← Healing + Human Potential
Healing + Human Potential
Your Family's Suppressed Trauma Is Affecting You + How to Heal it For Good
00:56:55
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- [00:00]
Mark Wolynn
When our grandmom is five months pregnant with our mother, all the eggs our mother will ever have, one of them being us, is in that womb. Let's say they came from a war torn country. People are being shot, people are being taken away, bombs are going off. Our grandparents develop reactions to the violence to help them survive this trauma. The reaction to a trauma, specifically the stress response, passes forward to the children and the grandchildren through DNA methylation, affecting them in a similar way, though they didn't personally experience the trauma. So the problem is we are inheriting that skill set and there's no war. We're rarely making the link that our anxiety, hypervigilance, depression is connected to our parents and our grandparents. We just think we're wired this way.
- [00:52]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
Welcome back to the Healing and Human Potential podcast.
- [00:55]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Today we're exploring a really powerful question. What if the stress, fear, anxiety and relational patterns that you're experiencing in your life didn't start with you? We're going to dive into inherited trauma, how things get passed down through generations and how that really influences our nervous system, attachment styles, and overall health. You're also going to learn powerful tools to identify if you have inherited trauma and then how do you actually break free of it? Joining us is Mark Woolen, who's a leading expert in inherited trauma and author of It Didn't Start with youh. His work really integrates family systems and uncovers the deeper roots behind our struggles. My hope is that this conversation not only serve you, but future and past generations and the healing that is possible. Mark, I'm so happy that you're here. I know this is a long time coming and I wanted to start off talking about, I know a lot of people feel anxious and overwhelmed emotionally. They feel stressed. Can you share with us what people are feeling is not just about their own personal individual experience, but could be connected to inherited family trauma.
- [02:07]
Mark Wolynn
I recently worked with a 40 year old woman and she didn't understand why she screwed up our relationship. She, she left after a few months. I think her longest relationship was nine months. Otherwise, you know, her life is great. She's very successful, she's a lawyer, she has lots of friends. But when I asked her in the session, what do you feel when you're in relationship? She told me, you know, I'm very keen on trauma language, which I'm sure we'll get into. Her trauma language was, I feel trapped, disconnected and disgusted whenever he makes love to me. So, you know, so hold those sentences for a minute. And then when we hear her story, it'll make a lot of sense. Her. Her story. Her mom was deeply in love with her high school sweetheart. I mean, they were a thing. But he had to leave town for a little bit, and he said, look, as soon as I come back, I promise we'll get married. And she thought she was being dumped. She didn't believe him. So he leaves. For a short time, she gets pregnant with another guy, and then when the guy returns, she finds the mom pregnant and refuses to marry her. So, reluctantly, the mom marries the client's father and lives this trapped, unhappy life. And, I mean, you see the connection. Listen to the language. Now, I felt trapped. This is not my client's experience. This is her mother's experience before she's born. But it transfers down. We'll talk science later. Epigenetics and how that happens. But, you know, I. I think maybe I want to start off as, you know, our children are our legacy. And as parents, we need to realize that the reaction to a trauma doesn't necessarily stop with the people who experience it. So the feelings and the sensations, specifically the stress response, the way the genes express this, passes forward to the children and the grandchildren, affecting them in a similar way, even though they didn't personally experience the trauma.
- [04:28]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Yeah, And I think that that is fascinating, that it can be passed down through the body three generations, as early as conception. Can you share more about that so people can grasp if this is a new concept to them?
- [04:41]
Mark Wolynn
Absolutely. I'm always happy to do that. We always looking for answers in the childhood. That's. That was me, too, 35 years ago. Oh, gosh, don't make me do the math. But I have a story that led me there, which I might tell as well. It's a really interesting case. We always think about what we didn't get from our parents and. Or what our parents did wrong. You know, my. My mom left me at the mall when I was 10, and that's why I have this fear of abandonment. We don't realize that the answer often lives in biology and the biology of what happens to us after a trauma. When a trauma happens, it changes us, Alyssa. It literally. It causes a chemical change in our DNA, and this changes how our genes function, sometimes regeneration. So, technically, chemical signals. You know, what they call chemical tags attached to our DNA and tell ourselves to use or ignore certain genes, enabling us to better deal with the trauma that just happened. But then the way our genes are affected will change how we act or feel. I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm not even Talking about nervous systems or fight, flight, freeze responses yet I'm just talking about our responses. So how we now are acting or feeling based on the way the package comes to us epigenetically, for example, we can become sensitive or reactive to situations that are similar to an original trauma, even if that trauma occurs in a past generation, so that we have a better chance of surviving it in this generation. An example I like to give is one of war. And, and it's common for many of us who had grandparents who suffered war somewhere they, let's say they came from a war torn country. People are being shot, bombs are going off, uniform men are lining people up in the square. People are being taken away. Now, our grandparents experiencing this could develop and pass forward a skill set to help them survive. Sharper reflexes, quicker reaction times, reactions to the violence to help them survive this trauma. And literally that's what, what gets passed down. So the problem is we are inheriting that skill set. But the problem, the problem is we're, you know, the Dows are set to 10 and there's no war. So here we are waiting for this catastrophe, waiting for the uniform men to come to our door, freaking out when there are loud noises, terrified when there are crowds, freaking out when we see policemen in uniforms, never understanding why, because we're rarely making the link that our anxiety, our hypervigilance, our depression is connected to our parents and our grandparents. We just think we're wired this way.
- [08:01]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
And I love that you're bringing this into more of the conversation because I think when people think it's personal to them, they think something's wrong with them. It feels heavy. There's so much I want to keep diving into so that people have compassion for themselves, where they are, and then can actually change it from this conversation. But one study that I love, that I know you also love, is the study with mice and how mice ended up fearing a specific scent and their offspring also feared it. Can you talk to us about this? Because I think this scientifically really shows how epigenetics, how it can go through a lineage.
- [08:37]
Mark Wolynn
Yeah, so that's one of my, that's also one of my favorite studies too. So it's a done at Emory Medical University in Atlanta. And they take male mice because it's easier to track the male line because there are less variables to track. And so they take male mice and they shock them and they make them afraid of this cherry blossom scent. So they, you know, they put the scent in the cage and as soon as the mice smell the scent, they shock them. And the mice become frightened of the scent, of course. And then they see that right in that generation, there's changes in the blood in the brain, in the sperm. Actually in the brain, there's enlarged areas where there's a greater amount of smell receptors which, which. Which are protective because then they can detect the scent at lesser concentra. See, it's a good epigenetic adaptation, so they can detect it at lesser concentrations. So they take some of the sperm and they go, what happens if we impregnate females that weren't shocked? Let's see what happens. Well, the amazing thing is what happens in the second and third generations. You know, the little mice pups become jumpy and jittery just by smelling the scent without getting shocked. So they've inherited the stress response of being jumpy and jittery without directly having experienced the trauma of being shocked. When I first wrote the book 10 years ago, Alyssa, all I had was my studies. I don't know if you know, but I revised the book just a few months ago. And the reason I did that is because now we have tons of human studies which we didn't have. And I went back to the publisher and said, got to do the book over, because, you know, I based it all on rodent studies. And now we have all these human studies to look at. And there's a study that just came out in 25 where there's an intergenerational epigenetic signature of violence that's embedded in the genome. And they were able to see this with Syrian women that were. Had gone through the war. So they, they were able to do this look at three generations. Specifically, they could find epigenetic changes. And specifically those would be changes in DNA methylation, which blocks proteins from attaching to the DNA, and then it changes the way the DNA expresses. So they could find DNA methylation changes in the pregnant grandmothers that are directly exposed to the war, violence, and then into their daughters in their wombs who were prenatally exposed. They can see changes in DNA methylation. And then when they looked even deeper at the germline, that, you know, because the. We know this from embryology for a hundred years, when our grandmom is pregnant with our mother, five months pregnant, all the eggs our mother will ever have, one of them being us, is in that womb. So, you know, get this. So grandma is five months pregnant with our mom, and we're in there too, to some degree. And so that's what they were able to find that the grandchildren who were in utero in their mother's womb. In utero. So another generation down the German line was exposed to violence. So they could see the signature for three generations, another study out of Brazil, they looked at women that were exposed, pregnant women who were exposed to partner violence. So they could see that the, the, the grandmothers were able to pass the effects of that violence onto the grandchildren again through DNA methylation, not only to their daughters that they would then give birth to, but then their mothers would then give birth to daughters with that same signature of violence. So there's a lot here.
- [12:56]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Yeah. And I also know that kind of time of being in the womb space is so important for a lot of the shaping of their nervous system in life. And so even more impactful.
- [13:08]
Mark Wolynn
Totally. And we will talk about that too. Because you know, even though I'm known as the generational trauma guy, I spend probably 85% of my time working with attachment when I'm working one on one. Because these generational traumas, massively important, created difficulties in mothering and fathering.
- [13:33]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
One of the things that you also explore is a study on how our relationship with our parent can affect our physical health, both positive and negative. Can you share more about that?
- [13:44]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
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- [14:25]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
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Host - Alyssa Nobriga
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Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
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- [14:35]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
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- [15:12]
Mark Wolynn
So, all right, I want to get the the right details on this one because it's pretty important. It's called the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study. Now it's done in the 50s. It's so crazy. So they take students, they followed them for 35 years. It was that long. So when they were 21 years old, they asked them one question to describe their relationship with their parents. You were, had a very close relationship with your mother and your father. They, they looked at both categories. Or it was warm and friendly, or it was, you know, tolerant or it was strained and cold. And they followed that for 35 years. Now the people are 46 years old and they discovered that 91 of the students who said that they had tolerant or strained and cold relationship with their mother had a significant health issue. We're talking cancer, diabetes, coronary artery disease, compared to only 45% which is less than half, less than half. If they described it as warm and close or friendly, isn't that amazing? I always tell people that, look, healing with your parents is not just a good idea. Remaining broken with them could cost us our lives.
- [16:48]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Those are the original imprints of what we learn relationship to be money, to be everything that we, you know, when up until we're seven, we're in Theta, so we're just a sponge absorbing also their patterns in on top of the things that we're talking about here. And so I'm a fan of proactively doing the work to heal and evolve, not for necessarily to maintain the relationship because I understand some people it's not safe or possible to maintain those relationships, but for our own well being. And I love that it also brings back back to the biology that it supports our physical health. One thing I wanted to ask you about on the flip side is for people who are estranged from their parents and they want to do this work, is there anything helpful that you would recommend that they do? And I know you've kind of alluded to it in some of your stories, but just to make it really clear, if it doesn't feel safe or they don't want the person's not their parents, not emotionally Available or they don't want to work it out with them or what can they do?
- [17:46]
Mark Wolynn
Yeah. So let me, let me start with what happens when we're estranged. When we reject a parent, not only, as we talked about earlier, can our physical health be affected, but there's three unconscious ways that that rejection operates inside of us. The first way, we, we can unconsciously reject aspects of ourselves because we can't see we're the same as that parent. We've disowned the behaviors we didn't like in that parent and ourselves. So we can't see when it expresses in us unconsciously, mom was cold, but we can't see when we're being cold. We think we're warm, but we're not always warm or, you know, dad was an alcoholic and we drink a lot. So we, we disown behaviors and then we have to notice how we share those behaviors. That's very helpful. The second way that rejection operates inside us unconsciously is through relationship. So we can pull in a partner who treats us a similar way that we, that the parent treated us. So if the parent was ignored us, we pull in a partner who ignored us. If the parent couldn't see us, we pull in a partner who can't see us. If we, if our parent was busy, our mother was busy all the time and didn't have time for us, we pull in a partner who was busy and doesn't have time for us. But the, the thing we do, Alyssa, is we don't realize that that's the law of attraction. Instead we just look at that partner and say, you know, he or she is doing this to me rather than this is the opportunity to use that relationship for healing. Sometimes we can even pull in a really nice partner, but we're so hyper vigilant that we're waiting for that partner to ignore us, that we can turn a good man bad or a good woman bad just through our hyper vigilance. And then the third way we can treat ourselves, that inner child part of ourselves, the way we feel we were treated. So if our parents couldn't be gentle with us, we can have difficulty being gentle with ourselves, with the child inside us, and do to ourselves what we believe was done to us. So if the parent was critical, we're inwardly critical. If the parent was aggressive, we're inwardly aggressive. If the parent ignored us or was distant with us, we're distant and we ignore this inner child part of us. So if you can't heal with your parents in real time because there's a danger, or they're not safe, or you keep collapsing or shrinking or going into caretaking mode. You're not ready to heal with them in real time. So, you know, you get all muscled up and you think, I'm ready. I'm gonna go in there and heal. And then you find you still caretake them or. Or you shut down and you're defended, you're not ready. At least do it in your own. Continue the healing process, but do it with their photo. I give a lot of people this practice of putting their. A photo of their mum over their left shoulder or their left nightstand. I'm using my cup here, but you know, to put this, like on their night. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you could see it. So to put. All right, there you go. To put this a photo of their mom right here over their left nightstand or above, taped above their pillow. Now look at the photo. Photo. And this is great too. If a parent is deceased. Mom, please hold me when I'm sleeping so I can learn to trust your love so I can. Here, let me give you some sentences that. That I often give. Mom, please hold me while I'm sleeping so we can heal this break in the attachment. Please teach me how to trust your love, how to receive it, and how to let it in without taking care of you. Just receiving. And then for 60 seconds, feel a current of aliveness, a current of life force, a current of energy really coming into our heart and healing us. So we begin to heal with that parent. In our inner images, which the brain doesn't know the difference. The same regions of the brain activate the audio cortex, the sensory motor centers. You know, many of the same regions of the brain activate when we visualize as though it's happening in real time. The healing is happening. So I. You asked for my advice. So get a photo and heal with that parent, even if it can't be done in real life.
- [22:53]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
And it's so empowering to know that I don't need them to change for me to find my own healing and resolution. And I don't need to wait for them or work it out with them if I don't feel safe to do so, or I choose not to for whatever reason. It's beautiful.
- [23:06]
Mark Wolynn
Absolutely.
- [23:07]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
I know that inherited family trauma can be unconscious. So is there a story of somebody that you've worked with that highlights and helps people see what may be playing out under the surface? That was really powerful.
- [23:19]
Mark Wolynn
You know, I'm going to tell you the story that taught me how to look for inherited family trauma. And it's actually, we're going back 35 years or so. I was working with a lot of cutters back then without ever realizing that I was a self injure too. I never knew why they were coming to me. But there was this one particular woman, just 24 years old and. And you have to understand, I know nothing of inherited family trauma. I don't even know if it's even possible. I'll call this particular woman Sarah, because the way she cut was different than the other cutters, which was more superficial. Sarah would cut in an extreme way so deeply that she'd hit a vein or an artery and almost bleed to death. And then she'd, you know, be rushed to the hospital. Her parents would take her, they'd lock her in a psych ward for three or four weeks at a time. You know, I'd work with so many other cutters. And what was it about the way Sarah was cutting that was trying to be communicated here? So one day after she was released, I'm going to show you what I did one day, if she's released. I gave her this pen. Not this one, but one like this. And I said, sarah, imagine this is your knife and show me how you cut. Show me what's. So she started to bring. So she would cut into her arms or her legs, into her abdomen. But in this particular moment, she puts the pen to her arm and she starts to glaze over. She begins dissociating and I go, right there, right there, what's going on? What's that thought? What's happening? What's that feeling right there? And she looks at me sort of far away and says, I. I don't deserve to live. Now here I'm looking at this young woman whose life has literally just begun. I mean, she's 24 years old and. And I said, what did you do? What have you done? Did you accidentally take someone's life? Did you cause a car accident? Did you break up with someone who took his life? She said, no, nothing like that. So as we had done before, we'd gone back and looked in her childhood and you know, her relationship with her parents, it was really good. She was able to take in their love, their nurturing. She could receive hugs and care. So I said, well, it's got to be attachment. It has to be there. So again, we looked at her relationship with her mom. A safe, strong, secure attachment. And I was flummoxed. And luckily these words popped out of my mouth. I said, well, tell me about your grandparents. And boom, she dropped the bomb. Dad's mother was an alcoholic later in dad's life. So in the early part of his life, he. He got enough. But when he was about 12, grandma, who was an alcoholic, was driving the car drunk. She hits a telephone pole, and grandpa goes through the glass and gets cut, lacerated, and bleeds to death before the ambulance. Those are the. Those are your cues, the key, the clues, remember? So he gets cut, lacerated, and bleeds to death before the ambulance can arrive. And in that minute, everything made complete sense to me. So, I mean, later in life, I would develop something called verbal trauma language and non verbal trauma language. But I think you told me a lot of your listeners or therapists, so I'm going to go for the gusto here. So if, if it's non verbal trauma language, the, the cutting is non verbal, and the almost bleeding to death, that puts her in a psych ward. That's the non verbal trauma, Lang. The verbal trauma language is I don't deserve to live. So the minute she tells me this story, everything becomes clear. And I grab two chairs and I throw them out in the middle of the office about 10ft away. And I. I say, sarah, look at that chair over there. That's where your grandfather is. Talk to him. Tell him what you told me. And she said, well, Grandpa, and remember, they're both dead, Grandma and grandpa, okay, by this time. So she says, grandpa, I cut so deep I almost bleed to death. And then I said, add the words, like you, Grandpa, like you bled to death. And she starts crying and says, like you, Grandpa. I say to her, what's he saying to you? What's he showing you? And she says, he doesn't want me to do this. And he's telling me that when I go to cut, to feel him there with me, to visualize him next to me, protecting me. And. And she did that. I'll get there in a second. Then I look at the other chair with her. I go, sarah, tell your grandmother what you told me. Tell her that you don't deserve to live. And she said, grandma, I don't deserve to live. And then say. And that's. And then I added. Which is what you would have felt, Grandma. And Sarah is, you know, just making this connection. And, you know, she's crying and, and, and she. I said, so what is grandma telling you? The same thing. That she'll be with me, and when I go to cut, they'll both be there supporting me. Well, guess what? Sarah never cuts again. Wow. And I discover. I get to discover inherited trauma which I didn't know existed. And. And, you know, it's. You know, I guess Sarah needed to know that this feeling of needing to die wasn't hers, obviously. And even the cutting wasn't hers somehow. It was a recreation, a reenactment. It's almost as the cutting was leading us to a family story that needed to be told for everyone's healing. Not just Sarah's, her dad's healing. Because the next thing I did is I said, sarah, bring your dad in here. And, you know, because obviously the dad hated his mother, even though he had gotten enough from her earlier to be a good dad, to not have enough elements of a broken bond. Or he could be present with his daughter and present in the marriage, and they could stay together. But what happened was when she brought the dad in, the dad was rigid, you know, when I had put the chairs up, and then I asked him to go back earlier to see what would have made her an alcoholic. And she lost her mom when she was three years old. The grandmom had lost her mom, which immediately built compassion in this guy who hated his mother for killing his father. And he could see that the alcoholism came from somewhere.
- [31:00]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
I'm just in awe of your. I'm so grateful that you had that experience, to dig deeper into this work in human form and to support intergenerational family healing, that it was a collective, systemic opportunity to. To help the whole family. And a lot of these things can play out subconsciously. And I'm. I'm curious if there are, because I'm imagining people listening are like, are there common fears that people are going through that aren't their own? And then what are some questions they can ask themselves to understand what is the origin of this?
- [31:37]
Mark Wolynn
Let me start with some of the signs. Like, what are the signs? Okay, so I know, because this is what I do, that many of us, you know, we. We carry something that feels like it doesn't belong to us. This is what I hear all the time. I'm carrying something, but I know it's not mine. And of course, my first question is, how do you know it's not yours? And then we look at attachment. We find out it is ours. But some. Often it isn't. You know, we're carrying our grandmother's fear. We saw the woman earlier was carrying her mother's response to a man making love to her that she didn't want to be with because she lost the love of her life. But we can be carrying a Sadness that doesn't belong to us, a grief that doesn't belong to us. Even the some aspects of a health condition, certainly panic attacks, chronic exhaustion, autoimmune. Let me tell one more story. And then the reason being is because, you know, these signs are important. But the next one I want to tell is about an age and, and it'll, it'll just kind of tie that up. So a mother works with me for her 16 year old boy who's got a rare neurological disorder. So ever since he's 10 years old, he, he begins experiencing this intense burning sensations on his skin. So we've got two clues so far. Clue number one, intense burning sensations on the skin. And he's 10 years old when it starts. So she takes him to the doctors and they can't figure anything out. And why is this happening? They don't have any root cause, they just call, well, he has an idiopathic neurological condition. Well, no kidding. It's idiopathic and neurological, but they don't know what it is. So I'm speaking to his mom and I go, can you tell me about his dad? Just tell me about his dad. And, and specifically age 10. I said dad because he was male and I went there first. If it wasn't dad, I'd say tell me about you at age 10, tell me about grandma or grandpa at age 10. But I'd hit the jackpot right there. Father at age 10 was playing with matches, accidentally catches the house on fire, the garage on fire, the house burns down, he can get his mom out, he runs in, but he can't get his brother out. And his brother dies in the fire. And the father never forgave himself for killing his brother. And because the trauma remained unhealed and unresolved, which we'll get to later, why traumas persist, the man's son, because again, it's unhealed, it's not resolved. The man's son brings it back into consciousness by these burning sensations on his skin at the same age. I mean, to you and me, it's clear because we're clinicians. Yeah, but so the family never makes the connection. And then after working with this boy, you know, his, his symptoms disappear. I mean, it's like I just said to the mom, okay, go home, tell, have dad tell him the story. Have dad tell him how terrible he felt, that he did this and that to hold his son and tell his son to leave all this with him, that this is his story, this is his guilt, this is his pain, and it's Made him who he is today, has given him his dignity, his strength, etc. Etc. But the father does this, tells the story. And the son doesn't have the burning symptoms anymore. So it can be that quick sometimes it can, yes. So I talked about certain ages, but it can be certain milestones or events in our lives. For example, as soon as we get married, which we saw with a woman, she starts dating someone too long and she starts to get that ick, and she can't get rid of the ick, which was her mother's ick. But all of a sudden. I've worked with many people who get married and they're shut down and they can't figure it out. Wait a minute. I love this guy. This guy's great. I knew I want to marry him. And I don't understand the shutdown. Well, what happened to your mom when she got married? Oh, she married an alcoholic. Or what happened to grandma? She got married. Well, he beat her a lot. So the shutdown is technically the fight flight freeze responses that go into the egg cell or sperm cell of the mother or the grandmother, and we inherit them in the epigenome. So it's not just an age or an event or milestone. It could be even moving to a new place. And then all of a sudden we get depressed like our ancestors that were persecuted and forced out of their homeland. Or we get rejected by our partner and, you know, the grief is insurmountable, even though we only dated them two months. But, oh, I can never get over this. But you only dated this person two months. It doesn't matter because it's taking us into what we need to heal, to a break and the attachment and, you know, there's. There's even more. I mean, I could go on and on we go to have a child, and then, you know, everything's cool, like life is going smoothly, and then we're pregnant and we start freaking out. I remember a case I had where the ancestral alarm clock started ringing as soon as she got pregnant. And this woman, she's consumed with anxiety. And I said, so whoa, whoa, let's. Let's talk about it 1. You. So you're pregnant, you're going to have this baby. And I could see her fidgeting. And I go, go, tell me, what's your worst fear that will happen? And she said, well, I'll do something terrible and I'll harm the baby. And I said to her, had you ever harmed a baby before? She, of course not. And I said, had anyone in your family Ever harmed a baby before. And she was about to say, of course not. She was. And all of a sudden, it hit her. She said, oh, my God. My grandmother as a young woman, and it starts coming to her. Lit a candle, caught the curtains on fire, caught the house on fire, couldn't get her baby out, who was sleeping upstairs. And. But then she said we were never allowed to talk about it. See, this is. This is what happens. We clamp down on traumas because we're not supposed. Don't ever talk about them, because somehow we'll conjure them up when it's exactly the opposite. Because that minute she made the link that she inherited that terror from her grandmother. And then we could break the pattern easily. We could. I had her hold that place in her body where she felt that fear, that horror of harming the baby, and to inhale into that place and exhale it back to the grandmother and just say, grandma, you know, this. This isn't mine. And I carry it. So every time she would feel that fear, I'd have her stop, really get into that fear as a sensation, put her hand there and exhale back to the grandmother. So it had a location almost like a hook to hang a coat that we carry.
- [39:23]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
1.
- [39:24]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Some of the signs that I'm hearing you say is, if it doesn't make sense, and maybe somebody's like this, this isn't logically making sense in my life. And there feels like there's something else to explore, to look at the age, to look at the experience of your. At least your parents and your grandparents. I know when I was becoming a clinician doing a genealogy, kind of like a family tree for people that don't know what that is. Doing genealogy work supported me in understanding the blessings and opportunities of both lines of my ancestors. And that was important to see both the gratitude, but also the family secrets or other things that are opportunities, I think, for us to heal in the next generation, if we're proactive, which people listening to this podcast are doing their own work and service. And my experience is everything's looking to be met with presence. Everything's looking to be healed, Everything's looking to be met with love, therefore transformed. And so having a greater understanding, maybe there's a compassionate like, whoa, this isn't mine. But also to even do some of the subconscious work, like, that's theirs, not mine. That was then, not now. To really get that on a deep level and to express anything that gets suppressed needs expression. It needs to come up and out without identifying, without. Without judging it, so that it can actually move and not get stuck in our body and our family systems, in our psyches. So I love that you're, you're supporting us and having greater awareness of what could be playing out in our lives. And these are some threads we could pull or an exercise like genealogy work to start having greater awareness.
- [41:04]
Mark Wolynn
I love it. I mean, it's exactly right. If there's anything that doesn't make sense in the context of your life or, you know, behavior that just started arriving, really be conscious, like you're saying, and look at what was going on right before this behavior. What did you know? I see this all the time. You know, someone will come to me with a child's, you know, when I, when children struggle, I work with the parent so people will come to me with the child's eating disorder. I go, so when did that start? And she said, oh, she was 13. I go, well, what was going on at 12 or 13? Did she get rejected by a girlfriend? She goes, how did you know? I go, I didn't know. I'm just asking. And, and you know, so what happens is these rejections take us to earlier rejections, which would be a break in the attachment, which is so subtle that many of us, I'd say, I'd say half of us don't know we have them. I'd say 85. I'm going to throw numbers out. Don't, don't stick me to them. But I'd say 85% of the people I work with have breaks in the mother child bond. And I'd say half of them have no clue they have a break. So we have to look, we have to be a detective of our language, of our behaviors, Just, just what you were saying, be so mindfully aware. And then you said, pull the threads. I love that. So we have to, you know, pull those threads through and then trace those
- [42:44]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
threads as well and talk to us about the difference, because you've spoken to this a few times. The difference with inherited trauma and attachment
- [42:53]
Mark Wolynn
trauma, I developed a tool called the core sentence. It's one of my questions that I ask in the book. So I ask a bazillion questions. But this one is something that clinicians can use to differentiate between the two types of trauma. So I'm going to ask the question right now to our audience and, you know, have let them take a minute and feel the answer, and then I'll talk about how you can discern how the answer can take us to an attachment trauma or a generational trauma. So don't do this if you don't feel safe. You know. Only do this if you feel resourced. But let me ask you the question for those of you who are doing it. If your life were to fall apart, if things suddenly just went south, if things went terribly wrong, what's your worst fear? What's the worst thing that could happen to you? Take a minute and even write it down if you want. So I'll say it again. If the. If things went terribly wrong, if things suddenly went south, your life just falls apart. What's your worst fear? What's the worst thing that could happen to you? And then when you get an answer, take it down another two layers. And if that happened, what's the worst part of that? And then do it again. And if that happened, what's the worst part of that? When you answer this question, inside, you can feel a reaction in your body. And you usually get to a 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 word sentence like I won't matter or I'll lose control, or I'll lose my family, or I'll be rejected. I'll be all alone. I'll be abandoned. You usually get there. Some people will go here, I'll hurt someone, I'll do something terrible. I won't deserve to live. I'll kill somebody, I'll hurt a child. And now you're starting to see how one can take us into a generational energy and one can take us into an attachment energy. So if we go into the I'll be all alone, I'll be abandoned, I'll be rejected, I'll be left. That's attachment. I'll be powerless. I won't matter. Well, we didn't matter to our mom is what we felt. I won't exist. We didn't exist to our mom because she was busy. I'll fall apart. That's what a baby feels whose mom isn't present. Even sentences like I'll be betrayed, I'll be ridiculed, I'll be judged, I'll be humiliated, which is what a young child feels when they're out of tune with what their mother needs rather than what the baby needs. So these are all take take us into an attachment direction. Interestingly, let me throw us in the other direction when we have a generational direction. I'll hurt someone. I'll let someone down, like our dad who cheated on our mom. It'll all be my fault. I'll be hated. I'll be ostracized. I'll be sent away like our mom. Who went to foster care. I'll be forgotten, like the grandmother's sister who was put in the asylum. I'll go crazy. They'll lock me up. Some sentences can go both ways. You know, for example, I'll lose my family. Could be generational because people lost their families, but it's also what a baby feels who loses its mother. So. And I'll go crazy the same way. You know, it's what a baby feels when the mother's attunement is off target. The baby feels as though he or she will go crazy. So, you know, you begin to work with these, what I call the core sentence. You begin to work with it, and then you can ask a few more questions. I teach us how to do it in the book, the bridging question, and how to locate who in the family also might have felt this way. And then you can know where you're going.
- [47:50]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
Yeah, that's like pulling those threads with mindfulness, getting even more curious. And what I love about that is that we all have our own wisdom and answers. It's just about asking the powerful questions to reveal the wisdom, to make it more conscious, and then to be able to heal it. I'm curious for you to share about what you have discovered in your work, why some trauma is repeated more commonly.
- [48:14]
Mark Wolynn
Many of us have trauma in our family history. I mean, most of us do. Yet not everyone manifests inherited family trauma. So why do some people seem to relive and others not? So epigenetics, really. It's only one piece of the puzzle, but there's. There's another piece. And what I found, what seems to anchor these traumas, what creates these repetitions, is when the traumas aren't talked about and the healing is incomplete because the pain and the grief is just too great. Or the people in our family system, they're excluded or rejected. You know, nobody talks about the alcoholic grandfather because he hurt our grandmother. And so then what happens is that now we have a whole lineage of alcoholics. So whatever we push away tends to, as you know, tends to magnify. Yes. There you go. Thank you for the word.
- [49:17]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
What you avoid, you create both within yourself, your family system, in the world. Yeah. And so this is. This is part of the work to be like, oh, I can. I can have the. And. And I want to be really clear with trauma work, really, please do work with a trained trauma specialist or a psychotherapist. Coaches are not qualified to do trauma work. And so you want to get. You want to be trauma informed. If you're holding space for people and make sure that you're always taking care of yourself, you know, in this conversation, in life in general, two things that I want to share, because there's dynamics within parents. I'm imagining there are some parents that are listening, being like, I'm really worried about passing on my stuff to my kids. What would you share with them? What advice would you tell them?
- [50:01]
Mark Wolynn
Well, I would tell them that they need to talk about the traumas in the family history, even if they're uncomfortable, so their children know what's going on. For example, you know, they. You can even do it in a safe way with little kids by drawing pictures of everybody so that everybody's included. This is going to sound crazy, but if. If someone is struggling, you know, if we, if. If it has gone a little bit too far and, you know, one of our kids is struggling with unexplained symptoms. Depression, anxiety, ocd, a phobia, some destructive behavior. A couple things could be happening. They could be mirroring what we felt at their age, but had long ago suppressed it. So the children are mirroring to us as the shaman in the family, mirroring to us what needs to be looked at, but also we need to shake the family tree and see what falls out. Those family secrets that, that were hidden, the stories that didn't get told, the traumas that never healed all the way. We've. We've got to tell our kids, even if we don't like our mom, you know, mom lives over there. Let's draw a picture of her, you know, just so everybody's included. And then we need to talk about the traumas in our family, get curious about them and try to work through them so they're not passed down. You know, you and I are saying the same thing today. What, what is pushed away reappears. You know, if we ignore the past, it comes back to haunt us. But the. The more that we know about it, the more we can talk about it, the more we can share about it. Then we can bring relief to our children that are struggling without a clue as to why, that they don't have to repeat it. We can break these patterns and then what else we can do with our kids. We can help them access what's painful in their body by placing our hand there as parents and say, thank you for showing Mommy or Daddy where you feel scared. Thank you for showing mommy where you feel sick, where you feel yucky. Mommy's got you. Mommy's just going to keep her hand here and Breathe with you until you feel better. That's so important. But I mean that's, that's obvious as parents we do that. But sometimes parents don't do that.
- [52:37]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
And yeah, or they think actually not talking about it's going to protect the child, but it's still felt in the system. They're still. This conversation is highlighting that and the importance age appropriate to talk about and maybe even doing a family tree together because you can do that with kids and draw and you know, have conversations, conversations age appropriate. But really for parents like we're never going to be perfect and some of this is ours to heal. We're not going to heal all of it, but we. The intention is to continue having grace with ourselves, to be compassionate parents with ourselves and our kids and to help lighten the last generation to keep doing our work to whatever degree feels true for us without being over responsible, which is one of my family inherited traumas. I can know over responsibility. And the burden of responsibility is one of mine, which I'm clear about. Just in closing, I'm curious if there's anything we didn't speak about that you feel like would be really important for people to know, especially in light of your revised edition of. It didn't start with you, your book.
- [53:39]
Mark Wolynn
Well, you know, I love this book. I love it, you know, because it's the. Okay, you write a book and you know this things you wish you changed and. But this book does so well, you know, it's in 40 languages, it's a bestseller and all over the place. But you know, they agreed to let me revise it. So I put the kitchen sink in it, of course, but I put everything in it. All the studies that are new, how we work with humans, all my new insights, a lot more about attachment because it's essential that we heal that early period. Remember, the heart starts beating in utero within 20 days and the neural tube and the neural groove, that which becomes the nervous system also 20 to 30 days. So the. The baby might not be in utero, might not be cognitively aware, but has a somatic sentience, a somatic awareness. So the events that happen, the most important time for neural development is those nine months in pregnancy, that nine months in utero and the first two years at least of life. And that's when we have no memory. So we have to go home and we have to ask our mom if she's alive or if she's not our dad and if he's not our aunts and uncles or our mom's best friend. You know, what do you know happened when I was in utero? You know, all the questions that you need to ask are actually in this book and in the new workbook, which I love equally. In fact, I might love it more if you've done a lot of work, just do this. It's like having a session with me and, you know, I'll have you stand in your own family constellations. And it's they're both amazing books. I love them both.
- [55:37]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
I love it. And I love your love for the work. I mean, it's such a important work. We will make sure to put the links here in the show notes below. And Mark, just thank you for who you are and the work that you are doing. The world, it is so important, especially now more than ever. And yeah, appreciate you.
- [55:54]
Mark Wolynn
Thank you for having me on.
- [55:56]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
Thank you so much for doing this work that changes the world, starting with yourself. It truly does make a difference. And if this podcast has supported you, one of the most impactful ways, ways
- [56:06]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
to help us reach more people is to simply press the follow button.
- [56:09]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
It really does help us grow and we are so grateful. You could also leave a review on Apple or Spotify and take a quick screenshot and upload it@alyssanobriga.com forward/podcast and as a thank you gift, we'll send you one of the most impactful tools for transforming your fear into freedom so that you can step more fully into your potential. There is so much more magic ahead and I cannot wait to share it with you. But for now I just want to
- [56:30]
Co-host - Alyssa Nobriga
say thank you for being being a
- [56:31]
Host - Alyssa Nobriga
living example of what it means to walk through the world with an open heart and mind. I am so grateful that you're here and I cannot wait to see you in the next episode.