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

This particular study suggests that even if humans receive supportive parenting as infants, we are still the recipients of the stress our parents experienced before we were conceived.

Because your father’s sperm continues to develop throughout adolescence and adulthood, his sperm continues to be susceptible to traumatic imprints almost up until the point when you are conceived.

Lipton stresses the importance of what he terms conscious parenting—parenting with the awareness that, from preconception all the way through postnatal development, a child’s development and health can be profoundly influenced by the parent’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.

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

When we pit one parent against the other, we go against the source of our own existence, and unconsciously create a rift inside ourselves. We forget that half of us comes from our mother and half from our father.

For example, the firstborn son is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the father, and the firstborn daughter is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the mother, though this is not always the case. The reverse can also be true. Later children in the family are likely to carry different aspects of their parents’ traumas, or elements

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

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.

The particulars of the events that shaped their lives may be obscured from our vision, but nevertheless, the impact of those particulars can be deeply felt. It’s not only what we inherit from our parents but also how they were parented that influences how we relate to a partner, how we relate to ourselves, and how we nurture our children. For bette