It Didn’t Start With You
It Didn’t Start With You shows how the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live in our unexplained depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, obsessive thoughts and physical symptoms—what scientists are now calling “secondary PTSD.”
Documenting the latest epigenetic research—how traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA—and the latest advances in neuroscience and the science of language, It Didn’t Start With You is an accessible and pragmatic guide to breaking inherited family patterns.
What is Inherited Family Trauma?
When a trauma happens, it changes us—sometimes for generations. The grief, the suffering, the distress doesn’t always end with us. The feelings and sensations—specifically the stress response, the way our genes express—can pass forward to our children and grandchildren, affecting them in a similar way, even though they didn’t personally experience our trauma. Simply put, many of us relive the tragedies from previous generations and rarely make the link. Examples from the book include:
- A man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit discovered he was paying the price for a murder his father had been acquitted for a generation earlier.
- A woman who couldn’t understand her sudden indifference toward her husband was entangled with her grandmother who lost her husband tragically at the same age.
- A young, Cambodian boy whose self-destructive behavior was linked to the murder of his grandfather by the Khmer Rouge.
- A woman with claustrophobia—unable to ride in a plane or elevator—made the connection to her father’s parents who perished in a gas chamber.
- A woman with a paralyzing fear that her child would die discovered that her grandparents lost two children before they immigrated to the United States.
A Practical Guide
The book leads readers through a process of self-discovery and healing, helping them identify the emotionally-charged language of their worries and fears that link to unresolved traumas in their childhood or family history. Through provocative questions, relevant case studies and a series of body-centered exercises, readers are guided to become detectives, mining their family history to unearth the source of their issues. Ultimately, readers learn how to convert old, fearful images into ones that bring strength and healing. It Didn’t Start With You is the first book of its kind to offer step-by-step guidance to help people break the cycle of destructive inherited family patterns.
You will learn:
- How to identify inherited family trauma that lives in your anxious words, fears, behaviors and unexplained physical symptoms.
- How to map out the traumatic events in your family history that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation.
- Practices, visualizations, healing sentences and other tools based in neuroscience that can help you disentangle from an emotional legacy you’ve inherited.
- How to create new neural pathways in your brain, new experiences in your body, and new vitality in your relationship with yourself and others.
Learn more about It Didn't Start With You.