Mark Wolynn

answer may not lie within our own story as much as in the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even our great-grandparents.

The great teachers understand that where we come from affects where we go, and that what sits unresolved in our past influences our present. They know that our parents are important, regardless of whether they are good at parenting or not. There’s no way around it: The family story is our story. Like it or not, it resides within us.

My early separation from my mother, along with similar traumas I inherited from my family history—specifically, the fact that three of my grandparents had lost their mothers at an early age, and the fourth had lost a father as an infant—helped to forge my secret language of fear. The words alone, helpless, and ruined, and the feelings that had accompanied them, were finally losing their power to lead me astray. I was being granted a new life,