You know that embryologists for a hundred years have known that the female cell line stops dividing in the womb, which means when grandmother is five months pregnant with our mother, the egg that will one day become us is already present in our mother’s womb, which is in grandma’s womb.
I talk about this in my book. Just speculating, what do you think the implications are that there are three generations present in mother and grandmother’s womb? Then we know from the work of Bruce Lipton that mother’s emotions can be chemically communicated to the fetus through the placenta, and that can biochemically alter genetic expression. So, there’s lots of science they’re just cobbling together nowadays. They’re using mice because you can only get a generation in humans. You can only look at a generation. It takes, what, 12 to 20 years to get a generation in humans? The studies are only 12–13 years old. So, they’re using mice because with mice, mice and humans, they share a similar genetic makeup. Over 90 percent of the genes in humans have counterparts in mice with over 80 percent being identical. You can get a generation in 12 to 20 weeks with mice.
So, for that reason, they’re able to extrapolate from these studies. In fact, my favorite study happened out of Emory Medical School in Atlanta, where they took male mice, and they made them afraid of a cherry blossom-like scent. Every time the mice smell the scent, they’d shock them. They found already, right in that first generation, changes—epigenetic changes in the blood, in the brain, in the sperm.
In the brain, there were these enlarged areas where a greater amount of smell receptors existed, so that these mice in that first generation that were shocked started learning to detect the scent at lesser concentrations, thereby protecting themselves. Their brains epigenetically adapted to protect them, which fascinates me, how quickly these epigenetic changes begin.
They found the changes in the sperm and the brain. So the researcher said, “Well, what would happen if we impregnate females that were not shocked with this sperm?” They did it. Then the amazing thing happened in the second and third generations. The pups and grandpups became jumpy and jittery just by smelling the smell, not by being shocked. They were never shocked. They became jumpy and jittery. They had inherited the stress response without directly experiencing the trauma.
So, I know this is a long answer to your question about past life, but this is where my fascination lives . . .
TS: Sure. No, I appreciate it.
MW: . . . in all these discoveries.
TS: What I want to make sure our listeners get a real sense of, and what I want to understand better, is your approach to helping people heal, what you call the “core language approach” for healing from inherited trauma. Take us through the steps.
MW: OK. So, when I’m working with people, I want to know both their verbal and their nonverbal trauma language, what I call core language. So, I’ve discovered that when a trauma happens, it leaves clues behind—not just in the DNA, but in the form of emotionally charged words and sentences. These clues, they form a breadcrumb trail. If you follow it, it can lead us back to a traumatic event in our family history. It’s like collecting the puzzle pieces, and then all of a sudden, you get this missing piece of the puzzle, and then the whole picture comes into view, and you finally have context that explains why you feel the way you feel.
MW: There’s a scientific reason also for this trauma language, because we know from trauma theory that when a trauma event happens, significant information in the trauma gets lost. It disperses. It bypasses the frontal lobes. So, the experience of this trauma, exactly what happens to us, can’t be named or ordered through words. Our language centers get compromised. Then without language, our traumatic experiences get stored as fragments of memory, language, body sensations, images, emotions. It’s like the mind disperses. The hippocampus gets disrupted and then these essential elements get separated. We lose the story, and then we never complete the healing.
Yet, what I found is these pieces aren’t lost, Tami. They’ve simply been rerouted. So, I’m looking for my client’s verbal and nonverbal trauma language, and the job is to gather this language and link it together and connect the dots, so we can land on the events where this language originated.
So, when it’s verbal, it can be sentences like, “I’ll go crazy,” or “I’ll be locked up,” or “I’ll harm somebody and I don’t deserve to live,” or “I’ll be abandoned,” or “I’ll lose everything.” But it can also be nonverbal, and that’s when we look at our fears and our phobias and our unusual symptoms and our anxieties and depressions. These things that strike suddenly may be or begin at a certain age, age 30, when grandma became a widow or age 25, when dad went to war and came home numb. It’s often the same age where something traumatic has happened in our family history. Or we look at the depressions or our destructive behaviors that keep repeating, or we keep making the same relationship choices or the same money choices or the same career choices, or we repeatedly self-sabotage our success. Literally, we keep stepping in the same potholes.
This is what I’m interested in finding. Then from there, now that we’ve isolated the problem, we got to have a positive experience that can shift our brain—that can change our brain. I feel like I’ve given the listeners only the bad news that we’re all in the same boat, and the boat is sinking, but it’s not true. There’s actually positive research that’s out there now.
Researchers are now able to reverse the trauma symptoms in mice, and the implications are fast. I list this all on my Facebook page, all of these studies, but just to put it into words, when these traumatized mice are exposed to positive experiences, it changes the way their DNA is expressed. It expresses. It inhibits the enzymes that caused the DNA methylation and histone modifications. So, Isabelle Mansuy, whom I talked about earlier, she was traumatizing these mice. Once she placed them in positive low-stress environments, their trauma symptoms reversed. Their behaviors improved. There were changes in the DNA methylation, which prevented the symptoms from being transmitted to the next generation.
TS: Now, one of the things I’m curious about, Mark, I know you’ve worked with people who are children and grandchildren of people who have been affected by the holocaust or people who lived through various wars or grew up in war zones. I’d be curious to know how you were able to find their core trauma language, but more importantly, the healing—in your work, how you were able to help those people heal from a real family lineage of such trauma.
MW: I’ll tell the story of Prak, not his real name, but an eight-year-old Cambodian boy, which was a fascinating case. He was never told that his grandfather was murdered in the killing fields. In fact, he was led to believe that the second grandfather, whom the grandmother married, was his real grandfather. So he didn’t have any information. This boy, he would run headfirst into walls and concuss himself. He would be on a basketball court, and he’d just run headfirst into a basketball pole and get knocked out. At eight years old, I think he’d had seven concussions already.
He also would take a hanger, just a regular coat hanger, and he would whack it on the sofa, and he’d scream, “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” So, as I’m working with his parents, both his mother and father, I’m already gathering his trauma language, the nonverbal and the verbal. The verbal language is, “Kill! Kill!” Where does it come from? The nonverbal trauma language is he keeps running into walls and poles and having concussions.
So, he has these two destructive behaviors, which is not important, but I call it a double identification. He’s identified with two people. Well, it is important. Who he’s identified with is the grandfather, the real grandfather, who’s bonked over the head with a scythe-like tool in Tuol Sleng prison, where he’s murdered. They accused him of being a Western spy, a CIA spy. They hit him over the head with the scythe, which looks like a hanger, and the person who hits him over the head kills him.
So the boy, without even knowing what he’s doing, is enacting these two behaviors of being bonked on the head, killed, and screaming, “Kill! Kill!” So I told the father, “Go home and tell your son about your real father, and how much you loved him, and what happened, and how you still miss him.” Because I found in that culture there’s a looking forward, not a looking back. It was really hard to get the father to tell him about the past.
He was telling me, “We only look forward. We don’t look back.”
I said, “Yes, but this is essential for your son’s healing. Do you have a photo of your real father?”
He says, “I do.”
“Please place this photo,” I said, “of his real grandfather over his bed, and tell him that grandpa protects him. In fact, show him the picture of a halo, and tell him that grandpa in the spirit world makes this light on the top of his head, blesses his head at night when he’s sleeping. Give him the image of this halo over his head. With his dad blessing him, tell him his head doesn’t have to be hurt anymore. Then also take him to the pagoda and light incense,” that’s the temple, “and light incense for the grandfather, his real grandfather, as well as for the man who killed him, so that the descendants in both families could be free.” That was a tough one explaining that to the family, but they did it.
This is the coolest part. They took him to the temple. Three weeks after taking him to the temple and putting the picture of the grandpa over his head with that image, Prak hands the coat hanger to his mother and says, “Mommy, I don’t need to play with this anymore.”
TS: It’s a powerful story.
MW: Yes, yes. It’s potent. Yes, yes.
TS: Now, Mark, one of the takeaways that was very meaningful for me in your book, It Didn’t Start with You, is a teaching that you credit Bert Hellinger with, which is this idea that we can have bonds of loyalty, which you refer to as unconscious loyalty, and that much of our suffering in our families can come from this—that we somehow feel we’re being loyal to people by carrying their pain.
I think this is a really, really profound idea. How do you help someone heal when they have this sense of, “This is an expression of my loyalty to this person, to carry their grief or their rage or whatever they’re suffering from.”
MW: What you’re talking about, this loyalty—and sometimes it’s unconscious loyalty, we don’t even know we have it—it’s the anchor. It’s why some people seem to relive and repeat and others don’t. When traumas aren’t talked about or when the healing is incomplete because the pain or the grief or the shame or the embarrassment is too great, and we don’t want to go in there and look at that trauma or talk about that trauma, or the people involved in the trauma are rejected or excluded, then as you mentioned, aspects of these traumas can show up in later generations. Unconsciously, we’ll repeat the pattern or share similar unhappiness until the trauma finally has a chance to heal.
Ultimately, I believe that the contraction of a trauma is ultimately looking for its expansion, and it will repeat, in a family, too, in generations, until that expansion happens. I mean, even Freud, a hundred years ago, when he wrote about repetition compulsion, he was writing about how the trauma is merely seeking the opportunity for a better outcome, so it can heal.
As an answer to your question, I might have somebody come into the office after we’ve diagnosed or unearthed this unconscious loyalty. I might have the person stand in the footprints. I literally might put out rubber footprints of the father or the mother or the grandmother or the grandfather, and have the client feel that his mother, her mother, his father, her grandfather, her grandmother, his grandfather doesn’t want our misfortune.
In fact, they only want us to do well, even if they can’t show us that. That’s really the hope and the dream: that we do well. The best way to honor them is to live our life fully, which is where we arrive in the session, where the client has a newer, deeper understanding that the true loyalty is to do well.
TS: I know you made a very significant leap there, let’s say, that this parent or grandparent has passed away. How do we know that they don’t want us to carry their pain? That the best way to honor them is by living fully and not continuing to carry that burden? How do we know that?
MW: Great question. In my experience, clinically, in my office, when I have people stand on the footprints of their deceased parent or their deceased grandparent and feel into their body as though they’re them, that’s not the information they report. The information they report, I mean the negative information that the parent would want, it’s always—I would say, my gosh! I would say 100 percent of the time—that parent or grandparent is . . . It’s as almost as though there’s also a cellular memory of this person, as though they’ve passed away in our bodies, and a cellular knowledge in our bodies that the movement is toward expansion, and not to sustain the contraction. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. It does. I know you work with healing images, as well as healing sentences. So, a healing sentence might be something like, “I will now honor you by living fully. What happened to you won’t be in vain,” that kind of thing. What are some healing images that people work with that are ways that they can release these bonds of loyalty to a previous generation’s trauma that’s actually holding the person back? What images help?
MW: Well, going back to some of the stories I even told today, Sarah had the image of her grandparents supporting her. Every time she would go to cut, instead of cutting, she would feel a warm feeling of her grandma loving her, standing behind her, and her grandpa loving her, standing behind her. Prak, the Cambodian boy, had a healing image of his head being blessed at night by a halo by his real grandfather, and then he was able to take the love. He could feel the father also, a change in his father, which is a healing image with the father being able to talk about his real father.
So, that was another. There are so many healing images wrapped up in that story. Now, the family is embracing this dimensional love in all dimensions, in all directions. The grandfather was brought back into the family lineage, into the history. He couldn’t be erased even by another person. This was what Bert Hellinger learned from the Zulus. He learned that when somebody passes away, they’re not gone, they’re very much right here, and they’re still very much a part of our family.
The idea of rejecting them, in Zulu culture, is almost unheard of, but it’s common in our Western culture. In fact, even when we think of the tomb, the big cement block, the six-foot block that is on a grave site. It was, superstitiously, so the spirit couldn’t escape. So, we’re erasing, we’re separating from the spirits rather than embracing the spirits as resources and as strength, as resources of strength, as healing images of strength.
I would tell the listener—if the listener could feel his or her ancestors behind him, his or her parents, and behind the parents the grandparents, and behind the parents and grandparents, the great-grandparents, and behind the great-grandparents, the great-great-grandparents—just to soften and breathe and lean back into this image of all that comes from behind us, all the gifts, all the strength, all the wisdom, all the lived life, the experiences, all the knowledge. And if we could just lean back into it, and bring it into our bodies, and soften to it, and allow it to expand us, even in this image we can gain.
TS: Now, Mark, you mentioned toward the beginning of our conversation that when you were traveling all over the world looking for help with your vision challenge—the fact that you were losing your vision—that you heard from various spiritual teachers that the most important thing you could do is actually heal your relationship with your parents. In the book It Didn’t Start with You, one of the pieces of science that really impacted me were studies that showed that if you are able to feel this love, if you can receive the love of your family line coming toward you, similar to how you just described it, that you’ll actually have greater health and even longevity. I thought this is so . . .
MW: Isn’t that amazing?
TS: Yes. Can you tell our listeners a bit about that?
MW: Yes. There’s a study that not many people know about that was conducted in the 1950s by Harvard and by Johns Hopkins. Well, the study at Harvard was called the Mastery of Stress study. They asked 21-year-olds, it was a longitudinal study, they looked at them every 35 years. They asked one question, “Describe your relationship with your mom,” and then one question, “Describe your relationship with your dad.” To make it easy, they gave you four multiple choice boxes. It was either warm and close, friendly, tolerant, or strained and cold.
People who chose—with their mother, for example—”tolerant” or “strained and cold,” 35 years later, 91 percent of them had a significant health condition like coronary artery disease, alcoholism, diabetes, compared with only 45 percent, less than a half, who checked the boxes “warm and close” and “friendly.” Isn’t that amazing? The numbers were similar with the father, 82 percent and 50 percent.
Johns Hopkins repeated this study looking at correlation with cancer, and they found the same thing: that there’s a correlation between closeness with the parents. So a lot of times, we can’t heal with our parents in real life, but minimally, we can heal it in our inner image. If it’s not possible to heal it in real life—never throw yourself in front of a moving train—but when you’re able to reflect in a broader way, you’ll see the behind your parents, behind their actions and behaviors, their criticism, their hurtfulness—is just a traumatic event that blocked the love they could give.
When we truly understand this, it changes things. We’re able to reach our compassion. Then through our compassion, we’re engaging areas of the brain that fill us with peace, the prefrontal cortex. It doesn’t excuse the bad behavior, but it explains. That’s something that I teach in the book, how to receive something good from my parents even very little was given.
TS: Can you give a clue to that for one of our listeners who might be tuning in right now saying, “Oh, God! I’m going to have to do some work now with my difficult parent?”
MW: Well, first thing, we have to get to the idea, and this is a mental part of that as to . . . I talk a lot about this in the book. I talk about the negativity bias that keeps us from feeling anything positive. A lot of us report, “There’s nothing positive. They were just cruel.” And the negativity bias in our brain, the way we’re oriented toward what’s negative to keep us safe, the amygdala, two-thirds of it is scanning for threats. It doesn’t really allow us to have any positive images. We are only holding the negative images so we can feel safe, but if we can look, start here, and look behind that parent and do a genogram, peel back the layers, list the traumas that happened to that parent.
“Oh, my God! She was given away when she was two.”
“Oh, my goodness! My father, his little brother died at the swimming hall and he was blamed because he was eight and the brother was five.”
We start to see some of these traumas that broke our parent’s love or broke our grandmother’s love for our mother or our grandmother’s love for our father. We can see these patterns of attachment have trickled down for generations. In fact, that’s the most replicated study in all of epigenetics. They take baby mice, separate them from their moms, and they can see for three generations that the pattern of broken attachment is experienced for three generations.
So, we have to look at, “Well, what broke the attachment? What shut your grandmother down?” Because if your mother didn’t get enough, she couldn’t give enough, clearly, and so on and so forth. So I help the client, the reader, the listener, first, look back. Let’s start with doing your traumagram, and I teach how to do that in the book, how to do the genogram, the traumagram to start to list these things, and to take a look at some of your trauma language, and where it really originated. Who was the first to feel this way? And then that’s to open us up.
TS: I just have one final question for you. One of the things I picked up from the book is this sentence: “Healing from an inherited trauma is akin to creating a poem.” I know you write poetry, Mark, and I thought this is so interesting that you would compare this process—which I think many people might think, “Wow! This is hard stuff. This is going to be tough for me to do this work.” It’s akin to creating a poem.
MW: That’s what I know best, writing. My background is writing every day and understanding how language comes to us, and where that language originates from. But let me see if I can explain that. When we write a poem, it hinges on the right image, the right timing, and the right language. If the poem is going to have any strength, we have to hit that image at the right time. That image won’t make sense to us if we’re still in our anger. You know what I mean?
We’ve got to be beyond all the ways in which we’re fighting ourselves for that image to land. It’s got to land in our bodies. It’s got to come at the right time, and the language has to be precise. So I not only help the reader, the listener, the client come upon his trauma language, but also his healing language, which is the reverse, often, of the trauma language.
When we heal, we’ve got to find an image, an experience that’s powerful enough to override the stress response. We’ve got to calm the brain’s stress response, and then we need to practice the new feelings, the new sensations, the new images associated with these experiences. Then by doing so, we not only create the neural pathways, Tami, we also stimulate the release of feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, or feel-good hormones like estrogen and oxytocin, even the very genes involved in the body’s stress response can begin to function in an improved way. These images, these experiences can be receiving comfort and support like I teach in my book, or feelings of feeling compassion or gratitude or practicing generosity, lovingkindness, mindfulness—ultimately anything that allows us to feel strength or peace inside.
Experiences like this feed the prefrontal cortex, as we know, and can help us reframe the stress response, which is what it’s all about, so it has the chance to calm down. What I found personally is our practice, whatever practice we land on, it needs to have meaning for us. We need to feel emotionally connected to it, Tami. The idea is to pull traction away from the midbrain, the limbic brain, the amygdala going crazy, and bring engagement to the forebrain, specifically the prefrontal cortex where we can integrate these new images, these new experiences, these new poems, this new language, and our brains can change.
TS: Mark, could you share with me whether it’s a visual poem or a language poem that for you has been a healing key?
MW: It’s funny you mentioned that. There are many poems by Rilke that just completely changed my life. My goodness! I could butcher many of them by telling you many of them, but one of the earliest ones that I worked with was a poem fragment by Theodore Roethke when he talked about, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade.”
That’s the first stanza of a poem “In a Dark Time.” And just remembering that when my eye, when I couldn’t see and they told me I was going to be blind in both eyes—it was a very dark time. I kept wanting to see in a different way, realizing that I knew that I might not see with my eyes, but I knew that in the dark time, the other eye, the inner eye, the eye begins to see. I did a lot of shadow work. It’s what we do. When we want to heal, we’ve got to go into the uncomfortable places. Yes. I met my shadow.
TS: Mark Wolynn is the author of a book that won the Nautilus Award for Psychology. It’s called It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Mark, thank you so much for your great and important and deep work, and for being a guest on Insights at the Edge. Thank you.
MW: Thank you, Tami. I enjoyed talking with you and being here.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. Also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe, we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
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