Reading Journal 2023: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are And How To End The Cycle

Reading Journal 2023: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are And How To End The Cycle
Author: Mark Wolynn

First off, let me address the apparent elephant in the room when it comes to this book. I had some suspicions in the early pages that the author might fall in the category of pseudoscience rather than being qualified to speak on the subject of epigenetics and genetically based trauma. Turns out I wasn’t alone, as goodreads affronts you with big bold capitalized letter reviews warning any and all readers curious over this books alluring title about his lack of qualifications and peer reviewed research.

I’m not sure how much of that is true. A little bit of research uncovered that he is the founder of the Family Constellation Institute, an established teacher at reputable educational institutions and published in the Elepehant Journal, the New Yorker and Pscyh Central. But his approach certainly veers towards popular theory as opposed to scholarship.

Credit where due though, the early chapters do make plenty of references to legitimate scientific studies and his notes are chalk full of reputable books, absent a bibliography. In truth, the uncertainty of that whole thing aside, that’s not even my biggest issue with the book. I’ve read plenty by authors musing over theoretical ideas that have been more than worthwhile. My bigger issue is with how his ideas essentially get wrapped up in a self help premise that abuses examples from his own work and clinic by presenting them as proof text for his own ideas. It’s like the whole thing is designed to say, look at how my ideas helped these people successfully overcome their trauma. Now you can do it too. Worse yet is how it tows this line, and I would argue crosses it, where the one experiencing the trauma is made the victim of their own making.

Here is the nuts and bolts of the books main ideas (or idea; the whole exercise is set up so as to narrow down and locate ones trauma in a single sentence). He begins with a discussion about fear, and how those fears are bound to inherited family trauma. He defines inherited family trauma as a web, interconnecting the experiences of generations, and it is trauma that, relating to its core expression- fear- we cannot articulate, it expresses itself unconsciously. Thus the rest of the book is given to formulating a practice of necessary articulation. We must locate, as he calls it, the family mind, or family consciousness, which is essentially the story of the genetic factors carrying our trauma, and then utilize the “core language approach”, which is simply searching out the clues of the central “unconscious themes” of our life (where we merge with our familial past, where we have rejected or blamed it or cut ourselves off from it, where we have experienced early interruptions to our development when it comes to our parents, and where we identity ourselves with another family member other than our parents). These unconscious themes can then become the basis for articulating our core complaint (what we feel the problem is), our core descriptor (how we define the problem in words or adjectives), our core sentence (taking the problem and our adjectives and putting it in to a sentence), and eventually allowing that sentence to define our core trauma. Rewriting the sentence into a positive statement rather than a fear based statement can then become a way of addressing the trauma and gaining agency over it. This relates to the final third of the book which reimagines core trauma in light of the core languages of our transformation- bonds/separation, relationships, success, and medicine.

This idea can apply to other circles of our life beyond family in certain ways, however the science, and its a real science, applies directly to the genetic and biological factors that lie behind trauma. Thus it has a specific interest in family dynamics. Much of this does feel like common sense. Perhaps not something most of us really would desire to confront or even recognize. And yet it seems to be true that we all carry this, and leaving it as unconscious factors in our lives, or worse yet unintentionally living distant from it, is often a way to give it power over us.

It’s fair to say that I’m sure there will be readers for whom this book will be helpful. I found it personally disaffecting, if even a bit problematic, but I tend to be fairly adverse to the self help genre, especially where it can lend itself to pseudoscience. His work seems to be based in something true, but operates outside of the general system of research and thought. Whether that is a positive or a negative will likely depend on the reader.