Unpacking Inherited Trauma, Shame, and Family Secrets with Gina BirkemeierUnpacking Inherited Trauma, Shame, and Family Secrets with Gina Birkemeier
Families Navigating Addiction & Recovery
Jeff Jones and Gina Birkemeier talk about inherited trauma, shame and family secrets, and how these patterns can shape addiction and recovery. They discuss practical ways families can seek their own healing, including trauma-informed therapy, faith, boundaries and nervous system tools.
1:00:57•7 Aug 2026
Inherited Trauma, Shame and Secrets: Gina Birkemeier on Healing Families
Episode Overview
- Inherited family patterns, secrets and shame can quietly drive both addiction and family dysfunction across generations.
- Shame often shows up as an inner push to hide, and this hiding can fuel ongoing substance use and isolation.
- Family members of someone in active addiction need their own recovery work, not just a focus on getting their loved one sober.
- Curiosity, both-and thinking and trauma-informed support can loosen rigid, black-and-white stories about the past.
- Simple practices like slow breathing, grounding and short phrases such as “I am safe” can help calm an overwhelmed nervous system.
“Is this inviting me to hide, or is this inviting me to heal? Because if it’s inviting you to hide, it’s shame.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This candid conversation between host Jeff Jones and therapist–author Gina Birkemeier gives a raw, gentle look at how inherited trauma, shame, and family secrets can quietly shape addiction in a family for generations.
Gina, a licensed professional counsellor and author of *Generations Deep: Unmasking Inherited Trauma and Dysfunction to Rewrite Our Stories Through Faith and Therapy*, blends her clinical training with her own complex adoption story and experiences around alcohol, drugs and toxic relationships. She talks about growing up surrounded by “palpable secrets” and how children in such homes often end up thinking, “it’s you that’s wrong,” when no one helps them make sense of what’s happening.
You’ll hear Gina explain the difference between the painful event and the trauma you’re left holding when no one comes alongside to repair it. She links shame and addiction in a vicious cycle: “Is this inviting me to hide? Or is this inviting me to heal? Because if it’s inviting you to hide, it’s shame.” From there, she offers simple grounding practices—like hand on heart, breathing slowly and repeating “I am safe”—to help frazzled nervous systems step out of fight-or-flight.
A big focus is on families who centre everything on the loved one in active addiction and forget their own recovery. Gina stresses that this is a journey “with, not for” the person using substances, and that family members need their own therapy, boundaries and healing, rather than only going to couples or family sessions where “the marriage is the client,” not the individual.
If you’re wrestling with rigid black-and-white thinking, feeling stuck in old stories, or unsure how faith and therapy can sit side by side, this conversation might be the nudge to ask: is it time to move from hiding to healing?
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