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

Depression. Anxiety. Chronic pain. Phobias. Obsessions. The roots of these difficulties may not lie in our immediate life experiences or chemical imbalances in our brains, but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. What many of us have long intuited, that traumatic experiences are passed down from generation to generation, is now being confirmed by the latest scientific research on the topic.

It Didn't Start with You builds on the work of leading experts on post-traumatic stress, including neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score The Body Keeps the Score. Memories and emotions live on even when the person who suffered the trauma is dead, or his or her story is forgotten or silenced. These emotional legacies, often encoded and hidden in everything from gene expression to everyday language, play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has been previously understood.

As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wallin has been working with individuals and groups for over 20 years, and It Didn't Start with You is a practical and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach It provides. Diagnostic Self-Recording provides a way to uncover fears and anxieties that are communicated through everyday language, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for creating genograms and extended family trees map experiences back through the generations. Then, through visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue, a path is created for 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 have been untouched by traditional therapies, drugs, and other intervention methods.