Maria Lassnig Self-portraits
"We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes — that changes can be made to how those genes function, that can help.
And maybe some changes are more likely to occur than others, and some genes are more flexible than other genes, but the idea is a very simple idea, and you hear it from people all the time. People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, “I’m not the same person. I’ve been changed. I am not the same person that I was.”
And we have to start asking ourselves, well, what do they mean by that? Of course, they’re the same person. They have the same DNA, don’t they? They do. And what I think it means is that the environmental influence has been so overwhelming that it has forced a major constitutional change, an enduring transformation. And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that"
– Rachel Yehuda, from The On Being Podcast, How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations