It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
TRANSLATED INTO 39 LANGUAGES
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED IN 2025
“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
It Didn’t Start With You and its companion, The Official It Didn't Start with You Workbook, provide a groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
TRANSLATED INTO 39 LANGUAGES
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED IN 2025
“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
It Didn’t Start With You and its companion, The Official It Didn't Start with You Workbook, provide a groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
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Community Reviews
was looking forward to understanding more about this subject, but I felt it was all a bit wishy washy and repetitive....
I am very interested in the concepts of transgenerational trauma and epigenetics. I was really looking forward to reading this book but found myself disappointed as well as actively annoyed and irritated while reading it. Wolynn's applications of Yahuda's research are shortsighted and even damaging. If some of his clients find his method beneficial, more power to them, but I see it as potentially alienating to many who might seek care.
Wolynn puts a huge amount of emphasis on parenting. While I agree that there is a coaction between genes and the environment and that primary caregiving has a profound impact on development, Wolynn gives a painfully heteronormative and gender binary perspective of child rearing. There is a tremendous amount of blame placed on mothers both in terms of how they may have cared for themselves during pregnancy as well as their caregiving style after birth. He also talks about the importance of having a male and female parental role model for children. There are plenty of family systems that do not include a cisgender female and/or cisgender male parent. The research is quite clear that children of same-sex couples are no worse off than children of heterosexual couples. His views are also excluding of single parents.
Also, the author insists that people cannot heal if there is a disrupted bond between them and their parents. I kept waiting for him to discuss obvious exceptions. Many people come from extremely dangerous and chaotic homes. This includes being the child of a parent who was drug-abusing or violent. Insisting that people cannot heal without seeking to repair ruptures with their parents sends a dangerous message. Children do not estrange themselves from their parents for minor reasons. It is typically a last resort to protect themselves from a dangerous or painfully unsupportive environment.
People can heal developmental, and transgenerational, trauma without actually repairing a relationship with their parent. There are many methods for doing this that do not involve reconnecting with an estranged parent. Placing the responsibility on the client to heal the trauma with their parent is further invalidating of what they went through that caused the need for separation in the first place.
Furthermore, Wolynn also insists that identifying past patterns that repeat in someone's current life is a cure in and of itself. Finding out why somebody feels the way they feel or where it came from is intellectually healing at best. It doesn't always heal the somatic and emotional process that accompanies it. This is work that is gratifying to the therapist but rarely has long term relief for the client.
In short, Wolynn takes Rachel Yahuda's groundbreaking research and applies it to his method of therapy. Unfortunately, it blames mothers, discounts fathers, excludes caregivers that aren't heterosexual dyads, and insists you cannot heal without healing your relationship with your parents regardless of how dangerous or unrealistic that might be. This is self-indulgent drivel.
Incidentally, I tried to find his credentials and, after about 15 minutes, this was the best I could find:
"Mark is a Summa Cum Laude graduate in English and Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. His graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Arizona was also in English."
From what I can tell, he doesn't have a graduate degree in psychology and isn't a licensed therapist. This is NOT someone who should be dispensing therapeutic advice.
Wolynn puts a huge amount of emphasis on parenting. While I agree that there is a coaction between genes and the environment and that primary caregiving has a profound impact on development, Wolynn gives a painfully heteronormative and gender binary perspective of child rearing. There is a tremendous amount of blame placed on mothers both in terms of how they may have cared for themselves during pregnancy as well as their caregiving style after birth. He also talks about the importance of having a male and female parental role model for children. There are plenty of family systems that do not include a cisgender female and/or cisgender male parent. The research is quite clear that children of same-sex couples are no worse off than children of heterosexual couples. His views are also excluding of single parents.
Also, the author insists that people cannot heal if there is a disrupted bond between them and their parents. I kept waiting for him to discuss obvious exceptions. Many people come from extremely dangerous and chaotic homes. This includes being the child of a parent who was drug-abusing or violent. Insisting that people cannot heal without seeking to repair ruptures with their parents sends a dangerous message. Children do not estrange themselves from their parents for minor reasons. It is typically a last resort to protect themselves from a dangerous or painfully unsupportive environment.
People can heal developmental, and transgenerational, trauma without actually repairing a relationship with their parent. There are many methods for doing this that do not involve reconnecting with an estranged parent. Placing the responsibility on the client to heal the trauma with their parent is further invalidating of what they went through that caused the need for separation in the first place.
Furthermore, Wolynn also insists that identifying past patterns that repeat in someone's current life is a cure in and of itself. Finding out why somebody feels the way they feel or where it came from is intellectually healing at best. It doesn't always heal the somatic and emotional process that accompanies it. This is work that is gratifying to the therapist but rarely has long term relief for the client.
In short, Wolynn takes Rachel Yahuda's groundbreaking research and applies it to his method of therapy. Unfortunately, it blames mothers, discounts fathers, excludes caregivers that aren't heterosexual dyads, and insists you cannot heal without healing your relationship with your parents regardless of how dangerous or unrealistic that might be. This is self-indulgent drivel.
Incidentally, I tried to find his credentials and, after about 15 minutes, this was the best I could find:
"Mark is a Summa Cum Laude graduate in English and Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. His graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Arizona was also in English."
From what I can tell, he doesn't have a graduate degree in psychology and isn't a licensed therapist. This is NOT someone who should be dispensing therapeutic advice.
Great book, kind of misleading as it doesn't apply to those who genuinely have toxic relationships with their parents.
This book had been on my list to read for a while. I was so excited to finally read it, only to be disappointed. I understand the concept of the book, though I'm not sure if I believe it is entirely true. If you read the first two chapters of this book you have read the whole thing. It repeats itself over and over and over and over.
While the premise is very interesting and I wanted to love this book, I felt as if it became redundant and lacked a certain gravitas considering the material it was expounding upon. I would recommend to read, but honestly the first half is all you need to get 90% of the what the book is getting across.
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