For six generations in a row, my maternal family has had a remarkable and rare pattern: the birth of only female offspring. This inheritance may date back even further, but my great-grandmother’s mother deliberately and carefully concealed the family’s history out of fear of the Soviet government’s actions towards noble families, of which her family was one.

As we tried to unravel the source of our family’s psychological traumas, my mother realized that each woman in our family shares a similar cycle of stories and behaviors with her predecessors, which culminates in a pattern of accumulated traumas. Even distant relatives who have never met experience the same mistakes and similar events, as if it is a loop programmed in our DNA.

And, in fact, there is a theory of DNA memory for traumatizing experiences. According to this, the mother’s experiences of trauma can be directly passed on to her future daughter and even to her granddaughter. However, proper conscious treatment may help avoid/minimize the “traumatic heritage.”

Therefore, we have begun to ask ourselves if now we, knowing the history, can break the vicious cycle? Can we give a new shape other than the circle to our MotherLine? This question inspired me to explore my family’s history through photography and reflect on the present and past and face it consciously.

On the photo, there are four generations of my family: my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and myself.