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	It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and H...	The Official It Didn't Start with You Workbook: Practical Exercises to Break ...
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Editorial Reviews

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One of The New York Times' 5 Books on Healing from Trauma of 2025
One of Teen Magazine's Top Trending Booktok Favorites of 2025
One of Oprah Daily’s 10 Best Trauma Books of 2023
One of Book Riot’s 9 Best Healing Books about Trauma for 2023
One of Healthline’s 13 Best Mental Health Books of 2022
One of Cosmopolitan’s 15 Books About Mental Health That Everyone Should Read
One of Men’s Health’s 20 Best Mental Health Books to Read in 2022
One of Choosing Therapy’s 10 Best PTSD & Trauma Books for 2021
Winner of the 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Psychology
Finalist for the 2016 Books for a Better Life Award

“This groundbreaking book offers a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, powerful tools for relieving its suffering. Mark Wolynn is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.”
—Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

“Mark Wolynn does a masterful job of illuminating the ways in which our ancestors’ unresolved suffering, often unknown to us, disables us and binds us painfully to them. He gives us the tools and skills—an approach that combines understanding, imaginative dialogues, and compassionate reconnection—to free and heal ourselves.”
—James S. Gordon, MD, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression

“It Didn’t Start with You takes us a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“Mark Wolynn’s extraordinary book cracks the secret code of families and proves that you can go home again—once you understand how history made you. Full of life-changing stories, powerful insights, and practical tools for personal healing, It Didn't Start With You deserves a place on your bookshelf next to Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child and Dan Siegel’s The Developing Mind. You’ll never see your family the same way again.”
—Mark Matousek, author of Ethical Wisdom

“Bridging both neuroscience and psychodynamic thinking, It Didn’t Start with You provides the reader with Mark Wolynn’s hard-earned toolbox of do-it-yourself clinical aids and provocative insights.”
—Jess P. Shatkin, MD, MPH, Vice Chair for Education at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Child Study Center and author of Child & Adolescent Mental Health

“After reading It Didn’t Start with You, I found myself immediately able to apply Mark Wolynn’s techniques with my patients and saw incredible results, in a shorter time than with traditional psychotherapeutic techniques. I encourage you to read this book. It’s truly cutting edge.”
—Alexanndra Kreps, MD

"Mark Wolynn elegantly weaves together the threads of generational and attachment trauma, offering a groundbreaking synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience. Drawing on the latest epigenetic research, he provides a powerful trauma language map—a tool to help readers decode their symptoms, trace them to their origins, and begin the journey of healing. This book is full of healing sentences, practices, and rituals that guide readers toward greater awareness, integration, and repair. It is both a compassionate companion and a practical guide for anyone seeking to transform inherited pain into embodied wholeness." —Diane Poole Heller, Ph.D, author of The Power of Attachment and Healing Your Attachment Wounds

"This book is essential reading. A must read. Mark Wolynn’s approach to inherited and early developmental family trauma and its effect on health and wellbeing is groundbreaking."
—Dr. Bruce Hoffman, Medical Director, The Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine

"Utterly invaluable and endlessly fascinating, Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start With You, links our psychology and biology in a profound new way, giving us the power to understand and transform ourselves in the face of what seems inevitable. Identifying our unconscious loyalties to our ancestor’s trauma through a series of practical questions and exercises, gives us the keys to unlock our own freedom and compassion. Reading this book is like being a part of one of Mark’s transformative workshops, a brave and powerful journey to self-realization."
—Brenda Strong, Emmy Nominated Actress Desperate Housewives, Dallas, 13 Reasons Why, Supergirl, and CEO of Strong Yoga4Women

"As medical doctors, we often treat the symptom. I’ve witnessed Mark identify the pattern and treat the cause."
—Dr. Russell Kennedy, author of The Anxiety RX

Praise for THE OFFICIAL IT DIDN'T START WITH YOU WORKBOOK

“It is a deep pleasure to welcome Mark Wolynn’s follow-up publication. In his first book (It Didn’t Start With You), he provided guidance to those suffering from hidden forces—those passed down from our ancestors affecting our lives, our health, our relationships and our capacity to find inner peace. In this new release, a well thought out workbook, he expands on his original book by providing people with practical tools and exercises to release them from the tyranny from the past. Thank you Mark for your contribution, a valuable gift to those seeking healing and personal growth.”
—Dr. Peter A Levine, bestselling author of Waking the Tiger and An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey

About the Author

Mark Wolynn is a leading expert on inherited family trauma. He is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Award in Psychology. As the director of The Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, he has trained thousands of clinicians and treated thousands more patients struggling with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive thoughts, self-injury, chronic pain, and illness. 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 Omega Institute, The New York Open Center, and The California Institute of Integral Studies. His articles have appeared in Psychology Today, Mind Body Green, MariaShriver.com, Elephant Journal and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. www.markwolynn.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Traumas Lost and Found

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

A well-documented feature of trauma, one familiar to many, is our inability to articulate what happens to us. Not only do we lose our words, but something happens with our memory as well. During a traumatic incident, our thought processes can become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything even remotely reminiscent of the original experience. Once they are triggered, it is as if an invisible rewind button has been pressed, causing us to reenact aspects of the original trauma in our day-to-day lives. Unconsciously, we could find ourselves reacting to certain people, events, or situations in old, familiar ways that echo the past.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern more than one hundred years ago. Traumatic reenactment, or "repetition compulsion," as Freud called it, is an attempt of the unconscious to replay what's unresolved, so we can "get it right." This unconscious drive to relive past events could be one of the mechanisms at work when families repeat unresolved traumas in future generations.

Freud's contemporary Carl Jung also believed that what remains unconscious does not dissolve but, rather, resurfaces in our lives as fate or fortune. Whatever is not conscious, he said, will be experienced as fate. In other words, we're likely to keep repeating our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness. Both Jung and Freud noted that whatever is too difficult to process does not fade away on its own but, rather, is stored in our unconscious.

Freud and Jung each observed how fragments of previously blocked, suppressed, or repressed life experience would show up in the words, gestures, and behaviors of their patients. For decades to follow, therapists would see such clues as slips of the tongue, accident patterns, or dream images as messengers shining a light into the unspeakable and unthinkable regions of their clients' lives.

Recent advances in imaging technology have allowed researchers to unravel the brain and bodily functions that "misfire" or break down during overwhelming episodes. Bessel van der Kolk is a Dutch psychiatrist known for his research on posttraumatic stress. He explains that during a trauma, the speech center shuts down, as does the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for experiencing the present moment. He describes the speechless terror of trauma as the experience of being at a loss for words, a common occurrence when brain pathways of remembering are hindered during periods of threat or danger. "When people relive their traumatic experiences," he says, "the frontal lobes become impaired and, as [a] result, they have trouble thinking and speaking. They no longer are capable of communicating to either themselves or to others precisely what's going on."

Still, all is not silent: words, images, and impulses that fragment following a traumatic event reemerge to form a secret language of our suffering we carry with us. Nothing is lost. The pieces have just been rerouted.

Emerging trends in psychotherapy are now beginning to point beyond the traumas of the individual to include traumatic events in the family and social history as a part of the whole picture. Tragedies varying in type and intensity-such as abandonment, suicide, and war, or the early death of a child, parent, or sibling-can send shock waves of distress cascading from one generation to the next. 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.

The following story offers a vivid example. When I first met Jesse, he hadn't had a full night's sleep in more than a year. His insomnia was evident in the dark shadows around his eyes, but the blankness of his stare suggested a deeper story. Though only twenty, Jesse looked at least ten years older. He sank onto my sofa as if his legs could no longer bear his weight.

Jesse explained that he had been a star athlete and a straight-A student, but that his persistent insomnia had initiated a downward spiral of depression and despair. As a result, he dropped out of college and had to forfeit the baseball scholarship he'd worked so hard to win. He desperately sought help to get his life back on track. Over the past year, he'd been to three doctors, two psychologists, a sleep clinic, and a naturopathic physician. Not one of them, he related in a monotone, was able to offer any real insight or help. Jesse, gazing mostly at the floor as he shared his story, told me he was at the end of his rope.

When I asked whether he had any ideas about what might have triggered his insomnia, he shook his head. Sleep had always come easily for Jesse. Then, one night just after his nineteenth birthday, he woke suddenly at 3:30 a.m. He was freezing, shivering, unable to get warm no matter what he tried. Three hours and several blankets later, Jesse was still wide awake. Not only was he cold and tired, he was seized by a strange fear he had never experienced before, a fear that something awful could happen if he let himself fall back to sleep. If I go to sleep, I'll never wake up. Every time he felt himself drifting off, the fear would jolt him back into wakefulness. The pattern repeated itself the next night, and the night after that. Soon insomnia became a nightly ordeal. Jesse knew his fear was irrational, yet he felt helpless to put an end to it.

I listened closely as Jesse spoke. What stood out for me was one unusual detail-he'd been extremely cold, "freezing," he said, just prior to the first episode. I began to explore this with Jesse, and asked him if anyone on either side of the family suffered a trauma that involved being cold, or being asleep, or being nineteen.

Jesse revealed that his mother had only recently told him about the tragic death of his father's older brother-an uncle he never knew he had. Uncle Colin was only nineteen when he froze to death checking power lines in a storm just north of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Tracks in the snow revealed that he had been struggling to hang on. Eventually, he was found facedown in a blizzard, having lost consciousness from hypothermia. His death was such a tragic loss that the family never spoke his name again.

Now, three decades later, Jesse was unconsciously reliving aspects of Colin's death-specifically, the terror of letting go into unconsciousness. For Colin, letting go meant death. For Jesse, falling asleep must have felt the same.

Making the connection was a turning point for Jesse. Once he grasped that his insomnia had its origin in an event that had occurred thirty years earlier, he finally had an explanation for his fear of falling asleep. The process of healing could now begin. With tools Jesse learned in our work together, which will be detailed later in this book, he was able to disentangle himself from the trauma endured by an uncle he'd never met, but whose terror he had unconsciously taken on as his own. Not only did Jesse feel freed from the heavy fog of insomnia, he gained a deeper sense of connection to his family, present and past.

In an attempt to explain stories such as Jesse's, scientists are now able to identify biological markers-evidence that traumas can and do pass down from one generation to the next. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is one of the world's leading experts in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a true pioneer in this field. In numerous studies, Yehuda has examined the neurobiology of PTSD in Holocaust survivors and their children. Her research on cortisol in particular (the stress hormone that helps our body return to normal after we experience a trauma) and its effects on brain function has revolutionized the understanding and treatment of PTSD worldwide. (People with PTSD relive feelings and sensations associated with a trauma despite the fact that the trauma occurred in the past. Symptoms include depression, anxiety, numbness, insomnia, nightmares, frightening thoughts, and being easily startled or "on edge.")

Yehuda and her team found that children of Holocaust survivors who had PTSD were born with low cortisol levels similar to their parents', predisposing them to relive the PTSD symptoms of the previous generation. Her discovery of low cortisol levels in people who experience an acute traumatic event has been controversial, going against the long-held notion that stress is associated with high cortisol levels. Specifically, in cases of chronic PTSD, cortisol production can become suppressed, contributing to the low levels measured in both survivors and their children.

Yehuda discovered similar low cortisol levels in war veterans, as well as in pregnant mothers who developed PTSD after the World Trade Center attacks, and in their children. Not only did she find that the survivors in her study produced less cortisol, a characteristic they can pass on to their children, she notes that several stress-related psychiatric disorders, including PTSD, chronic pain syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome, are associated with low blood levels of cortisol. Interestingly, 50 to 70 percent of PTSD patients also meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression or another mood or anxiety disorder.

Yehuda's research demonstrates that you and I are three times more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD if one of our parents had PTSD, and as a result, we're likely to suffer from depression or anxiety. She believes that this type of generational PTSD is inherited rather than occurring from our being exposed to our parents' stories of their ordeals. Yehuda was one of the first researchers to show how descendants of trauma survivors carry the physical and emotional symptoms of traumas they have not directly experienced.

That was the case with Gretchen. After years of taking antidepressants, attending talk and group therapy sessions, and trying various cognitive approaches to mitigating the effects of stress, her symptoms of depression and anxiety remained unchanged.

Gretchen told me she no longer wanted to live. For as long as she could remember, she had struggled with emotions so intense she could barely contain the surges in her body. Gretchen had been admitted several times to a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed as bipolar with a severe anxiety disorder. Medication brought her slight relief, but never touched the powerful suicidal urges that lived inside her. As a teenager, she would self-injure by burning herself with the lit end of a cigarette. Now, at thirty-nine, Gretchen had had enough. Her depression and anxiety, she said, had prevented her from ever marrying and having children. In a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone of voice, she told me that she was planning to commit suicide before her next birthday.

Listening to Gretchen, I had the strong sense that there must be significant trauma in her family history. In such cases, I find it's essential to pay close attention to the words being spoken for clues to the traumatic event underlying a client's symptoms.

When I asked her how she planned to kill herself, Gretchen said that she was going to "vaporize" herself. As incomprehensible as it might sound to most of us, her plan was literally to leap into a vat of molten steel at the mill where her brother worked. "My body will incinerate in seconds," she said, staring directly into my eyes, "even before it reaches the bottom."

I was struck by her lack of emotion as she spoke. Whatever feeling lay beneath appeared to have been vaulted deep inside. At the same time, the words vaporize and incinerate rattled inside me. Having worked with many children and grandchildren whose families were affected by the Holocaust, I've learned to let their words lead me. I wanted Gretchen to tell me more.

I asked if anyone in her family was Jewish or had been involved in the Holocaust. Gretchen started to say no, but then stopped herself and recalled a story about her grandmother. She had been born into a Jewish family in Poland, but converted to Catholicism when she came to the United States in 1946 and married Gretchen's grandfather. Two years earlier, her grandmother's entire family had perished in the ovens at Auschwitz. They had literally been gassed-engulfed in poisonous vapors-and incinerated. No one in Gretchen's immediate family ever spoke to her grandmother about the war, or about the fate of her siblings or her parents. Instead, as is often the case with such extreme trauma, they avoided the subject entirely.

Gretchen knew the basic facts of her family history, but had never connected it to her own anxiety and depression. It was clear to me that the words she used and the feelings she described didn't originate with her, but had in fact originated with her grandmother and the family members who lost their lives.

As I explained the connection, Gretchen listened intently. Her eyes widened and color rose in her cheeks. I could tell that what I said was resonating. For the first time, Gretchen had an explanation for her suffering that made sense to her.

To help her deepen her new understanding, I invited her to imagine standing in her grandmother's shoes, represented by a pair of foam rubber footprints that I placed on the carpet in the center of my office. I asked her to imagine feeling what her grandmother might have felt after having lost all her loved ones. Taking it even a step further, I asked her if she could literally stand on the footprints as her grandmother, and feel her grandmother's feelings in her own body. Gretchen reported sensations of overwhelming loss and grief, aloneness and isolation. She also experienced the profound sense of guilt that many survivors feel, the sense of remaining alive after loved ones have been killed.

In order to process trauma, it's often helpful for clients to have a direct experience of the feelings and sensations that have been submerged in the body. When Gretchen was able to access these sensations, she realized that her wish to annihilate herself was deeply entwined with her lost family members. She also realized that she had taken on some element of her grandmother's desire to die. As Gretchen absorbed this understanding, seeing the family story in a new light, her body began to soften, as if something inside her that had long been coiled up could now relax.

As with Jesse, Gretchen's recognition that her trauma lay buried in her family's unspoken history was merely the first step in her healing process. An intellectual understanding by itself is rarely enough for a lasting shift to occur. Often, the awareness needs to be accompanied by a deeply felt visceral experience. We'll explore further the ways in which healing becomes fully integrated so that the wounds of previous generations can finally be released.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Life
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 25, 2017
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101980389
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101980385
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.45 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #2,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Post-Traumatic Stress
- #12 in Popular Psychology Pathologies
- #54 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
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Mark Wolynn

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Mark Wolynn is a leading expert in the field of inherited family trauma. As the director of The Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, he trains clinicians and helps people struggling with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive thoughts, self-injury, chronic pain and illness. 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 Omega Institute, The New York Open Center, and 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 Nautilus Book Award in psychology. His articles have appeared in Psychology Today, Mind Body Green, Maria Shriver, Elephant Journal and Psych Central, and his poetry has been published in The New Yorker. www.markwolynn.com

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Customers find this book highly informative and easy to understand, with a conversational writing style that includes helpful exercises. They appreciate its content on intergenerational trauma and how it helps understand oneself and others, while also being relatable and beneficial for relationships. The scientific base receives mixed reviews, with several customers noting it lacks sufficient evidence to support its conclusions.

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382 customers mention content, 320 positive, 62 negative

Customers find the book engaging and well-written, with one customer noting that the first two chapters were particularly riveting.

It is a great book that anyone can benefit from. It's a gateway to discovering family stories and finding out how to heal them....Read more

A great read about the systemic influences of your parents and grandparents....Read more

this is an excellent book, I can not express enough the shift it has assisted me with in my life....Read more

Good book overall until I got to the middle part of the book... it is from the author's point of view/opinion of trauma and doesn't take into...Read more

179 customers mention informative, 163 positive, 16 negative

Customers find the book highly informative and practical, helping readers understand themselves and others, with one customer noting it provides a good combination of research and practice.

Interesting premise, well described, informational and insightful.Read more

...Very insightful and well written. I recommend it to anyone curious about how their ancestors impact them.Read more

...again, Wolynn’s mastery of language communicates his accessible and helpful therapeutic methods with the same ease as if he is confidently taking...Read more

...It’s very informative, and one that I would say you can’t just casually read.Read more

77 customers mention readability, 61 positive, 16 negative

Customers find the book highly readable, appreciating its easy-to-understand explanations and self-probing exercises.

...Mark's writing style is fluid and easy to read - the inclusion of examples, research, personal stories, and exercises is not only well-balanced, but...Read more

...And I am glad I did. But this book worked like magic for me! It is an easy read with many examples of how this process works....Read more

...how the subject matter was discussed in a way that is easy to understand for someone who isn’t a geneticist or psychiatrist; it puts understanding...Read more

Very dull and hard to read. It's incredibly redundant and I personally disagree with some of the points in this book....Read more

76 customers mention trauma content, 62 positive, 14 negative

Customers appreciate the book's content on intergenerational trauma, providing scientific evidence of inherited patterns and offering a roadmap to break the cycle.

very inspiring, eye-opening, great readRead more

...research and in the next page draw you into interesting and touching stories from his fascinating and diverse experiences.Read more

...Just in the first two chapters, it will change your life! Buy it and give it to everyone you know and love!Read more

...Mark Wolynn’s book takes you on a journey of self-discovery....Read more

32 customers mention writing style, 28 positive, 4 negative

Customers appreciate the writing style of the book, particularly its conversational tone and helpful exercises.

This book was well written with scientific support, documented case studies and personal antidotes. I highly recommend this book!...Read more

...Mark is an excellent writer and trainer in this field.Read more

...His conversational writing style makes it easy to understand the concepts and processes he has so thoroughly researched and organized....Read more

This book was so beautifully written, It helped me go through some tough times when I needed just some space to myself....Read more

30 customers mention interesting, 30 positive, 0 negative

Customers find the book fascinating, with one mentioning compelling case studies and another noting interesting biological studies.

Interesting perspective and a new way of thinking about our past....Read more

Interesting premise, well described, informational and insightful.Read more

...Just not worth your time. It is an interesting topic and I'm interested in intergenerational trauma, but this isn't the right book....Read more

Some interesting ideas but plagued throughout by the author's anti-abortion views....Read more

30 customers mention relatability, 26 positive, 4 negative

Customers find the book relatable and beneficial for relationships, with one customer noting how it helps them feel more connected to their ancestors.

...is fluid and easy to read - the inclusion of examples, research, personal stories, and exercises is not only well-balanced, but powerful....Read more

Intersting book on how genetics effect is in the moment and now we can change our past in the presentRead more

...explains the concept of inherited family trauma in a way that is relatable, impactful, and relevant....Read more

Mark Wolynn's new book is a great read -- smooth, heart-felt, deeply personal....Read more

26 customers mention scientific base, 14 positive, 12 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the scientific base of the book, with some finding it plausible and well-theorized, while others note that the conclusions are not supported by sufficient evidence.

Great theory, well explained. A little repetitive at the end. Also, Wollyn seems to make histheory out to be the one and only fix for our struggles....Read more

...No accountability. No proof. Very speculative.Read more

Zeiguest inspired book on neuroscience and epeigenetics. We used it for our martiarge and family graduate class....Read more

...Not science based. Not evidence based. Not a book about healing. Not helpful. Not worth the money.Read more

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SG
The best.
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Best resource I have ever found on healing generational trauma. I really thought that a book could not make such a difference - I assumed after years of therapy and different healing modalities that I would have to do some kind of crazy physical feat or something for it to shift from my body - but reading this book and doing the exercises in it healed parts of me that I always struggled to understand and did not know how to eradicate from my being - facing it through the support of this book healed things from my mind and system that had plagued me since 14. I highly recommend this book to everyone and have bought multiple copies to gift.

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3 people found this helpful

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A. Villalobos
Just What I Needed
Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I have always been interested in epigenetics and what we inherit. I really appreciated how the subject matter was discussed in a way that is easy to understand for someone who isn’t a geneticist or psychiatrist; it puts understanding and healing some of the inherited weight we carry within reach. It also helped me to see my parents and grandparents in a different light. I’m so thankful this book exists, an highly recommend it if you’re doing shadow work; it will help open doors that have felt stuck for a long time.

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4 people found this helpful

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Eva
Very, very illuminating and helpful!
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Fantastic book for those of you who experienced childhood and adult trauma from your parents and the in turn from a partner.

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3 people found this helpful

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Nancy
Would recommend a read!
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Great book!

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One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer
Excellent resource on family trauma.
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Hands down the best book that I have seen on “ family trauma”. Explains the lasting effects of trauma and how it follows fellow generations.

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One person found this helpful

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Greg G.
Valuable relationship resource
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Such a valuable resource to help people understand themselves and those they love.

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Junior
good quality
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Great help when I needed it most

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Gator-rific
This hits for systems thinking too
Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book explains something many people intuit but don’t have language for: patterns persist across generations even when no one consciously remembers why.

What makes this stand out is that it doesn’t frame inherited trauma as pathology—it frames it as information that hasn’t been integrated yet. The exercises are optional; the conceptual model is the real value.

If you think in systems, this reads less like therapy and more like a case study in how unexamined inputs propagate forward. Useful far beyond its stated audience.

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14 people found this helpful

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KLN
Great book, good read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2026
Verified Purchase

A colleague of mine encouraged me to read this book, when I was working in a forensic high secure hospital - I was busy learning about trauma based therapy and this book has played a great role in helping me understand my patients and a lot about myself as well.

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Cliente de Amazon
Qué buen libro!!
Reviewed in Mexico on August 21, 2024
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Lo leí antes de este boom que están teniendo las constelaciones familiares. Me ayudo a confirmar muchas dudas/teorías que yo estaba teniendo sobre mi persona y de cómo lo estaba relacionando con la forma de ser de mis papas, tíos y abuelos. Me dio calma al saber que no me lo estaba imaginando ya que si existe el impacto que dejan y forman tu persona.

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Deeb Store
cool book
Reviewed in Saudi Arabia on August 2, 2024
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cool book

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Paul Meleng
Vital critical information.
Reviewed in Australia on June 8, 2023
Verified Purchase
Well written, plain English description and examples, backed up by all the links and research references.

Could be a breakthrough for many people. The unease you carry could have been installed in earlier generations and never "discharged" , hence it can reside in you. You can get rid of it.

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Katia Nancy Borges
Para quem se aprimorar nas dinâmicas sistêmicas em suas sessões de Constelação Familiar
Reviewed in Brazil on November 20, 2024
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Comprei esse livro quando ainda não havia a tradução para o português. Me ajudou muito nos meus estudos em Constelação Familiar.

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It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle Paperback – April 25, 2017

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Top reviews from the United States

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Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, good read.

5.0 out of 5 stars Qué buen libro!!

5.0 out of 5 stars cool book

5.0 out of 5 stars Vital critical information.

5.0 out of 5 stars Para quem se aprimorar nas dinâmicas sistêmicas em suas sessões de Constelação Familiar

Great book, good read.

Qué buen libro!!

cool book

Vital critical information.

Para quem se aprimorar nas dinâmicas sistêmicas em suas sessões de Constelação Familiar