It Didn't Start with You

Chapter 1

Traumas Lost and Found

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

A well-documented feature of trauma, one familiar to many, is our inability to articulate what happens to us. Not only do we lose our words, but something happens with our memory as well. During a traumatic incident, our thought processes can become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything even remotely reminiscent of the original experience. Once they are triggered, it is as if an invisible rewind button has been pressed, causing us to reenact aspects of the original trauma in our day-to-day lives. Unconsciously, we could find ourselves reacting to certain people, events, or situations in old, familiar ways that echo the past.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern more than one hundred years ago. Traumatic reenactment, or "repetition compulsion," as Freud called it, is an attempt of the unconscious to replay what's unresolved, so we can "get it right." This unconscious drive to relive past events could be one of the mechanisms at work when families repeat unresolved traumas in future generations.

Freud's contemporary Carl Jung also believed that what remains unconscious does not dissolve but, rather, resurfaces in our lives as fate or fortune. Whatever is not conscious, he said, will be experienced as fate. In other words, we're likely to keep repeating our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness. Both Jung and Freud noted that whatever is too difficult to process does not fade away on its own but, rather, is stored in our unconscious.

Freud and Jung each observed how fragments of previously blocked, suppressed, or repressed life experience would show up in the words,

Mark Wolynn

One of Oprah Daily s 10 Best Trauma Books of 2023
One of Book Riot s 9 Best Healing Books about Trauma for 2023
One of Healthline s 13 Best Mental Health Books of 2022
One of Cosmopolitan s 15 Books About Mental Health That Everyone Should Read
One of Men s Health s 20 Best Mental Health Books to Read in 2022
One of Choosing Therapy s 10 Best PTSD & Trauma Books for 2021
Winner of the 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Psychology
Finalist for the 2016 Books for a Better Life Award
  
This groundbreaking book offers a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, powerful tools for relieving its suffering. Mark Wolynn is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.
Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

Mark Wolynn does a masterful job of illuminating the ways in which our ancestors unresolved suffering, often unknown to us, disables us and binds us painfully to them. He gives us the tools and skills an approach that combines understanding, imaginative dialogues, and compassionate reconnection to free and heal ourselves.  
James S. Gordon, MD, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression

It Didn t Start with You takes us a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work.
Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

Mark Wolynn s extraordinary book cracks the secret code of families and proves that you can go home again once you understand how history made you. Full of life-changing stories, powerful insights, and practical tools for personal healing, It Didn't Start With You deserves a place on your bookshelf next to Alice Miller s The Drama of the Gifted Child and Dan Siegel s The Developing Mind. You ll never see your family the same way again.