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

by Mark Wolynn

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.

learned how my mind continually taunted me with worst-case-scenario thinking and the lie that if I just worried hard enough, I could insulate myself from what I feared most.

no experience is ever wasted. Everything that happens to us has merit, whether we recognize the surface significance of it or not. Everything in our lives ultimately leads us somewhere.

The 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.

Sometimes, the heart must break in order to open.

Traumatic reenactment, or “repetition compulsion,” as Freud called it, is an attempt of the unconscious to replay what’s unresolved, so we can “get it right.” This unconscious drive to relive past events could be one of the mechanisms at work when families repeat unresolved traumas in future generations.

Carl Jung also believed that what remains unconscious does not dissolve but, rather, resurfaces in our lives as fate or fortune. Whatever is not conscious, he said, will be experienced as fate. In other words, we’re likely to keep repeating our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness.

during a trauma, the speech center shuts down, as does the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for experiencing the present moment. He describes the speechless terror of trauma as the experience of being at a loss for words, a common occurrence when brain pathways of remembering are hindered during periods of threat or danger.

“The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, hope among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of her offspring.”5 During pregnancy, nutrients in the mother’s blood nourish the fetus through the wall of the placenta. With the nutrients, she also releases a host of hormones and information signals generated by the emotions she experiences. These chemical signals activate specific receptor proteins in the cells, triggering a cascade of physiologic, metabolic, and behavioral changes in the mother’s body as well as in the fetus.

In his book Nurturing the Unborn Child: A Nine-Month Program for Soothing, Stimulating, and Communicating with Your Baby, psychiatrist Thomas Verny tells us: “If a pregnant mother experiences acute or chronic stress, her body will manufacture stress hormones (including adrenaline and noradrenaline) that travel through her bloodstream to the womb, inducing the same stressful state in the unborn child.”9 Verny goes on to say, “Our studies show that mothers under extreme and constant stress are more likely to have babies who are premature, lower than average in weight, hyperactive, irritable, and colicky.

conscious parenting—parenting with the awareness that, from preconception all the way through postnatal development, a child’s development and health can be profoundly influenced by the parent’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.11

chromosomal DNA—the DNA responsible for transmitting physical traits, such as the color of our hair, eyes, and skin—surprisingly makes up less than 2 percent of our total DNA.14 The other 98 percent consists of what is called noncoding DNA (ncDNA), and is responsible for many of the emotional, behavioral, and personality traits we inherit.15

These adaptive changes are caused by chemical signals in the cells, known as epigenetic tags, which attach to the DNA and tell the cell to either activate or silence a specific gene. “There’s something in the external environment that affects the internal environment, and before you know it a gene is functioning in a different way,” says Yehuda.24 The sequence of the DNA itself doesn’t change, but because of these epigenetic tags, its expression does.

External instead of genetic influences

The most common epigenetic tag is DNA methylation, a process that blocks proteins from attaching to a gene, suppressing its expression.27 DNA methylation can positively or adversely affect our health by locking “helpful” or “unhelpful” genes in the “off” position.

Violence, war, and oppression continue to sow the seeds of generational reliving, as survivors unknowingly transmit what they have experienced to successive generations.

“It is a phenomenon that was expected . . . all that is not said, is transmitted,” says psychiatrist Naasson Munyandamutsa. Even children whose families were unscathed by the violence are similarly affected by what psychiatrist Rutakayile Bizoza refers to as a “contagion in the collective subconscious.”47

Sack writes, “Trauma travels throughout society, as well as generationally.”

“transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” the notion that behaviors can pass from one generation to another.

It’s not only what we inherit from our parents but also how they were parented that influences how we relate to a partner, how we relate to ourselves, and how we nurture our children. For better or worse, parents tend to pass on the parenting that they themselves received.

Hellinger believes that the mechanism behind these repetitions is unconscious loyalty, and views unconscious loyalty as the cause of much suffering in families.

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.

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In essence, when brain cells activate together, the connection between them strengthens.

“visualizing, remembering, or imagining pleasant experiences activates many of the same sensory, motor, emotional, and cognitive circuits that fired during the ‘real’ pleasant experience.”

visualization, meditation, and focusing on positive thoughts, emotions, and prayers—what he calls internal epigenetic interventions—can activate genes and positively affect our health. “Filling our minds with positive images of wellbeing,” he says, “can produce an epigenetic environment that reinforces the healing process.”9

“You can’t change your DNA,” says Rachel Yehuda, “but if you can change the way your DNA functions, that’s sort of the same thing.”

the verbal expressions of these traumas core language. Core language can also be expressed in nonverbal ways. These can include physical sensations, behaviors, emotions, impulses, and even the symptoms of an illness.

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.

Nondeclarative memory, also called implicit, sensorimotor, or procedural memory, operates without conscious recall.

Traumatic experiences are often stored as nondeclarative memory.

The last thing parents would want to see is their child suffering on their behalf. It is arrogant and inflated to think that we, as children, are better equipped to handle our parents’ suffering than they are. It is also out of tune with the order of life. Our parents existed before we did. They provided for us so that we could survive.

When a child takes on a parent’s burden—whether consciously or unconsciously—he or she misses out on the experience of being given to, and can have difficulty receiving from relationships later in life. 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.

If you reject your mother, it could be that you experienced an interruption during the early bonding process with her. Not everyone who experiences a break in the early bond will reject his or her mother. What is more likely with an interruption during this period is that you experience some degree of anxiety when you attempt to bond with a partner in an intimate relationship. That anxiety could translate into a difficulty maintaining a relationship or even not wanting a relationship at all. It could also translate into making the decision not to have children.

not all behaviors expressed by us actually originate from us. They can easily belong to family members who came before us. We can merely be carrying the feelings for them or sharing them. We call these “identification feelings.”

In analyzing the core complaint, we’re not only looking at our spoken language, we’re observing our somatic or physical body language as well. We also pay particularly close attention to the symptoms and behaviors we have that stand out as idiosyncratic or unusual.

When we examine the words of a core complaint, we trust the words implicitly. We don’t always trust the context, however. The words themselves are generally true for someone—not necessarily us. Discovering who that someone is requires a peek behind the curtain into our family history.

Written Exercise #2: Ten Questions That Generate Core Language What was taking place in your life when your symptom or problem first appeared? What was going on right before it started? What age were you when the symptom or problem first appeared? Did something traumatic happen to someone in your family at a similar age? What exactly happens in the problem? What does it feel like in its worst moments? What happens right before you feel this way or have the symptom? What makes it better or worse? What does the problem or symptom keep you from being able to do? What does it force you to do? If the feeling or symptom were never to go away, what would be the worst thing that could happen to you?

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. 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, we can gain strength from our parents, who, even if they couldn’t always show it, wanted only the best for us.

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. —Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

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.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and his colleague Mark Robert Waldman write: “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 us unknowingly expect our partner to fulfill the needs that could not be fulfilled by our mother. This misdirected expectation is a prescription for failure and disappointment. If our partner begins to act like a parent and attempts to satisfy our unmet needs, romance can fly out the window. If our partner does not satisfy our unmet needs, we can feel betrayed or neglected.

are we truly available for a partner? No matter how successful we are, how wonderful our communication skills, how many couples retreats we have attended, or how deeply we understand our own patterns of avoiding intimacy, as long as we’re entangled with our family history, we can distance ourselves from the one we love most. Unconsciously, we’ll repeat family patterns of neediness, mistrust, anger, withdrawal, shutting down, leaving, or being left, and blame our partner for our unhappiness when the true source lies behind us.

The poet Rilke understood the difficulty of sustaining a relationship. He wrote: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

You experienced an interruption in the early bond with your mother. With this dynamic, it is likely that you experience some degree of anxiety when you attempt to bond with a partner in an intimate relationship. Often the anxiety increases as the relationship deepens. Unaware that the anxiety stems from a break in the early bond, you might begin to find fault with your partner or create other conflicts that allow you to distance yourself from the closeness. You might also experience yourself as feeling needy, clingy, jealous, or insecure. Or conversely, you appear independent and don’t ask for much in your relationships. Perhaps you avoid relationships altogether.