Name: It Didn't Start With You
Rating: 4.2 (253 reviews)
Author: Mark Wolynn

What’s in it for me? Overcome the long-standing traumas that have shaped your life.

Were you ever uncomfortable when you visited grandparents or other relatives? Or did you have a fraught relationship with your parents? Chances are that hidden traumas in your family are to blame.

Traumatic events can affect the way we feel and behave, and when they run deep, sometimes trauma requires years of therapy to resolve. But if left unresolved, traumas, just like genes, can be passed on from generation to generation. This can have far worse consequences than just suffering a parent’s sour looks over the family Christmas dinner table!

How do you overcome the crippling hold of family trauma to ensure that you don’t pass on such feelings to your children? As these blinks will show you, language is the key to unlocking the past.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

how the pain suffered by your great-aunt could haunt you personally today;
why a few simple questions are all you need to get to the root of pain; and
how repeating positive statements can rewire your brain.

Severe trauma can lead to negative behavior and feelings, even when the trauma isn’t your own.

Many people struggle with emotional problems. Some hold irrational fears, exhibit destructive habits or feel trapped in unhealthy relationships.

If you’ve ever faced problems such as these, you might think that you’re to blame, that you’re the source of your emotional turmoil.

But often such unhealthy behavior stems from trauma that you instead experienced, directly or indirectly, through your family.

Traumatic events, such as an early separation from a mother or an act of violence, can affect a person deeply. These events not only cause stress and fear but also can change a person’s behavior.

Importantly, if a person isn’t able to resolve the symptoms of such trauma, that person might instead suppress them and as a result, develop unhealthy behavioral patterns.

Worse, such people can even pass the effects of trauma to the next generation.

In short, you can carry symptoms of trauma in your life that you didn’t experience. You might have recurrent feelings or exhibit behaviors that aren’t the result of any particular event in your own life.

One of the author’s patients, for example, was overwhelmingly afraid of dying. She was severely claustrophobic and feared being unable to escape from a life-or-death situation.

She described the feeling as “I can’t breathe, I can’t get out; I’m going to die.”

The patient wasn’t reacting to trauma from her life but to the experience of her mother’s relatives, who she later learned were murdered in a gas chamber during World War II.

Severe trauma like this can be so powerful that echoes of it can affect people who personally didn’t experience it. But how exactly can this be the case?

Resolving parent-child relationships is key in breaking the cycle of trauma.

Even if you had a favorite teacher, a close friend or perhaps someone in your life you felt was your hero, these individuals probably don’t affect who you are and how you feel about yourself as much as your parents.

Simply, parents have the strongest influence on a child’s life.

Discover underlying fears or trauma by finding the right language to shine light on their true nature.

It’s common to be afraid of spiders or snakes, but there are also many less common fears. And less common fears are often rooted in trauma from your past or your family’s past.

We have to be particular with the language we use for describing hidden fears because we often don’t have simple words for them, especially when the fear stems from early childhood trauma or inherited trauma.

Free yourself from inherited trauma by making peace with your past and your family’s past.

A problem is a lot easier to solve once it’s been identified. Identifying trauma is the first step toward overcoming it.

Creating new visual and verbal language that allows you to communicate with yourself is an important part of the healing process. When you recognize that a relative’s trauma is holding you back, you can work on breaking the cycle, so the trauma stops with your generation.

Kernaussagen in It Didn't Start With You

Worum geht es in It Didn't Start With You?

It Didn’t Start With You (2016) sheds light on a common thread in family relationships. These blinks explain how the source of your emotional or mental problems isn’t necessarily you but instead, your family history. You’ll learn how trauma can be passed from generation to generation, and what you can do to break the cycle.