Reviews with content warning for Addiction - It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Reviews tagging 'Addiction'

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn

7 reviews

patydenisse's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

It’s a great book, I feel like it’s a must for people who’ve tried it all, podcasts, books, self care articles, etc.
I like that you have to write and think about your past and your family.
I think I’ve actually became closer to my parents while and after reading this book, it helped me a lot just to change a little bit my perspective.
I don’t give it 5 stars just because I felt there were times where the book was very repetitive and used a lot of examples of patients that felt like I had read them before or very similar.
It has a lot of trigger warnings, so I would definitely suggest reading this when you feel ok to do some self exploring and revisit trauma, look out for yourself.

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andreisa12's review

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.5

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mleon's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective medium-paced

2.75

Although the author makes fair points, I don’t think that the reconnection with parents is the utmost step to achieve success in your life. I don’t think the author explores every situation with parents, and although having unfinished business with parents might affect your life emotionally, not every parent is alive or open to reconnection, so in my opinion the author should’ve accounted for this in the book.

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jomick's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

3.0

It went from interesting to heavy real fast. A lot of extreme examples of trauma. A lot of feeling like I may have ruined my children with my own stress as a mother with NO insight or instruction in how my own healing may or may not impact my living children. It’s very one note as far as focusing on finding out what happened to your ancestors and offering what they need—but no information for the future. I found it to be heavy and left wondering if it was useful at all for my specific situation. I can’t say I would recommend it.

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thereaderfriend's review

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informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

Was helpful but felt it repeated over and over the same notions

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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hopeful informative

4.5

In my online research about trauma, I came across the idea of intergenerational trauma – that you can inherit the trauma of your ancestors. However, the sites that talked about healing your intergenerational trauma also tended to be the type that advised rose quartz would heal your mother wound and other such less-than-scientific “treatments.” So I was excited for this book, hoping to get a more trustworthy look at intergenerational trauma and see if the idea has any scientific merit.

I was surprised to find that it actually does. The book starts with a solid scientific foundation, discussing the basics of epigenetics and how trauma not only changes our own genes, but the genes that go into our egg and sperm cells that later become our children. It traces why trauma can be shared back three generations but often isn’t passed down longer than that, and it discusses how outside of genetics, family dynamics can encourage people to take on traumas from relatives they’re not directly descended from (e.g. aunts and uncles). I was fascinated to find such a strong scientific basis for inheriting trauma.

The bulk of this book, though, is a healing program to help the reader identify the trauma, figure out who in their family system it actually belongs to, and “give it back” so they don’t have to deal with a trauma that isn’t even theirs. There’s an assortment of writing and reflection exercises, interspersed with nearly-miraculous stories of healing from people Mark has taken through these steps. You’re supposed to do each of the exercises as you read, but I was listening to this at work and couldn’t really stop doing my job and pull out a notebook. I did do one of the exercises (number 12, I think) on a break, and it was intense and enlightening. This is one of those books that I want to read again in a different format so I can follow along better and actually do the exercises.

Though I think this book can and will be very helpful, I don’t think it’s perfect. The stories of recovery Mark shares seem almost impossible in their rapidity and completeness, which makes me skeptical, but I’m going to reserve judgement on that until I actually try all the steps. What bothered me the most was towards the end, the book harped really hard on forgiving your parents, reconciling with them, and putting effort into having a relationship with them. Putting aside the fact that I’m definitely not ready to forgive my mother, I kept thinking, What if your parents aren’t safe? I don’t think my parents would be physically violent or attempt to ruin my life or anything like that when I come out to them, but I highly doubt they’ll be willing to use my real name and pronouns. Should I just live with their clear and obvious disregard for who I am just to have a relationship with my parents? And what about queer people who are in legitimate physical danger of injury or even death from parents who won’t accept them? Should they put themselves in danger to attempt a relationship with parents who would rather have a dead child than a gay or trans one? It’s all well and good when your parents still love you and the only thing between you and them is trauma, separation, and/or differences in how you give and receive love, but I have to imagine there are ways to heal that don’t involve exposing yourself to people who are dangerous to you.

That said, I still consider this a valuable book. It has a solid basis in science, and it’s full of practical steps with plenty of examples to follow. As I mentioned, this is one I want to get in physical or ebook form to actually follow along with the steps. (The audiobook is supposed to have a PDF with the exercises and diagrams, but my library apparently doesn’t include accompanying PDFs with audiobooks.) Though I’m skeptical about advising “you need a relationship with your parents” to everyone, overall I think this is a very important book.

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lookingforwonder's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

2.5

The first couple of chapters are very informative when it comes to inherited trauma. The rest of it is more of a self-help book. I had anticipated more scientific background, but the book often comes out more Freudian and there's no studies to back up his suggestions of how to help people with inherited trauma. And the author's claim that "psychopaths" (which is already a loaded term mental health professionals shouldn't be using) are created by parental neglect has been debunked. This made me question the first two chapters I'd thought were well-researched. Still, some of the self-reflection questions may help people and it does have some interesting research included on inherited trauma. The author shares his client's stories (with their permission and detailed altered) which deal with family trauma and the subsequent result of how it affected the client. These stories include various kinds of trauma, told in passing more than graphic. I've labelled the ones I've remembered, but I'm sure I'm missing a few.

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