It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

by Mark Wolynn

Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

What I failed to realize at the time is that when we try to resist feeling something painful, we often protract the very pain we’re trying to avoid.

we’re likely to keep repeating our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness.

Yehuda’s research demonstrates that you and I are three times more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD if one of our parents had PTSD, and as a result, we’re likely to suffer from depression or anxiety.4 She believes that this type of generational PTSD is inherited rather than occurring from our being exposed to our parents’ stories of their ordeals.5 Yehuda was one of the first researchers to show how descendants of trauma survivors carry the physical and emotional symptoms of traumas they have not directly experienced.

Yehuda claims that children of PTSD-stricken mothers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than children in her control groups. She also finds that children of survivors are three to four times more likely to struggle with depression and anxiety, or engage more in substance abuse, when either parent suffered from PTSD.

When entangled, you unconsciously carry the feelings, symptoms, behaviors, or hardships of an earlier member of your family system as if these were your own.

Church says that when we meditate, we are “bulking up the portions of our brains that produce happiness.”11

The vast reservoir of our unconscious appears to hold not only our traumatic memories, but also the unresolved traumatic experiences of our ancestors. In this shared unconscious, we seem to reexperience fragments of an ancestor’s memory and declare them as our own.

Whether they’re dead or alive, whether we’re distant from them or our relationship is amicable, our parents—and the traumas they’ve experienced or inherited—hold a key to our healing.

our amygdala uses about two thirds of its neurons scanning for threats. As a result, painful and frightening events are more easily stored in our long-term memory than pleasant events.

Often, our discontent toward our parents gets projected onto our partner or shows up in our close friendships.

Of all the terrible things that happen to people, the one that strikes us as the most terrible will most likely link to a traumatic event in our family system. It can also remind us of a trauma we personally experienced. When another’s tragedy resonates with us, there is generally something about that tragedy that belongs to us on some level.

By developing a relationship with the painful parts of ourselves—parts we have often inherited from our family—we have an opportunity to shift them.

Reconciliation is mostly an internal movement. Our relationship with our parents is not dependent on what they do, how they are, or how they respond. It’s about what we do. The change occurs in us.

“a single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.”3 They explain that just by concentrating on positive words, we affect areas of the brain that can improve our perception of ourselves and of the people we interact with.4

Many of the problems experienced in a relationship do not originate in the relationship itself. They stem from dynamics that existed in our families long before we were even born.

Marital suffering and relationship conflicts can often be tracked in a family genogram for several generations.

You are merged with the feelings of a parent. If one parent feels negatively toward the other, it is possible that you will continue these feelings toward your partner. Feelings of discontent toward a partner can be carried intergenerationally.

The action you take is important. You might start by telling yourself: “These are not my feelings. I have merely inherited them from my family.” Sometimes, acknowledging this is enough.