The Untold Side of Generational Trauma

Hi there,

My mother once ran a sting operation to catch her manager stealing from her.

She couldn’t read or write, but she solved a situation the hotel’s “corporate leadership” and compliance team couldn’t make head or tails of. She didn’t have any fancy titles or credentials but outsmarted a man who thought she was beneath him.

Before I tell you how she did it, you need to understand the stakes.

Growing up, we were poor. Not ‘we didn’t have cable’ poor. More like six kids, skipping seven-dollar field trips, and counting coins for dinner poor.

My mom worked as a housekeeper, cleaning 18 to 20 hotel rooms a day. Her hands were cracked from bleach and cleaning chemicals. Her English was broken. Her body was tired in a way I only understand now as an adult.

Every day, the second she walked through the door, all six of us would run to her with the same question:

“How much tip money did you get today?”

Because if she’d collected a few loose dollars, that meant we could splurge on 50-cent tacos from Taco Bell. That was our big win.

Then she got into a stretch where she’d come home empty-handed day after day with no tips. A complete dry spell for weeks.

She told my dad she had a hunch her manager was taking the tips before the housekeepers got to the rooms. But she didn’t have proof.

So, she did the most brilliant, badass thing I’ve ever seen.

She took a five-dollar bill, marked it with a tiny symbol only she would recognize and placed it on the bed in one of the rooms she was assigned to clean.

Later, she returned. The bill was gone.

The next day she repeated the setup this time looping in the head supervisor. And again, the marked bill disappeared.

When confronted, the manager denied everything. So, the supervisor asked to see the cash in his pocket.

And there it was:

My mother’s marked five-dollar bill.

He was fired on the spot.

And I will never forget the look on my mother’s face when she came home to share the story. It wasn’t triumphant or emotional… it was just steady and certain. The look of a woman who knew exactly what she was capable of, even when the world underestimated her.

These days, we talk endlessly about generational trauma. Everyone loves to dissect the wounds passed down through their families. But no one talks about the generational intelligence that’s passed down too.

What my mother embodied that day is something researchers call post-traumatic growth (PTG) the documented phenomenon where people who experience adversity don’t just endure it; they develop enhanced capabilities because of it.

The father of PTG research, psychologist Richard Tedeschi, found that hardship can create five domains of measurable psychological growth. In fact, PTG research consistently shows five ways hardship can sharpen a person’s mind and character:

• Sharper inner strength

• Clearer life priorities

• Deeper resilience

• Greater appreciation for what matters

• More effective problem-solving under stress

My mother had all of them long before I knew that science had a name for it.

Studies now show that people who grow up navigating unstable or high-pressure environments develop heightened cognitive skills: hyper-attunement to patterns, rapid threat detection, and intuitive social intelligence.

And not only that, post-traumatic growth is inheritable.

Children who grow up watching a parent adapt, observe, endure, strategize, and persist under adversity learn those same micro-skills through modeling. Long before a child has words for it, they’re internalizing the blueprint.

Final Thought

Talking endlessly about generational trauma is only half the story. The other half, the half that never gets airtime, is generational advantage, generational resourcefulness, and generational intelligence.

When people talk about their childhoods, they often describe what they lacked: money, stability, safety, opportunity. But the homes we grew up in, as messy or chaotic as they might’ve been, were also training grounds for resilience, intuition, grit, and creativity.

We forget that we are walking proof of our families’ strategies, both good and bad. We forget that every time we doubt ourselves, we betray the strength and grit of the lineage we come from.

So maybe the holidays aren’t about remembering what you have. Maybe they’re about remembering who you come from.

Because when you forget your roots, you start to underestimate yourself.
You start thinking you need another course or credential to feel qualified.
You start believing other people are more naturally capable.

You start treating your childhood as something to overcome instead of something that gave you wisdom.

But when you remember your lineage, the ingenuity, creativity, and resilience that ran through your family long before you were born, something inside you steadies.

Whether your strength came from the people who raised you or from surviving the gaps they left, it is still yours.

When I remember that, I remember I didn’t come from scarcity. I came from ingenuity and brilliance.

And no matter your circumstances, so do you.

Shakila