It Didn't Start With You: The international bestseller - How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle

by Mark Wolynn

Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, even if his or her story lies submerged in years of silence, fragments of life experience, memory, and body sensation can live on, as if reaching out from the past to find resolution in the minds and bodies of those living in the present.

many of these patterns don’t belong to us; they’ve merely been borrowed from others in our family history.

when we try to resist feeling something painful, we often protract the very pain we’re trying to avoid.

The constant looking outside of ourselves can keep us from knowing when we hit the target. Something valuable can be going on inside us, but if we’re not tuning in, we can miss it.

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.

my ability to receive love from others was linked to my ability to receive my mother’s love.

My body would tighten in on itself as if to create a shell she couldn’t penetrate. This wound affected every aspect of my life—especially my ability to stay open in a relationship.

During a traumatic incident, our thought processes can become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event.

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.”

we’re likely to keep repeating our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness. Both Jung and Freud noted that whatever is too difficult to process does not fade away on its own but, rather, is stored in our unconscious.

“When people relive their traumatic experiences,” he says, “the frontal lobes become impaired and, as [a] result, they have trouble thinking and speaking. They no longer are capable of communicating to either themselves or to others precisely what’s going on.”

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

descendants of trauma survivors carry the physical and emotional symptoms of traumas they have not directly experienced.

the 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.

was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body—three generations sharing the same biological environment.

signals from the environment could operate through the cell membrane, controlling the behavior and physiology of the cell, which in turn could activate or silence a gene.

“The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, hope among others, can biochemically alter the genetic expression of her offspring.”

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.

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

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

the percentage of noncoding DNA increases with the complexity of the organism, with humans having the highest percentage.

Noncoding DNA is known to be affected by environmental stressors, such as toxins and inadequate nutrition, as well as stressful emotions.17,18 The affected DNA transmits information that helps us prepare for life out of the womb by ensuring that we have the particular traits we’ll need to adapt to our environment.19 According to Rachel Yehuda, epigenetic changes biologically prepare us to cope with the traumas that our parents experienced.20 In preparation for similar stressors, we’re born with a specific set of tools to help us survive.

all that is not said, is transmitted,”

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.

these patterns are transmitted more than learned.

“Mother and offspring live in a biological state that has much in common with addiction,” says behavior science writer Winifred Gallagher. “When they are parted, the infant does not just miss its mother. It experiences a physical and psychological withdrawal … not unlike the plight of a heroin addict who goes cold turkey.”

In our fear and anxiety, we often try to control our environment to feel safe. That’s because we had so little control when we were small, and there was likely not a safe place for the intense emotions we experienced.

On a neurophysiological level, each time we practice having the beneficial experience, we’re pulling engagement away from our brain’s trauma response center, and bringing engagement to other areas of our brain, specifically to our prefrontal cortex, where we can integrate the new experience and neuroplastic change can occur.

“practicing a new skill, under the right conditions, can change hundreds of millions and possibly billions of the connections between the nerve cells in our brain maps.”5 Once a new brain map is established, new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can emerge organically, expanding our repertoire when old fears arise.

With new thoughts, new feelings, new sensations, and a new brain map ingrained, we begin to establish an inner experience of well-being that starts to compete with our old trauma reactions and their power to lead us astray.

The more we travel the neural and visceral pathways of our new brain map, the more we identify with the good feelings that accompany that map. Over time, the good feelings start to become familiar and we begin to trust our ability to return to solid ground even when our foundation has been temporarily shaken.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation,”

“Filling our minds with positive images of wellbeing,” he says, “can produce an epigenetic environment that reinforces the healing process.”9

Traumas do not sleep, even with death, but, rather, continue to look for the fertile ground of resolution in the children of the following generations.

Without words, we no longer have full access to our memory of the event. Fragments of the experience go unnamed and submerge out of sight. Lost and undeclared, they become part of our unconscious.

When memory function is inhibited, emotionally significant information bypasses the frontal lobes and cannot be named or ordered through words or language,

Without language, our experiences often go “undeclared,” and are more likely to be stored as fragments of memory, bodily sensations, images, and emotions.

Once we have the story, we’re more able to revisit an experience—even a trauma—without reliving al...

When our connection to our parents is impaired in some way, the life force available to us can feel limited. We may feel blocked and constricted, or feel outside the flow of life, as if we’re swimming upstream against the current.

it would be difficult for your mother to give you what she was unable to receive from her own mother.

A failure to reestablish the bond can create “an unexplainable lack of closeness [that] casts a shadow over daily relationships,”

As infants, we perceive our mother as our world. A separation from her is felt as a separation from life.

defenses that have been with us so long, they become us.

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.

Our complaints, symptoms, and problems can function as signposts pointing us in the direction of something that’s still unresolved.

The problem is not what our parents have done to us; the problem is how we’re still holding on to it.

the sentence that describes your worst fear, your core sentence, is the most direct path to uncovering unresolved family trauma.

What is hidden from sight often increases in intensity.

What has been unspoken or invisible in your family history has likely been hidden in the shadows of your own self-awareness. Once you make the link, what was previously unseen can become an opportunity for healing.