Why We Carry Other People's Pain
And how to finally tell what is actually yours
Imagine you have been carrying a heavy backpack since childhood. You have grown so used to its weight that you no longer notice it — it is simply how you feel. It is simply who you are. Then someone asks: "What's actually in the backpack?" You open it — and half the things inside are not yours.
Someone else's grief. Someone else's fear. Someone else's guilt. Someone else's loneliness. All neatly packed. So familiar that it never occurred to you that you could live without it.
That is what this article is about.
This is not a metaphor. It is neurobiology.
When I say "we carry other people's pain" — this is not a poetic image or an esoteric concept. It is a measurable biological fact.
Researcher Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai Medical School studied the descendants of Holocaust survivors. People who had personally experienced nothing remotely resembling what their parents and grandparents had lived through — showed specific alterations in cortisol regulation. Their stress response was identical to that of those who had directly survived the trauma.
The body remembered what the person had never experienced.
We do not inherit memories. We inherit a nervous system shaped by those memories. A system that already "knows" — what is dangerous, what hurts, what to avoid. Before we have personally encountered any of it.
And this is only one layer.
Three channels through which other people's pain reaches our nervous system
First channel: Epigenetics
Stressful states leave molecular traces in DNA — changes in how genes are expressed. These changes are transmitted to the next generation. Not the memories themselves — but the nervous system's readiness for certain responses. A grandmother who survived famine may transmit anxiety around resources and safety to her granddaughter. Not through conversations. Through biochemistry.
Second channel: Right-brain resonance in childhood
Allan Schore demonstrated that a parent's nervous system transmits its state directly to the child's nervous system — right hemisphere to right hemisphere. Without words. Through presence alone. A child in the theta state (up to age seven) absorbs the emotional atmosphere around them as absolute normality. If the mother is chronically anxious, the child does not think "Mum is worried." The child concludes: "The world is dangerous."
Third channel: Unconscious loyalty
Bert Hellinger described what he called unconscious loyalty — one of the most powerful and least visible mechanisms in the human psyche. We are part of a family system. If someone in the family line carried an unbearable burden, someone in a later generation will unconsciously want to ease it — to take part of it on themselves. Not because they decided to. But because they love. Because that is how loyalty operates in the family field.
"I will be sad instead of you, Mum." "I won't let myself be happy — because Grandfather had no right to happiness." "I'll take your fear so it isn't so heavy for you."
The child never speaks these words aloud. But the unconscious fulfils this contract with absolute precision.
Six signs that you may be carrying something that isn't yours
These are not a diagnostic checklist. They are a way of finally seeing — what in this backpack is genuinely yours, and what arrived from somewhere else.
01 — The intensity doesn't match the situation
Someone is ten minutes late and something inside you collapses. A partner makes a neutral comment and you are already in a panic or completely frozen. When the reaction is disproportionate — it has almost always touched something older than this moment.
02 — It is always there — regardless of circumstances
A sadness that persists regardless of what is happening in your life. An anxiety not attached to any specific threat. A loneliness even among people who love you. When an emotion is chronic, background, unexplainable — it often did not originate in your own experience.
03 — You carry what you never experienced
Guilt for something you did not do. Fear of something you have never personally encountered. A deep longing for a place or person you have never known. If the experience wasn't yours — where does the feeling come from?
04 — The pattern repeats across generations
Your mother had the same difficulty with closeness. And her mother before her. When the same thing appears in three consecutive generations — it is no longer a personal problem. It is a systemic one.
05 — There is no explanation within your own story
You have done years of therapy. You understand your childhood. You know your triggers. And yet something remains — a shadow, a fear, a sadness with no explanation inside your personal history. The explanation may lie beyond your individual biography.
06 — The body knows what the mind cannot explain
Chronic pain in a specific part of the body with no medical cause. A tightening in the chest in certain contexts. Nausea at the thought of particular topics. The body stores what the psyche could not digest — yours or those who came before you.
Why "just let it go" doesn't work
There is popular advice that goes roughly like this: "Just let it go. It isn't yours — give it back." If it were that simple, nobody would carry another person's pain for longer than a day.
The problem is that these programs do not live in the mind. They live in the nervous system. In the body. In the right hemisphere, where there is no language and where an act of will simply has no access. You cannot decide to stop being afraid any more than you can decide to stop blinking. The response is automatic — it fires before consciousness has time to intervene.
And there is another layer: unconscious loyalty.
If the unconscious decided to carry this burden out of love for someone in the family line — it will not release it simply because the rational mind says "this isn't mine." Because for the system, that looks like abandonment. Like leaving someone you promised to help.
This is why willpower alone doesn't work here. What's needed is not effort — it is recognition. First, to see clearly. Then, to choose.
Three steps toward genuine release
Step 1 — See it
Not just know it intellectually — but see it in a state where the psyche is open. In the alpha state. Where what is normally protected by layers of defence becomes visible. This is where an ancestral contract can first be seen as something separate from who you are.
Step 2 — Recognise it as not yours
Not "I am an anxious person." But "I am carrying anxiety that came to me from the family line." The difference between identity and burden is everything. Identity cannot be changed by a decision. A burden can be put down. This distinction changes everything.
Step 3 — Return it with love
Not "this isn't mine, take it away." But "I see you. I understand where you come from. And I will no longer carry you in place of the one to whom you belong." This is not cruelty toward the ancestors. It is respect. Because when we carry someone else's pain, we do not ease it. We simply extend the chain. The most loving thing is to live your own life — fully, genuinely yours. And in doing so, give everyone who comes after you permission to do the same.
Not every pain you feel is someone else's. Some of it is yours — born from your own experience, your own childhood, your own decisions. And that part also deserves attention. Your attention — not the attention you have been spending on what was never yours to carry.
The first step is not "release everything." It is learning to distinguish. What here is mine — and what arrived from somewhere else?
That distinction changes everything.
Victoria Vysochanska — psychologist, empathic regressologist, founder of Alfa Vita. 15 years of practice. alfavita.space
Scientific Sources
Yehuda, R. et al. (2016). Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372–380.
Schore, A.N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton & Company.
Hellinger, B. (1998). Love's Hidden Symmetry. Zeig, Tucker & Co.
Lipton, B.H. (2005). The Biology of Belief. Mountain of Love Productions.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking Press.