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

By Mark Wolynn

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781101980378

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Praise for

It Didn’t Start with You

One of The New York Times’s 5 Books on Healing from Trauma, 2025

One of Oprah Daily’s 10 Best Trauma Books of 2023

One of Book Riot’s 9 Best Healing Books About Trauma for 2023

One of Healthline’s 13 Best Mental Health Books of 2022

One of Cosmopolitan’s 15 Books About Mental Health That Everyone Should Read

One of Men’s Health’s 20 Best Mental Health Books to Read in 2022

One of Choosing Therapy’s 10 Best PTSD & Trauma Books for 2021

Winner of the 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Psychology

Finalist for the 2016 Books for a Better Life Award

Mark Wolynn does a masterful job of illuminating the ways in which our ancestors’ unresolved suffering, often unknown to us, disables us and binds us painfully to them. He gives us the tools and skills—an approach that combines understanding, imaginative dialogues, and compassionate reconnection—to free and heal ourselves.

—James S. Gordon, MD, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression and Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing

"It Didn’t Start with You takes us a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work."

—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

This groundbreaking book offers a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, powerful tools for relieving its suffering. Mark Wolynn is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.

—Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

"Mark elegantly weaves together the threads of generational and attachment trauma, offering a groundbreaking synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience. Drawing on the latest epigenetic research, he provides a powerful trauma language map—a tool to help readers decode their symptoms, trace them to their origins, and begin the journey of healing. This book is full of healing sentences, practices, and rituals that guide readers toward greater awareness, integration, and repair. It is both a compassionate companion and a practical guide for anyone seeking to transform inherited pain into embodied wholeness."

—Diane Poole Heller, PhD, author of The Power of Attachment and Healing Your Attachment Wounds

"Mark Wolynn’s extraordinary book cracks the secret code of families and proves that you can go home again—once you understand how history made you. Full of life-changing stories, powerful insights, and practical tools for personal healing, It Didn’t Start with You deserves a place on your bookshelf next to Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child and Dan Siegel’s The Developing Mind. You’ll never see your family the same way again."

—Mark Matousek, author of Ethical Wisdom

"Bridging both neuroscience and psychodynamic thinking, It Didn’t Start with You provides the reader with a tremendously helpful toolbox of do-it-yourself clinical aids and provocative insights."

—Jess P. Shatkin, MD, MPH, vice chair for education at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Child Study Center and author of Child & Adolescent Mental Health

"After reading It Didn’t Start with You, I found myself immediately able to apply Mark Wolynn’s techniques with my patients and saw incredible results, in a shorter time than with traditional psychotherapeutic techniques. I encourage you to read this book. It’s truly cutting edge."

—Alexanndra Kreps, MD

This book is essential reading. A must-read. Mark Wolynn’s approach to inherited and early developmental family trauma and its effect on health and well-being is groundbreaking.

—Dr. Bruce Hoffman, medical director, The Hoffman Centre for Integrative and Functional Medicine

"Utterly invaluable and endlessly fascinating, Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start with You, links our psychology and biology in a profound new way, giving us the power to understand and transform ourselves in the face of what seems inevitable. Identifying our unconscious loyalties to our ancestor’s trauma through a series of practical questions and exercises gives us the keys to unlock our own freedom and compassion. Reading this book is like being a part of one of Mark’s transformative workshops, a brave and powerful journey to self-realization."

—Brenda Strong, Emmy-nominated actress (Desperate Housewives, Dallas, 13 Reasons Why, Supergirl) and CEO of Strong Yoga®4Women

As medical doctors, we often treat the symptom. I’ve witnessed Mark identify the pattern and treat the cause.

—Dr. Russell Kennedy, author of Anxiety Rx

Penguin Life

It Didn’t Start With You

Mark Wolynn is the founder and director of the Family Constellation Institute. A sought-after lecturer, he has taught at hospitals, clinics, conferences, universities, and training centers around the world, including the University of Pittsburgh, JFK University, UPMC Western Psychiatric Institute, Kripalu, the New York Open Center, the Omega Institute, 1440 Multiversity, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. Wolynn’s articles have appeared in Psychology Today, Elephant Journal, mindbodygreen, and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. His book It Didn’t Start with You has become an international bestseller translated into over thirty-five languages. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Anna.

markwolynn.com

@MarkWolynn

Book Title, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Author, Mark Wolynn, Imprint, Penguin Life

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Copyright © 2016, 2025 by Mark Wolynn

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

A Penguin Life Book

Cover design by Matt Vee

Diagrams by Spring Hoteling

Interior design adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardcover Edition as Follows:

Names: Wolynn, Mark, author.

Title: It didn’t start with you : how inherited family trauma shapes

who we are and how to end the cycle / Mark Wolynn.

Description: New York : Viking, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008387| ISBN 9781101980361 (hc.) | ISBN 9781101980378 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101980385 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Psychic trauma. | Memory. |

BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Psychotherapy / Couples & Family. |

PSYCHOLOGY / Mental Health. | SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / General.

Classification: LCC BF637.S4 W6575 2016 | DDC 155.9/24—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008387

Ebook ISBN 9781101980378

First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

Published in Penguin Books 2017

This revised edition published in Penguin Books 2025

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.

The case studies portrayed in this book are based on the experiences of real patients, whose names and identities have been changed to protect their privacy. Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Introduction: The Secret Language of Fear

Part I

The Web of Family Trauma

Chapter 1. Traumas Lost and Found

Chapter 2. Three Generations of Shared Family History: The Family Body

Chapter 3. Our Invisible Inheritance

Chapter 4. The Family Mind

Chapter 5. The Core Language Approach

Chapter 6. The Four Unconscious Themes

Part II

The Core Language Map

Chapter 7. The Core Complaint

Chapter 8. Core Descriptors

Chapter 9. The Core Sentence

Chapter 10. The Core Trauma

Part III

Pathways to Reconnection

Chapter 11. From Insight to Integration

Chapter 12. The Core Language of Separation

Chapter 13. The Core Language of Relationships

Chapter 14. The Core Language of Success

Chapter 15. Core Language Medicine

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Appendix A: List of Family History Questions

Appendix B: List of Early Trauma Questions

Notes

Index

_154264514_

To my late parents,

Marvin and Sandra, who carried the torch

forward from previous generations.

I’m grateful for all you’ve given me.

Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

—Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. 1

Author’s Note

I’ve designed this book to be a guide to lead you through the rich landscape of self-discovery. You can use it on your own or work through the material with a well-trained therapist.

Notice how you feel as you read these pages. If you feel agitated or anxious, a certain amount of that is normal. After all, we’re excavating the depths of likely uncharted territory.

However, if you find that the intense feelings don’t resolve, or you feel unsafe in any way with any of this material, it could mean you need more support. I suggest you bookmark the places that triggered you and seek the help of a somatically trained therapist, preferably one who’s trained in working with attachment trauma.

Take good care of yourself as you read this book. Feel everything that comes up, as these feelings may be preparing the ground for the next level of healing that’s arising.

The information in this book is not intended to take the place of a psychologist’s care, nor is it a substitute for medical or mental health treatment. Instead, this book is a potent tool for unlimited self-discovery.

Introduction:

The Secret Language of Fear

In a dark time, the eye begins to see…

—Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time

This book is the fruit of a mission, one that has led me around the world, back home to my roots, and into a professional career that I never could have envisioned when this journey began. For more than thirty years, I have worked with individuals who have struggled with depression, anxiety, chronic illness, phobias, obsessive thoughts, PTSD, and other debilitating conditions. Many have come to me discouraged and disheartened after years of talk therapy, medication, and other interventions failed to uncover the source of their symptoms and allay their suffering.

What I’ve learned from my own experience, training, and clinical practice is that the answer may not lie within our own story as much as in the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even our great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, also tells us that the effects of trauma can pass from one generation to the next. This bequest is what’s known as inherited family trauma, and emerging evidence suggests that it is a very real phenomenon. Pain does not always dissolve on its own or diminish with time. 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.

How does this happen? As you’ll learn in this book, memories of trauma are imprinted in our parents’ and grandparents’ sperm and egg cells. The feelings and sensations of the trauma—specifically the stress response, the way the genes express—can pass on to the children and grandchildren, affecting them in a similar way, even though they didn’t personally experience the trauma. As a result, we can be born with altered brains that prepare us biologically to cope with traumas that are similar to the ones our parents and grandparents experienced.

What you’ll read in the pages that follow is a synthesis of empirical observations from my practice as director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco and the latest findings in neuroscience, epigenetics, and the science of language. It also reflects my professional training with Bert Hellinger, the renowned German psychotherapist, whose approach to family therapy demonstrates the psychological and physical effects of inherited family trauma on multiple generations.

Much of this book focuses on identifying inherited family patterns—the fears, feelings, and behavior we’ve unknowingly adopted that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation—and also how to end this cycle, which is the core of my work. You may learn, as I did, that many of these patterns don’t belong to us; they’ve merely been borrowed from others in our family history. Why is this? I strongly believe that it is because a story that needs to be told can finally be brought to light. Let me share my own.

I never set out to create a method for overcoming fear and anxiety. It all began the day I lost my vision. I was in the throes of my first ocular migraine. No real physical pain to speak of—just a cyclone of dark terror, within which my vision was obscured. I was thirty-four years old and stumbling around my office in the murk, fingering the desk phone for the 911 buttons. An ambulance would soon be on its way.

An ocular migraine is generally not serious. Your vision becomes muddled, but usually returns to normal in about an hour. You just don’t always know that while it’s happening. But for me, the ocular migraine was just the beginning. Within weeks, the vision in my left eye began to disappear. Faces and road signs soon became a gray blur.

The doctors informed me that I had central serous retinopathy, a condition without a cure, its cause unknown. Fluid builds up under the retina and then leaks, causing scarring and blurring in the visual field. Some folks, the 5 percent with the chronic form mine had turned into, become legally blind. The way things were going, I was told to expect that both eyes would be affected. It was just a matter of time.

The doctors were unable to tell me what caused my vision loss and what would heal it. Everything I tried on my own—vitamins, juice fasts, hands-on healing—all seemed to make things worse. I was flummoxed. My greatest fear was unfolding in front of me and I was helpless to do anything about it. Blind, unable to take care of myself, and all alone, I’d fall apart. My life would be ruined. I’d lose my will to live. I’d be annihilated.

I replayed the scenario over and over in my head. The more I thought about it, the deeper the hopeless feelings embedded in my body. I was sinking into sludge. Each time I tried to dig myself out, my thoughts circled back to images of being all alone, helpless, ruined, and annihilated. What I didn’t know then was that the very words alone, helpless, ruined, and annihilated were part of my personal language of fear. They echoed traumas that took place in my family history before I was born. Unbridled and unrestrained, these words reeled in my head and rattled my body.

I wondered why I gave my thoughts such power. Other people had adversity far worse than mine and they didn’t dwell in the depths like this. What was it about me that stayed so deeply entrenched in fear? It would be years before I could answer that question.

Back then, all I could do was leave. I left my relationship, my family, my business, my city—everything I knew. I wanted answers that couldn’t be found in the world I was part of—a world where many people seemed to be confused and unhappy. I had only questions, and little desire to carry on with life as I knew it. I handed my business (a successful events company) over to someone I had literally just met, and off I went, east—as far east as I could go—until I reached Southeast Asia. I wanted to be healed. I just had no idea what that would look like.

I read books and studied with the teachers who wrote them. Whenever I heard that there might be someone who could help me—some old woman in a hut, some laughing man in a robe—I showed up. I joined training programs and chanted with gurus. One guru said, to those of us gathered to hear him speak, that he wanted to surround himself with only finders. Seekers, he said, remained just that—in a constant state of seeking.

I wanted to be a finder. I meditated for hours each day. I fasted for days at a time. I brewed herbs and battled the fierce toxins that I imagined had invaded my tissues. All the while, my eyesight continued to worsen and my depression deepened.

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. Doing so is a prescription for continued suffering. There’s also something about the action of searching that blocks us from what we seek. 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.

What aren’t you willing to see? the healers prodded, provoking me to look deeper. How could I know? I was in the dark.

One guru in Indonesia shined the light a bit brighter for me when he asked, Who do you think you are not to have eye problems? He went on: Perhaps Johan’s ears don’t hear as well as Gerhard’s, and maybe Eliza’s lungs aren’t as strong as Gerta’s. And Dietrich doesn’t walk nearly as well as Sebastian. (Everyone was either Dutch or German at this particular training program and seemed to be struggling with one chronic condition or another.) Something got through. He was right. Who was I not to have eye problems? It was arrogant for me to argue with reality. Like it or not, my retina was scarred and my vision was blurred, but I—the me underneath it all—was beginning to feel calm. No matter what my eye was doing, it no longer had to be the defining factor for how I was doing.

To deepen the learning, this guru had us spend seventy-two hours—three days and nights—blindfolded and earplugged, meditating on a small cushion. Each day, we were given a small bowl of rice to eat and only water to drink. No sleep, no getting up, no lying down, no communicating. Going to the bathroom meant raising your hand and being escorted to a hole in the ground in the dark.

The goal of this madness was just that—to intimately come to know the madness of the mind by observing it. I 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.

After this experience and others like it, my inner vision began to clear a bit. My eye, however, stayed the same; the leaking and scarring continued. On many levels, having a vision problem is a great metaphor. I eventually learned that it was less about what I could or couldn’t see and more about the way I saw things. But that wasn’t when I turned the corner.

It was during the third year of what I now call my vision quest that I finally got what I was looking for. By this time, I was doing a lot of meditation. The depression had mostly lifted. I could spend countless hours in silence just being with my breath or body sensations. That was the easy part.

One day, I was waiting in line to have a satsang—a meeting with a spiritual master. I had been waiting for hours in the white robe that everyone in line at the temple wore. It was now my turn. I was expecting the master to acknowledge my dedication. Instead, he looked right through me and saw what I couldn’t. Go home, he said. Go home and call your mother and your father.

What? I was livid. My body shook with anger. Clearly, he misread me. I no longer needed my parents. I had outgrown them. I had given up on them long ago, traded them in for better parents, divine parents, spiritual parents—all the teachers, gurus, and wise men and women who were guiding me to the next level of awakening. What’s more, with several years of misguided therapy under my belt, of beating pillows and tearing cardboard effigies of my parents to smithereens, I believed I had already healed my relationship with them. I decided to ignore his advice.

And yet something struck a chord inside me. I couldn’t quite let go of what he had said. I was finally beginning to understand that no experience is ever wasted. Everything that happens to us has merit, whether we recognize the significance of it or not. Everything in our lives ultimately leads us somewhere.

Still, I was determined to keep the illusion about who I was intact. Being an accomplished meditator was all I had to cling to. So I sought a meeting with another spiritual master—one, I was sure, who would set the record straight. This man imbued hundreds of people a day with his heavenly love. Surely he would see me for the deeply spiritual person I imagined myself to be. Again, I waited a full day until it was my turn. I was now at the front of the line. And then it happened. Again. The same words. Call your parents. Go home and make peace with them.

This time I heard what was being said.

The great teachers know. The truly great ones don’t care whether you believe in their teachings or not. They present a truth, then leave you with yourself to discover your own truth. Adam Gopnik writes about the difference between gurus and teachers in his book Through the Children’s Gate: A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject and then ourselves.

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.

Regardless of the story we have about them, our parents cannot be expunged or ejected from us. They are in us and we are part of them—even if we’ve never met them. Rejecting them only distances us further from ourselves and creates more suffering. Those two teachers could see it. I couldn’t. My blindness was both literal and figurative. Now I was beginning to wake up, mostly to the fact that I had left a huge mess back home.

For years, I had judged my parents harshly. I imagined myself to be more capable, far more sensitive and human, than they. I blamed them for all the things I believed were wrong with my life. Now I had to return to them to restore what was missing in me—my vulnerability. I was now coming to realize that my ability to receive love from others was linked to my ability to receive my mother’s love.

Still, taking in her love was not going to be easy. I had such a deep break in the bond with my mother that being held by her felt like being squeezed in a bear trap. 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.

My mother and I could go months without speaking. When we did speak, I’d find a way, through either my words or my armored body language, to discount the warm feelings she showed me. I appeared cold and distant. Conversely, I accused her of not being able to see me or hear me. It was an emotional dead end.

Determined to heal our broken relationship, I booked a flight home to Pittsburgh. I had not seen my mother in several months. As I walked up the driveway, I could feel my chest tighten. I wasn’t sure our relationship could be repaired; I had so many raw feelings inside. I prepared myself for the worst, playing out the scenario in my mind: She would hold me and I, wanting only to soften in her arms, would do just the opposite. I would turn to steel.

And that’s pretty much what happened. Embraced in a hug I could barely endure, I could hardly breathe. Yet I asked her to keep holding me. I wanted to learn, from the inside out, my body’s resistance, where I tightened, what sensations arose, how I would shut down. It wasn’t new information. I had seen this pattern mirrored in my relationships. Only this time, I wasn’t walking away. My plan was to heal this wound at the source.

The longer she held me, the more I thought I would burst. It was physically painful. Pain would meld into numbness, and numbness into pain. Then, after many minutes, something gave. My chest and belly began to quake. I began to soften, and, in the weeks that followed, I continued to soften.

It was in one of our many conversations during this time that she shared—almost in an offhanded way—an event that occurred before I was two. My mom had to be hospitalized for three weeks for gall bladder surgery. With this insight, I began piecing together what was going on inside me. While we were separated, an unconscious tightening had taken root inside my body. When she returned home, I had stopped trusting her care. I was no longer vulnerable to her. Instead, I pushed her away, and would continue to do so for the next thirty years. The fear that I would be all alone finally began to make sense.

Another early event may have contributed to the fear I carried that my life would suddenly be ruined.

Reviews for It Didn't Start with You

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Epigenetic and assumed trauma are considered as the sources of current dysfunction and emotional disconnection. The author gives examples of defining and addressing such issues. The diagnoses and treatments might well work no matter what the source of the current concern, but that doesn't enter this picture. If disease can benefit from placebo, emotional issues must as well—or if we are just considering the treatment as based on potentially misdiagnosis, if it is shown to benefit the same problems from more personal experience, it working for 'adopted' or 'generational' sources is not surprising.
I feel this book provides good information, but it is a bit blinkered and has some unfortunate language & ideation—life force is not how I would describe positive emotional connections.

[climbingdan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The introductory chapters, explaining epigenetics and stress hormones, are a welcome addition to the growing list of known ways that environment can be passed down to future generations.

I am so grateful that this research has been done and is continuing. Society can learn how to undo the epigenetic hand that was dealt to them.

Many of us intuitively understand how such things as nutrition or “broken homes” can negatively impact children just on a surface level. But understanding that impact can be passed down through other vectors is vitally important because it empowers us to then address and mitigate those symptoms.

Those first couple of chapters resonate with what I am reading in current scientific literature.

Around chapter 3, when Wolynn gets into the application of this knowledge for the remainder of this book, he quickly gets into territory that I’m less familiar with.

Some of his conclusions make sense to me: the power of forgiveness, confronting difficulties, recontextualizing memories, and the impact of stories, imagined dialogue, and guided imagery.

I love that he believes in the value of not forever cutting people out of our lives. There seems to be a theme in social media these days to quickly, permanently, ban people out of our lives if there is any kind of difficulty, or especially if there is criminal activity. However, after safety has been established, boundaries have been erected, a certain level of healing has been reached in the victim, and/or the guilty party has demonstrated a level of repentance, there can be value in having contact with those people once again. Wolynn applies this even in the extreme case of murderers who have taken the lives of our loved ones.

Forgiveness and reconciliation, when safe, is a refreshing take.

I also agree with his advice on difficulties in life or our past: don’t avoid them, pivot to approach and engage with the challenges. Search to find and implement constructive solutions. I’m reminded of a boat tacking into the wind.

We probably all agree with his position that stories are powerful tools that can be used for healing and growth. That’s why so many books are banned. President Lincoln anecdotally told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

Whether that is a real quotation or not, stories have the ability to move us. They move us to change our beliefs, incite action we would not otherwise take, and create and shape thoughts we would not otherwise hold.

And when he speaks of imagining conversations with our dead or unavailable loved ones, so that we can emote our way through unprocessed trauma—to imagine an estranged mother apologizing for what she did and explaining her own trauma that caused her to do that, or a dead grandfather assuring his grandchild that they don’t have to carry the weight of his sin—I have seen firsthand the power of this in people’s lives.

But I am skeptical or uncertain about some of his other conclusions. And perhaps this is due to my lack of experience. I have been very fortunate and have led a sheltered, privileged life.

I am charmed by the idea of revealing family trauma to the next generation (when age-appropriate). If descendants are subconsciously and molecularly impacted by their ancestors, and knowledge of this trauma will enable the younger generation to shake off the ill effects that might be plaguing them, then this is possibly a kind of a “family medical history” that could free them from their particular set of symptoms of intergenerational trauma.

But some stories are very difficult to recount, and your family’s stories are not mine to share. I am not authorized to say, “This is great advice for everyone!” and propose such a decision to share sensitive histories for anyone but myself and my family.

As for the ideas that we might be carrying the specific guilts and the sorrows, or atoning for the privileges and the successes of our ancestors, I’m not so sure. As I write this sentence it makes sense that we certainly bear the general guilts, sorrows, privileges, and successes of those who came before us, but can a grandniece suffer from a specific, seemingly one-time, isolated action of a great aunt? I might just be writing myself into agreement with it, but it seemed like a far stretch when I first read it.

Still, five stars and worth reading.

[pnwkatie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A big meh and then a raised eyebrow. This author is obsessed with mothers and heteronormative identity. We all know about the epigenetic mouse study, yes? It's interesting and relevant but this book veers into la la land. We certainly do pass things down within families, but he leaves out many ways this happens. Read My Grandmother's Hands for a better idea of intergenerational trauma and innate response.

[Monika · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this case, within the psychology books, which are what I’ve been given now, it is different from everything I have read before. It touches on a theme that, although something had reached me, but only peripherally, the family problems or burdens that we carry without realizing it. It shows us how things that affected the lives of even your grandparents can have something to do with your present. Like unrecognized burdens, that when patients talk about them, they discover that it was something that their parents or even their grandparents suffered. As I said, I had not read anything so specific on this topic, but I also say that it did not seem as good to me as I was seeing everywhere. (Translated from Spanish)

[Evita Bernabéu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Highly recommended.
I think we all carry something anchored that doesn’t belong to us. (Translated from Spanish)

[EckaMH · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How interesting it is to locate in these pages things read and related to history that we can load, analyzed from another perspective.

Stopping to analyze "nuclear phrases" that mark the steps of more than one generation!!✨ Memories known as family constellations combined with interesting exercises to perform.

The book once again makes me think about the human being, as a magnificent creation connected to facts, situations, ultimately inherited traumas that leave their mark, even if we sometimes cannot recognize them consciously.

A reading without much technicality, captivating the desire to understand even more about human behavior and its history.

"Thank you for all that has been given. I return what is not mine. Now it’s my turn" (Translated from Spanish)

[CarlaDanitza · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I believe that any self-help book can be important in moments of personal healing; I have read some that relate adult behavior to childhood wounds, and in my case, they have been more relevant.

The idea of wounds that come from further back, on a genetic level, is interesting if we understand it as part of an emotional inheritance and from there, its relationship with inherited fears; however, more research is still needed on this, because these generational inheritances go much further back than a family tree and can be very diverse. Exploring them can be interesting because it is really another way to know ourselves more deeply.

Nevertheless, inheritances projected by people who have never been part of your life are difficult for me to understand; they are more of a projection with which you feel identified. Therefore, I believe that the help of a therapist is essential to address these fears that are beyond our self-knowledge. However, questioning oneself is always healthy, and some exercises help in that process.

We can all have wounds that are beyond our understanding, and this book may be useful to you, but it will only be part of the process, not the answer itself… so keep exploring yourself and always consult a therapist. (Translated from Spanish)

[Beelu López · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I understand; and at the same time I don’t understand the great hype surrounding this book. I read quite a bit in this genre and honestly, I didn’t find anything new in it compared to what I’ve been reading in other psychology and self-help books. I’ve also been attending psychoanalytic therapy for almost a year now; and I didn’t discover anything I hadn’t previously discussed with my psychologist. Additionally, I studied a bit of psychology in my career. I believe that this book can help you if you feel that you have problems in your life and you have not yet made the decision to seek help from a professional. This book has the capacity to help you understand that what one thinks is happening in life by mere coincidence actually has its origin in childhood and family traumas; and that it is possible to resolve it with the right help. I CELEBRATE THIS.

What I liked and found most interesting about the book is the beginning. The amount of studies and information about genetics and epigenetics that the author cites/explains seemed incredible to me. I had never read about the capacity to "store traumas" in DNA, and this is new to me. I will continue to research the topic.

To complete my review, I also watched the series where this book is mentioned, and for which I believe it became very well-known. In the series, three friends venture into a type of therapy called *family constellations*. Although this therapy is not mentioned in the book, the author is the founder of the Family Constellations Institute in San Francisco. The stories told in the series are not those of the book. The series is very good; I recommend it. (Translated from Spanish)

[Chuchn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book is more useful if you do the exercises. I recommend having psychological support because sometimes asking ourselves questions hurts, and by sharing, we lighten our load. (Translated from Spanish)

[RosarioNunez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had so much fun with this book, I highly recommend it. (Translated from Spanish)

[AndreaDG · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Talking about this type of book is, for me, a matter of passion. While I am a therapist (I read it, reread it, listened to it, and studied it), I also did it as a person who loves to heal every day, and one thing we are very clear about is that healing your lineage, your ancestors is the key to living your own life.

This book is a marvel when it comes to these types of processes.

✨ Seriously, it's not a trend. Thanks to the thousands of recommendations made about this book and the series that recommended it, today thousands of people have been able to constellation their family and thus have been able to heal or at least seek therapy ?

✨ Big shoutout to #berthellinger who has inspired what I previously mentioned.

✨ And now talking about the book, it's magical, seriously from my therapeutic perspective, anyone who reads, becomes aware, does the exercises, constellates, and perhaps decodes their lineage. Woww They will gain a lot of ground for their evolution. (Translated from Spanish)

[birthsister · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As an amateur genealogist, I have an interest in epigenetic trauma. I've read the studies the author cites, and hoped he would expand on them further. Unfortunately, the rest of the book reads like a 1990's self help book with no empirical evidence to support his personal brand of therapy, often stretching to make his points fit into the framework of epigenetics. If you want to read this book because you're interested in epigenetics, I wouldn't bother. If you're reading it because you're trying to find an answer to otherwise unresolved personal conflicts, I'm not going to say it won't work for anyone, but your time and money might be better spent elsewhere.