Epigenetics: what impact does it have on our psychology? [theconversation.com]

This article seems to be at one end of a spectrum of though about the role of epigenetics in our health and behavior. At the other end is the book "The Genie in Your Genes" by Dawson Church. It's hard to imagine  whether a gene is being read or not having a role in our behavior.

There is an experiment cited by those more enthusiastic about the role of epigenetics about the male mice who were trained to fear the smell of cherry blossoms. Male mice were used because the sperm is basically a packet of chromosomes and little else. As the story is told, successive generations of mice were also afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms. One would imagine that if one of those generations of mice were given a therapy that extinguished the fear of that odor. Successive generations would also be free of that fear. That paradigm is what establishes the hope that generational trauma can be interrupted not just from extinguishing behaviors that pass along the trauma but also genetic markers that may also perpetuate the trauma.

That's all a mechanistic way of looking at inherited trauma. For people who are into spirituality or field theory, trauma could also be carried by a family's or a culture's collective soul or morphic field.  In that perspective, healing the trauma from a generation of that family or culture would end their transmission of trauma.