"Anyone with a passing acquaintance of history knows that pretty much every family, from anywhere, will have a long history of trauma starting not very many generations ago."
This sidesteps the issue of scale and omnipresence. It's not limited to someone you hold kinship with, or you, or your direct parents, it's the very idea of you. There are few things that personal... and it happened to millions; it's that long "history of trauma" extended from kin to kind.
I'm ethnically Armenian and I've seen children who've never been exposed to any of the gruesome photos, or even set foot in the country, burst out into tears on Red Sunday. The concentration of generational transference is on a different order of magnitude. From there, if you add the wrinkle of knowing what gruesomely and specifically happen to the people closest to you, experiencing trauma like it happened first hand becomes a much more understandable occurrence.
TLDR: Large scale communal lose shift the starting point, personal trauma pushes things over the edge.
In a way it might also be knowledge that is passed on between generations. So my parents and grandparents passed on their deep seated insecurity that comes from their experience of war - but as history shows these extreme situations can return. Maybe my own anxiety might be a preparation for that. I like to think it has such a dimension. Experiences of past generations become part of the genetic markup for the future. Epigenetics is a keyword here.
This sidesteps the issue of scale and omnipresence. It's not limited to someone you hold kinship with, or you, or your direct parents, it's the very idea of you. There are few things that personal... and it happened to millions; it's that long "history of trauma" extended from kin to kind.
I'm ethnically Armenian and I've seen children who've never been exposed to any of the gruesome photos, or even set foot in the country, burst out into tears on Red Sunday. The concentration of generational transference is on a different order of magnitude. From there, if you add the wrinkle of knowing what gruesomely and specifically happen to the people closest to you, experiencing trauma like it happened first hand becomes a much more understandable occurrence.
TLDR: Large scale communal lose shift the starting point, personal trauma pushes things over the edge.