The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Mark Wolynn | How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Join us for our Life of Purpose series this month as we revisit some of our most impactful episodes. Dive deep into expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community, helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

Mark Wolynn says that inherited family trauma can become a core language that we tell ourselves – leading to our own unexplained anxiety, depression or other mental illnesses. He joins us to share the redeeming truth that even though this trauma didn’t start with you, it can end with you. Through healing we can find a way to change and break inherited family patterns.

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Duration:: 1h 14m
Broadcast on:: 12 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed, this month we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to UnmistakeableCreative.com/Lifepurpose again. If the worst thing happened to you, if things suddenly came undone, if things went terribly wrong, what's your worst fear, what's the worst thing that could happen to you? And when people answer that question, they come up with this, what I call this very deep thread of this core language. For example, the answer that could be, "I'll be all alone," "There'll be no one there," or, "I'll be betrayed," or, "I'll be powerless," or, "I'll be helpless," or, "I'll be annihilated," or, "I'll be destroyed." That type of language, you know, comes from early trauma with attachment. So I've discovered, Srini, there's two types of this core language. There's attachment language that comes from either our attachment with our mom, her attachment with her mom, or our dad's attachment with his mom. And I call that early trauma core sentences, early attachment core sentences. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the UnmistakeableCreative podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who've started movements, built driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at UnmistakeableCreative.com. Mark, welcome to The UnmistakeableCreative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you for having me, Srini. Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So I came across your book. It didn't start with you, how inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle at the recommendation of a girl that I wanted to date with, and I've read tons and tons of self-help books trying to solve many of my problems. And this was one of the few that I really honestly, I came out of it and thought, "Wow, I have never gotten so much clarity from a book." But before we get into all of that, I want to start by asking what I think is a very relevant question given the subject matter of your work, and that is, what is one of the most important things that you learn from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing with your life. That is a good question. I've never been asked it before. I would say my father took things apart. He was very mechanical, and I would sit and watch him do this. He would build things and take things apart. And I think that in a sense, I feel that I'm doing the same thing, taking a story apart when I'm working with people and looking at the deepest intricacies. In some ways, I see myself as the guy with the flashlight shining it on the symptoms and the behaviors that we can't explain. So whether I'm working with clinicians or non-clinicians, it's really to dig into this area that's relatively new, this idea of generational trauma and its biological effects. Anything for that question? I never had that question before. It makes me wonder, right? You decided to start taking human beings apart, at least their stories and their mindsets, but most people might look at a parent taking things apart and think, "Oh, I'm going to become an engineer or somebody who builds things." How in the world did it lead you down this path of all things to become somebody who does what you do? The answer to that is twofold. One is always a deep curiosity of the intricacies of things, but the deeper answer is, I fell apart. I lost my eyesight in one of my eyes. Probably, oh, I don't know, as a young man, maybe 30, I began to lose the vision in one of my eyes, and the doctors told me that I had a rare form of retinopathy, for which there was no cure, and they couldn't give me anything. The best they could tell me is, "We think it's stress," and I couldn't figure out where that stress was coming from, and I had no idea what to do, and because of the way the vision was progressing, they told me I was likely going to lose the vision in my other eyes well, and I was desperate to find help, and I went on a search for healing, one that led me halfway around the globe, literally, as far as Indonesia, where I learned from several wise teachers who taught me some fundamental principles. Principles were not taught here, one of which was the importance of healing my broken relationship with my parents, but before I could do that, I had to heal what stood in the way, though I didn't know it at the time, which would have been inherited family trauma. I had no clue that I was on a search for, but specifically the anxiety that I had inherited from my grandparents, all of whom were orphaned in some way, three of them lost their mothers when they were infants or toddlers, and the fourth she lost her father when she was one, so ultimately she, as well, loses her mother in the grief, and this anxiety, this was the real cause of my vision loss, I have a little story that I just remember being five or six years old, and every time my mom would leave the house, I would panic, and I didn't know that I had inherited this feeling of being broken from a mother's love, because that's ultimately what lives in the family, and five or six running panic, she's gone, I'm running into her bedroom every time she'd leave the house, and I'm going into her room, and I'm pulling open her drawers, and I'm literally crying into her scarves and her nightgowns, thinking that I'd never see her again, and all I would have left would be her smell. Now, I don't connect this two years later, but that would have been the experience of my grandparents, all little babies having nothing left, but maybe their mom's house coat, or a blanket, forty years later, I share this with my mom, she told me she did the exact same thing when her mother left the house, and then my sister reading the book said, "Honey, that's what I would do when mom would leave the house," and that was a family pattern. This brokenness from the mother, for me, it expressed in losing my vision. They said stress, but they were right. It was the terror of aloneness, and after healing the broken bond, the broken attachment with my mom, my sight came back, and then afterwards I felt compelled to share these principles I learned, and ultimately I developed a method for healing the effects of inherited family trauma. No. All the way to where we'll get into. One thing I wonder, and this is fresh on my mind because tomorrow I'm interviewing a man who's actually been blind for most of his life, having your vision compromised, change your vision for what was possible with your life. Well, none of the old answers made any sense. So, you know, I remember back then trying, "Well, I can just fix this. Heal this. I can go to an acupuncturist. I can take supplements. I can go to a hands-on healer. I can go to a different type of doctor. I can go to an alternative doctor. What was so funny is everything I did made things worse. Not because they weren't doing their job. It was because I wasn't doing my job. The real job was that something was broken in me, and every direction, every path led me back into myself into what I wasn't seeing. You know, it's a quick metaphor, right? Your eyes are blind, and the quick metaphor is, "What can't you see?" But in this case, it was quite true. I couldn't see what I was doing with the pain I was feeling, how I was avoiding it, how I wasn't able to stay inside the uncomfortable feelings of great aloneness, the terror that I had experienced. Instead, I walked around as a shaking, vibrating teenager, and young man in my 20s, literally, with panic attacks. I remember back then I was carrying a volume in my pocket in case I had one of these utter panic attacks. The work itself led me to look at what lived beneath my shaking, what lived beneath my terror. That's what led me to look into a deeper relationship with my parents, and then a deeper understanding of what occurred in my family history. It was all quite accidental. You opened the book by saying that the answer may not lie within our own story as much as in the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even our great-grandparents, the latest scientific research now making headlines also tells us that the effects of human trauma can pass from one generation to the next. That's a real anomaly in the culture of self-development and psychology and therapy, because one of the things you hear over and over and over is, "Oh, you need to take 100% responsibility for all the things that have happened in your life," yet you're not even the one who had anything to do with many of the things that have happened in your life. How do you resolve those two paradoxes? The best way I can answer that is to tell a story. My first case that led me to look into this direction of inherited family trauma. Sure, I'm doing the work on my own at this point, but I don't know how to do this with a client. I remember, oh my goodness, again, almost 30 years ago, I'm working with a young woman 24 years old, a cutter, and there was something unusual about the way that she cut. She would cut so deeply that she would hit a vessel, a vein, an artery. She'd almost bleed to death, and her parents would have to rush her to the hospital because she was going to bleed out. Then they'd lock her in a psych ward for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks at a time. I was flummoxed. I wasn't able to help her. She was flummoxed, not knowing why she cut so deeply. Then one day when she got out of the psych ward, I handed her a pen. I'm going to call her Sarah for the sake of this talk. I said, "Sarah, take this pen and imagine, visualize it's the knife that you use to cut your arms, your legs, your abdomen, and just hold it to your body. Tell me what happens when you have that knife right close to your body?" She brings this pen close to her arm. In that moment, I could see she starts to glaze over, she starts to dissociate, and I said, "Right there, right there. What's that feeling? What's that thought? What's that urge? What's that impulse?" She said, "Looked at me, flummoxed herself and said, "I don't deserve to live." Here I am looking at a 24-year-old woman whose life has just begun. I said, "What did you do? Did you take somebody's life? Did you cause an accident? Did you break up with somebody who took his or her life? What happened?" She said, "Nothing like that." I did the usual stuff. What I knew how to do back then I looked at her relationship with her parents. I looked in her childhood. I looked at her attachment. Again, no answer. She had a great relationship with her mom. She was able to receive her mom's love and nurturance and care. She adored her mom. She had a great relationship with her dad. She could receive his love. Then I figured it had to be in the attachment. I looked at her early relationship. Again, strong, safe, secure attachment with her mom. I was flummoxed. Luckily, I asked the next question. I said to her, "It's okay. Well, then tell me about your grandparents." Boom. She dropped the bomb. Her grandmother was an alcoholic. She was driving the car drunk one day. This is her father's parents. The grandfather was in the passenger seat. Grandma drunk, crashes into a pole. Grandpa goes through the windshield and gets cut, lacerated on the glass, and bleeds to death before the ambulance arrives. In that moment, we made an incredible connection that when she cuts, she's mirroring something about the grandfather who bleeds to death. She's feeling like the grandmother who deserves to die, who doesn't deserve to live, or killing somebody, taking the life of her beloved. In that moment, because I had been trained in a bunch of psychodrama modalities, I put two chairs in the room, and I had her tell her grandpa and her grandma what she was doing. It was interesting. I said, "Sara, tell your grandfather that you cut yourself so deeply that you almost bleed to death." Then, add the words like you did, grandpa, and she's crying. I said, "What's happening?" She says, "He doesn't want me to do this." He says, "Every time I go to cut myself, think of him supporting me, being with me, and he'll be there." I thought, "Wow, this is great. She's got a resource out of this chair. I have no idea what I'm developing at this point. This is 30 years ago." Then, I said, "Tell your grandmother the same thing. Tell her that you feel you deserve to die, but grandma, that's your feeling." Again, these grandparents, she's never met or telling her they'll be there to support her, and every time she goes to cut to feel them there. I could go on an on-screenie, but the bottom line is, "I begin to develop this insight, this pathway into the stories of the past, into stories that happened before we were born, and how they're still alive in our lives." Along the way, of course, then, yes, I develop this model of working, but it's quite accidental. Ryan Reynolds, here for, I guess, my hundredth mid-commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. 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I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim. So it takes time. And we often need a guide. I was in the pre-talk that you and I had, you told me you figured out some things in your own by reading the book. It's so awesome you did that and that's why I wrote this book. So, because not everybody has access to a therapist. So I thought, okay, write a book that people can go from A to Z on their own. And that was my intention. You say that it's not only what we inherit from our parents, but also how they were parented that influences how we relate to a partner, how we relate to ourselves and how we nurture our children for better or worse parents tend to pass on the same parenting they themselves received. Absolutely. I mean, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with my mother. She means well, most of the time, but we definitely have our differences and it was kind of, and sometimes she nags about really stupid things, things that I think are incredibly unimportant that are just like, you know, stuff related to cleaning the house. And I remember my grandmother was visiting and I was watching the two of them interact and my grandmother was asking her about lighting some sort of candle in the Pooja room and my grandmother must have asked her like a hundred times in the day. And I looked at both of them and I was like, holy shit, I was like, I know where this comes from. It was just like, I can't believe that I am seeing this, you know, unfold before my eyes. But it sounds to me, I think every one of us, even though we hear that, I can't tell you how many people say, okay, you know what, I definitely am not going to do the things that my parents have done. And I've asked friends about this, do you ever find yourself being exactly what you said you wouldn't be? I mean, it sounds to me like we can overcome those patterns. You know, I always like to say that it isn't so much the traumas in our family history in and of themselves, but it's how they affect and limit parenting. So grandma or grandpa goes through some very severe difficulties or misfortunes or traumas in his life, her life. And this has a tremendous effect on what they could give to our mother or what they could give to our father. And then the parent turns to us with inabilities to give what they didn't get. And so I forget your question already. Yeah, it was more a comment than a question, but it's a great, I'm glad that you, you know, you got that out of the book, you know, because ultimately, no matter what trauma lives in the family history, how did it affect your mom's ability to bond with you? Because we know from the science that, you know, one of the most replicated studies in all of epigenetics is separating little baby mice from their mothers and then seeing the effects for three generations. And that's so startling to me, because what I've learned, even in those studies, but also in the field, working with people, is we don't just have our attachment history with our mom to look at. We've got our mom's history with her mom and our dad's history with his mom to look at too, because those are heritable. So the broken relationship our mom had with her mother lives in our body as a wound that's passed forward. So, you know, we don't always know whose trauma it is we're working with traumas there. Yeah. Yeah. So you talk in chapter four about this idea of the core language approach, and you say, we don't realize the breadcrumbs of our core language all around us. They live in the words we speak aloud and one spoken in silence. They live in the words that go off continually in our heads like the alarm clock. But instead of falling into see where they lead, we may be paralyzed by the trans these words created inside us. Now, traditional self help pretty much bullshit you with things like, Oh, just say a bunch of affirmations and overcome all that nonsense. And you actually have a very different take on this. You say the intense or urgent word we use to describe our deepest fears. That's our core language. Can you expand on that for people who are listening who may not have read the book? Like, what is core language and how does it affect our experience of our lives? Yeah, I'm sort of doing the opposite of affirmations in a way. I'm having us dig up the very difficult language, because I've discovered, I've discovered that when a trauma happens, clues are left behind clues in the form of emotionally charged words and sentences that live inside us. And I found that they form like they form a breadcrumb trail. If we learn how to listen to it, we learn how to follow this breadcrumb trail, it's like finding the missing piece of the puzzle, which lets the whole picture come into view and then finally gives us a context for for why we feel the way we feel. Look, if we look at trauma theory, we know that when a traumatic event happens to us, significant information bypasses the frontal lobes. So the experience of exactly what happened can't be named or ordered in words because our language centers have become compromised. And our memory centers have become compromised. And then without this language, our experiences, the experiences of a trauma, they're stored as fragments of memory, fragments of body sensations, fragments of images, fragments of language, emotions. It's like the mind disperses. And these essential elements, they get separated. So we lose the story of the trauma in a way. We remember too much or we remember too little, and we never complete the healing. Yet these pieces aren't lost. They've simply, as I talk about in that book, they've simply been re-routed and they can resurface in our verbal and our non-verbal trauma language. So going back to Sarah, who I talked about a few minutes ago, her verbal trauma language is, I won't deserve to live or I don't deserve to live. I deserve to die. And I'm thinking, holy cow, why is she saying that? That's her verbal trauma language. Her non-verbal trauma language is the fact that she cuts herself so deep deeply that she's almost bleeding to death. So there's these two streams of language. When it's non-verbal, we look for the physical and emotional symptoms that show up after an unsettling event, or we look for the fears and anxieties that strike suddenly when we reach a particular age. Often it's the same age that something traumatic happened in our family history, or we look for the depression, the destructive behaviors that show up after a situation that's similar to some trauma in our family history that we don't even know. It could be in a generation before us or two generations ago. I think that when I sat down and identified my core language and we'll get into the unconscious themes, I came to this conclusion of, I'm going to die alone or I'm never going to find real love. And I'm like, where the hell does this come from? And it's funny because here's what was odd to me when I sat down and did this map and we'll talk about that map in a second. I knew about all these events. I just never put them into this context to say, oh my God, that's where it comes from. I'd seen literally every grandparent ended up losing their significant other early in their life, both from my dad's and my mom's side. I'd seen multiple, some of the first time, particularly because divorces are uncommon in Indian families, but I saw weddings that didn't happen that were planned, first-time divorces, marriages that didn't work out. And I couldn't believe how often I'd seen all of these things around me yet until I sat down and did this. I never realized that this was literally everywhere in my life. Yeah, that's brilliant work that you did to uncover that. We know the stories. We know them very often. They'd been talked about when we were children. They were spoken about a couple of times. But we were told never to speak about them or we were, again, this reminds me of a case. I recently worked with this woman and she knows what happens in her family, but she doesn't connect it. She was diagnosed with cancer a few months after her dog died. As I'm working with her, I'm talking about the dog. Tell me about your dog. She said, "Well, I was with him for 16 years. He was everything to me." I write this down because that sentence, I was with him for 16 years. He was everything to me. I've learned over these years to listen to this language, this trauma language. And then I started asking about her family history and get this serenee. Her mother's favorite brother dies in a car accident. The mother was 16. And this was her favorite brother. He was everything to her. And so she was with him 16 years. And then even her father was 16 when his father died suddenly of a massive stroke. And he was with him for 16 years. So the client who's an only child carries the unresolved grief of both parents. And then that's her verbal language. Her nonverbal language is having health issues arise after her 16-year-old dog dies. I'm listening as the clinician. I'm listening to our, just like you did, our verbal and our nonverbal trauma language because it's telling the whole story. Let's talk about these foreign conscious themes that you talk about. You talk about merging with a parent, rejecting a parent, experiencing a break in the early bond with a mother or identifying with a member of the family system other than our parents. The reason this struck me in particular is because there's something, and I know that you've referenced Bruce Lipton's work in this book as well, who we've had as a guest here on Unmistakable Creative. And I asked him this question. I want to ask you this question because I'm curious based on sort of your experience with this. I was born in 1978 and my dad left before I was born because he had to start a PhD in Australia. So my dad wasn't actually there when I was born. And I didn't see him until I think I was three or four months old. And my mom apparently went into a pretty severe postpartum depression because at that time it was difficult to make phone calls. It was really expensive to call from India. And what I wonder, based on your experiences, what kind of impact that would have on my adult life? So the first thing I would look at would be the break in the attachment with your mother. Because remember, I said a little earlier, but I want to say it again. It's so important. Yes, there are hundreds or dozens or multiple traumas in our family history. But not all these traumas have an effect on us directly. But one of the most direct paths is these traumas limit what our parents could receive or limit what we could receive. So there's this trauma. Your mom goes into a postpartum depression when you're a couple months old. And now all of a sudden, her light, the light that she shines on her baby, you is dimmed by the heavy feelings of I miss him or I can't talk to him. Will I ever see him again? Is he being faithful? Is he is he coming back? How am I doing this alone? I don't have I don't have enough support. And though that would shine a dimmer light on the babies would likely I can't say for sure would likely shine a dimmer light on what this baby at this crucial time this very important time for neural development needs. He needs mom's light to be more bright rather than dimmed by a postpartum depression. So one of the four themes I talk about is a break in the attachment with our mom, which occurs when there are early events. Really, I look from conception to age 10 events that would challenge the safety and security of the child. You know, when mom's connection is cut off, we you and I have difficulty trusting the feeling of who we are inside. That's because the child's inner experience of himself is dependent on mom's attunement. And when we have a break in the bond with our mother because she is postpartum depression, dad goes away. We also in a sense have a break in the bond with ourselves. You know, the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohat, he talks about how the gleam and our mother's eye is the vehicle through which we develop in a healthy way. And when we're cut off from our mom's presence because she emotionally is not feeling very good, we're also cut off from our core, our gut feelings, our inner experience of ourselves. Or you know, when mom's depressed or not in sync with us, the message is to the baby is something's wrong. Or if she's afraid, I'm afraid. And if her attention is diverted because of stress or, you know, we panic, where did she go? Or I don't matter? Or I'm not enough? Or I'm too much? Ultimately, you know, we feel something must be wrong with me because she's not present. And as early as in utero, we learn to either organize around her feelings. If I make mom feel okay, then I'll be okay. Or we stop trusting her love. We stop trusting receiving from her. And then we yearn for that security that a mother gives. It's missing the dopamine, really, that's missing in the brain's reward motivation circuitry. And then we search outside ourselves and blah, blah, blah. You know, so yes, one of my four themes is did something early happen like a postpartum depression that broke our connection from trusting our mom's love. So on that note, I have to ask you a question that is just out of morbid curiosity. So, you know, I for a long time had this sort of envious feeling of the bond that my sister and my dad have. And I realized I was like, there's no way I'm ever going to compete with that. Then I started seeing it across all of my friends who have daughters. And I was like, Oh my God, there's something really different between of the bond that takes place between a father and daughter. Like, I just know my dad well enough to know to the point where it's the kind of thing where he listens to her like he doesn't listen to anybody else. And I told this story before where we had this atrocious looking family portrait hanging in our living room that was massive. My mom and I were like, take this down. My sister came home and she's like, we're not the Trump's move it to another room. And he did instantly. It was one of those moments. There's something very special about the bond between them. And I realized I was never going to compete with that because my job wasn't to compete with that. But why is that? Why do fathers and daughters have the bond that they do that is so different from fathers and sons? In all families, that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes if a dad was close with his dad, he'll be close with his son. Sometimes if a dad is broken with his dad or he was too close with his mom, he'll go in the opposite direction and become close to his daughter. So you know, again, we have to look worldwide and statewide and citywide. And we have to look at our parents' relationships with their parents and what was flowing and what wasn't flowing and then how they're striking relationships with their children. And again, you and I, both having early events that would break our bond with our mom, would recognize when other people have these loving bonds that we don't have, that would be in our radar because the deepest bond is mother and child because that bond begins in utero. It's actually the first bond. It's the first relationship. It's even before dad comes into the picture that we're already in relationship with our mom. And when something devastating happens to that bond, like she goes into postpartum depression, or in my case, there's events to the pregnancy and four seps deliveries and mom in the hospital. Then we look at those bonds that other people have with a yearning because we didn't get it. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do this. Let's shift gears and start talking about the core language map. I know this might be difficult to do via audio, but can you talk about how somebody creates a core language map and what it reveals? And let's start with this idea of the core complaint because you say to hear the core complaint in our everyday language, we look for the deepest threat of emotion in the fabric of the words we speak. We listen for words that have the strongest emotional resonance to them. Right. Okay. So, one of us will walk around. One of the questions in the core language map is, tell me your worst fear. If the worst thing happened to you, if things suddenly came undone, if things went terribly wrong, if things suddenly fell apart, what's your worst fear? What's the worst thing that could happen to you? And when people answer that question, they come up with this, what I call this very deep thread of this core language. For example, the answer that could be, I'll be all alone. There'll be no one there, or I'll be betrayed, or I'll be powerless, or I'll be helpless, or I'll be annihilated, or I'll be destroyed. That type of language, and I have that type of language, my language is, I'll be destroyed, I'll be ruined, I won't exist. I'll be annihilated. It comes from early trauma with attachment. So, I've discovered, Srini, there's two types of this core language. There's attachment language that comes from either our attachment with our mom, her attachment with her mom, or a dad's attachment with his mom. And I call that early trauma core sentences, early attachment core sentences. And then there are these generational core sentences, sort of like Sarah had. I won't deserve to live. Another one is, I'll do something terrible. It'll all be my fault. Another one is, I'll go crazy, they'll lock me up. Another one is, I'll be ostracized. I'll be sent away. The way dad was sent away to boarding school. Or another one is, I'll be forgotten, like our stillborn brother that nobody talks about. Or another one is, I'll hurt someone. I'll hurt a child. This is generational core language. So, I've learned to look based on this language that we talk about, whether we're looking at something that a wound had happened to attachment, or a wound that happened generationally that we're carrying. And just even giving your story, you've got both. You've got the attachment language of Aldi alone, which is the baby's feeling of, "Hey, there's no mother here if she's got postpartum depression." But you've also got the generational story of, I'll die alone, because 20 people in my family died alone. They lost their great love. They lost their wife. They lost their husband. They had marriages that didn't take place, as you told me. They're spouses died young. So, in a sense, you've got a double-barrow shotgun facing you with two streams of this language. So, it's lovely, really, because you've done all that deep work to isolate it. But it's so cool when we do this, because it says, "Oh, my goodness, this is what I've been living." Stories that aren't mine, a generational story, generational story, or attachment story that is mine, or a generational story that is heritable that came to me. I have a secret. I wore the wrong foundation for years. Then I discovered Ilmakayaj. Their AI-powered quiz makes it so easy to find a perfect match, customized for your unique skin tone, undertone, and coverage needs. With 600,000 5-star reviews and 50 shades of flawless natural coverage, this foundation is going viral for a reason. And with Try Before You Buy, you can try your full size at home for 14 days. Take the quiz at ilmakayaj.com/quiz. That's i-l-m-a-k-i-a-g-e.com/quiz. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 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Let's reclaim our peace and put an end to those spam text messages and other data privacy issues once and for all. Well, I remember the week I did it. I mean, I was in tears every morning. It was the most painful sort of cathartic thing at the same time, and it was so bizarre. But there's something that you say many of us hold images that are painful. Images of our parents not giving us enough. Images of not getting what we needed. Uncheck these inner images can direct the course of our lives, forming a blueprint for how our lives will continue. And I remember reading that, and I don't remember who it was. A friend tried to kind of walk, maybe it was a therapist. Her friend was like asking me about childhood memories of my mother. And I said, I can't come up with any that I look at fondly, to be honest. I don't remember any in which I felt warmth in any one of them. And as much as I hate to say that, I just don't. Right. Well, you and me both really, what we're sharing together is we have these early events. People discount maybe the importance of postpartum depression, but we can't discount it. The baby is in such need of the mother's light. So early to build a neurological safety, in a sense, our early experiences are, there's a pruning going on neurologically based on our early caregiving environment. And when these events happen, we then have these, we don't have positive memories. Actually, I talk about that in the book, I talk about the negativity bias. We talk about where we only have memories that are painful of she was never there. She wasn't warm and loving. She wasn't affectionate. Those types of memories, because those we think are protecting us. For example, I refuse to be vulnerable and think of positive memories. So my mind is oriented around the negative memories. So I don't have to get the rug pulled out from under me. So we only have memories that aren't fond, which is so powerful of you to even allow those memories to come and say, "I only have negative memories," which is like wonderful, because we're really digging right there into the trauma as to why something happened. I can't say enough serenee how these early events affect us. Was dad cheating? Were mom and dad drinking? Were we in an incubator? Was mom hospitalized? Were we hospitalized? Did they take a vacation too early? Did they send us to stay with grandma for a week when we were only six months old? Were they fighting a lot? Were they splitting up? Were they separating? These early events have an effect on our safety and security that we're building, which therapists would call, psychologists would call a secure, safe, healthy attachment. And when these events happen, it digs in, it breaks that attachment, and that can leave a scar or wound that lives with us for a lifetime until we do what you and I did. We dug in and we saw, "Oh, that's what happened. There was this, you know, dad goes to school, mom's depressed." That's the story right there, along with the stories of everybody in the family. Sorry to keep using your case, but it's so brilliant. It's so perfect, but it's exactly how we operate. We have something from a mystery we live with that we can't explain that's usually got two streams, an attachment stream and a generational stream. I remember looking at this, I sent it to a friend. I was like, "This is a Bollywood movie in the making." And then my cousin said, "Just make sure everybody's dead when you're right, the screen player." I was like, "All right." One thing that you say, let's talk about now integration and insight, because I think that was one of the things that was really beautiful for me was that all it took was doing the map to say, "Holy shit, just that awareness alone made the fear go away, but I don't think that's going to be the case for many people." And it's not like that narrative doesn't still come up in my head of, "Oh, maybe I'm going to be alone." It's a hell of a lot less after going through this, just for affirmation for the work that you've done. One thing that you talk about, you say early in the chapter about healing, you say reconciliation is mostly an internal movement. Our relationship with other parents is not dependent on what they do, how they are, how they respond. It's about what we do. And my immediate response was, "Thank God, because my reconciliation with my mom is definitely not going to be external." I learned this therapist who was like, "Listen, you can battle your mom over how you load the dishwasher, you can just load it the way she wants you to." He's like, "You probably should do the latter, because you're never going to win this one." So what I wonder is how do we begin to get to this path of healing, particularly when this reconciliation is mostly internal, when I think deep down, many of us think, "Oh, we want this to be external." So that's such a great question. Thank you for it. Most of us struggle with a relationship with one of the parents, and we would love to heal it, but we find that we can't. Every time we go back and try to heal it, we're met with the same sort of energy that tightens us or shrinks us or, in other words, the work has to be done internally. So in a bottom line, the way we heal, we've got to have positive experiences that can change our brain, bottom line. And then we need to practice the new feelings and the new associations, the new sensations with these experiences. And when we do this, that's how we create new neural pathways, or we begin to stimulate the release of feel-good neural transmitters in our brain, like serotonin and dopamine, or feel-good hormones start to release estrogen or oxytocin, even our genes change. So how do we get there? What do we do? Sometimes when we have a broken relationship with a parent, which I find most common and most everybody I work with, we have to do this work internally. I might say to somebody, here's a practice I often do, where I have maybe someone put a photo of the mother that they can't heal with over the left shoulder as they sleep above the pillow or at the nightstand. And they might look at that photo before they go to bed and say, "Oh, mom, I wish I could have this happen in life, but it doesn't happen." But I'm going to visualize that when I'm sleeping, you're holding me the way you could never hold me when I was little, and that you're helping me feel safe in my body, helping me heal this break in the attachment. And I might even have the person say to the photograph, "Mom, teach me how to trust your love, how to receive it, and how to let it in, and then go to sleep." So the visualization is feeling, because that's one of the most important times for neuroplastic change right before we go to bed. I might have somebody put the photograph of the mom that they can't heal with and visualize that there's a, she's holding us, or there's some healing happening that's maybe directed by some greater force, or we're visualizing her higher self, or something like that, holding us, the good mother, the mother that could if she would, that would if she could. But the brain, as I talk about in the book, doesn't care where the healing comes. It just wants the healing. And I spend pages and pages talking about visualization, how it's as important as reality. So the brain doesn't know we're visualizing the mother holding us. The brain thinks we're being held by our mother, and the brain is healing. The audio cortex lights up, the insula lights up, all these structures of the brain are lighting up as though it's happening in real time, as though our mother's really holding us, and we're just lying beneath the photo, visualizing it, and we're healing. So that's only one of hundreds of practices that I'll give people to heal the relationship with the parents, even though it's broken. Wow. So there's one other thing that I want to ask you about that you talked about when you talked about the core language of relationships, you said for many of us, our greatest yearning is to be in love and have a happy relationship yet because of the way love is expressed unconsciously in our families, our way of loving can be to share the unhappiness or repeat the patterns of our grandparents or parents. Now, I don't necessarily want to talk about how we repeat patterns, but when you talk about the way that love is expressed, this is something that really struck me with my parents. I think that when I learned about love languages, I realized that my more words of affirmation, physical affection, these are two things that in the Indian culture are not very common, at least not in my family. And yet I noticed that my dad will do certain things that are really bizarre, like he'll send three pairs of pajamas from Costco. And when I ask him why, I'll say, oh, they're on sale or he'll send us air filters because the air in our apartment isn't clean enough to breathe. And I realized those are absolutely acts of love. They're just expressed in very different ways than I necessarily wanted them to be. Yeah. So when I talk about that chapter, that's the relationship chapter that you're bringing up, I'm talking about love looks often skewed by the events of our family history. For instance, if we have a break in the attachment, we may have difficulty trusting love. However, if let's talk about a generational story, if our grandmom didn't like our grandpa and our mom didn't like our dad, a female who's the next in line might have difficulty liking her husband, even if she likes him, because she's part of this team, this unconscious team. And she's expecting that relationship to go poorly, unconsciously, generationally. You know, it's so interesting, I worked with this woman one time who loved this guy totally. And she wanted to marry him, and she married him. But as soon as she married him, she felt terribly trapped. And so we looked in her family, she goes, she said to me, I know he's the right guy. I know I love him dearly. Yet after I married him, I've been terribly depressed, and I feel trapped. And when we looked in her family history, we saw in her culture that both of her grandmothers were given away as child brides, one at nine and one at 12, to much older men. And they lived these miserable, loveless marriages trapped to these much older men where they were more like property, rather than living vibrant relationships. And so she drew the trigger of being married. And I talk about these triggers in the book too, you know, there's these, I guess we're going in a different direction. But, you know, people ask me, Mark, what are the signs of inherited family trauma? There are signs. You know, we, I don't know if you want me to talk about them, Srini. Okay, so you and I, we can be born with an anxiety or a depression and never think to separate it from the events of the previous generation. That's true. But what I find are these signs, we can also experience a triggering event, you know, a fear or a symptom that strikes suddenly or unexpectedly when we reach a certain age, or we hit a certain milestone or event in our lives, you know, like this woman, she gets married and all of a sudden, you know, she feels trapped. You know, it's so funny. I worked with her and then I worked with her sister and her sister had coming from the same trauma. One of her sisters married a much older guy, 30 years older, just like the grandmothers, she repeated the trauma. And then the other sister I worked with never wanted to be married at all because she didn't want to live trapped. So we had to look at the events of the past, but, but there's other triggers. We can move to a new place and suddenly we're depressed, but we don't realize it, but we're depressed like the ancestors who were persecuted or forced out of their homeland. And that gets triggered by moving across town or we can get rejected by our partner. And even though we've only dated this person two or three months, we've got this grief that's insurmountable and it takes us back to a much earlier grief, maybe that break in the attachment when we lost our mother's attunement or we go to have a child. And it's as though there's this ancestral alarm clock that starts ringing inside us. I once worked with this woman, she was consumed with this anxiety. And as soon as she became pregnant, it started and she didn't even know that. I'm working with her. I said, what's going on? And she said, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just anxious. I'm just, when did this start about seven months ago? What happened seven months ago? I don't know. I don't know. That's when I got pregnant. And she was pregnant with this baby. I asked that core sentence. I said, so what's the worst thing that would happen if you have a baby? And she goes, I'll harm the baby. I'll do something terrible. I'll harm the baby. And then I ask, had you ever harmed a baby? She was no, no, no, no. And I said, did anyone in your family ever harm even accidentally their baby? And she was about to say no. And then she said, oh my God, my grandmother as a young woman led a candle. And she caught the curtains on fire. And then the house caught on fire. And the baby was upstairs and she couldn't get the baby out. And then she said to me, but we were never allowed to talk about it. And in that moment, she made a link that she had inherited the terror from her grandmother. And then after that, she and I could, we could break the pattern. But I hear this so much serenee. Oh, that happened in my family. But we were never allowed to talk about it. And that I've discovered is one of the anchors that makes traumas repeat in our family history. There's lots of traumas. Not everybody manifests these traumas. But I find that when the traumas aren't talked about, when the healing is incomplete, the pain or the grief is too great, or the people in our family history are excluded or rejected because those are the bad people. Or there's not been quote unquote bad people, right? You know, in the book I talk about, there are no bad people. There's just trauma. But basically, when there's not been any resolution, then aspects of these traumas show up in later generations. Unconsciously, we'll repeat the pattern or we'll share a similar unhappiness until that trauma finally has a chance to heal. You know, I talk about this in the book, but Freud, Freud over 100 years ago, observed this concept of repetition compulsion that until the trauma heals, it repeats. You know, the contraction of the trauma is ultimately looking for its expansion. And we'll keep repeating until it has fertile ground with which to heal. And that's what you did. That's saying, all right, enough's enough. Let me peel back the layers and see where this feeling is coming from. And that's how we heal. So I want to finish by going over one last area. You talk about the core language of success and one of the things I wanted to ask you about was money and why we tend to repeat financial challenges. Like, why do we get ourselves into debt even if we manage to get ourselves out? And I am definitely speaking through personal experience. Like, how can I break that pattern? So we have to look at the source of debt. And I talk about this in my book and the source of financial abundance. And a lot of times for us, as the baby, that abundance, again, is having enough and getting enough of the mother's light. So when that light gets dimmed because she goes into a postpartum depression or in my situation, there's four steps or she's in the hospital or I stop trusting her love because there's too many separations. This idea of having enough and getting enough, that's one source. You know, for me, it's the first source I look of, let me hear about how the early relationship with the mother goes. And when the early relationship with our mother is abundant and she's there with her love, you know, she only needs to be there 20, 30 percent of the time says Edward Tronk. But sometimes there's enough wounds that aren't mitigated. There's enough breaks that never heal where our inner experience is she wasn't there. She didn't give enough. There wasn't enough love that she never held me. That's the memory. That's the feeling. That can be transposed, extrapolated, if you will, onto our financial solvency, our financial success. For example, no matter how much money we have, it's never enough. Or we develop a pattern of squandering it or losing it because that's what happened when we were a baby. We lost our mother's love. So we can't hold on to money or we don't trust that we'll have enough. So the first place I do look is with our relationship with our mom and then I start to look at other things. You know, for example, our dad starts to fail at age 40. He, you know, he loses all the family's money. And then all of a sudden we're 38, 39, 40, and we start making bad financial decisions. Or we look at improprieties or events that happen in the family history. And I talk about this in the book too, where grandpa, you know, he cheated somebody and now we can't hold our money. Or he received money off of the toil of laborers that he didn't treat well. And it's almost as though we have an unconscious identification with those laborers, those victims. You know, the book is complex in that way. We're also talk about perpetrators and victims and parents and grandparents. You know, I go through, I put the whole kitchen sink in there. But it's like we have to look at all of these places when we're talking about financial success. Well, it's interesting to hear you put it this way because, you know, I just turned 42 and, you know, it's in the last maybe two or three years that I started to sort of have real traction and progress with my career. And my dad being a professor, I noticed it was right around the same age that his career started to actually finally turn around and take off. Oh, lovely, lovely. What you're speaking about there is this unconscious merging with parents. It's almost, it's almost like mom or dad, if you suffer, I'll suffer too. Mom, if you have a bad relationship with dad, I'll marry someone and I'll have a bad relationship with someone or even dad. If you don't do well, I won't do well. And if you do well, I'll do well. You know, you're talking about these, again, these unconscious threads, these unconscious tendencies to mirror our parents' experiences. And then again, you know, the important thing, I don't know how much time we have left. But the important thing is this idea of how we heal. You know, I devote a whole last third of the book to how we heal to these experiences of these positive experiences, this language, these healing sentences or these positive experiences that we can repeat daily, which allow us to change the pattern. You know, they're doing all this amazing work right now with mice. They're learning that even traumatized mice can heal if they're exposed to positive experiences. It actually even changes the way the DNA expresses so they don't pass it forward into the next generation. And so, you know, mice heal with positive experiences, but we heal with positive experiences, because experiences like receiving comfort or support, which I talk about in the book, how to receive from our parents' support, even though there was no support ever again, or feelings of compassion for ourselves or for our ancestors or for our parents, or feelings of gratitude that we were given at least something rather than focusing on the good, rather than focusing on the bad. I wasn't given anything. Recognizing, no, I was given a great deal. It was just that my parents had so much trauma. They couldn't give a lot. Or, you know, even as we know from mindfulness, feelings of practicing mindfulness or loving kindness or generosity, really anything that allows us to feel strength or peace or joy inside, these types of experiences feed the prefrontal cortex and can help us reframe the stress response, whether it happened to us when we were, you know, with a bad attachment, broken attachment, or whether we inherited that stress response from our parents or grandparents. But we can reframe it so it is a chance to down-regulate, a chance to calm down. I guess the last thing I'll say is the idea is to pull traction away from the emotional brain, the limbic system, the amygdala, and bring engagement to the forebrain, specifically, you know, the prefrontal cortex or any where we can integrate these experiences and our brains, our brains can change. Basically, we need to practice being with the good sensations, you know, and when we begin this practice, sometimes those feelings are not so good. You know, we, we begin being with the uncomfortable sensations in our body until we can reach into what's beneath them, the feelings of the sensations that are life-giving, like pulsing and tingling or softening and expanding or blood flowing in our body, or waves of energy, heat or warmth, or, you know, and then being able to hold these sensations for at least a minute, you know, maybe even six times a day. That could be enough to change our brain. Wow. This has been incredible. This has been incredibly deep. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? Huh. First, tell me what unmistakable is. I define unmistakable for the purpose of writing a book as something that is so distinctive that nobody else could have done it but you. It's immediately recognized as your unique contribution to the world. You know, it's interesting. I think that I kind of said that, but I want to say it again in how we heal. We learn in our own lives to sit with what's intolerable, what's uncomfortable, what's horrible. For me, I had no choice, right? I'm blind in this eye and they told me I'm going to go blind in both eyes. And, you know, I was forced. I was kicking and screaming, going into the inner body and finding, like you did, as we talked about, with those horrible weekend you had of, or week you had reading the book while you're sick and crying pretty much every day. We have to go into what's uncomfortable, sit with it, learn about it, live in it and through it until we come out the other side. And then often, you know, people always say, how do I find that my joy in life? Or how do I find my job, my vocation, my evocation, my dream in life? And it often sits on the other side of our hero's journey, our pain, our dark night of the soul. We go through that journey. And on the other side of that journey is this tunnel of light that we would have never seen unless we took that journey. And that's what makes us unmistakable, because we can only do what we, through our personal experience, are led to do. We can only arrive on an island or into the light, which often led through crossing a sea or going through a deep expanse of darkness that leads us into here's the light I found and I can help others cross that sea or go through that dark, or I can live in this light that only through my journey took me there through visiting what was uncomfortable, what was intolerable, living through and arriving into. Does that make sense? Yeah, it really does. Wow. Wow, well, this has been breathtaking. First off, can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your insights with our listeners. I can't recommend this book highly enough to people who are listening to this mark. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything else that you're up to? Well, the book is everywhere. It's in 20 languages. It's on all the places where we buy books. But they can also visit my website, Mark Wolin, M-A-R-K-W-O-L-Y-N-N.com. They can learn about videos or my trainings or individual sessions if needed, that sort of thing. I think a good place is on Facebook. Facebook, Mark Wolin, because I list all the new studies, the epigenetic studies every week, so people can stay very current with this new and striking and startling field we call epigenetic inheritance. Well, well, again, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? Well, what if you could turn that fear into creative fuel? 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