In this short video, I explain how a family history nobody spoke about can still steer your feelings today, and how we trace it together by video.
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Online generational trauma therapy helps you make sense of feelings that seem older than your own life: a dread, a watchfulness or a sorrow that came down through parents and grandparents who lived through war, exile, poverty, persecution or sudden loss. You meet me alone by video, in English, for 1-hour sessions with 50 minutes of therapy, booked in your own time zone.
I help you trace what was handed down, tell it apart from what is truly yours and decide what you want to keep. This work sits within my online trauma therapy, part of my wider online psychotherapy.
You can arrange a free 30-minute call, pick a session time, read my client policy or write to me.
Online generational trauma therapy is for adults, wherever they live, who sense they are carrying something that did not start with them. Perhaps your grandparents fled a country, survived a war or buried children, and the story was never told. You want to understand how that history lives on in you, and to stop passing it forward without knowing.
Inherited pain often sits beside other difficulties, and some of them call for a different focus. If one of these lines describes you more closely, the linked page was written for you.
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These reviews describe clients’ experiences of working with me. They come from my wider practice and do not all relate to online sessions. Each person’s experience is their own, and a review does not promise a particular outcome.
“In more than 20 years of sitting with people, I have heard the same sentence open this work again and again: ‘Nothing really bad ever happened to me.’ I take that sentence seriously, and I also think it is usually the family speaking. Inherited fear arrives without a story attached, so you conclude the problem must be you. Underneath, one voice asks ‘Why did nobody tell me what happened to us?’ and another answers ‘We do not dwell. We cope on our own.’ Some people hold a third voice too, aching to know their parents more closely and dreading what they might find. I believe the deepest loyalty you can show your family is to understand its pain, not to carry it in silence for another generation.”
Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist and EFT couples therapist
I am Mark Colclough, MA. I have practised since 2004 and offer online psychotherapy and couples therapy in English.
My training brings together your emotions, your thoughts and your relationships. My deep passion is the moment when what happens between you finally makes sense, to each of you and to each other. I have lived and worked in nine countries, so I know something of life across languages, cultures and borders.
Read about my background, or explore online psychotherapy and online couples therapy.
I meet regularly with experienced psychotherapists to reflect on my work, question my understanding and develop my skills. Supervision is part of the professional care I bring to individual and couples work, including online sessions.
My focus is thoughtful practice, integrity and responsibility.
You are welcome to ask about the kind of support you need.
Tell me where you are based and your time zone. We can then consider whether online sessions together are suitable.
Ines is 37, a translator who grew up in Lisbon and now lives in Montreal with her partner and their small son. Her grandfather was a political prisoner, and her mother still lowers her voice when certain names come up. Ines keeps her passport in her bedside drawer, cannot settle when her son has a fever and feels a wave of panic whenever a neighbour knocks unannounced. She feels foolish, because her own life has been safe.
I would begin with the passport in the drawer and ask whose readiness it really holds. In a first video session, Ines would probably notice that her alarm belongs less to Montreal than to a house in Lisbon decades ago, and that naming this already loosens it a little.
I have presented this clinical example as a compound of 22 years of clinical practice.
You have tried to explain your feelings through your own life story, and the explanation keeps falling short.
There is no single right moment or right reason to look at what your family passed down. A sense that you carry something older than yourself, or that a family silence presses on you, is enough. You do not need proof, documents or a dramatic event in your own life before we meet. In 22 years of practice I have come to recognise the particular texture of inherited pain, and I can tell when it is shaping a life more than anyone has noticed.
I will help you see what was handed down, what keeps it active and what you can put down. Read the 6 questions below with your own family in mind.
If so, take it seriously. Inherited pain tends to appear as a mood rather than a memory: a low ache on certain dates, an alertness in queues and crowds, a reluctance to enjoy good news in case it is taken away.
I would look at when the heaviness is strongest and whether it echoes anything you know, or half know, about your family’s past. If you see yourself here, book a session with me and we can begin to trace it.
Both pulls can live in you at once, because each protects something precious. One part wants the facts, so your feelings finally make sense. Another stays loyal to the silence, as if asking would wound a parent or betray a grandparent.
I will not ask you to pick curiosity over loyalty. Both come from love. I help you see what each part is guarding, so you can choose what to ask, whom to ask and when.
Often it does, when a family once lost homes or people without warning. The fear of loss can hum in the background of everything. A partner who is late or a teenager who does not answer can set off a panic much larger than the moment, and you keep calling until you hear a voice.
Your wish to keep your people close is real, and I will not make you feel silly for it. What we work on is the alarm that behaves as though disaster were always one step away. We look at which generation first needed it, and you practise noticing when it belongs to then rather than now.
Many people from families shaped by hardship swing like this. Closeness once meant survival, so family can feel like the only safe harbour and also like a room with no air. You ring your mother daily, then feel smothered by her worry.
Together we slow this swing down to see what draws you in and what drives you out. Often it is an old family rule about loyalty or danger meeting your own wish for a freer life. I have compassion for both moves, and I will also ask you to own the moments when the swinging hurts the people you love.
Families that came through hard times often learned to keep going and never complain. You may have inherited that strength along with its price. When feelings rise, you become practical, say it is nothing or find something to fix.
My view is that this way of coping got your family through things most of us cannot imagine, and it deserves respect rather than criticism. I help you see what the silence shields you from today and what it costs. Then you practise letting one person a little closer.
When a family has suffered great loss, children often take on roles nobody names: the one who makes everything worthwhile, the one who never adds to the trouble, the one who will finally be safe. Years later you may not know whether your drive, your caution or your guilt is truly yours. None of that means you are broken.
I help you look honestly at which beliefs and loyalties you inherited and which you would choose today. I will challenge you when you give yourself too little, but I will not hand you a ready-made identity. The aim is a clearer sense of who you are, apart from the family script.
If you recognised your family in these questions, book a free call to talk it through, or choose a session time if you already know you want to start.
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Tell me briefly what kind of support you are looking for.
Include your country and time zone so we can discuss whether online work together is possible and find a suitable time.
You do not need to explain your whole story in your first message.
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Understanding your family history matters, but the work also has to change how you live, love and raise whoever comes after you.
Working with me will help you understand what came down to you, recognise the patterns that keep it alive in ordinary days and change what you no longer wish to carry. Recognising your family in a book is a start, but it seldom changes how your body reacts.
In 22 years of practice, I have found that inherited pain moves when I take an active part. Psychosynthesis, my core training, helps here because it works with the inner voices we absorb from others. I will guide you, name what I see and question the family rules that keep you stuck. These 6 questions show what we work towards.
For men: online father wound therapy. Related reading: I know exactly why I do it. Why can’t I stop? and Why do I end up with the same kind of person every time?.
I help you separate what is yours from what you absorbed. A fear of borders, a pantry that must always be full or an inability to rest can be echoes of survival habits that made sense 2 or 3 generations ago.
I bring structure to that search. We map what you know of the family story, what you sense but cannot prove and where your own reactions seem to start. I will say what I see and question explanations such as “that is just how we are”. When you are ready, book a session with me and we start the map.
You can learn to notice the moment an old family response begins in you. It often has a recognisable shape: an urge to check the exits, a rush of guilt when you laugh too freely, a cold shutdown when a certain subject comes up. Seeing it early gives you a moment of choice.
In our sessions I help you slow those moments down and ask whose reaction it is, what it once protected and whether it is needed now. Then we practise a different response together until you can use it at a family meal or when your child does something that once frightened your mother.
Calming the fear does not mean dismissing what your family lived through. It means staying present enough to know you are here, now, in a safer time and place, while still honouring what came before. An old fear can be felt in full without the old danger being present.
I help you notice the rise earlier and understand what your body is bracing for, which is often a threat from your grandparents’ world. I will ask you to practise for a few minutes most days between sessions.
It starts with knowing what you feel, what you want to learn and what is fair to ask. In families with a painful past, that is hard. You stay quiet to protect your parents, or blurt out questions at the wrong moment, and older relatives change the subject or say it is better forgotten.
I help you find words that are honest and proportionate, such as “I would like to understand where we come from, whenever you are ready.” I will challenge you when you silence yourself for the family’s sake, and also when you expect a frail parent to give answers they cannot give.
Your choices become clearer once you separate inherited fear, family duty and old expectations from what you actually want. A family history of loss can make you play safe, or drive you to succeed for everyone who could not.
I help you look at your options and what each would ask of you, including what it might mean in the family story. You will hear my honest view, and I will point it out when guilt seems to be choosing. The decision stays with you. Often the freeing step is realising you may want something your family never had.
Real change has to reach beyond our sessions: into how you parent, how you rest, how you celebrate and what you say when your child asks where the family comes from. You may need firmer limits with relatives, or permission to enjoy an easier life than theirs.
I help you decide what to keep and what to release. Your family’s courage, humour and loyalty are part of the inheritance too, and they can stay. The aim is not to cut yourself off from your roots. It is to carry your history knowingly, so that what you pass on is chosen.
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Knowing little or nothing of the family story is no obstacle. We start from what you feel today.
When you begin, I listen closely, help you name what feels heaviest and give our work a clear direction. Gaps in what you know often tell us a great deal.
This is a focused strand of my online psychotherapy, structured individual work on your inner life, your family history and your relationships. If inherited patterns are clashing between you and a willing partner, online couples therapy offers long-term relational development and healing. If you can already see that several generations need unpacking, a therapy bundle brings real savings and the security of an agreed plan.
In the first session I ask what has brought you now, what you feel and notice, what you know of your family’s past and what you hope will change. No research is needed.
Before we finish, I share my first sense of what may have been handed down and suggest where to begin. You then decide whether this way of looking at your family feels right. If you would rather speak first, book a free 30-minute call.
Individual work is right when the focus is what you carry inside: your inherited fears and loyalties, your sense of self and the way you relate to others. Nobody else needs to join the call, and that freedom often matters.
With me alone, you have someone who holds the whole family picture from week to week and questions its rules when they block you. You can say things about your family you could never say in front of them. Online psychotherapy describes this structured individual work more broadly.
Couples therapy fits better when the space between you and your partner needs the work more than your own inheritance does. If your ways of handling fear, money or closeness keep colliding with your partner’s, so the same argument returns, working together often helps more.
In couples sessions I help you both see the cycle, understand which part comes from which family and build a more secure way of being together. Online couples therapy is long-term relational development and healing, and some people start alone before inviting their partner.
The pace depends on how strongly the inherited material affects you now, how much room your life has and how much continuity the work needs. This work tends to move in waves. A talk with a relative can open something, and quieter weeks follow.
I usually suggest a session every week or every second week while the first material is opening. I will tell you honestly if the gaps are too long, if closer support would help around a family visit or a trip to the old homeland, and when we can meet less often.
A bundle makes sense when you already expect several sessions and want continuity rather than a fresh decision after every one. For people raised never to spend on themselves, a planned course is a way of deciding this matters.
A bundle lowers the cost of each session and commits you to a steady stretch of work. I will tell you honestly whether your material looks like a few sessions or a longer stretch. The cards further down and therapy discounts and bundles set out the options.
The work has done its job when you have more ownership and choice, and the inherited weight has eased enough for you to carry on without the same support.
I review progress with you openly and will not keep you in therapy once the weight has lifted. We can then meet less often, pause or stop. If you return later, perhaps when a grandparent dies or your child reaches an age that stirs something, that is a new layer, not a failure.
Unsure whether this is where to start? Here is how online generational trauma therapy compares with the neighbouring options people with a heavy family history most often weigh up.
| Option | Choose it when | Pace |
|---|---|---|
| Online generational trauma therapy (this page) | You carry fear, grief or silence that seems to have begun before you were born. | Weekly or fortnightly 1-hour video sessions |
| Online trauma therapy | Something overwhelming happened to you yourself, and your body still reacts to it. | Carefully paced weekly video sessions |
| Online childhood trauma therapy | The deepest wound is how you were treated by the adults who raised you. | Weekly video sessions over several months |
| Online third culture psychotherapy | Growing up between countries, more than family history, is what unsettles you. | 1-hour video sessions at a pace you choose |
Online generational trauma therapy with me is individual psychotherapy by video, in English, for adults who carry fear, grief, silence or patterns that began in earlier generations, often after war, migration, persecution or sudden loss. It helps you understand what was passed down, tell it apart from what is yours and choose what to carry on.
I work in depth, with psychosynthesis, object relations and close attention to the body, where inherited fear often lives. I do not use EMDR or any named trauma protocol. This page is a branch of my online trauma therapy.
Come when your reactions feel bigger or older than your own life explains, when a family silence weighs on you, or when you want to stop a pattern before it reaches your children. You do not need to know what happened. Sensing that something was passed down is reason enough.
In 22 years of practice I have learned to listen for the signs: anniversaries that hurt without a clear reason, fears that match a grandparent’s history, a family rule nobody can explain. When these shape your choices, they deserve proper attention.
Yes, often it can. Children absorb far more than they are told, and a parent’s fear or grief shapes a child long before any story is shared. I cannot change what happened, and I do not offer quick fixes, but I can help you see how it lives in you and loosen its grip.
In my clinical experience, people are often surprised how much lighter they feel simply from naming what belongs to whom. I would focus on what your family had to survive, what they could not feel at the time and what you can now grieve on their behalf.
Then we work without them, which is common. What you carry lives in you, so we can reach it directly.
My view is that the silence is part of the story. I help you respect their limits while taking your own experience seriously. Some people later find gentler ways to open a conversation. Others find peace without ever having the full facts.
Both make sense in a family marked by loss. Clinging makes sense when people were once taken suddenly. Distance makes sense when closeness comes wrapped in worry and duty. It is a learned way of staying safe, not a flaw in you.
I help you notice which way you tend to move, what sets off each shift and what it costs you and your relatives. Then we build steadier options: staying close without being swallowed by the family fear, and stepping back without guilt or a dramatic break.
We start with what you feel today and how it shows up in your days, your body and your relationships. We might sketch your family across 3 generations on screen, just to see where the weight seems to sit. Before we finish, I tell you how I read what has been handed down and where I would begin.
There is nothing to prepare. Gaps and uncertainty are part of the picture. Book a first session, or use a free discovery call to ask me anything about this work.
Plan for a course of sessions over several months, weekly or fortnightly. A pattern built over generations can shift within months, given steady attention.
From 22 years of practice, I would rather we agree a clear first stretch and review it honestly than drift. At each review we look at what has eased and decide together whether to continue, look further back, meet less often or stop.
For most people, yes. Video lets you do this work in your own home, often surrounded by the very photographs and objects that carry the story, and it keeps the therapy going if you move between countries or visit family abroad.
All you need is a door you can close, a pair of headphones and a connection that holds for an hour. If you are unsure, we can talk it through on a free call.
Generational trauma work is individual psychotherapy, booked as 1-hour online sessions with 50 minutes of therapy. You will find current fees in US dollars on my prices page.
If you expect a course of sessions, a therapy bundle saves you 10 per cent and gives you the steadiness of a structured plan. Bundle sizes and terms are on therapy discounts and bundles.
Book your first session straight away, or ask for a free 30-minute call if you want to hear more about how I work with family history. A sentence about what you sense you carry is all I need.
If no time suits you, or a family event has suddenly stirred everything up, contact me directly. I hold some room for acute cases, usually a time within days, described under acute online psychotherapy. Choose your time, and we start with what you carry today.
You can also send me an email
I want therapy to help you understand your experience and make choices you can use in everyday life. We pay attention to feelings, needs and the responses that happen before you have time to think.
Our online room should offer enough trust and honesty to explore what is difficult. I bring attention and professional judgement. You bring your experience, questions and the right to say when something does not fit.
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