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

the DNA responsible for transmitting physical traits, such as the color of our hair, eyes, and skin—surprisingly makes up less than 2 percent of our total DNA.14 The other 98 percent consists of what is called noncoding DNA (ncDNA), and is responsible for many of the emotional, behavioral, and personality traits we inherit.

You can’t change your parents, but you can change the way you hold them inside you

The family story is our story. Like it or not, it resides within us.

we come from affects where we go,

What I failed to realize at the time is that when we try to resist feeling something painful, we often protract the very pain we’re trying to avoid.

Visualizing Your Mother and Her History

Pain does not always dissolve on its own or diminish with time

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

—Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

When a parent is rejected or disrespected, one of the children will often represent that parent by sharing the rejected behaviors. In this way, the child makes himself or herself equal to the parent by suffering in a similar way. It is as though the child is saying, “I’ll go through it, too, so that you don’t have to go through it alone.” Loyal in this way, the child continues the suffering into the next generation. It often doesn’t stop there.

Those of us who feel that we didn’t receive enough from our parents, especially from our mothers, often feel that we don’t receive enough from life.