It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
Mark Wolynn, 2016
Twenty-year-old Jesse stopped sleeping after his nineteenth birthday: he woke at 3:30 freezing cold and was afraid he would never wake up again. The answer lay in the fate of an uncle he had never met. Mark Wolynn shows how the misfortunes of parents and grandparents can live on in their descendants, and teaches you to find them through the words people use to describe their deepest fear.
Who it is for
For anyone who has lived for years with anxiety, fear or failures that keep repeating, and can't find a reason for them in their own life. And for anyone curious about what we get from our family besides the colour of our eyes.
When suffering confounds us, we need to ask ourselves: whose feelings am I actually living?
The blindness that sent him home
At thirty-four, Mark Wolynn began to go blind. One day, right in his office, darkness came down over him, and in the weeks that followed his left eye saw less and less, until the faces of passers-by turned into a grey haze. The doctors' diagnosis was central serous retinopathy. Cause unknown, no treatment. The same words kept going round in his head: lonely, helpless, crushed.
He left his business and went to Southeast Asia. For three years he meditated, fasted and moved from one teacher to the next. Once, after a long wait in line to see a spiritual teacher, he heard something quite different from what he expected: he should go home and call his mother and father. He was angry, but later another teacher told him almost the same thing.
Back home, his mother mentioned in passing that when he was about two, she had been in hospital for three weeks. Ever since, her hugs had felt to him like a trap. And three of his grandparents had lost their mothers early. The words “lonely” and “helpless” turned out to be older than he was. By the author's account, once he made peace with his parents, his sight gradually came back, although his eye doctor still can't understand how he sees with such scarring on his retina.
For more than twenty years, Wolynn has worked with people who were not helped by years of treatment for depression, anxiety, phobias and insomnia. He trained with the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger and draws on research into how stress is passed on to children. His central idea: some of our fears and repeating misfortunes may begin not in our own life, but in the unresolved grief of our parents and grandparents. The clue lies in the words a person uses to describe their deepest fear. The author has one name for such words: core language. Ahead are the stories of his clients, the research, its limits, and four steps you can take on your own. Let's begin.
Insomnia that began thirty years before Jesse
Jesse was twenty but looked thirty. A straight-A student and a promising athlete, he had barely slept for more than a year, dropped out of college and lost his scholarship. Three doctors, two psychologists and a sleep clinic could not find the cause. It all started after his nineteenth birthday: he woke at 3:30, shivering, and no blanket could warm him. A fear came that he had never known before: that if he fell asleep, he would never wake up.
Wolynn latched onto one word. Jesse said he had been “freezing.” So Wolynn asked: had there been a tragedy in the family that had to do with cold, with sleep or with the age of nineteen? Jesse remembered that his mother had recently told him about his uncle Colin, his father's older brother. At nineteen, Colin was checking power lines in a snowstorm in northern Canada and froze to death. For him, falling asleep meant dying. The family grieved so hard that they stopped saying his name, and Jesse had never even heard of him.
Imagine a letter that never reached its addressee: there is no one at that address any more, and for years the post keeps bringing it to the next tenants. That is how the author sees unresolved grief. In his view, when a tragedy is too heavy, the family shuts itself off from it, but the fragments of feeling don't disappear: they find someone born later. Most often they show up in odd details: in the age at which a symptom began, in a word that doesn't fit your life.
The mistake is to look for the cause only in your own story. Wolynn notes that people spend years going over their childhood and find no answer, because the answer isn't there. He suggests something else: listen to your complaint as if it were someone else speaking. When did the symptom start? How old were you? Did something similar happen to someone in your family at the same age?
For Jesse, this connection was a turning point. But in the author's experience, understanding alone is usually not enough. We'll come back later to how Jesse separated his sleep from his uncle's fate.
About the author
Mark Wolynn is an American specialist in inherited family trauma and directs the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. For more than twenty years he has led workshops and individual sessions. He trained with Bert Hellinger.
All books by this author: Mark Wolynn
Terms from the book
- PTSD
- Cortisol
- Neuroplasticity
- Central serous retinopathy: An eye disease in which fluid collects under the retina and vision becomes blurred. The author writes that the cause of his illness was unknown.
- Hellinger: Bert Hellinger (1925–2019), a German psychotherapist and former Catholic priest, the creator of family constellations. Wolynn trained with him.
- Core language: The author's concept, not a scientific term: emotionally charged words, gestures and symptoms which, according to Wolynn, lead to unresolved trauma in a person's life or in their family.
- Jesse: A client of the author who suffered from insomnia. Wolynn changed the names of all the clients in the book.
- Colin: Jesse's uncle, his father's older brother, who died at nineteen in a snowstorm.
- Emory: Emory University, a private research university in Atlanta, USA.
- Acetophenone: An organic compound with a flowery smell. The author compares its scent to the smell of cherry blossom.
- Yehuda: Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She studies post-traumatic stress disorder and its traces in the children of people who lived through trauma.
- Holocaust: The murder of about six million European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War.
- Epigenetics: The science of how environment and experience switch genes on and off without changing the DNA sequence itself.
- Mansuy: Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroscientist in Zurich who studies how the effects of stress are passed on to the next generations in mice.
- Todd: The son of one of the author's clients, a boy with unexplained aggression.
- Earl: Todd's father, a client of the author.
- Unconscious loyalty: A concept from Hellinger's approach, not a diagnosis: an unconscious faithfulness to the fate of someone in the family that makes a person repeat their misfortunes.
- Gavin: A client of the author who repeated his father's financial ruin.
- Carson: A client of the author, a firefighter who suffered from panic attacks.
- Core complaint: The author's concept: a person's main problem, described in their own words. The first marker on the core language map.
- Core descriptors: The author's concept: the adjectives and short phrases a person uses to describe their mother and father. According to Wolynn, they reveal unspoken feelings about the parents.
- Core sentence: The author's concept: a short sentence that voices a person's deepest fear. According to Wolynn, it holds a trace of unresolved trauma.
- Core trauma: The author's concept: an event in a person's early life or in their family history which, according to Wolynn, lies behind their core language.
- Bridging question: The author's technique: your deepest fear is turned into a question about your family, so you can find the person who had similar feelings.
- Genogram: A diagram of the family tree: men are drawn as squares, women as circles, and the important events of their lives are written beside them.
- Doidge: Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, author of a book on neuroplasticity, The Brain That Changes Itself.
All terms
Similar books
- Little Essays of Love and Virtue, Havelock Ellis
- Love and Marriage, Ellen Key
- Love Yourself, No Matter Who You're With, Eva-Maria Tsurkur
- Love's Coming-of-Age, Edward Carpenter
- Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, Esther Perel
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Read in Livria
