Generational Trauma and Mental Health: A Personal Story

My Adverse Childhood Experiences score is zero. My life says otherwise. Here’s what generational trauma, ultra-processed food, and four decades of environmental inputs taught me about the biology of mental health.

Same kid. Different inputs.

On paper, I had an incredible childhood. Loving parents who are still in love. A big brother I looked up to. A physician for a father, a health-conscious mother, and a home in a good Los Angeles neighborhood. If you handed me the standard 10-item Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) questionnaire, I would score a zero.

And yet… I was carrying something heavy from the very beginning. I remember being happy and mildly tormented at the same time. I always knew I was going to be somebody, and I also felt like I didn’t fit inside my own skin.

It took me years of clinical work and a PhD to understand what I was feeling. My doctoral research at UCLA studied adversity across the life course. The biggest personal takeaway was this: the ACE questionnaire doesn’t capture the full breadth of adversity. It asks about what happens inside the home. It doesn’t ask about the schools, the streets, the culture, the food supply, or the legacies we inherit from the people who came before us.

That’s why, in my clinical work, I ask about your childhood before I look at your labs. And it’s why I’ve come to see my own story less as a series of choices and more as a sensitive nervous system absorbing the inputs it was given. Some of those burdens were mine. Many of them weren’t mine to carry.

Two lineages with generational trauma

My father’s side is mostly Russian and Polish, and they played by the rules. The rules worked for them. They were socially advantaged in many ways (not rich), with a legacy of excellence and long lifespans. My father became an academic orthopedic trauma surgeon with an incredible work ethic, in a corner of medicine that’s hard to criticize. His job was saving lives.

My mother’s side is mostly Irish, and they were a bit more rebellious. My mother and her family embody California hippie culture. Her father was an engineer who struggled with textbook alcoholism and eventually got sober. Her mother died of brain cancer in her fifties. Her youngest brother died at 30. Another brother, my Uncle Mike, was a tormented soul raised in that alcoholic household, and he struggled with addiction and relational trauma until he passed during COVID. Today, most of the adults on that side have passed away, and the rest are living with chronic disease.

My mother was the healthiest of the bunch. She championed my wellness journey in my mid-20s. She now lives in memory care with dementia that began in her sixties, and my father visits her on most days. Their love story continues.

I grew up between these two inheritances. A rule-following, high-achieving lineage on one side. A free-spirited, wounded, norm-rejecting lineage on the other. Some folks march to a different drumbeat, and I was one of them.

Here’s what I now know: what we inherit isn’t only genetic. Epigenetics describes how gene expression changes in response to environmental inputs, through processes like DNA methylation. There’s growing evidence that stress and trauma can leave marks on stress-response systems, and that some of those marks may cross generations. Human evidence is still limited, and families share genes, kitchens, and coping styles all at once, so it’s hard to tease apart. I’ve written about one specific question at FxMed Mental Health: can generational trauma influence the body’s detoxification capacity? The honest answer is plausible, not proven. That question became very personal for me, and I’ll come back to it.

Four decades of inputs

Genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger. My environment changed every decade, and each one found a different door in.

The 1980s: engineered food

I was born in Boston in 1981 during my father’s residency, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was one. I developed severe asthma early on and was hospitalized many times. I now know it left a profound immunological signature, one that would resurface decades later as eczema.

If I’m honest, my most salient childhood memories are about food: Domino’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Fruit by the Foot, Doritos, Kraft Mac & Cheese. My parents caught me trying to make Mac & Cheese on the stove at age three. We had healthy food at home, but it was hard to compete with cheese, sodium, and corn syrup engineered to be irresistible. My brother didn’t care about food nearly as much as I did. I now know that’s because our neurochemistry was different.

We were also living through the low-fat era. Like most families, we were told to eat less fat and cholesterol, while the sugar industry was quietly funding favorable research behind the scenes. I remember skipping the ice cream for a rainbow snow cone because it had less fat and fewer calories. It was high-fructose corn syrup and food dyes, which we now know are not inert. Today, one of the most consistent findings in the ultra-processed food literature is its association with poorer mental health, particularly depression.

Less fat, fewer calories, and a lot of corn syrup and dye.

By middle school I was overweight and uncomfortable in my skin. Genetic neurobiology, early-life adversity, and an engineered food environment equal weight gain. That body shame would become one of the quieter drivers of everything that came next.

The early 1990s: a violent urban culture

I went to public school in Los Angeles during the crack epidemic and the height of gangster rap. I graduated from Hamilton High, the same school as the late Nipsey Hussle. As a kid who already felt like an outsider, I blended into an increasingly unsafe urban environment. My first beer and my first hit of weed came before puberty, and I believe early cannabis use shifted my growth trajectory.

On AOL, I dove deep into underground hip-hop. It was a counterculture against “the machine”: stay true to your craft, don’t sell your soul. Many of those values still resonate with me today. But the high school environment also carried real threat, and a child’s stress system adapts to threat. Chronic activation of the HPA axis shapes cortisol rhythms, mood, and reward sensitivity in ways we can now measure.

NYC hip-hop in the late 90s

One of my closest friends from those years came from New York, fleeing childhood physical abuse and a tumultuous divorce. His risk appetite was through the roof, and he loved racing cars. I now know he almost certainly had a traumatic brain injury from the violence in his household. He’s now serving a life sentence after a string of car crashes ended in tragedy. I often ask: how many people in prison are products of childhood trauma who never had easy access to executive functioning? How many have head injuries? How many grew up malnourished? The research suggests the answer is most.

The late 1990s: the rave

In 1999, the Southern California rave scene exploded, and so did I. I now see it as an extension of my mother’s legacy: free-spirited, rejecting norms, and dancing away the pain of feeling constrained. Raving was ancestral. Ground stomping, kicking up dust, and most importantly, doing it together. It was also a laboratory of MDMA, LSD, ketamine, and speed, layered onto a brain that was still developing.

The early 2000s: the opioid crisis

In the fall of 1999, I started at USC. I arrived just as the first wave of the opioid crisis was flooding the streets with an unlimited supply of prescription drugs. You could get anything. I lost friends to overdoses and was sure it would never happen to me. By my early twenties, the crisis had me too, and getting out took everything I had.

Genetic vulnerability, plus early exposure to adversity, plus a stressful urban environment, plus easy access. It challenges simple notions of willpower and personal responsibility. I had to take responsibility to recover. But I can’t authentically say that I chose it.

Setting the burdens down

When recovery began for me in 2006, I didn’t have a protocol. I just intuitively knew. I was pale, overweight, and smoking a pack a day. I started eating as many colorful plants and proteins as I could, anything I hadn’t eaten before. I got sunlight, drank water, and moved my body every day. The weight came off quickly, and my skin cleared up.

I moved in with a friend who lived near a juice bar. The first green juices made me gag. My body rejected them. I kept going until I enjoyed them, and eventually I craved them. That was my first profound lesson in neuroplasticity. Taste is trainable, and food carries signaling information that the brain and genome respond to. I now build that lesson into everything I teach, including the Wise Mind Nutrition app.

Exercise became extremely rewarding. It started as vanity and eventually became about my sanity. I now know it was repairing my brain through BDNF, the protein that supports neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. I trained jiu-jitsu and summited Mt. Whitney five years in a row. I went back to dance floors and danced sober, and I now know that movement was working through stored trauma in my body. Dance is sacred medicine.

The top of Mt. Whitney, CA

My mother gifted me an acupressure massage during that first year that changed my life. I was flooded with dark memories, and the therapist encouraged me to let them out. I fell asleep for thirty minutes afterward. I now know there were issues lodged in my tissues, and what I experienced was a deep release.

None of this happened alone. Recovery happens in community, and the word itself says it: take the “I” out of illness, replace it with “We,” and you get wellness. I made amends, my family came back together, and I went back to school. In many ways, I’m an academic miracle: I may have the lowest GPA of anyone to ever graduate from USC. I then became a Registered Dietitian and started running groups at a treatment center, which became my first practice, Nutrition in Recovery.

The antenna

Hypervigilance is usually described as a symptom. In my case, it also became a professional instrument. My antenna is strong because my roots are deep. Perhaps that’s one of the gifts of trauma: an inability to ignore what doesn’t add up. Over my career, I’ve gravitated toward the same kind of tension again and again. Each time, I’ve refused to simply pick a side.

Detecting transactional energy. Something about the nutrition field always felt off. Early in my career, I started writing about corporate conflicts of interest and the concept of “capture” inside my own professional organization, and many people questioned my sanity. Years later, The Washington Post reported on the food industry paying influencer dietitians. Industry money shapes research conclusions, government advice, and public opinion. I’ve spent fifteen years studying that playbook, which I now teach as the commercial determinants of health.

Altruism vs. for-profit treatment. When the addiction treatment industry boomed in the mid-2010s, I watched good intentions get tangled up with patient brokering and fraud. People knew it, but few spoke up. I learned that care can’t be fully separated from the incentives that fund it. I was one of the few who spoke up.

Psychiatry vs. nutrition. I knew food and supplements could improve mental health. I also knew the health care system would never pay for it, and that the research would never be properly funded. Nutrition isn’t patentable, scalable, or profitable. Meanwhile, the evidence for a simple serotonin-imbalance explanation of depression has weakened, and we now recognize multiple depression phenotypes, many with nutrition-related mechanisms. Functional medicine doesn’t replace psychiatry. It asks the questions psychiatry was never designed to ask.

Social vs. biological sciences. My PhD was in Community Health Sciences, a department devoted to the social determinants of health. I learned an enormous amount, and I also struggled, because I knew too much about biological mechanisms. Sociologists tend to set biology aside, and biologists tend to set social context aside. I kept asking: if childhood adversity is linked to higher body weight, what’s the mechanism? Poverty matters enormously. So does biology. Health psychology and the biopsychosocial model gave me a way to hold both.

Restrictive vs. addictive eating. The eating disorder field split into camps: one sees dieting as the root of disordered eating, the other sees addiction-like responses to ultra-processed food. I collected data on more than 300 people in my practice. Many developed eating disorders in the wake of childhood trauma and addiction-like eating, which suggests dieting is often a consequence rather than a cause. In our sample, adults with four or more ACEs had roughly twice the odds of screening positive for ultra-processed food addiction, and the link was strongest among people with a substance use history. This year I brought it together in a unified theory of restrictive and addictive eating.

The Conceptual Model

12-Step vs. psychedelics. The last tension is the one I resisted longest. It deserves its own section.

Plants all along

For most of my career, I worked inside an abstinence-based treatment world, and I believed in it. I’ve watched 12-Step programs save countless lives, and I still respect what that tradition protects. So, when psychedelic research re-emerged, I was skeptical, especially for people with addiction histories. As a treatment provider, my first question was always about safety.

Then the evidence kept coming. I started seeing patients who use psychedelic medicines, and I witnessed what I can only call miracles. I completed training with the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, reviewed the literature on psychedelic medicine in substance use disorder recovery, and hosted an expert panel in my community. Today, I’m cautiously optimistic and dialectical. I hold the genuine therapeutic promise and the legitimate risks in the same space. Safety and recovery always come first, and preparation and integration are where the biology matters most. That’s why I’ve written about plant allies for the psychedelic journey.

Somewhere along the way, I realized something that made me laugh. I’d been working with plant medicine all along. The green juice that made me gag until I craved it. The ginger, turmeric, mint, sage, and rosemary. The raw sauerkraut juice I hunted down in a New Zealand health food store. The urban farm we built with biodynamic soil at a treatment center early in my career. The ceremonial cacao. The purple foods. My conviction has always been that nature is the original medicine, that plants can heal humans, and that trauma can be healed. Indigenous cultures have understood plants as teachers for millennia. It would be irresponsible for me to turn my back on the science now.

Plant Medicine, Early Career Edition

I had to be rigid to get free. But I didn’t get free to be rigid.

What my own biology shows

Eventually I turned the detective work on myself. In functional medicine, we build biopsychosocial timelines and use specialty testing to look for biological bottlenecks. My results didn’t explain everything, but they explained a lot.

During my PhD, my anxiety returned. I knew it wasn’t just circumstantial. A stool test showed no detectable GABA production from the bacterial species in my gut. Simply knowing that my anxiety had a biological basis reduced it. I also learned that caffeine-free, for me, means anxiety-free.

A telomere test, a rough biomarker of biological aging, came back short: close to two standard deviations below the mean for my age. Despite years of excellent health habits, my body seems to be working uphill.

Then came the question I mentioned earlier: can generational trauma influence detoxification capacity? My genetic panel showed I’m homozygous for a CYP1A2 variant associated with slower Phase I detoxification, and heterozygous for variants in two Phase II genes, SULT1A1 and GSTP1. That’s a bottleneck at two stages of clearing toxins from the body.

Given the history of cancer on my mother’s side, I wanted to understand the root cause. Certain estrogen metabolites are linked to higher cancer risk, and bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in plastics, mimics estrogen in the body. Even though I avoid plastics, my BPA levels came back far above the reference range after a five-day fasting protocol, which mobilizes fat-stored toxins. A month later, unprovoked and off caffeine, my BPA was in range. Two months after that, provoked again with sauna and back on caffeine, it was high again. Same body, roughly tenfold different readings, depending on context. Caffeine competes for the same CYP1A2 enzyme, so removing it seems to free up capacity for actual toxins. With targeted support, my estrogen metabolism normalized, even though my genetic ceiling didn’t change.

I’m a sample size of one, so I hold all of this loosely. But it gave language to something I’ve felt my whole life: I may be inherently more toxic than most, and I have to work very hard not to be. If you’re curious what this kind of testing looks like, our Testing Guide walks through it, and our case studies show how it plays out for patients.

The next generation

I’m now the father of two daughters, with a third on the way. They’re my greatest teachers. My first daughter was born in 2022, the day everything changed. During our second pregnancy, my wife, Nathalie, was hospitalized for the final ten weeks with a rare complication. Our second daughter was born at 34 weeks and came out of the NICU two weeks later in miraculous health. So did we.

My younger daughter strongly resembles my mother’s side of the family. Because I know that lineage so well, I could predict a lot about her temperament, her eating patterns, and her free spirit, and raise her accordingly. She might carry some messy code. But her environment is filled with nurture and repair. That’s what epigenetics looks like at the kitchen table.

I take their nutrition seriously because I know what’s at stake. Nutritious food is one of the many ways to break legacies of adversity and generational trauma. And corporate agendas are monetizing our children’s brains. It’s our job to protect them.

There’s a saying: if you don’t face your demons, they will raise your child. I faced mine before starting a family. If you really want to know about my recovery, ask my four-year-old if I’ve ever yelled at her. For me, that’s what real healing looks like. My mother lives with dementia now, but her granddaughters carry her in their faces and their temperaments.

In Internal Family Systems, the inherited pain we carry is literally called a legacy burden, and healing is called unburdening. I’ve written about how biology shapes that inner work. Here’s what my life has taught me about it:

• An ACE score of zero doesn’t mean zero burden.
• What looks like a bad choice is often a vulnerable system meeting a hostile environment.
• Biology isn’t destiny. It’s information.

I’ve learned to be more like water and less like rocks. Moving from rigidity to fluidity is the real sign of mental health recovery. I’m hard on the systems that shaped me and soft on the boy who absorbed them. If you’re carrying burdens that were never yours, and you’ve been told your symptoms are a character flaw or a chemical imbalance, there’s another way to look at it. That’s the work we do at FxMed Mental Health.

Dr. David Wiss, PhD, RDN, FMCP