It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Mark Wolynn, 2016
Beware of spoilers!! (🤪🤪🤪)
For my first dabble with a self-help book, It Didn’t Start With You left me with a positive enough impression that I’ve made a new goal to always accompany my fiction reading with a nonfiction counterpart. I start with this personal vocation because naturally I feel compelled to share my list of negatives, but the book clearly had meaning for me, and I would still recommend it to anyone holding familial resentment or with self-demeaning thoughts/behaviors that don’t seem to have a clear origin.
Especially to start, Wolynn’s ideas seemed not only believable but felt as though they were offering new explanations for the woeful parts of my personality that I have no explanation for. One of the book’s highlights is the deposit of language that allows new ways of understanding our own negative self-talk. We have a “core complaint,” which is essentially a main fear that we tend to perpetuate (“I’ll always be alone,” “I’ll lose all my money,” etc.), and a “core sentence,” which is an intrusive thought, or our lived experience of the core complaint (an example given in the book for someone’s core sentence is “I need to die,” more active than their core complaint, which would have been something like “I will always be unhappy”).
By posing these fears/negative thoughts as “core complaints” or “core sentences,” Wolynn has diagnosed them as disordered, no longer rational truths, so we feel a new potential for them to be curbed. I would argue the book’s merit really ends here (there are also some cool studies about maternal/paternal trauma that are helpful). Wolynn works hard—like, really hard—to convince us that these “core complaints and core sentences” are not our own, but have been passed down generationally and belong to a family member up to 3 generations prior. Well, easy, he’s convinced me! I am fully under the impression that a lot of my negative self-talk is my paternal grandmother’s, having somehow reached me. The issue with this is it very well may not be my grandmother’s trauma, and to put it so laboriously at the finish of every point in the book may cause a comfortable redirection of personal trauma that allows me (you?) to blame a source completely outside of myself. So now I have this social issue, and I can newly say Grandma you did this to me because you also had a social issue, and I’m absolved of the fault for it with no longer any responsibility to process other parts of my life that may have played into it. It’s a very easy go-around.
I would prefer if Wolynn suggested the idea of familial trauma as one of many possibilities for why a person has negative thoughts. Like, what about mental illness Mr. Wolynn? I made a note of some of the language Wolynn uses, (“she now realized…”, etc.) that lend to the impression that Wolynn is intending his theories to be definite answers to all our questions about our intrusive thoughts, rather than one theory that may be applicable to some but not to others.
The solutions offered mainly rely on healing external relationships, which is nice in theory but probably not very plausible to most. Have open conversations, y’all! Well, be conscious of where your body tenses when you speak to the parent who never treated you with love, and then have open conversations! It works, believe me, here’s like two examples in every chapter.
He uses a lot of extreme examples to make his points and show his theory in practice. There’s a woman with a desire to evaporate (yes, her core sentence is literally that she will disintegrate), and then finds out that her grandmother was vaporized in the Holocaust. Her understanding of this “softened” the feeling of the core complaint, and soon she’s cured of it. Examples like these are plenty throughout, and they became somewhat frustrating because I don’t believe most people will be able to make such a direct/obvious connection to a family member’s trauma. Such a substantial aha moment would be lost on us. Also, the solution being the acquisition of knowledge about the trauma (in other words, have the balls to ask your family members about their family member’s trauma) doesn’t seem like enough to really cure such a strong, intense, inapt feeling.
About halfway through, I was put off by the repetition chapter through chapter about the cyclical have negative thought, learn family member had negative event that would have caused negative thought, forgive family member, feel better. It’s cool at first but then it begins to smell like donkey dung.
Also, I must say that Wolynn seems to not know the concept of coincidence. In one example, Nancy is married to Dan, and complains in therapy that said Dan is emotionally distant and they don’t connect. If you could believe it, Nancy also said that about her mother. Now, I did find all this interesting—the connections between rejecting a parent and then a partner, or even rejecting a parent and then success—BUT emotional distance is a top complaint for any turbulent relationship, no? It would make sense that Nancy felt distance with both her mother and her husband if they were both relationships with conflict. I guess I don’t see how one is directly correlated to the other, or I don’t see the value in making the correlation, or I more so see harm in taking the blame off Dan and putting it wholly on her mother when I’m sure Dan’s got some things to work through as well. This may be an easy red herring.
It sometimes feels like Wolynn is grasping at straws to make connections like these. In a later chapter he makes a list of “twenty one invisible dynamics that can affect relationships,” and although some of them were compelling (“you reject, blame, or judge a parent”), some were base like “your parents were unhappy together,” or “your parents didn’t stay together.” Most children of divorce not only know this statistic, but fear it, making it a silly thing to see among a list of things intended to be eye-opening.
But hey don’t get me wrong, much of the book is eye opening. I post-it noted nearly every page.To put a positive here, I do think although the parent-relationship/your-relationship pipeline isn’t directly related to how you’re shaped by generational trauma, I appreciate Wolynn’s tacit suggestion that you may be in the process of creating generational trauma if your relationship with your parent goes unhealed.
Despite my earlier complaint about the open communication solution—mostly because communication takes two and if we do all this self-work, who’s to say mom/dad are open to doing their own self-work (boomers don’t believe in therapy, Mr. Wolynn)—I do wanna mention that the most positive experience I had with the book was when I got to the “healing sentences.” Wolynn offers phrases to say to our family members or, if unable, to their photograph or something, that ultimately give new perspectives about forgiveness (“I will heal your trauma,” “what happened to you won’t be in vain,” etc.). There was also a tidbit about feeling your body when speaking your core complaints/sentences out loud and releasing those tense feelings, which may have a placebo effect but I’ll admit did feel healing.
Throughout the book there are writing exercises I can imagine would be very helpful to someone not in the practice of journaling/organizing their emotions in that way. Even for someone who does write/journal daily, it was cool to discover my own “core complaints” and “core sentences,” as I now see these as thoughts that were imposed on me (again, there’s pros and cons here, and I believe it only like, half), and are mostly irrational.
With all that being said, I come out of this book feeling much more informed on the ways my relationships with my parents affect all aspects of my life (relationships, friendships, work), as well as my perception of myself. Things really do lay much deeper within us than we realize, and a book like this sure does bring that to light, as well as beg your awareness that our negative thoughts really do bleed into everywhere, and are a much bigger issue than we think.
It goes without saying but there’s muchhhhhh more here that I didn’t get into. I’d be interested to hear other perspectives, specifically if the suggestions in this book are believable to others or taken mainly as easily relevant or too reliant on deductives.
