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

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.

As with many stories of healing and transformation, what started out looking like adversity was actually grace in disguise.

Adam Gopnik writes about the difference between gurus and teachers in his book Through the Children’s Gate: “A guru gives us himself and then his system; a teacher gives us his subject and then ourselves.” The great teachers understand that where we come from affects where we go, and that what sits unresolved in our past influences our present. The

Researchers are now finding that our thoughts, inner images, and daily practices, such as visualization and meditation, can change the way our genes express,

Core language can have the quality of coming from outside us while being experienced inside us.

When entangled, you unconsciously carry the feelings, symptoms, behaviors, or hardships of an earlier member of your family system as if these were your own.

Sleeping inside each of them were fragments of traumas too great to be resolved in one generation.

the traumas we inherit or experience firsthand can not only create a legacy of distress, but also forge a legacy of strength and resilience that can be felt for generations to come.

Hellinger believes that the mechanism behind these repetitions is unconscious loyalty, and views unconscious loyalty as the cause of much suffering in families.