Trauma can be passed down from generation to
generation, affecting unconscious behavior and beliefs
like a “ghost” (Fraiberg et al., 1975). In “Ghosts in
the Nursery,” Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro (1975)
observe how the “ghosts” of parents’ unremembered,
conflicted histories can lead to repetitive enactments in
parenting children. According to Fraiberg et al. (1975),
the trauma of the first generation unconsciously
influences the behavior of the second generation.
Fraiberg et al. (1975) presented cases that included
multigenerational trauma histories with dysregulated
affect and problematic mother-infant attachments. In
Fraiberg’s paper, the authors describe how empathic
witnessing by the therapist allows these mothers to
gain access to early trauma and, as a result, become
more resilient (Fraiberg et al., 1975).
Children are attuned to their parents’ unconscious
lives, and trauma can affect their parents’ capacity to
provide the necessary “containment” to enable healthy
thinking and symbolizing in their infants. Cavalli
(2012) extends Fraiberg’s (1975) work by describing
how even the fetal environment may be impacted. She
states, “If the mother’s mind is already inhabited by
trauma during gestation, her incapacity to differentiate
will work as a shadow under which the fetus will be
developing” (2012, p. 609).
Rachel Yehuda (2016) discovered that the genes of
parents who were Holocaust survivors could be passed
to their children through epigenetic inheritance.
Her study indicates that the markers on ancestors’
genes affect how the present generation’s genes will
be expressed—that ancestors’ traumas influence the
expression of the present generation’s genes.
Porges’ (2009) polyvagal theory emphasizes the
neurophysiological foundations of attachment,
emotions, communication, and self-regulation. His
theory demonstrates the effect of safety and stress on
the nervous system by focusing on the impact on the
vagus nerve, which unconsciously and automatically
provides embodied, environmental, and relational
cues. Porges explains how an autonomic state is
optimized during safe social interactions and disrupted
during defensive states of stress. Porges considers that
if a threat is perceived in one’s environment (e.g.,
the fear and chronic stress of failing to live up to the
highest standards of perfection of the cult or the fear
of “bad karma” or being reported and verbally attacked
by others), the sympathetic nervous system prepares
for the threat, and body processes are disrupted. The
emphasis on avoiding trouble and bad karma shifts the
focus outward, away from healthy self-awareness. Calm
and a sense of safety are impossible while experiencing
this higher-level threat. This constant stressful state