I KNEW there was something to the idea of "genetic memory"

[ButterflyWoman]

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes#.UbM1-_m1EeX

[CFTraveler]

It looks interesting, I could only concentrate on half of it. When do I get my brain cells back?

[Beekeeper]

I've read some stuff on how epigenetics impacts weight gain as well and it's not just on grandma's line but also about what was happening to grandpa. It's interesting stuff.

[eyeoneblack]

Good article. I've read that genes can be adaptive to different races of people. For example, people of Sino (Chinese etc) decent are not 'milk' tolerant (word?) which is normal for mammals (why the bowl of milk for the cat is a bad idea). There are epigenetic alells (genes) that were selected as a result of the medieval Black Plague. We see that American Indians can't tolerate alcohol but Western Europe decendants handle it much better.
I'm German/Irish and I dooo love my beer and handle it well. :)

[ButterflyWoman]

Through doing genealogy, I've discovered a lot of things about my ancestry that, well, let's just say it explains a lot. I have felt for many years that I'm breaking generations worth of dysfunction, and, having learned a great deal about my immediate ancestors through genealogy, let's just say my perception was correct.

[eyeoneblack]

What you said is a little cryptic, but I think I understand what you mean.

[ButterflyWoman]

It's not meant to be cryptic. I just didn't want to go into all the details of my ancestry. :)

In a nutshell, there's a lot of genetic and behavioural dysfunction on both sides of my family, and I always felt like I kind of inherited it. I didn't even know about my father's biological paternal family (nor did he), but when I learned about them, I felt like I'd opened up a Pandora's box of severe dysfunction, poverty, insanity, criminal activities, and so on. I saw how I had kind of "inherited" a lot of my issues, and not directly, because there was no way to do that (my father was not raised by his biological father and I don't think they ever even met, though I do know his name and some basic facts about him, which helped me locate him when I did the genealogical work). Some of my "stuff" was pretty obviously inherited directly from my parents and their stupid and erratic behaviour and ridiculous decisions, but some of it seems to go back several generations.

It's like inheriting really bad karma, I guess you might say (though I don't believe in that at all; it's just the best way I can think to describe it). And I've had to spend decades breaking all those karmic links (so to speak), maybe on behalf of my predecessors, too, I don't know. Feels that way sometimes.

That make more sense?

I definitely see that the experiences of my most immediate ancestors set up a chain of events that contributed directly to my own dysfunction. Seeing that there is very possibly, even likely, an epigenetic factor just makes perfect sense. Maybe it's karmic (whatever that actually means ;)), maybe it's genetic, maybe it's both, I don't know. I'm just happy to break as many links in that chain as I can.