The Official It Didn't Start with You Workbook: The Companion to the Worldwide Bestseller

by Mark Wolynn

The must-have companion to the million-copy bestseller, a comprehensive guide to understanding and transforming the impact of traumatic family legacies on our daily lives

Depression. Anxiety. Chronic pain. Obsessive thoughts. The roots of these difficulties may not have originated with us—but with our parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents. As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has helped people for more than thirty years break long-standing patterns of suffering. Now you can break those patterns this workbook, the companion to his international bestseller It Didn’t Start with You, offers a pragmatic and easy-to-follow guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Through a series of experiential exercises, thought-provoking prompts, and practices based in neuroscience, you may discover that the symptoms you’ve suffered with your whole life are really just fragments of unresolved trauma in your family history. This workbook is a transformative experience that will teach you how to heal the past, reconnect with yourself, and reclaim your life, health, and vitality.

Some of the experiences you’ll explore on your path of self-discovery
Tracing your family history back to unresolved traumatic events.Following your words, fears, symptoms and behaviors to understand your deepest emotions.Exercises for healing both attachment and generational trauma.Practices to release unconscious patterns of illness, emotional blocks, and destructive behavior. New work that expands upon the concepts from It Didn’t Start with You to further your healing journey.

219 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 9, 2025

About the author

Director of The Family Constellation Institute, The Inherited Trauma Institute and The Hellinger Institute of Northern California, Mark is North America’s leader in Inherited Family Trauma. A sought-after lecturer, he leads workshops at hospitals, clinics, conferences, and teaching centers around the world. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the Western Psychiatric Institute, Kripalu, The New York Open Center, The Omega Institute, The California Institute of Integral Studies. His book IT DIDN’T START WITH YOU: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (Viking/Penguin) is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award in psychology. Mark specializes in working with depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, fears, panic disorders, self-injury, chronic pain and persistent symptoms and conditions.

Mark is a Summa Cum Laude graduate in English and Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. His graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Arizona was also in English. Mark has published poetry in The New Yorker.

“As creator of the Core Language® Approach, I’ve spent the last 20 years observing how language and trauma intersect—how patients’ presenting symptoms, specifically the language they use, can lead us to the root of the issue, often to a trauma in the family history or in early childhood. Uncovering our core language can free us from reliving traumas that don’t belong to us.”