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,

As with many stories of healing and transformation, what started out looking like adversity was actually grace in disguise. Ironically, after scouring the distant corners of the planet for answers, I found that the greatest resources for healing were already inside me just waiting to be excavated.

the specific words that led to the origin of their pain.

Recent developments in the fields of cellular biology, neurobiology, epigenetics, and developmental psychology underscore the importance of exploring at least three generations of family history in order to understand the mechanism behind patterns of trauma and suffering that repeat.

The findings demonstrated that babies exposed to increased cortisol in utero, as early as seventeen weeks after conception, exhibited impaired cognitive development when they were evaluated at seventeen months old.

The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.

The repetition of a trauma is not always an exact replica of the original event.

Even people we wouldn’t normally include in our family system must be included. If someone harmed or murdered or took advantage of a member of our family, that person must be included. Likewise, somebody in our family harmed or murdered or took advantage of someone, that victim would also need to be included in our family system.