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

by Mark Wolynn

Something valuable can be going on inside us, but if we’re not tuning in, we can miss it.

great teachers understand that where we come from affects where we go, and that what sits unresolved in our past influences our present. They know that our parents are important, regardless of whether they are good at parenting or not. There’s no way around it: The family story is our story. Like it or not, it resides within us.

helpless, ruined, and annihilated was essential. In many ways, healing from trauma is akin to creating a poem. Both require the right timing, the right words, and the right image. When these elements align, something meaningful is set into motion that can be felt in the body.

all is not silent: words, images, and impulses that fragment following a traumatic event reemerge to form a secret language of suffering we carry with us. Nothing is lost. The pieces have just been rerouted.

What I’ve seen demonstrated time and time again is this. Symptoms often mimic or recreate some facet of a trauma that we, or our parents or grandparents, found intolerable. So intolerable, in fact, the event is rarely discussed.

In order to process trauma, it’s often helpful for clients to have a direct experience of the feelings and sensations that have been submerged in the body.

An intellectual understanding by itself is rarely enough for a lasting shift to occur. Often, the awareness needs to be accompanied by a deeply felt visceral experience.

the effects of traumas we inherit or experience firsthand can not only create a legacy of distress, but also forge a legacy of strength and resilience that can be felt for generations to come.

epigenetics—the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the sequence of the DNA.[13]

Scientists used to call it “junk DNA,” thinking it was mostly useless, but they’ve recently begun to recognize its significance.

This is how you can tell scien e is a male dominated field.

Interestingly, the percentage of noncoding DNA increases with the complexity of the organism, with humans having the highest percentage.[16]

“Environmental enrichment,” Mansuy says, “at the right time could eventually help correct some of the alterations which are induced by trauma.”[28]

The effects of inherited trauma may not have started with us, but they can certainly end with us. How do we begin to heal? First, if we or one of our children struggle with unexplained symptoms—depression, anxiety, OCD, a phobia, a destructive behavior—we need to shake the family tree and see what falls out. What family secrets have been hidden? What stories didn’t get told? What traumas were never healed? Our symptoms may be replicating feelings we had when we were small, or mirroring someone’s experience in a previous generation. Through curiosity and exploration, we can gather the fruit we seek.

Secondly, we need to talk about the traumas in our family history and try to work through them so they’re not passed down to future generations.

I’ve found that when we ignore the past, it can come back to haunt us. Yet when we explore it, we don’t have to repeat it.

Thirdly, we must learn to calm our brain’s stress response, whether we’ve inherited that stress response from our parents or it originated in our early childhood. We do this by having positive experiences, and then by taking time to relish in the positive sensations that these experiences evoke.

In your earliest years, you’re creating a template for whether you feel safe and secure in life or whether you feel you need to defend against it.

When a mother carries inherited trauma, or has experienced a break in the bond with her mother, it can affect the tender bond that’s forming with her infant, and that bond is more likely to be interrupted.

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.

Because the hippocampus—that part of the brain involved in creating memories—isn’t fully operational until after the age of two, the older child may not consciously remember being held, fed, or cuddled by the mother, but remembers the younger child receiving their mother’s love.

Most of us carry at least some residue from our family history.

Applying Hebb’s principle, we benefit most when we practice having a new experience we perceive as being positive, rewarding, or meaningful—one that engages our sense of curiosity and wonder. This can be an experience of receiving comfort or support, or feeling compassion or gratitude—ultimately anything that allows us to feel strength or peace inside.

How can i apply this ?

The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. —Annie Rogers, The Unsayable

Declarative memory, also called explicit or narrative memory, is the ability to consciously recall facts or events. This type of memory depends on language to organize, categorize, and store information and experiences that will later become retrievable memories. It’s like a book we can pull off the shelf when we need to refer to a story from the past. When we can put events into words, we can recall them as a part of our history.

Nondeclarative memory, also called implicit, sensorimotor, or procedural memory, operates without conscious recall. It allows us to automatically retrieve what we’ve already learned without having to relearn the steps. When we ride a bicycle, for example, we don’t think about the sequence of events required to make it move forward. The memory of riding a bicycle is so ingrained in us that we just hop on and pedal without breaking the process down into steps. These kinds of memories are not always easy to describe in words.

Traumatic experiences are often stored as nondec...

When memory function is inhibited, emotionally significant information bypasses the frontal lobes and cannot be named or ordered through words or language, as Bessel van der Kolk describes. Without language, our experiences often go “undeclared,” and are more likely to be stored as fragments of memory, bodily sensations, images, and emotions.

not every fear, anxiety, or repetitive thought can be explained by a traumatic event in the family, certain experiences can be more fully understood when we decipher our core language.

The intense or urgent words we use to describe our deepest fears—that’s our core language.

The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth…it hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family: We remain connected, even against our wills. —Anthony Brandt, “Bloodlines”

A child who takes care of a parent often forges a lifelong pattern of overextension and creates a blueprint for habitually feeling overwhelmed. By attempting to share or carry our parent’s burden, we continue the family suffering and block the flow of life force that is available to us and to the generations that follow us.

Even if we can’t heal with them in person, it’s essential that we heal these relationships, at the very least, in our inner images.

We reject a part of ourselves. The behaviors we dislike in our parents, the behaviors we view as negative in them, get disowned in us, and then can express unconsciously. Blind to how their behaviors also live in us, we can’t see when we’re the same.

Our unhealed relationship with our parents gets projected onto others. We’ll either pull in partners with similar traits who treat us in the same way, or we’ll do the opposite; we’ll attract caring partners who are kind to us yet see them as uncaring. We’ll interpret their actions in the most negative light. In our hypervigilance and inability to trust, we could even turn a good partner into a bad one. One way to tip the scales in our favor is to act in the highest integrity in our relationships, even if it’s not what we are yet able to feel. I often say: Trust your partner, and he or she will become trustworthy.

We’ll do to ourselves the very thing we believe was done to us. If our parent was critical or aggressive, we can become self-critical and inwardly aggressive, treating our inner child in the same way. If our parent ignored us, we can ignore that young, vulnerable part of ourselves.

I may put in the effort not to treat my kids lile that but I forget about my inner child who needs so much from me.

understand how to navigate our emotions, learn how to feel safe in our bodies, and develop clear but flexible boundaries

Let’s say that you blame or reject your mother. Let’s say that you blame her for not giving you enough of what you feel you should have received. If this is true for you, have you also asked yourself what happened to her? What event had the power to interrupt the flow of love in your relationship? Did something occur that separated the two of you when you were small, or separated her from her parents?

As a child, you might experience her as unavailable, self-absorbed, or withholding. You might then reject her, taking her depleted flow of love personally, as if somehow she had made a choice to keep it from you. The greater truth would be that the love you longed for was not available for your mother to give. Any child born into similar circumstances would likely experience a similar type of mothering.

The divorce was a trauma for her

Visualizing Your Mother and Her History

the work of opening is now your responsibility and not your mother’s.

her mother had often described her own mother—Tricia’s

My mother never described her parents' parenting now that I'm thinking of it.

The relationship dynamics may remain the same, but your perspective will be different.

blueprint for bonding and separating in future relationships.

What particular quality or essential message is the complaint or symptom attempting to express? When looked at out of the box, your complaint or symptom can be a creative expression leading you to complete something, heal something, integrate something, or separate from something—perhaps a feeling you’ve taken on that never belonged to you in the first place.

Maybe you have ignored a young or fragmented part of yourself that expresses in symptoms, and now, that young part of you needs your attention and care. Maybe you neglected a personal boundary that can no longer remain overlooked.

The feelings we hold about our parents are a doorway into ourselves.

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

When we’re resentful, it erodes our inner peace.

Many of us have become fixated on something we believe our parents have done to us that has spoiled our lives. We have allowed these memories, whether accurate or distorted, to override the good things that our parents gave to us. Parents, in the course of being parents, inadvertently cause their children pain. It’s inevitable. The problem is not what our parents have done to us; the problem is how we’re still holding on to it. Generally, when our parents caused us harm, it was unintentional, arising from a wound they experienced in their childhood. Most of us feel that there are things we didn’t get from our parents. But being at peace with our parents means that we are at peace with what we did receive as well as what we did not receive. When we hold what was given in this light, our life can flow with greater ease.

There is often sadness hibernating beneath your angry words. The sadness won’t kill you. The anger actually might.