You can also find this episode wherever on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is also available on YouTube.

Mark Wolynn is a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma and the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. He wrote the mega-bestseller It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. And just last year, he fully updated and revised this amazing guide with new research, stories, and tools. He also created a companion workbook which is more akin to having a session with him.

I find Mark’s work endlessly fascinating, in part because there’s constantly more that he’s learning and discovering, as research in this world continues to catch up and evolve.

Today, we talk about how inherited family trauma and attachment trauma affects us all, and how we can play out old patterns in ways that we don’t always have a conscious understanding of. Mark used the term unconscious loyalty, which may resonate with many of you. You may also recognize the feeling of having anxiety that feels like it doesn’t really belong to you.

As a side note, it’s interesting that this episode on generational patterns is coming a week after my conversation with Belle Burden, which I hope you’ll go back to if you haven’t listened already.

Mark also shares some powerful case studies and stories, along with his tools for what we can actually do to make positive change in our lives now, and for future generations.

Book: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Workbook: The Official It Didn’t Start With You Workbook

Mark’s Website

Follow Mark on Instagram

(Generated by AI, not perfect! It’s definitely better to listen to the episode itself. :) )

ELISE:

I’m so happy to see you again. Our conversation, which happened probably six or seven years ago on the Goop Podcast. So I’m so happy when you pop back up with a revised version of It Didn’t Start With You and a Workbook so that I could get you in the seat again because I think about you and your work all the time and so do obviously so many other people. It’s so compelling.

MARK:

Well, thank you for that. Yeah, I’m excited to be back too. I really am. I enjoyed our podcast. It was one of the few that I put on my website because I thought I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed the energy of it. So let’s recreate it.

ELISE:

All right, here we go. Take two. This one will be even better. So for people who are uninitiated, I have a feeling a significant portion of this audience has read your book and understands the basic stakes of the generational trauma part of your work, although we’re going to talk about attachment theory as well today. But can you take us back to the beginning of you understanding how we can play out these old patterns in ways that we don’t even need to have a conscious understanding of what’s happened in our family history in order to have these strange behaviors?

MARK:

Well, I think you’re asking me how I figured out how to do this.

ELISE:

Yeah. How did this come to you? And I know it’s now a bit of a patchwork of that there are other people who are part of this constellation, but yeah, what happened?

MARK:

Okay. So the case is kind of heavy, but I’m going to start there. The very first case that taught me how to look for inherited family trauma because I had no clue. And we’re going back 30 some years ago when I was working with a lot of self-injurers and they were pulled to me. I didn’t realize at the time I was a self-injurer, but that comes later. So I’m getting all these heavy, super duper, I guess, very heavy cases of young people who are harming themselves. And this one woman, 24-year-old woman, I’m going to call her Sarah for this interview, she was cutting herself in an extreme way that was ... It was different than the other cutters that I’d worked with. Their cuts were more superficial and when Sarah would cut, she would hit a vein or an artery and she’d almost bleed to death.

And then her parents would find her bleeding profusely and they’d rush her to the hospital and she’d end up in a psych ward for three, four weeks at a time. I’m wondering why is this? I’d worked with many other cutters and their cutting was more superficial, but what was it about Sarah the way she was cutting? So the question that I was holding was, what was trying to be communicated here? And so she gets out of the psych ward and I want to see exactly what she does. So I hand her a pen. I go, “Sarah, pretend this is your razor and show me exactly what you do. “ So she puts the pen to her upper arm. She would either cut in her upper arm, her thighs or her abdomen and she puts the pen here and immediately I could see that her eyes begin to glaze over and she begins to dissociate.

So I stop her right there and I go, “Sarah, right there, right there. What’s that thought? What’s that feeling, that impulse?” And she looks at me and she says, “I don’t deserve to live.” At least here I am looking at a 24-year-old woman whose life has just begun. And my first question is, “What did you do?”

“What did you do? Did you take someone’s life? Did you break up with someone? Did you cause an accident? “And she said,” No, no, noth like that. “So I did the only thing I knew how to do back then which was to look in the childhood, which was amazingly good. I wanted that childhood and to look at attachment so she could go to her parents and lean into them and get nurtured and held and everybody was loving and caring. And so I said,” Well, it has to be attachment. “So I start looking deep at her early life and wasn’t there. She is a safe, secure, strong attachment with her mother and basically I’m flummoxed because that’s all I knew how to do. So somewhere out of the ethers came this question,” Tell me about your grandparents, Sarah. “And I’m so lucky I asked that because she dropped the bomb.

She said,” Oh, my father’s mother was an alcoholic and she was driving the car drunk and she crashed the car into a phone pole and my grandfather, who I never met, who was sitting in the passenger seat, went through the windshield and got cut, lacerated on the glass and bled out before the ambulance arrived. And there it was. I mean, there was everything right in that story. Well, she never met the grandmother either because the grandmother ended up dying of the alcohol poisoning when the father was 20. So just to backtrack a little and then I’ll get into the story. The father was about 12 when this happened and his mother really starts amping up her drinking and he never forgives his mother for killing his dad. Now let’s fast forward because that’s a piece of it we’ll talk about in a minute. Grandpa goes through the glass, dies and the words I don’t deserve to live aren’t Sarah’s.

They’re the words of grandmas who felt horrible that she took another life, the life of her beloved. But then there’s this other piece that when she cuts so deeply and almost bleeds to death, that’s not hers either. And in this minute, everything is downloading. So I go, “Okay, okay.” And I put two chairs out in the office and I look at Sarah and I go, “Sarah, look at your grandpa over in that chair and tell him what you told me. Tell him how deeply you cut and you almost bleed to death.” And she looks at the chair and says, “Grandpa, I cut so deeply that I almost bleed to death.” And then I said, “Add like you did, grandpa, like you bled to death.” And now she’s crying and she’s having an experience. Luckily I was a student of John Nolte in psychodrama at that time and I knew what to do.

I said, “What’s he showing you? What’s he telling you? “ And her eyes are closed and she says, “He tells me that he doesn’t want me to do this. And when I go to cut to feel him there with me.

And I go, “Okay, look at the other chair next to him and tell your grandmother exactly what you told me that you don’t deserve to live.” And she looks at the chair and says, “Grandma, I told Mark that I don’t deserve to live.” And of course I say, “And ad, and this is what you would’ve felt, what’s your grandmother telling you? “ And she says, “My grandmother’s saying the same thing that when I go to cut that she’ll be there with me supporting me. “ Well, she goes home to cut and never cuts again because in her inner image, in her inner landscape, there’s this feeling of support of this isn’t mine and now I’m supported and I’m held by something greater. And this is the first flashlight, the first, well, I should say floodlight that opened my eyes to inherited family trauma. And then after that, I studied with Bert Hellinger, the great father of family constellations.

ELISE:

So I want to take you in many directions into maybe a small parking lot to begin, but I’m just thinking about self-harmers or active cutters or people who are looking to sabotage their health or their life or blow up relationships, et cetera. And that’s obviously a huge catchall for a lot of people and a lot of our behavior, right? And then you also think about, and maybe there’s nothing to say here, but you think about particularly with women, the preponderance of autoimmune disease, which is its own self-inflicted violence. Is there a connection do you think between

MARK:

I do?

I do. Between either inherited trauma or attachment trauma. A typical case that I see, and I see this all the time, a young woman, mid-twenties, mid-thirties, she’ll choose all the wrong relationships, all the wrong guys. And so one relationship after another will crash and burn and she’ll blame herself and she’ll think she’s defective and her self-esteem is in the gutter. And again, when we look in the childhood, it’s not always there. Sometimes it’s pretty average, but she doesn’t understand why her life is spiraling. So we have to look in two directions. Same thing for symptoms, autoimmune diseases in particular. I’m thinking of a particular case that this young woman in her mid-twenties, what sat at the root of her relationship struggles is that her grandpa, the love of grandma’s life died also in a car accident while grandma was pregnant and with the mother. And so grandma never married again, raised the mother as a single parent and stayed alone the rest of her life from her mid-twenties onward.

And we could look at this a couple different ways, but the trauma chemically alters her genes and those genes get passed down to the granddaughter or actually the mother also in her mid-twenties divorces, separates and then divorces and stays alone. And so what chance does this young woman in her mid-twenties have when her mother stayed alone, her grandmother stayed alone? And it could be wired, of course, in the DNA and the epigenome could have an alteration that sometimes pops up at various ages.

ELISE:

Yeah. I want to talk about those age gates because I know regardless of even if it’s not in your DNA, it can be sort of a trigger for people to unravel in certain ways. But I remember this so acutely from when I first read the book, this idea of maybe bonds of loyalty or something like that too, but that sometimes we also have this, my life cannot be better than my mother or my father or my aunt who never got to have kids or whatever it is that this somehow it feels better to stay loyal to someone’s unfulfilled life or unhappy life. I’m not saying that people who don’t have kids don’t have, don’t get me wrong, some people definitely happily choose that and I get it. Do you always find that’s genetically encoded too or is that more of like a not quite conscious feeling of not surpassing or not competing or not doing better

MARK:

Yeah, that particular one like you hit on is not encoded because we can be born alive and repeat our parents’ misfortunes or repeat their unhappy circumstances. So for example, our dad fails in his forties and we fail in our forties. Our mom lost her great love and then somehow we lose our great love. Our mom or dad’s in poor health and we replicate that. We don’t exercise. We junk food and we’re in poor health. We don’t understand that there’s another factor beyond epigenetics called, well, I think the best way to term it is unconscious loyalty that there’s, as you said, somehow a loyalty to not exceed the success marker of our parents or to live similar lives. It’s almost as though unconsciously, mom, if you can’t be happy in a relationship, I won’t be happy in a relationship. Dad, if you drink, I’ll drink. Mom, if you carry this great sadness, I’ll carry it too.

But then you have to look at how early was that sadness and did that affect the attachment? So there’s many different streams. So when I’m working a case, let’s say, I’m listening very carefully to the words which we’ll get to trauma language, but I’m also looking at ... There’s two types of trauma language. Let me just get that out of the way. There’s verbal trauma language and nonverbal trauma language. And I want to go back to Sarah because Sarah’s case really spells that out. The verbal trauma language she gave me was, “I don’t deserve to live.” Well, we learned it wasn’t hers, it was her grandmother’s. But the nonverbal trauma language she gave me was cutting so deeply that she almost bleeds to death and that’s not verbal, but it’s a behavioral pattern that we have to look at to see, does this come from the epigenome?

Does this come from a broken attachment with the mom? Is she repeating out of loyalty someone’s misfortune? So there’s these streams that we have to navigate in order to find the root cause.

ELISE:

And tell me if I’m understanding this right, but there’s this generational bucket that is sometimes present, not always, but that generational bucket has attachment implications. They get carried on through DNA and also through if your mother kills your father in a car accident, there’s some maybe indecipherable wound but that’s carried through somehow. Is that fair?

MARK:

Oh, very fair. And that’s the part that’s hard to explain. It’s easy to explain the scientific part that the reaction to a trauma doesn’t necessarily stop with the people who experience it, that the feelings and sensations, specifically at least the stress response, the way the genes express. This can pass forward to the children and then the grandchildren if we don’t do some work to stop the trail and the children and the grandchildren can be affected in a similar way even though they didn’t personally experience the trauma. That’s the genetic coding, that’s the gene expression. That’s easy to explain because the genome is altered after a trauma and I can talk about how that happens, but the part that’s harder to explain is we’re alive and our parents have misfortune and this isn’t in the genes and then we repeat their suffering and that again, unconscious loyalty.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and you can extrapolate this out to sort of world events too and watch us repeat these trauma patterns quite obviously in a way that we desperately need interventions here if we’re going to have a different future. And I want to talk about those interventions. It’s also fascinating to me that your book first came out on the Eve, I feel like all that, the Rachel Yahuda’s work and all of that is new, relatively new and still I think pretty widely understood at this point we’re so maybe too trauma literate as a culture if that’s possible or too trauma. You know what I’m saying? I do know

MARK:

What you’re saying. It’s

ELISE:

Like,

MARK:

Can we just sit with a cup of coffee and look at ...

ELISE:

It’s fascinating and kind of wonderful to think about what we might understand soon in the next few decades and certainly about how to unwind some of this. I also would imagine, and I don’t know, I’m guessing people come to you and I have this feeling about my own anxiety for what it’s worth, that it doesn’t belong to me and I don’t know whose anxiety it is, but I’m sure that people come to you all the time and there’s palpable, huge amounts of relief to realize I do this thing that’s self-harming in some way, whether it’s direct physical action or blowing myself up at my jobs or whatever it may be. And now I understand why, because I haven’t been able to source it in myself. I have never been able to make sense of myself. So I would imagine it’s incredibly relieving for people to lean on something in their family history as a reason.

MARK:

Absolutely. It’s comforting because we’re carrying this coat and we don’t have a hook to hang it on. We’ve been carrying it for years as code of grief or this code of embarrassment or shame or this code of misery. And it doesn’t make sense because we can’t, like you said, source it to anything early, but that opens up the territory of early. We don’t have memories before the age of three, more or less and there’s this whole landscape of trauma that we need to explore. So when I hear the word anxiety, immediately I’m looking at was your mother able to download, to install the software for wellbeing in your core because she fortunately or unfortunately has the greatest job in the world, but to create a sense of peace and safety for the child in this way, how can I say it? Well, if it doesn’t happen, then we have this uncharted landscape of what we don’t remember that begins after conception because the heart starts beating within 20 days and the neural tube and neural groove, that which will become our nervous system, goes online 20 to 30 days.

So within the first month of being a fetus in utero, we are sentient to some degree somatically aware of our surroundings. So it’s massively important how our mom was feeling while she was pregnant. Did she like our dad? Did she feel trapped in the relationship? Did she want to be a mom? Was she prepared? Did she want to keep the baby? Was he drinking? Were they fighting? Were they separating? Even though we’re in utero, this is one of the most important times for neuro development, how our brain is being wired for safety or lack of safety, trust or hypervigilance, feeling open or feeling cautious and we have no memory of this. And then let’s continue it for the first couple years of life, the same thing. Usually we don’t have memories again till age two or three, but this is a massively important time when our brain is being wired for wellbeing.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I mean, I’m laughing because I think about without selling my mom down the river, but my mom is very open and I’ve written about this in the New York Times, but my mom really didn’t want to have kids and I was the second and when she was pregnant with me, she almost aborted me because she got, it was called Rocky Mountain Tick Fever and they just didn’t know what it was going to do to me. And while my dad’s a physician, while he was figuring it out and calling specialists around the country, it became too late. And so they just decided to hope for the best. And then my mom got really sick and infected after I was born and she has tons of attachment wounds from her, let’s just say less than desirable mother. My mom was the oldest of seven kids so you can end up scarce-

MARK:

You’ve just

ELISE:

Given

MARK:

Me 20 things to ... You and I actually have the same childhood just for

ELISE:

The record.

MARK:

Without throwing my mom under the bus, the story was, and I put this in the new version of the book. I didn’t put this version in when she was alive because I didn’t want to embarrass her, but I told the rest of it, which is somewhere in my 50s when she was nearing the end, I sat on her bed and I said, “Mom, I know I have a deeper break in the attachment from what you’ve told me. Come on, tell me the truth. What happen?” She said, “All right.” And she said, “I didn’t want to be pregnant and I had your dad pull me down on my pregnant belly for nine months to dislodge the pregnancy and my mouth dropped off because I knew it. I was teaching this stuff around the world.” I said, “Mom, let me get this straight.” So basically you were trying to end the pregnancy for the whole nine months.

She said, “Yep, you must have really wanted to live.” And that’s the story I must have really wanted to live, but like your story, that creates a wound we can’t locate viscerally until we do deep work

ELISE:

Besides general anxiety of this hyperventilation disorder, chronic hyper overbreathing, which can go on for months and my mom had it. My mom’s the oldest, her next sister had it. I think they both recovered from it, but the two oldest girls who I think were also the most traumatized because the younger sisters got some semblance of mothering from my mom and my aunt. But we all have this breathing pattern and this feeling of scarcity, which shows up all the time. But I don’t know. I mean, I’ve tried everything. So what would you advise someone to do who can’t roll into your office?

MARK:

Yeah. So if I could work with you or them, I would, because those are the cases I take where there’s a symptom that can’t be explained. Now, you’ve already given me the details. If she’s the oldest, but there’s seven kids, there’s kind of a line at six kids. But once we get seven in the past, there’s not enough attunement. And then you use the words her less than desirable mothering from her mother. My own grandmother, my mother’s mother’s an orphan. She loses her parents at two. So she can’t give what she didn’t get and the mothering wasn’t great at all. It was emotionally disconnected. Sorry, grandma. I remember she couldn’t feel. So there’s a huge part of attachment where our mom or the mom needs to match the frequency of the child’s feelings. So if the child’s exuberant, the mother needs to match that exuberance so that’s reflected to the child so the child can take it in.

So in other words, a mother might say, “Oh honey, you’re so happy.” And the child is, “Me happy.” Or, “Oh, honey, you’re so sad. I can see it in your eyes.” Me, sad. So the child can assimilate its own experience through the mother’s reflection. Well, my grandmother had no emotions that were present. So this goes for a lot of people who have either flatlined or matter of fact or emotionally disconnected mothers or the other way, like my mom, frantic and overly emotional, disproportionate, which doesn’t see the emotions of the child. In either case, if the emotions of the child aren’t mirrored back in a way that the child can receive, that’s a massive break in the attachment. In fact, Elise, and then we’ll get to how we work with it because that was your question.

In fact, therapy can be done with one question in my world,

In my world. So I don’t need to get your history. I don’t need to do your genogram. I don’t need to know anything. I just need to ask you this question, which I’m going to ask you. And I’m going to ask it to you, Elise, but you don’t have to answer it. Well, I know the answer because you just told me. But Elise, did you feel seen by your mom really seen that she could intuit what you need and give it to you? Did you feel known that she really knew you and then she could soothe you and you could just nestle in her care? So the question is, did you feel seen known and soothed by your mom? And if somebody says, “No, I did not, “ that is big Trauma. That’s attachment trauma and that’s capital T attachment trauma. Just for the record, guys.

ELISE:

No, and I feel bad that the onus is always on the mom or the primary caregiver. I know it’s largely biological.

MARK:

Wait, wait, I’m interrupting you there. Yeah. Thank you for saying that because it is biological. The child’s attachment with the mother is rooted in biology because in the womb, the rhythms, the smells, the sounds, the feel, the child is learning to be attuned to and the mother is atuning to the child. There’s a co-regulation, a co-relationship happening that is biological that is not the same with the father. So can a father excrete oxytocin? Absolutely, just like a mother. Can he downregulate the child’s nervous system? Absolutely, like the mother, but it’s not biological. And that’s what we miss. So when we say there’s an onus, a burden put on moms, it’s true because of the biological nature of the relationship. As I said earlier, it is the most important relationship and it is throughout our lives in a sense, it’s the most important relationship because if that one has wounds or holes or places that are unexplored or we haven’t done our inner work to heal those places, they show up in our partnerships.

And I say this in every chapter in my book, I think, that our early relationship with our mom is the template, the blueprint for our relationship with a partner. It is not a girl and her dad. It is both a boy and a girl in their early relationship with their mother.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and I think mine’s probably my relationship with my mom is rich in the sense that practically my mom was an exquisite mother who wanted me and my brother, my older brother to have everything that she didn’t have. Sometimes there was, I think, a little bit of ambivalence because she would’ve loved to have herself as her mother, but so practically needs were met and education was prioritized and we have an amazing check the box childhood, but I think that there’s inner anxiety and scarcity in my mother from her own abusive childhood that-

MARK:

I have to interrupt you because I love what you’re saying there. There are a couple things that I want to comment about. So yes, the wounds of your mom from her early childhood, that’s information rich molecules which attach to the DNA and act like dimmer switches turning on parts of what genes will be used and silencing others, turning on and off, that moves forward so to say, and that is what you are born with. So there’s memories of trauma that your mom will have and they’re imprinted in her egg cell, just like in your dad’s sperm cell there are imprinted traumas and this information will pass forward and as a result we’re born with these altered brains, these fight, flight, freeze responses that we’ve inherited from our mom and our dad that prepare us biologically, I would say, to cope with traumas that are similar to the ones that they endured.

So here you are because of your mom’s childhood, you have her fight, flight, freeze responses, but what you told me earlier about being in the womb where there’s no memory that you have, where she was sick and they had this type of fever and they were thinking about an abortion and she’s saying, “I can’t keep you. I can’t keep you. I can’t keep you. We have to give you up.” And then she gets sick again and that’s creating a sea of cortisol that’s passing the blood-brain barrier and moving into the womb and you are now trying to reach up as a fetus to feel the connection with your mom and you can’t because it’s clouded with worry fear/cortisol. So there’s that early landscape that ... So when you said to me, “Mark, what would you do with someone like me? “ Well, I would look at your fight, flight, freeze responses, how they still are expressing in your body and I would work with you to ... But you’ve done this.

I can see it in your face. You show your teeth, you have a bright face. I know you’ve done this work because you look fully alive in your face. Where I would see this wound in the womb is it would be expressed, you would see maybe the downturn mouth because that’s the vagus nerve, the ventral vagus connection can distort how our features look and when we heal, our features can come back alive.

ELISE:

No, I think this is my thing. I mean, I’m still young, so I’ll have other things, but that is all very resonant and also feeling as a kid far more attuned to managing my mom’s anxiety than expressing any of my own. She’s not someone I can go to with any concern because it will freak her out. I think that’s the other-

MARK:

Wait a minute. Now you just told me something else. Okay, look, I love that you’re doing this. It’s like we’re having a session with everybody in the world who’s listening to this because those of us who can’t go to our mom because we don’t want to upset her, don’t want to freak her out, don’t want to rock the boat, don’t want to disrupt her wellbeing. We learn to give and not receive. And in that sense, Elise, that’s a break in the bond. So there’s a place where the child’s only job is to just receive and expand, receive and expand and express, receive, expand, express. But when there was that disruption to, oh, my mom is kind of nervous or my mom can’t handle those things or I can’t go to her, then we learn to give and don’t take in. So that would be part of the palette with which we would paint the canvas of work

ELISE:

So to speak. It’s interesting too. There’s something you said about how even the choice that we make and who we marry is patterned by our mothers, but I can see how that is by that primary attachment, I can see though why we get confused and think it’s our father, right? Because we might end up choosing someone who fits that soothes that I’m married to someone who I get to do a lot of things for him. He’s a wonderful person, but I am the competent one so it makes me feel so in control, Mark.

MARK:

But you gave the information a minute ago. So I have to take care of my mom, not go to her for nurturance and I have to be the competent one, the efficient one, the capable one. You see the stream and then we do that in the partnership. We do

What we did with our mom. So if we had to be ... Look, let’s go back. We have a break in the bond and it feels terrible to feel the fight, flight, freeze responses. Who wants to feel anxious, tight, shaky, trembly? So instead we sort of go outside of our body and concoct strategies to get what we need. So we become efficient because if I’m efficient, then I don’t disrupt my mom. We become capable. We become independent. We become intelligent. We start to construct a personality of strategies to succeed in life, but then these strategies are the inauthentic self, the false self. The real self is that little boy or girl who says, “Hold me, I’m shaking. I’m anxious. Please take care of me, mommy.” But we don’t dare do that because she can’t. She’ll get upset, but that is the authentic self, the panic attacks, the anxiety attacks.

This is the honest, authentic self. So I always tell people when your anxiety comes up, that’s so awesome. It’s knocking on the door to be held, to be talked to, to be soothed, to be comforted.

ELISE:

It’s so powerful. Well, thank you for that and apologies to everyone who can’t relate as we went on that journey. But it’s funny, even in these moments, I’m like, “This feels awfully needy, Elise. He can’t be talking about you. Let’s move on.

MARK:

You’re the best. Wait a minute. Wait, I’m sorry to interrupt again, but the way you’re spelling it out for people, it’s a normal, healthy ... When I look at your face again, you’re fully alive. You’ve done the deep work, obviously. I mean, you’re amazing, but the story you’re telling is everybody’s story.

So I have this ... Wait, I’m going to do it again. I have a mom who didn’t get enough. So that passed to me biologically in terms of fight, flight, freeze responses. Then I have this area which I can’t remember where my mom wasn’t feeling great during the pregnancy and instead was having a lot of cortisol, nervousness, fear, worry that she’s going to lose me or have to give me up. Then there’s that experience. Then I don’t want to upset my mom, so I just can’t go to her for these things. And so this is the perfect story that describes 90% of us, particularly those of us that are givers, Elise, or we give to our partner or we over give or we’re the capable one or the efficient one.

ELISE:

It’s a story. You can’t accept support and nobody understands why. God, life is exhausting.

MARK:

I’ve time because that’s exactly what I get. I get a typical client will say, “Yeah, I feel I have to do everything on my own. I’ll always have to do everything on my own.” And immediately I know it’s attachment because as a child, this particular person couldn’t rely on the mother and that’s attachment.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I think that it’s those really fine distinctions between, of course, I could rely on my mother to take care of all of my basic and essential needs and then some to sort of check the box, right? But I think for a lot of us, it’s that emotional attunement that you’ve been talking about that might be missing or might be fractured where we’re role playing or we’re enacting. And I find myself doing this too sometimes where I’m like, when I turn into my robot self where I’m like, I got to do all the things rather than saying, why? I don’t need to check all the boxes of parenting. I can just chill on the couch with my kids and be a soft lap. So how do we break these patterns? How do we fix these patterns? Is there anything to be done?

MARK:

No. No, there’s nothing to be done. I’ll just

ELISE:

Tell you the quality. Yeah. I’ll leave you there. No. How do we fix these mice? How do we change the expression? How do we start repatterning ourselves?

MARK:

Yeah, no, that’s the big question. And really to heal, we’ve got to have positive experiences that can change our brain and then we need to practice not a lot but enough these new feelings that we have from these positive experiences. Let me go back to Sarah, the first story I told.

Sarah has this experience of comfort and peace being surrounded by these beloved grandparents that she never met and so she goes to cut and all of a sudden there’s this feeling of comfort or support that seems to come out of nowhere, but it doesn’t. It’s coming from her inner landscape. So these new feelings and these new sensations associated with these positive experiences, when we practice them, what’s going on? Well, the first thing that’s going on is we’re creating new neural pathways in our brain of a new experience and really a new way our brain is performing. We’re also stimulating the release of feel good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine or feel good hormones like oxytocin or estrogen. But the important thing is our genes start to change. So the very genes that are involved in the stress response, they can even begin to function in a new way.

We can literally change the way our DNA expresses. So what are these positive experiences? I named comfort and support, but there’s others. There’s feelings of compassion. There’s feelings of gratitude. We all know about gratitude practice, but it’s massively important for changing our frequency. So when we do gratitude, whenever we feel crappy, we’ve all heard do a gratitude practice, but it really changes us. So do it. Practices of a mindfulness practice. Ultimately, anything that allows us to feel strength or peace or joy inside because these experiences feed the prefrontal cortex and help us basically they help us calm down. They help us downregulate our nervous system. But if I had to put it in a nutshell, because I want to go even deeper here because not everybody knows what I mean when I say positive experiences. I would say first we need to practice being with the uncomfortable sensations in our body because that’s what most of us have.

We have tightness. We have a feeling of shutting down, a feeling of being compressed, squeezed, panicked, shaky, trembly, burning, all these sensations that we have. We need to practice being with those until we can reach what’s beneath them, which are sensations that we experience as life giving if we hang in there, sensations such as pulsing, tingling, softening, expanding, blood flowing, waves of energy going up and down or a warm feeling, waves of warmth, really sensations that are in our deep core because when we can stay with those and hold them, the magic number is 60 and six. If we can hold those sensations for at least 60 seconds and do it six times a day, then we can calm our vagus nerve. We can downregulate our nervous system. We can literally change our brain.

ELISE:

It’s interesting. I try not to be a psychedelic pusher, particularly because I feel like a lot of people only know me from rolling around on the ground doing mushrooms and I’m not that person. Ironically, I’ve done psychedelics three times I think in my life, mostly for that TV show. But I was listening to a conversation with, I’m going to butcher her name, but it’s something like Goul Tobin. She’s a researcher in MDMA, I think specifically and she was talking about how they’re starting to understand what’s actually happening in those sessions and with drugs like Ibogaine, that it opens up for a period of two or three weeks and this is why integration and doing it with the right therapist is so important. These are not recreational medicines, but that it opens that brain up for learning for a window of time to be exactly what you said, sort of an expedited opportunity to reprogram some of the neural circuitry.

I don’t know if you’re a fan or not, but I mostly do what you do, which is this old-fashioned, small, incremental attention to myself rather than sort of hero dosing myself to wellness. But I will say I did do the MAPS three-part MDMA series. I do think it actually really helped. It helped me in the way that you’re describing Sarah being with herself and being able to look for resources in her extended world. I now have that capacity to be with little Elise or I didn’t have that before, which is odd. I didn’t know what that would’ve felt somatically. That whole connection was missing for me.

MARK:

Well, I love that you said Little Elise because right there that just gives us all permission to be with that young part of us that is feeling uncomfortable and generally we want to get away from that and push it away or drown, take antidepressants or drink or do whatever, go exercise, do what we do not to feel it. But that young part of us is screaming, banging on the door to get our attention. And it is little Mark, little at least little all of us that is saying, “Look, I just need to be held and breathe with until we can access that deeper feeling of expansion in the core.” It really is easy when we can go there and stay there. It’s like, wow, what is this? Whoa. So yeah, I’ve done shrooms and had some amazing experiences, but I’m like you with that. I don’t do it a lot.

In fact, the last time I did it was so profound that I haven’t wanted to touch it and do another one because I mean, how do you top that one? So okay, I got off track. What

ELISE:

Was I saying? I mean, I watched that space with sort of attention. I am also very wary of that space and the psychonauts and the people who come back and think that they’re Messiah and it’s dangerous, not necessarily MDMA, but some of the other stuff that people are doing. That’s a whole conversation for another day, but I am so excited you’re writing another book. I can’t wait. I hope I get an early copy and that you’ll come back. And I know that the workbook besides sort of the wholly renovated and refreshed book, that the workbook is essentially, I’ve heard you equate it to doing a session with you, so I can’t wait to do it.

MARK:

Yeah, that’s the way I designed it. It’s like having a personal session with me. It really is. I go step by step. I’m right there beside you. We go into an experience and we make it very visceral, very somatic. Then the next practice we take that and go a level deeper, even more somatic. And then again, we take it again and go even more somatic. So there’s a really great visceral physical movement. And what I talked about just a few minutes ago accessing those deeper feelings in our core, that’s really what the workbook is oriented toward. And then I also wanted to give people the experience of a family constellation. Well, how do you do that in a workbook? Well, I figured it out. So I have people put flip-flops or shoes in the room at a certain distance and to stand in them as their mother or their father or their mother when they were young or themselves as what they don’t remember.

At least stand over here as you as a fetus. And then you’re standing in these footprints and you’re accessing feelings that would be like, “How am I feeling this? How’s this possible?” Or you’re standing as your mom when she was a little girl and not having the best mothering and feeling her anxiety. Well, that’s what I did with people. I have them stand in the footsteps and experience these visceral experiences of a family constellation, which we know happens with the representatives, but they themselves are the representatives of their own life.

ELISE:

We didn’t really get a chance to talk about family constellation work today, but it is, I’ve watched sessions, I’ve seen it happen and you start watching people. And also sometimes when you do it in a group and other people are standing there representing your dad or whomever and people start talking and it’s crazy. I mean, it is wild. It’s one of the nuttier things that I’ve experienced in terms of what people are able to bring through and the accurate ... I mean, it’s similar to what you were describing with Sarah being able to actively talk to her dead grandparents. This stuff is real. It’s somewhat inexplicable, but it is quite powerful to watch.

MARK:

They made a movie of my book on Netflix Another Self where there’s a facilitator leading people on these family constellations. I think they did that movie out of Turkey, but no, it’s amazing. That’s what Bert Hellinger did. So Virginia Sutter, she’s the mother of family constellations. She invents something called family sculpting. And then Bert Hellinger says, “Well, wait a minute, these people are having access to information, these representatives, these people that are in the sculpture, they’re part of a knowing field and if we listen to them or watch them or hear or watch what they’re experiencing, we’re going to gain in Information he discovered. So he was the one who brought that whole idea of the aliveness of the representative. But what I try to do in the book is make you your own representative so you don’t even have to rely on other people. You get the data, you get the visceral download of what’s happening through doing the practices in the workbook. Elise, what I did because I want to say something about, but

I wrote the original book 10 years ago and I was thrilled with it and everything was great. But then over the last 10 years there’s been all this new research done with humans. And back then I was talking about mice and a few human studies, but not what has been happening in the past 10 years. So I went to my publisher, Viking Penguin, and I said, “I’ve got to redo it. My insights are different. My awareness is all this new research.” So they gave me the go ahead and I gutted the old book and I put in all this new research with humans and all these new cases. I even include Sarah’s case in there, the one I talked about and I do a lot more about attachment and I even talk about how generational trauma we used to think three years is a limit and now we find it can extend out to five years.

I talk about how to discern whether your trauma is a trauma of attachment or a trauma of a generational trauma. So I do that with the reader as well in the book. And the other thing is I put these amazing cases in. There’s a case last year even that I think is startling where they looked at Syrian refugees that had experienced war violence and they found an intergenerational epigenetic signature of violence in the genome of three generations. And then there’s this other study that came out a couple years ago in Brazil that I talk about, about grandmothers who were exposed to partner violence and how that partner violence through one of the mechanisms called DNA methylation that blocks the proteins from attaching to the DNA, how for three generations they could see changes in DNA methylations. So grandmothers are able to pass this partner violence experience to their granddaughters who are being born with these feelings of like that, that.

I mean, where does that come from, right?

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s a frontier. I mean, it’s amazing again to think about what we’ll be able to understand place and hopefully address emotionally, scientifically. I don’t know. I mean, you think about what this field will look like in 50 years and it’s kind of amazing to be able to sort of say, “That’s not a helpful ... Thank you, grandma. I don’t live in a war zone. This isn’t helpful. I need something else.” Yeah.

MARK:

No, I’m glad you brought that up, the war zone because this is ... I feel like I just want to tell the story of grandparents who come from the war zone. So this trauma happens and then, okay, there’s these chemical signals in our cells that attach to our DNA and then they tell the cell, either use or ignore this certain gene so we can better deal with this trauma we’re experiencing of war. And then the way their genes are affected will change how they act or feel that they’ll become more sensitive or reactive to situations that will they’re going to now pass that experience through the DNA to the kids. But if our grandparents are from this war torn country and which is going on in the world right now, people being shot, bombs going off, uniformed men lining people up in the square, people being taken away, people being shot, hung, all that stuff, our grandparents could pas down a couple different types of skillsets.

One could be helpful, sharper reaction times, sharper reflexes to help the descendants experience this sort of trauma. But the problem is they’re also passing down the experience of a heightened nervous system, stress responses with a diocese to 10. And then we in the next generation or even the next generation below that don’t make the link that our anxiety, our hypervigilance, our experience to chaos, our experience to loud noises, our depression, that this is connected to our grandparents. We just think we’re wired this way.

ELISE:

Right. Yeah. Oh, it’s so rich. Please come back now that you’re out of the cave. I can’t wait for whatever you do next and I hope it’s not the last, even though I know you always say it’s the last, but I hope I see you again soon, Mark.

MARK:

I hope so too, Elise.

ELISE:

So I wish we’d been able to spend more time on family consolations because it really is the most striking, most startling casework that comes out of books like It Didn’t Start With You, but it speaks to this idea that even though we may not have even known these people that we’re still bathing in our genetic destiny, we’re still resonating with the people in our families who came before us and their patterns for survival. And it makes so much sense. I think back in the day when so many of these therapy systems first started emerging on some level they seemed they made sense and yet they didn’t make sense scientifically. We had no evidence at that point of epigenetics, which is that we can change how we express our genes, even though it takes a long time for genes themselves to actually evolve and shift over time.

So it’s kind of amazing, I think, to think about this field and where it will be even in 10 years. And I think that we will have so many more tools for both understanding exactly what’s going on and addressing it. I think that the more that this work gets out there and the more comfortable we are with the reality that we are all part of a lineage and that nobody gets everything that they need and that things happen that fracture families all the time, whether it’s wars or divorce or death or illness, that we still have a responsibility to heal those things and reintegrate them and that if we don’t, they become the burden of future generations. So I think as that becomes more understood and that it goes backwards and forwards, we can heal past generations as well That’s really powerful stuff and hopefully it feels less triggering than everything needing to be dialed into your immediate family of origin because I do think moms get such a tough, tough break and carry so much baggage that’s, I understand it’s biological, but it still feels unfair.

And to that point, to all the moms out there, it’s like I don’t think any of us need to feel any more responsibility than we already do, but this is a cultural issue where attachment wounds happen in part because we have a culture that doesn’t support women at all. We are actively working hard to make our culture now support women even less. And so how could we expect any more from women who have no resources, there’s no culture of care, there’s no network, there’s no paid family leave, et cetera. So I just want to shout out all the moms. We’re all doing the best we can. I think that obviously needs to be stated and we need collectively, culturally to do much more. All right friends, I’ll see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word.

Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.