04/13/2026
đđź The Turning Point Blog Series 1 of 5 ¡
Cycle Breaking TruthsâŚI wish someone had told me before I had kids⌠Your Great-Grandmotherâs Heartbreak Might Be Living in Your Body Right Now?
I want to share something with you that I find myself returning to again and again, something that stopped me completely the first time I truly understood it, and that I believe every woman deserves to know.
The eggs you were born with, your entire lifetime supply, were not made in your body. They were made in your motherâs body, while she was still growing inside your grandmotherâs womb. You arrived in this world already carrying the next generation within you, formed in an environment you had no control over, shaped by everything your grandmother was living through at the time. If she lived through wars, famine, abuse of any kind. The fears, the hurt, the pain that she carried in her nervous system gets stored within her genes, her epigenetics. If she did not clear that before she had your mother it passed along, then your mothers again passed along, to you and your will to your child and grandchild. Unless you become the turning point.
Let that land for a moment. The biological beginning of you happened one generation before you were born.
What Three Generations Share at Once
Because a female fetus forms all of her eggs during pregnancy, any significant stress her mother experiences does not just affect the mother and the developing daughter, it reaches the eggs forming inside that daughterâs tiny ovaries as well. Scientists call this a three-generation effect. A single period of maternal stress can touch the mother, her daughter, and her daughterâs future children, all at the same time.
Research has shown that extreme stress during pregnancy, including the loss of a loved one or a mentally or physically abusive partner or enviroment, in the first trimester, is associated with an increased risk of fertility challenges in the daughter in adulthood. Not because the daughter did anything wrong. Not because her body is broken. But because the biological environment she developed inside carried an imprint that her body took as instruction.
The Heartbreak That Traveled
Think about the women in your line. Your grandmother, and hers before her. The losses they carried quietly. The grief that was never spoken about. The fear that lived in the bones of wartime, famine, displacement, and hardship. The stress of surviving in a world that did not always make space for a womanâs pain. In the past, even more so than today, it was a very patriarchal society.
None of those women chose to pass any of it forward. They were doing everything they could just to keep going. But the body does not distinguish between chosen and unchosen. It responds to what it experiences. And in responding, it leaves marks, epigenetic marks on the genes of developing eggs, that can travel quietly from one generation to the next, shaping stress responses, hormonal patterns, and sometimes fertility itself, in women who were never anywhere near the original experience.
This is not a reason to feel hopeless. It is a reason to feel compassion for yourself, and for every woman who came before you. And it is the beginning of understanding why the healing work you do today is not just personal. It is generational.
The Good News the Science Also Tells Us
Epigenetic marks are not permanent. Unlike changes to DNA itself, they are responsive, to environment, to safety, to care, to the internal shift that happens when a nervous system finally learns that it does not have to stay braced. Research has shown that positive environments and supportive experiences can buffer and even begin to reverse some of these inherited marks. The body is not locked into what it received. It is listening, always, to what is happening now.
You are not only the product of what your ancestors carried. You are also the environment your own descendants will develop inside.
That is the turning point. It is available to you right now. Healing starts within.
If something in this has resonated, the next post in this series explores what happens when the body itself feels unsafe to conceive, and what that has to do with beliefs formed long before you ever thought about becoming a mother.
Andrea Drabble
Rapid Transformational Therapist