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

“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 RefugeA 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. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781101980385 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 04-25-2017 Pages: 256 Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)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 Today, Mind Body Green, MariaShriver.com, Elephant Journal and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. www.markwolynn.com.Table of Contents Table of Contents Introduction: The Secret Language of Fear 1 Part I The Web of Family Trauma Chapter 1 Traumas Lost and Found 15 Chapter 2 Three Generations of Shared Family History: The Family Body 25 Chapter 3 The Family Mind 40 Chapter 4 The Core Language Approach 53 Chapter 5 The Four Unconscious Themes 60 Part II The Core Language Map Chapter 6 The Core Complaint 87 Chapter 7 Core Descriptors 107 Chapter 8 The Core Sentence 110 Chapter 9 The Core Trauma 130 Part III Pathways to Reconnection Chapter 10 From Insight to Integration 145 Chapter 11 The Core Language of Separation 164 Chapter 12 The Core Language of Relationships 179 Chapter 13 The Core Language of Success 200 Chapter 14 Core Language Medicine 216 Acknowledgments 221 Glossary 223 Appendix A List of Family History Questions 225 Appendix B List of Early Trauma Questions 227 Notes 229 Index 237