Inherited Family Trauma: It Didn't Start With You | Mark Wolynn #156

Trauma leaves an imprint, and that imprint passes down the bloodline. In the Vedas, we call it a samskara, an impression etched into us by experience and carried across generations.

Depression, anxiety, chronic pain, phobias, obsessive thoughts — the evidence suggests the root of these may lie in the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Recent research affirms that traumatic experience passes to future generations, hidden in everything from gene expression to everyday language.

In this episode, Dylan speaks with Mark Wolynn, leading expert in inherited family trauma and author of the groundbreaking book It Didn't Start With You. Mark developed a method to identify and break these inherited patterns — accessible, pragmatic, and grounded in neuroscience and post-traumatic stress research.

In this episode we cover:

• Why inherited trauma is physical, carried in the body and the cells
• How trauma passes beyond blood, to family members you have never even met
• The connection between inherited trauma and recurring dreams
• How trauma can paradoxically make us more adaptable and resilient
• Whether healing can happen through the body alone, without revisiting painful memories
• Practical steps to locate, interrupt, and resolve inherited patterns

RESOURCES:

• Book: It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wolynn
• Work with Dylan: vitalveda.com.au/bookings

RELATED EPISODES:

• #81 Creating Your Own Reality and Reprogramming the Subconscious Mind | Bruce Lipton
• #22 How to Heal Anxiety Naturally | Johnny Pollard

Transcript

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Cold Open On Inherited Imprints

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This time on the Vital Veda podcast. It leaves an imprint, and that imprint passes down the bloodline. In the Vedas, we call it a samskara. An impression etched into us by experience and carried across generations. Welcome to the Vital Vader Podcast. I am your host, Dylan Smith. I'm an Ayurmatic practitioner and holistic health educator, and someone who, when dealing with my clients, has to consider trauma because it's so common. And this doesn't have to mean a significant massive tragedy. There are mini special traumas and micro-traumas happening all the time. And one of the roots of what's shaping that trauma and of essentially shaping who we are is correlated with our family. And this is what we're speaking today with an absolute spectacular expert on the field of family trauma. And it's so much more than what you might think it is. In this episode, we're going to speak about how inherited family trauma is not just a story or a mood, it is physical carried in the body and the cells. And we're going to go into the science for that, the extraordinary science. We're going to speak how it's beyond blood, that it can be even in people that are not part of our blood, it can be in the family members we have not meant. We talk about the correlation with dreams. We talk about traumas making us more adaptable and resilient. We speak about can you just heal through the body and not have to go into all your crap and all the dark aspects and abuse any cognitive intellectual process? Can we just do it in get on like a massage table and have a therapist take care of it? Speak about practical steps of how to locate the trauma and then how to actually interrupt it and resolve it. But this is a juicy episode. Hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think. Much love.

Meet Mark Wolynn And His Work

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Welcome to the Vital Vader podcast. I'm here with Mark Wallen, the founder and director of the Family Constellation Institute and the author of the international bestseller, It Didn't Start With You. How inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle. And what strikes me, Mark, is that your book came out 10 years ago in 2016, and it's still going strong. Like more than three million copies, translated into 40 languages, revised again in 2025. It's clearly still relevant. People are still reaching for it. It kind of reminds me of another guest we had, John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women A From Venus. And it's like just these books decades. How does it feel?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

I was writing the quest, the crest of a wave like a surfer, you know, right at the right at the very time people were beginning to think of inherited trauma and how we can be affected by it. I had the book ready to go, and the science had just come out, and um it was a stroke of good luck, I think. But um, you know, about a year and a half ago, I asked my uh editor, my my publisher, if I could update it because there's all this new science in the last 10 years, and you know, I think differently about it a little bit. And so um I put out the revised edition last year, which which I'm pretty excited about. And then I, as you know, or maybe you don't know, I added a workbook so people could do, you know, the people who are gonna take it to the next level can go deep.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

I read your book, well, actually listened to the audiobook probably four or five years ago, and I again listened to it last week and did the workbook, and I didn't do the workbook. So there was not a workbook the first time then. No, no, no. Oh, that's right. I was like, why was I lazy before?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Now yeah, but could you tell the difference when you listened to it this time? Could you know I think I changed maybe 30-40% of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Wow. To be honest, I I was much more engaged this time, and I didn't even know that you revised it after until after I finished it. So I I wasn't I wasn't that aware, but I was much more engaged and I really enjoyed the workbook. It was it was a practice. I was just attending to myself for a week, and and I'm so excited to go into that and and the practice of doing this for yourself rather than for other people.

Vision Loss That Led Back Home

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Um so I would like to yeah, hear about your story because I'm a medical uh practitioner, and your story kind of starts with the physical, very uh pathological state of what brought you to addressing your family.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

So and also, just to add, Mark, like also it resonates with a lot of our communities because we are also in spiritual communities and people have quote-unquote gurus or lineages that they're following, and this is all tied in with your story.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Okay, so my story begins with a medical condition, and uh I didn't know it would be a story. I was just I was just suffering at the time. But um, you know, I had symptoms I couldn't explain. So about I don't know, 35 years ago, I began to lose the vision in one of my eyes, and I was diagnosed uh with a chronic form of retinopathy, and the the doctors they didn't have an answer, they couldn't cure it, and by the way, it was progressing, they told me that I could expect to lose the vision in my other eye too, because I had a scotoma that was expanding in this eye, and then there was one in this eye, and I was pretty desperate uh for an answer, and there was no answer. The best they could give me was stress. So I um I did what a lot of seekers do. I um left, I left my city, left my family, left my relationship, left my job, and I would hear about you know, there's a master in teaching in this country, and I'd go there, or or there's um some guy in a hut who has the answers, and I'd go there, I'd read a book, and I'd take a training program with this guy or or this woman. Um and this trip, you know, what I fondly refer to as my vision quest, um, takes me halfway around the world as far as Indonesia, you know, where I've learned for from uh several wise teachers who taught me some fundamental principles, one of which was the importance of healing my relationship with my parents, that was completely broken. And, you know, I didn't know that that mattered, right? I thought, well, you know, I'll just trade them in for divine parents or better parents, and you know, it's not the way it goes. Um, so one of the things I did was I healed, I went back to my city and I healed the relationship with my mother and my father, the broken bond with my mother. Um, but before I could really understand what was happening, um I had to I had to heal the inherited trauma, the inherited family trauma that stood in the way, specifically the anxiety that I had inherited from all my grandparents, um, three of whom are orphaned, they lose their mothers when they're babies or infants. One was a toddler, and the other one loses her father when she's a year old, and ultimately she also loses her mother in the grief. And you know, all of them, as babies, were panicked and full of terror. And that anxiety, I would later learn, was the real cause of my vision loss. And, you know, probably the deepest healing came from healing the break in the bond that I had with my mom. And afterwards, you know, my sight came back. I I didn't even expect it to at this point. It was, you know, I was doing this lots of meditation, doing some very deep work. Um, but one of the benefits of the healing, um, my vision came back, and then I felt compelled to share uh the principles I'd learned and ultimately developed a method for healing inherited family trauma.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

I love the the physicality of this all. And I would like to ask, I hear that as well as being a trainer in in family constellation and in family trauma, I hear that before this you were trained as a body worker. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Oh, yeah. Uh um, well, the first training was as an energy healer, and you know, I'm working. Um I did one somatic training after another in trauma, of course, not knowing why I'm doing any of this, but following um the following the energy that showed up. So, yeah, I'm a body worker, I'm trained in craniosacral, orthobiony, um, uh neuromuscular, um, which which I still use, you know, when I'm working with people, um my work is very body-centered, and I'm always looking at where the breath is held and where trauma is held, and all this would lead me to you know write this book. I never intended to write a book. It's all in fact, the funny story is that this book was just a manual for my students. You know, I was teaching uh students how to work with generational trauma, and we needed a manual. So I wrote it, and my my friend said, Do you have an agent? And I said, What's that? And he said, Let me give you an intro. So he sends me an intro to his agent, and she said, Send me the first 20 pages, but don't expect to hear from me. So I, you know, sent her the first 20 pages, then she said, Okay, okay, send me the next 30. So now she has 50 pages, and she goes, but don't expect to hear from me. And then she said, Okay, send me the rest of the book, but I'll probably never hear from me. I sent her the rest of the book, and I don't know, maybe three, four months later she took me on and sold it to Viking Penguin. Um I was I was happy to self-publish it. So I never knew that it was going to be a bestseller. I never had any ambition in that direction. Um, I just knew that this information needed to be out there.

Words As Clues In The Body

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Oh, so beautiful. So you've you've kind of moved from between body and words. I mean, now you've developed something called core language approach. So much of your book is the words that the specific words describe our fears and are like clues into exactly what's going on. And also, you're bringing the body a lot in your book and your and your workbook. It's feel the body, feel what comes up first. Just where is it? How does this sentence feel? How does this world feel? So I love this dance. Now, I have a question on some modalities, and even in my past, I've practiced this myself. It's like, can the body do its healing on its own? Like, can we do it without going into our past and perhaps going into that dark spaces? Um, can we just kind of lie on the table, not even hardly be conscious, maybe be in transcendental states or more subtle states, and and make and allow this trauma to leave?

SPEAKER_01 11:59

You know, it's an interesting argument, and I'm on the side that if we're present daily and have a presence practice, but a presence practice that's connected with um resting in our aliveness, our vitality, our energetic core, yeah, there's we would heal because we'd um be in the moment, moment to moment, and not in the mind in the past and the future. So if we can stay with what comes up and treat it as um, well, here's this in the moment, and can I just stay with it and not be afraid of it, not be panicked by it? Um, yes, we can heal, I I do think. But for many of us, um the the mind needs to know so the body can let go. So, in that sense, you know, I I like to help people, um, I like to help them trace their symptoms or their issue or what you were talking about, their trauma language, their core language, to trace it back to where it originates. In fact, um, Dylan, you probably remember this in the book, there's something called the core sentence. And you know, I use this as a as a specific tool because if if it's used right, you can tell whether we're struggling with attachment trauma or generational trauma just by the outcome of that question. Here, here. I'm gonna ask it. I'm gonna ask you this question. I'm gonna ask all the listeners this question. Please don't do this if you don't have support, because it can take you into a pretty heavy place. But um, if you feel supported or you have someone to work with, you know, answer this question. You know, it here. If your life were to fall apart, if things went terribly wrong, you know, what's your worst fear? What's the worst thing that could happen to you? Feel that for a minute. I'll ask it again. If things went terribly wrong, if your your life suddenly went south, if everything fell apart, what what's the worst thing that could happen to you? What's your worst fear? I, I could, they, that, they would, whatever it is, feel it. And then let's take it down another level. If that were to happen, what's the worst part of that? Feel it. Now take it down one more level. And if that were to happen, what's the worst part of that? And then you get to your core sentence, which is often three, four, five, six, seven words, and it causes a visceral reaction when you speak it. You don't even have to speak it, you can just think it in your mind. I'll be all alone, I'll be abandoned, I'll be rejected. You know, if if those are your sentences, I'll be left, I'll be helpless. That takes us in an attachment direction. A generational direction would look a little different. I'll do something terrible and I'll be hated. Like somebody who did something in the family. Um, here, I'll give you another one. Um I'll do something terrible and I won't deserve to live. That's a common one, believe it or not. And it's generational. Or I'll be sent away, I'll be ostracized, I'll be hated, I'll go crazy, they'll lock me up. Um these have more of a generational undercurrent. Where the other ones, you know, I'll be alone, abandoned, rejected, I won't matter, it's like I don't exist, I'm not important. Um, you know, that's more of an attachment direction. So depending when I'm working with somebody and I hear their answer to that, then I know which direction to look, to look at, if that makes sense.

Core Sentence Exercise And Warning

SPEAKER_00 16:25

So the attachment can it also be influenced by intergenerational.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Totally. In fact, it generally always is. So if if, for example, if our mom's family suffered in some way, if they, you know, her dad died young, and uh her mother had a breakdown, um, you know, something that caused your mother to not have enough of her mother. Um, these are generational wounds. So what your mother didn't get, it would be difficult for her to give. And because of the traumas that happen in a family, in our family history, it often creates challenging with mothering and fathering. And you know, that's that's just the way it is. Um, yes, generational traumas lead to attachment traumas, and attachment traumas often lead to dregulated nervous systems. So you know, Dylan, I would say I would say it this way. Um attachment traumas are more common than we think. Um and I would say 85 to 90 percent of us have some degree of an attachment trauma with our mom, even if we're close. And um only or less than 50% of us realize it. And what we do know is that we have a dysregulated nervous system, and as we know, as our stress responses increase, our health often decreases. So if we have these fight-fight-freeze responses that are preparing our body to deal with threats, you know, they're they're actually um protective, but not really. They're protective in the sense that our body pushes, fights, gets aroused to deal with this threatening situation. That's a fight response. A flight response is get me out of here. You know, we back up, we're we contract, we recoil because there's a threat. A freeze response is we're overwhelmed and we shut down. These fight, flight, freeze responses affect our health because there's unconscious tightening in the body. We're not even aware of it, it's unconscious, or unconscious contracting or freezing. And you know, after a while, this can affect mitochondrial function, how we get our energy, and this can lead to uh several chronic health issues or symptoms we can't explain, like what happened to me with my eyes, you know, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, um, autoimmune disease, a cell danger response. I mean, there's so many things that are linked to these uh a nervous system that can't quiet.

Attachment Trauma And Health Breakdown

SPEAKER_00 19:28

If you want to support your body to be more resilient to the purification and the influx of stress that may come physically and on your nervous system and your emotional state, your mental state, this is where I can support you in an Area Veta Health consultation. If you want to book a consultation with me, go to vitalveta.com.au forward slash ebookings. And along with all the other therapies and work that you're doing on yourself, which could include Mark Wallins book and workbook to support the body in that process and to bring into balance, to reduce inflammation, and to start feeling good quality, prana, life force-filled cellular energy so that you can process whatever needs to be processed and move emotionally and mentally. It's so important to support the body and the emotional state and the mind with karyometic medicine. So to book a consultation, I would love to connect with you one-on-one online at bottlebata.com.au forward slash bookings, and also you can see the show notes for the links.

Ayurveda Consultation Support Message

SPEAKER_00 20:33

I'd like to just share some light on people might be thinking, well, come on, how can your uh eye degeneration and and blindness be caused by your parents? So I'd like to share like like trauma does leave an imprint and it passes physically through the bloodline, and there's science to show that. In the Vedas, we call it samskara, which is which is like an impression that's etched into us by any experience, all that also can be carried across generations. And like in the in your book you shared, and there's a well-known, beautiful um study of in 2013 when neuroscientists at Emroy University they published a study in Nature Neuroscience that they taught the male, the male mice to f to fear a specific scent, a cherry blossom-like scent. When they would smell it, they would shock them, and then they bred them, and the pups and even their pups, so the grandchildren of the mice that they shocked, they reacted to that sense when they smelt it. So even though they were never shocked, when the grandchildren smelt the cherry blossom scent, they got that reaction. And this is incredible. Like the the sense of smell has been passed past that that association with has been passed down. And there's there's other studies. There's you mention a lot in the book, Rachel Yehuda from Mount Sinai School in New York, when she speaks about there's actual.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

genes being imprint imprinted um or or be being activated rather like for example the fkp uh b p5 gene which i believe is like the body's it's like a thermostat for the body's stress and how sensitive we are to cortisol and how quickly it can it can turn this response uh stress response response back off and she found it actually passed down into the generations that gene expression you know you talked about those mice um what was so cool is they shocked them and just in that first generation alone before they even reproduced the brains changed they had epigenetic changes in the the brain there was enlarged areas where where there could be a greater amount of smell receptors to detect that smell at even lesser concentrations so they would be prepared and so the what they when they pass down this fear um the the mice as you said in the second the pups and the grandpups they weren't shocked they just put the scent in the cage and and the mice would go crazy you know they'd get jittery and and have uh what we would call anxiety response and these mice so you know that's I'm glad you brought that up because the first time I wrote the book 10 years ago um we didn't have a lot of human studies we just had we just had rodent studies so that's why I went back to my publisher a year and a half ago and said I've got to rewrite the book there there's all these human studies right now and that's what makes this information more relevant because the one of the feedbacks or complaints was you can't extrapolate from mice even though they're similar genome epigen you know the similar genome of mice and humans it's over 92% but one of the um objections was you can't make this extrapolation from rodents to mice and that makes that makes a lot of sense to me so I went back and rewrote the book and put in all the human studies and you can't fight it now. For example some of the new things I added in the book that you read last week there's a 2025 last year a study in Finland at the University of Turku so they took men with high levels of abuse in childhood, you know, high ACE scores and they they saw changes epigenetic changes in their sperm and and that they could pass to future generations and they pull out two mechanisms the same mechanisms we see in mice which were DNA methylation which blocks the protein and then silences the gene and then the other one is levels of non-coding RNA which is what you were talking about earlier the the levels get affected you know the greater amount of smell receptors and the levels of non-coding RNA. So that was one study ah there's a 2017 study also with humans they looked at Brazilian grandmothers who um experience part partner violence. And the researcher researchers discovered that the grandmothers were able to pass the effects of this violence onto their grandchildren again through DNA methylation um you know blocking the proteins that attach to the DNA and then it suppresses the expression okay and then there's another I mean I added a ton of studies from from Pakistan in Syria here. The one in Syria is last year they looked at um war-related violence in Syria and they could see it for three generations literally they could detect an intergenerational epigenetic signature of violence in the epigenome for three generations I mean it's amazing you can't dispute this anymore you know generational trauma is a thing and it it some of the mechanisms I talked about too there are more histone modifications as many mechanisms for this transgenerational epigenetic transfer transmission.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

We're gonna soon go into another point of epigenetics is that you can you can change these things and that like you're not bound to this and that's a such an important part of this whole process of you can't just blame it on your parents and grandparents like so you have power.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

But before that I want to keep rolling with this just to just to strengthen the argument I'm curious about the three generations all these studies seem to say three why do you think that the number three you know um the new book talks about five generations now so in some instances they can see this transmission for three others they can see it for four or five generations and and I'm sure the jury's not out I mean I remember in the book I talked about 300 generations in worms it's like you know it's um but three I I don't know you know I I guess you could look at what the Bible has been saying for you know eons that you know the grand the that the fathers can pass um these traumas forward to the offspring for three or four generations I mean it's there um did they know something when the Bible was written years ago sounds like it you know and you know when you look at um countries India China there's they go back seven generations you know when they're looking um for these transmissions so um in ritual going forward uh going back seven generations so yeah I I don't know why three you know but it's certainly um all over the

Epigenetics Evidence In Humans

SPEAKER_01 28:04

place.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

It's an auspicious number in the Vedas they speak about seven generations also and I think three, five, seven these odd numbers there's kind of wholesome complete aspects to them. I would like to also mention one of my favorite phenomena in biology and that is and you've probably people have probably heard about it how the sense that you were in your grandmother's body when your mother was in her womb. So I'll I'll just paint the picture. So a baby girl she'll form all her eggs before she's even born because sh while she's still developing in her own mother's womb this is happening.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

In the fifth month yeah right fifth month of break in the fifth month and and you you read that in my book in the in the fifth fifth month the our mother will have all the eggs that she'll ever have at five months of fetus one of those is us.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

Right. So you in your grandmother's womb I love that and the same is with the father because the the boy although boys don't produce sperm until they get to adolescence or puberty still there are these precursor germ cells that the sperms grow from and they're also already in your father when he was in his mother's womb.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

So you were also in your grandmother on your paternal side yeah it's pretty amazing I I can't believe none of this had come to light. I mean we've known it I've been look I've been working with this for over 30 years but I couldn't when I initially started the book so this is goes back to our first conversation I didn't have much science there wasn't any science and I'm writing the book and I'm gonna make it a manual for my students and right before I publish in 2015 um all this science comes out with the with mice and luckily I I'm I'm able to gather it all up and put it in that first version and then in the last 10 years I'm able to gather up all the rest of it with humans and put it in the new version and I'm happy I've done so because I love the book. I love what it does. It doesn't just announce the problem it gives the solution and you know and that we can heal and we can reverse these trauma symptoms.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

We interviewed someone who you reference a lot in your book and that's the wonderful Bruce Lipton, Dr. Bruce Limpton and the the kind of thing that I was speaking to him in our interview that we did is in our practice our my greatest passion is pre-conception because you have a great influence. I I see it as the ultimate preventative medicine is optimizing your body preconception because you can whatever you you're you're working at the level of seed and you're about to plant that seed and create a human so if we can optimize that physically but also emotionally mentally all those aspects that is going to really create a good human in the future.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

You and I are on the same page you know my uh my my battle cry is before you have kids do your work because you can change the way your DNA expresses you can't change the DNA but the way it expresses can change. So you know do your inner work and you know read this book do the workbook do your work and that way when we go to have kids we're not passing forward the unexamined unhealed expression of of this DNA we're we're healing it so that it changes the way we transmit it.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

What I've realized from doing my own work preconception and having a child where we did a lot it doesn't have to be completely healed at that time. It can be and this can be physical mental emotional it can be quote unquote pacified you can be really resolved with it at least I can say especially for physical for example if someone has a chronic condition if that is not so inflamed at the time and is is really in a good state that's that's that's great. So don't have pressure I've got to heal all my stuff before like you can get into such a good mindset and and physical state yeah I I I agree and you know basically um we want to be able to have positive experiences which is how you know how we heal you know there's the trauma and then what do we do?

Preconception As Preventive Medicine

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Trauma creates a a disruptive experience in our body again the fight flight freeze responses the vagus nerve our nervous system is reactive hypervigilant and the way we heal is by having positive experiences that we can lean into that can change our brain we learn how to be with um or or or I'll use this word we learn how to practice the new feelings and the new sensations associated with with these positive experiences. When we do this you know that's how we create new neural pathways that's how we stimulate the release of feel good neurotransmitters from being in a good place like you just mentioned so serotonin, dopamine, feel good hormones like estrogen oxytocin, which is key and then you know ultimately even the very genes that are involved in our body's stress response you named one the FKBP5 gene they can begin to function in an improved way and then we can change the way our DNA expresses um if I had to put it in a nutshell I would say this to our listeners I would say can you practice being with what's uncomfortable in your body your uncomfortable sensations can you just hang out there until you can reach what's beneath them which is always there we just don't know it but sensations we experience as life giving um sensations such as pulsing pulsing or tingling wow I'm feeling a tingling in my body hang out there or wow my body starting to soften or expand or release hang out there you know I can feel my blood flowing I can feel waves of energy or waves of warmth and these sensations of life force these are the key for me um to healing when we can really be with um you know some people call it the Taurus the Holy the Grail cup the turietal flow you know double vortex in through the crown and up through the pelvic floor you know if we're really sitting in that sacred geometrical shape of the Taurus we're feeling these movements particles waves light uh I could go on energy warmth heat whatever in our core and if we can if we can hang out in our core the positive alive vital sensations in our core and we can do it for at least a minute and then do it six times a day we're changing our brain we're calming our nervous system and also should we hang out in the dark the dark vibrations the thoughts the traumas no feel that as well they're a doorway so if I'm sitting in a dark place a um you know a dark image you know a lot of people that I work with have intrusive images intrusive thoughts this is a doorway we again I said this earlier but I'm gonna say it again often the brain needs to know the mind needs to know so the body can let go of if we if we can find out ah I'm feeling this because I was in the womb when my mother lost a baby before me to a miscarriage and she was worried I would die too and there was no I'm a fetus reaching up to feel my mother but but I can't feel her because she's worried that I'm gonna die and all I can feel is swirling cortisol. So um if we know that if we if if we know what happened we can then say that's what's happening I'm feeling my um hypervigilant overactive vagus nerve nervous system you know I'm feeling the the the normal terror that occurred in the womb every time I uh get close with somebody because what happens to that person who's attempting to get close to the mother but can only feel the cortisol because the miscarried baby happened before this pregnancy. So if we know these things we we're going through that dark place we're going through that doorway um and we don't hang out there but we can use it as a doorway into the deeper parts of ourself that feel alive really it's about life force it's about feeling aliveness.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Okay so maybe not hang out there but we we got to address it because a lot of people don't want to address it it's too it's too scary. Right oh okay uncomfortable to that question.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

We gotta go in yeah yeah we gotta go in yeah absolutely I mean I'm I'm a big shadow guy I'm a big shadow work guy you know when something uncomfortable slams us in the face um there's our opportunity or if we keep repeating the same thing in our relationships every time or the same time every time we get a job or every time we get money you know these are opportunities to see the same shadow place and yes we need to go through that doorway because through that doorway is as Jung would say as we all would say is the light.

Trauma Beyond Blood And Unconscious Loyalty

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Back to the family dynamics I wanna can you also share about is can we can inherit patterns from family who we barely know or maybe that we haven't met and and is that again related to this physical transmission within within the biology and what what about also sorry go on. No no you go ahead you're you I was going to then add a second a second one along with that is even beyond blood.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

So that could be my uncle who is not part of my blood okay you're talking about the most difficult part of my book I had to explain this because phenomenologically we see it um if someone is living um a difficult misfortune a difficult life a difficult fate and when you look at the history who in the history relative or not related or not can we trace it to many people are um living the life of a victim or a perpetrator because there was a perpetrator or victims in the family and there was no resolution so for example um if somebody told me uh okay uh I'll create a scenario I've seen this one before you know grandpa backs down the driveway and he accidentally runs over a little boy on a five year old boy on a tricycle and the boy dies. And now that boy becomes part of our system. So later on two things could happen and and the way I had to explain this in the book is really don't know how it happens but the best we can call it is unconscious loyalty that there seems to be Jung spoke to it that when he made the quote that there seems to be an unresolved karma in the family system that seems to fall on my lap for me to solve that I have nothing to do with it's one of the I'm paraphrasing of course but that's a quote out of Young in my book. So later on someone could say to me I could harm a child and I'll say did you ever harm a child and say no and I'll say did anyone ever harm a child in your family and they're about to say no and then they go my grandfather and you know and then all of a sudden we're we're carrying our grandfather's feeling that we can harm a child. On the converse we can be take on the energy of that child and feel terrified of automobiles or terrified to ride a bike or terrified that someone's going to harm us and and that child is not a blood member but nonetheless we can take on the how can I say that the facets of the trauma that have occurred in a family that are not related by blood that there's a victim a perpetrator a criminal somebody who stole from our family somebody who stole our whole family's farm or fortune and then later we can take on the energy of that person or relive what happened to our family. It can go either direction for example um I talk about this in the book when I talk about that Cambodian boy who took the hanger and he'd go kill, kill, kill and his mother had and father they had no idea why this boy was was going to kill, kill and taking the hanger and but at the same time he would run headfirst into basketball um poles and have he had seven concussions in one year. So he was turning his head and he was taking the hanger going kill kill when he looked at his family they they had no idea what was happening the father told me that his father in Cambodia was killed by the camarouge when they took an uh instrument similar to a scythe and and smacked him over the head. So the boy in the same action he's hitting his head the way the grandfather's head was hit and he's identified with the perpetrators with this hanger going kill kill kill so I had the family take him to the pagoda uh the church the the place of worship in the Buddhist tradition in Cambodia they took him to the church and lit candles for the family for his grandfather who he never heard about because they wouldn't talk about them to talk about his grandfather his father's father but also to light a candle for the families of the killers and he did it two weeks later the boy takes the hanger and hands it to his parents and says Mommy daddy I don't need to play with this anymore so and it's incredible. So you know it's but you're asking me a question is that epigenetic no that is not uh well could be but not epigenetic not The way I understand it, but does it exist? It absolutely does exist as a phenomenon that I explain as unconscious loyalty.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

And I'll say some scars pass through family, just the grandfather would have had that energy with his kids and that passes down. What are some of can you share some phobias that you've heard from clients that are like have just gobsmacked you? They're like, wow, that is so specific, direct. What are what are some what are some stories some wild phobias you've come across?

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Many, many, many, many. Um oh boy. I'm thinking of one, but I don't feel that I can share it because I don't have the permission of this particular person that did not go in the book.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Um, but I I can I can tell I'll give you one from my from my one of my family members who's it's it's not extraordinary, but it's it's just shows. My cousin has a phobia of elevators, and I feel that it was from his grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. For sure. And she was not in those tight spaces, whether it was in the carts or like that.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

Yeah, absolutely. I I have a case like that in the book. A woman I referred to as Sandra, who the same age her father was in the camp but survived, the father's whole family was um gassed in a gas chamber. Right. And she couldn't go in an elevator. A common case, which is going to answer your question of phobias, and I've seen gazillions of phobias, nothing is coming to mind in the way that I want to uh I you know, my mind is going, wait a minute, I know millions of these, but they're not going to be. But a typical one is um somebody has a phobia of harming someone close to them. You know, I remember I worked with this 42-year-old woman recently, and she had severe anxiety ever since she was 17. So hold this number 17, because that's when it strikes. And the the phobia is, you know, it's it's a fear really, but it's a fear of harming someone close to her. Hold that detail, someone close to her at 17. Then I asked the question: who in your family was 17? And they harmed someone close to them, and she was shocked, you know, because her language is I'm gonna do something terrible and harm someone I care about, and it'll all be my fault. Her father backed up the truck and ran over his best friend at 17. And boom, 17, harming someone close, it all fits. And here's another case that I'll tell you which is kind of interesting. So a mother calls me to work with her 16-year-old boy. He's got a rare neurological disorder because he has these intense burning sensations on his skin ever since he was 10. Hold the idea 10 years old and hold the idea of burning sensations. The doctors they can't figure out any root cause. And I asked the mother, tell me about his dad, and particularly around age 10. And the mother was in shock and said, How did you know? And I go, I don't know anything. She said, the father was playing with matches, and he accidentally set the garage on fire, and then the house caught on fire, and he got his mother out, but he couldn't get his little brother out. And his brother died in the fire. And the father never forgave himself, never speaks about it, and because the trauma remained unhealed and unresolved, the man's son expressed the symptoms, the burning sensations on his skin at the same age. And the family never made the connection. And then after working with the family, um, the boy's symptoms subsided, and the mother joined my training program because you know it was so uh you know, so alarmingly startling how the healing was simple.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

Right. I'm

Resilience Research And Dream Signals

SPEAKER_00 48:10

I'm excited to get more into the healing in a bit. But before that, I the this fascinating section in the book. I actually remember it more when when I read it for the first time, and it was malabdation creating adaptation from trauma, creating resilience. And like I think Yehuda, it was uh the research of Yehuda suggests that some of these inherited changes can uh prepare or prime a child for the harsh world that the parent survived. And that that's a fascinating, it's like the blessing you I mean, the trauma's like needed, strengthen up, mate. You're about to also have and obviously that's needed sometimes, but probably not in majority.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Yeah, she does. She talks, there's a study she has in 2021, um, where she finds that the mice, and hence humans, are able uh who were resilient to stress, were able to pass that resiliency onto their children through their sperm. And then there's a study right there in Australia in the journal in 2020, oh, in psychological trauma, um, where they talk about how we can bounce back from PTSD, and then as a result, you know, we we uh when we ex, yeah, we uh we can have positive responses. How do they word it? Um, you know, resilience and they call it post-traumatic growth. So they looked at first-year paramedic students um who were experiencing terrible things all day long, you know, people that are in terrible car crashes, people that are dead, people that are dying, and and they found they first they looked at their saliva and they measured it. And then they measured it again after experiencing a traumatic event, and then they looked, you know, specifically at two stress genes. And don't make me mention them. Um oh wait, one of them is the FKBP5 gene. And the research has found that the majority of participants naturally showed moderate to high post-traumatic growth after experiencing the trauma. So, yes, there is such a thing as post-traumatic resilience. Yeah, post-traumatic growth.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

Yeah. Um, I'd love to hear your view on dreams. Can they carry valuable messages? I'll I'll give you my my example. Give news. I had dream recurring dreams of Holocaust-like situations. I have three out of my four grandparents are Holocaust survivors, and I my dreams for years were me, someone or something is trying to take over the world, and I have to fight with violence and run away and hide and protect my loved ones. And this only occurred to me. I probably had these dreams for six, seven, eight, nine years, maybe ten years, and only I'd say after maybe halfway or not even even later, I realized, oh, that's probably related to the Holocaust. Of course, it's exactly like a Holocaust.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

It's the impulse of your grandparents that you know, and and those in their community and their brothers and sisters and parents and whoever died. It's it's the impulse, the the main impulse would be I've got to protect my family, I've got to get out of here, I've got to fight. I mean, that would, of course, that would pass forward. Okay. And it would show up in dreams. So yeah, I'm a big I don't talk about dreams in my book, but dreams are a big part of my personal um, you know, all right, this does nothing to do with the book, but before I go to bed, I have I said in intention that I I'm in a lucid place, so I'm not whipped around by my dreams, that I enter them lucidly, and I go to into the dream space, into what will be from my greatest um healing, my high my highest good, and then I set an intention to remember my dreams in the morning. So I have a practice of going in lucidly, and then a practice of remembering in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

And how's your success rate in remembering?

SPEAKER_01 52:34

Some days pretty good. When my intention is uh when I remember to do it, um very good actually.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Can you have can you process and heal the dreams without needing to remember them?

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Oh, I don't know. I I I I'm sure we can. I'm sure that's why dreams happen. We're probably processing them without remembering them all the time. But um I I find dreams are important, at least for me personally.

unknown 53:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:03

Okay, I'd like to finish with yeah, just

Mapping Triggers And Somatic Practices

SPEAKER_00 53:05

practical steps. So you've mentioned this, the first kind of step is to locate a pattern that isn't theirs, and also to to bring this thing of like, well, just because it's inherited or it was passed down, like not to blame it on them, or of course not to blame it. I mean, many people understand this was what happened, it wasn't their fault necessarily, or whatever karma or circumstances happened. But to I want to talk about like self-responsibility, like I kind of think it could be just to bypass, oh I I behave that way because my mother was like that. So, yeah, about that, and then to locate it, and then once they've found it, what do we actually do? You've mentioned some people just by knowing it, it's like switches a switch on, and like great, I'm healed because I realize that that's what my grandfather did at 10 years old. But I would say for most cases that's not just that.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

No, no, no. I say in the book that's rarely the case.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

That's rarely, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:58

Yeah, that's rarely sometimes it happens, but most times we need to do a practice, we need to work with it. For example, you asked me how I locate it. So a lot of times what I'll do is I'll have um, let's say there's an attachment trauma. I might have one's mom step close to the body uh five times to locate uh to get the location and sensation. I might say something like this, Dylan, um, here comes your mom, and she's gonna stand, you know, uh an inch away from your body. Here she comes. She's gonna take three steps one, two, three, and then they'd say, here she is, right in front of your sternum. And most people who have an attachment trauma will have some visceral response. I have people do this with their eyes closed, so uh it might be um my chest tightens, my shoulder goes forward, my back goes back, it's almost like I'm protecting my heart, or someone else might say, I feel nausea in my solar plexus. Someone else might say, Wow, I completely feel numb or frozen. You know, I help people locate. Um, so you mentioned the core language approach. The next step is the core, and and I give people the core language map in my book. It's very important to be able to follow that language. That we all have this trauma language that we say, and we don't even know why we say it. But when we look at it consciously, it'll lead us back to where those traumas originate. Now, when I work with people, I get and in my new book that's coming up, I give them the core somatic map. So in this case, I've used this practice. Um, uh, feel your mom coming close, here she comes, she's standing right in front of your body, and notice, and I get about three, four, or five places in the body that have a visceral response. And we create a map of noting where our fight-flight-freeze responses are in the body, and then I work with people to integrate those. And I'll I'll get into how I do that uh in a minute. Um, but it's it's important to know what we do in response to what's uncomfortable. I don't think you can bypass that. It's what we talked about earlier: the shadow work, the doorway. Um, if we're having a reaction to something, um you don't even need to have your mother walk close. Let's say you're having an issue with your partner. Here comes your partner. Your partner's coming close and standing within inches of your body here, they come and boom. Um, oh, you know, we need to know what our body does. Does it where does it tighten? How does it tighten? Where does it shut down? How does it freeze? What do I feel in my energy centers? You know, we might follow the chakra system and look at what happens in the energy centers. Um, then I might give somebody a six times a day practice, like I mentioned before, of being able to integrate those fight, flight, freeze responses, maybe to put a hand here at the chest, maybe another hand here at the intestines, if that's what shows up as the two main points. And to do a practice, I'll give them a six-point breathing practice that I developed. Um, I can I can give it here, relaxing, uh breathing and relaxing your feet, relaxing your hamstrings, opening your pelvic floor, um, inhaling up your vagus nerve, up your midline, relaxing your jaw and mouth, and exhaling and expanding your core, expanding your heart, and integrating those fight-flight freeze responses in your core, in your vitality, in your aliveness. That is massive. And and I do this, um, this is all in my new book. So I'm uh I'm happy to give it to you. It's coming out soon. Um, how to integrate the how to work with the break in the attachment and how to heal um in our body, how to heal with our partner, how to heal our children. So that's um coming out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:28

Yeah, there I'm so excited for that. There's this common people always talk about um I'm breaking the lineage or I'm doing it for my lineage, and and this this is real in various uh expressions and various traditions. Um can you just before we finish, just expand a bit more on the attachment.

What A Break In Attachment Creates

SPEAKER_00 58:49

You talk about like there's the inheritance the what are we attached to? I just want to unpack that a bit. I don't quite grow.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

Yeah, no, it's it's a really it's a really important question. So for many reasons, we even if we're very close with our mom, that closeness can be that we felt responsible for making her feel okay. And in that sense, we're not receiving, we're doing we're giving. That that's a brick, because we're not receiving the ideal situation, perfect situation, is parents give to a child and the child receives and expands. And one of the questions I ask in my books is did you feel seen by your mom, really seen? Did you feel known that she knew who you were, that she knew who you were, that she could intuit what you needed and give it to you. And then she could soothe you and you could just go to her and rest in her care. Nine out of ten people will say, no, I could not. And that's a break in the attachment. And crazy as it is, but I'm close with my mom, but I couldn't receive from her, they say. Or yeah, we're really close, I take care of her, but I can't receive from her. The more dramatic break in the attachment is what I had when I didn't want to even be close to her, because being close to her felt like, ah, you know, I just didn't trust um her love, which I had to heal. And those people who read my book, I'll let them read the story of how I did that because it was pretty nuts how I'm gonna heal this relationship when I feel like um I don't want to be even next to her. Um, but uh that's all that story is all in the book. But aside from that, um when you have a break in the bond with your mom because you were a giver to her or you rejected her, resisted her love, it's a challenge to feel safe and secure in life. Uh because when the connection with our mother is cut off, physically or emotionally, either there was a separation physically or emotionally, our mom wasn't present or attuned, we have difficulty trusting the feeling of who we are in our body because our inner experience of ourself, Dylan, is dependent on our mother's attunement. So a break with her is often felt like a break in the bond with ourselves. We're cut off from our core, our gut feelings, to the point where uh sensations of anxiety can't be managed. They feel intolerable. That's what I was talking about earlier, that we've got to be with what's intolerable. If we have anxiety, sit with it, hold it, comfort it, do that practice that I just taught you five minutes ago with your own anxiety. Um, because these feelings of terror and anxiety, they are so important. And when we've had a break, these sensations of terror and anxiety are just overwhelming, and and we try to avoid feeling them, so we create strategies to feel safe. Strategies like um be a good child, be quiet, um, please your parents, uh, be smart, be really smart because then they're nice to you, or be efficient, or be really independent because they can't give you anything anyway. So be super independent, don't walk the boat, uh, or be a people pleaser. You know, I could go on and on. But these are often the personality strategies of the break in the attachment, and they're not they're ultimately not taking us home, they're taking us further away from home.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:44

Beautiful.

Compassionate Family Questions And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:02:47

What do you want every listener to feel differently about their own family after this episode?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:54

Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, I I I would love us, rather than to hold anger toward our parents, is to look behind them and to see what happened to them that made them cruel or not present or unable to be loving. So that's the first thing. If we can say, Oh, oh yeah, of course my mom couldn't be loving. Look what she got, or look what happened to her when she was a little girl. If we can develop compassion for what happened to them and then for what happened to us, that's a really good step. Um, you know, the second thing, ask your mom if your parents are alive, ask them what happened. Mom, what was it like when I was in the womb? What were you feeling? What were you thinking? What was going on with dad? What was what you know, did you feel resourced? Did you feel safe? You know, mom, tell me about what happened when you were a little girl. Dad, tell me what happened when you were a young kid. Dad, were you able to receive your mother's love? Mom, were you able to receive your mother's love? There is it's all in my book. But it's so important to get the bigger, a bigger map, a bigger landscape so you can heal.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:12

Thanks so much, Mark. I just want to add, I did that. Like I was asking, I met with my mother, asked her questions, I called my grandmother, asked her questions. I heard something from my mother that was shared that I that was huge, that I've never even heard anything about, about her first marriage and about something that happened there. And I was like, whoa, like so such a beautiful thing. And and to ask about my own birth, like I I kind of forgot what happened and and my first three years of life and all these things. So highly recommend recommend the book Um Inheriting Family Trauma. It didn't start with you and doing the workbook. It's just it's it's attending to yourself and and expanding knowing yourself through all your shared family karmas and and everything. So thank you so much so much, Mark. I look forward to the the next book and maybe we can chat again when that comes out and do some techniques even on on on audio and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:09

Hey, thanks for having me, Dylan. I enjoyed it. It was a fun conversation.

Outro And More Episodes To Hear

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

Thank you for listening. And I really appreciate it if you made it to the end. If you like this episode, I have a couple other episodes I would like to refer you to. One that is an episode eighty one with creating your own reality and reprogramming.