Healing Generational Wounds with Mark Wolynn

You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to explain inherited family trauma before we even jump in.

Perfect.

What I often see is we have regular lives.

Everything's going okay.

You know, our life's on track.

We're ticking off all the boxes.

We've done the right things.

We've gone to a good college.

We have a good job.

We're maybe with a good partner, you know.

But every morning there's this sensation, this feeling, this depression, this anxiety, we struggle with panic attacks.

And this is the question I get, what's up? My life looks okay on the outside, but ever since I can remember, or ever since I'm 23, or ever since I got married, or ever since I moved to a new town, I've been feeling this way.

And those are those are important details.

We'll get into that later.

You know, ages and events that happen in our lives that trigger other events or trigger other feelings and sensations.

But I always like to tell people that the answer could lie in a trauma that happened to one of your parents and your grandparents.

Maybe their mother or father died when they were young, which is pretty serious trauma.

Or one of our parents was sent away to live with relatives when they were small.

or they were placed in foster care or one of their siblings died tragically.

You know, something like this can devastate a family.

But here's the key.

The reaction to the trauma doesn't necessarily stop with the people who experienced it.

So the feelings and sensations, specifically the stress response, the way our genes express, This can pass forward to the children and the grand forward, grand forward, the children and the grandchildren affecting them in a similar way, even if they didn't personally experience the trauma.

So, you know, we have to as clinicians or even non-clinicians, we have to be looking beyond the childhood, beyond attachment, although we'll talk about attachment, how important that is as well.

But we have to be looking back a generation or two and sometimes even three.