Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle > Status Update

Much like in the realm of “immature parents”, we can ask ourselves a solid question: ‘Why did this person who said they loved me so much, spend so much time trying to scare me?’

“telepathically or epigenetically inherited” is stronger than what Wolynn actually needs to claim. His language about an “unconscious connection” and “violent feelings that weren’t his” is suggestive and causal, but the book doesn’t establish a mechanism by which the grandfather’s specific violent experience entered Todd’s psyche. That’s precisely the evidentiary problem….

“Your job is to reconnect with the love you naturally felt for her when you were small. In this way, you can let go of what you might be carrying that actually belongs to her.”

Carl Rogers and other personality theorist would argue that a professional and effective therapist be congruent. Unfortunately for Mr. Wolynn, I do not see any evidence of this. The author reiterates again and again that life begins and ends at the communion of parent and child, reinforcing false claims that victims of child abuse, etc., need reconciliation. Projecting mommy issues onto clients, he overgeneralizes.

The author seems to rely on confirmation bias often by making generalized claims in the same strain as horoscopes. Sometimes comforting? Sometimes vague? I do think the open-ended questions are deep enough to read with someone you are comfortable being vulnerable with however most of the eureka moments happen likely within the reader as opposed to due the author’s genius.

Unresolved traumas from our family history spill into successive
for many.
generations, blending into our emotions, reactions, and choices in ways we never think to question. We assume these experiences originate with us. With their true source out of sight, we're often unable to differentiate what is ours from what is not.

conscious parenting-parenting with the awareness that, from preconception all the way through postnatal development, a child's development&health can be profoundly influenced by the parent's thoughts, attitudes, behaviors. "Parents that did not wish to have a child…emotional abuse during pregnancy all represent situations where adverse environmental cues surrounding the birth of their child can be passed on…"

“Recent developments in the fields of cellular biology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and developmental psychology underscore the importance of exploring at least three generations of family history in order to understand the mechanism behind patterns of trauma and suffering that repeat.” (p. 17)

Full circle moment for narrator.