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

· Sold by Penguin
4.4
79 reviews
Ebook
256
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field
 
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
 
As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

Ratings and reviews

4.4
79 reviews
Merrill Miller
July 20, 2019
The beginning of this book offers an interesting introduction to epigenetics, grounded in research and science. However, the second half of the book, which toutes the author's program for supposedly healing from family trauma, devolves into victim-blaming, as the author insists that readers must foster warm and loving relationships with their parents, nevermind that these parents may be toxic or abusive. The author also, anecdotally, presents his version of self-help as a way to heal not just emotional and psychological wounds but also physical maladies, as he supposedly cured his eye disease through a better relationship with his parents. More likely, the cure came from the fact that he was privileged enough that he could sell a company and with the proceeds, travel around Asia for three years, suggesting that he probably also had access to quality medical care and nutritious food, which probably did more for his eyes than anything else.
150 people found this review helpful
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Kris Ross
October 5, 2023
haven't finished this book, but it's pretty ok so far. It's a good book to read along side "the body keeps the score"
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Janet Haycraft
July 20, 2020
I have read hundreds of books. God helped me to see the lineage curses that lie deep into our bloodlines because of emotions that have been subliminally passed down and we don't even realize it. This is a deliver us from evil because of our ancestry kind of book. Life changing to say the least. I usually have one in my car to pass on if need be.
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About the author

Mark Wolynn is a leading expert on inherited family trauma. He is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Award in Psychology. As the director of The Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, he has trained thousands of clinicians and treated thousands more patients struggling with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive thoughts, self-injury, chronic pain, and illness. A sought-after lecturer, he leads workshops at hospitals, clinics, conferences, and teaching centers around the world. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the Western Psychiatric Institute, Kripalu, The Omega Institute, The New York Open Center, and The California Institute of Integral Studies. His articles have appeared in Psychology TodayMind Body Green, MariaShriver.comElephant Journal and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. www.markwolynn.com.

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