Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Address the Hidden Traumas in Your Life, with Mark Wolynn

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

Whether we are consciously aware or not, we all carry some form of trauma in our lives. Sometimes the reason for the trauma is obvious, but sometimes trauma can be hidden. In the fourth and final episode of a series with “It Didn’t Start with You” author Mark Wolynn, he and Daniel and Tana Amen give you tips for identifying the various traumas you carry with you, so you can treat them and feel happier and healthier.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with Mark Wolin. I hope your mind is being blown as ours was. I mean, when I read the book, I was just so excited. And so many of

these things just make sense with a lot of my patients. So when I was a young psychiatrist, I learned a technique called hypnoanalysis, where you'd basically go to the symptom a person was having, what are they thinking and feeling, and then take them back under a trance to the first time they had those thoughts or feelings. And then reading Brian Weiss's book, Many Lives, Many Masters, well, he would flip them into other lives. And I thought that was fascinating, but it may not be like a past life regression, but it could be a past family tree. And generation, yeah.

Regression. So before we get, Mark, into more tips, how can people learn more about your work? So they can obviously get the book. It didn't start with you. How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to End the Cycle. Brilliant. How else can they learn about your work? The book's everywhere. Bookstores. It's in 20 languages. Audible, you said?

Yeah. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, everywhere. And to connect with me directly, I teach trainings for clinicians. MarkWilin.com, W-O-L-L-Y-N-N.com, training in Copenhagen, one in San Francisco, and one in Sydney, Australia. So always three trainings a year. Wonderful. And then do you have a center in San Francisco? Yeah, I have.

I'm located here in Marin actually yeah fantastic um so let's talk about more tips people can do if they're thinking and and one of them i think they should do what i did is i went and talked to my mom and dad. And I'm like, I want to know more about your mom and dad. And were there any traumas in the family? Yeah. So, you know, nothing beats that, you know, we've got to have the story of what happened, if we can get it is, is, is amazing. So a lot of people who read the book, then, if the parents are alive, they can ask the parents, sometimes they have to ask an aunt or an uncle or an older sibling or a cousin because everybody's gone. But some of us

are adopted and some of us, our parents are gone. We have no one to ask. It's important to know that this information, even if it's not known, still lives in our trauma language. It's in our fears. It's in our symptoms. It's in our self-sabotaging behaviors or self-destructing, self-destructive behaviors. It's in the symptoms of an illness. As I talked about earlier, it's in an anxiety, a symptom, a depression, something that appears after a difficult event. It's in our relationship struggles. It's in the repeated ways we deal with money and success. So even if we don't know exactly what happens, doesn't matter. We've got a sense of what might have happened because it's showing up in one of those areas. So, you know, what I ask people to do if they can is to, what you did, Daniel, shake the family tree and see what falls out. I love that analogy.

That's a beautiful image. What family secrets, you know, were never talked about, that were hidden? What stories didn't get told? What traumas never healed all the way? That's the biggie. What traumas never healed all the way? And because of the trauma, people collapsed, people shrunk, people turned away. Your grandfather stayed angry at his sister.

Was that who you said? Yeah. So these, these types of experiences can block the healing of the trauma. In other words, anger is easier than grief. So we go to anger. For sure. Secondly, talk about the traumas in your family, try to work through them. We need to try to work through them ourselves. That's essential so they're not passed down into future generations. In one of the mice studies, they found that as they put the traumatized mice in positive, low-stress environments, it actually changed the DNA.

It inhibited the enzyme that causes DNA methylation or histone modifications, which are some of the mechanisms of transfer. So talk about these traumas. Because the more we talk about them with our kids, the more they're able to connect, have relief there, the more they're able to get an answer for, to have a coat hook for the coat that they're wearing in a sense. Yeah, that's so true. Hang the coat. That's so wild.

Cause when, um, so when I was growing up, my grandmother, um, she used to, because what happened to her and I never understood this, well, my grandmother, she used to, because what happened to her, and I never understood this. Well, two things happened. My uncle was murdered in a drug deal. And then she also had gone through the war and all of that stuff, her war-torn country. She'd sit in her room. She became a hoarder. And so she would keep old used tinfoil.

She was so afraid of a war breaking out. She became this hoarder. She wouldn't throw anything away. Plastic utensils, nothing. And she also would sit in her room and cry. She would turn the news on and just cry and ball and wail all day because she would just think about what happened to her. Well, I never understood that. And so all I knew was like, what, what is happening? Like, this is so weird. Like, why is this, what is this crazy behavior? Um, I knew there was something wrong. I just could never figure out what it was crazy behavior? Um, I knew there was something wrong.

I just could never figure out what it was. And when I was writing my book and I actually went back and asked my, my mom and my uncles, I'm like, something's got to give here, you know, and around the same time, my, my grandfather was also hit by a train and became a quadriplegic. So there were a lot of things in her life. And when I began to put it through that lens, it was like, Oh, well, geez, no wonder she sat in a room to cry. Like she, and she had a language barrier, so she couldn't express herself. And so she, you know, she didn't speak English very well. And so all of a sudden there's this sort of a warm feeling that came to me and this, this empathic feeling like, oh, I just, I feel bad for her rather than that was just such a weird way to grow up with this woman in the corner crying all the time.

You know, well, judgment is so easy. It just changed everything. Understanding why I'm in a new docuseries with Justin Bieber. Justin's been one of my patients for a long time. And when you I read his mother's book. So Patty wrote an autobiography. It was just the best psychiatric history. But when you see the traumas that she went through or his dad went through and how he relived some of those, and it may not be his genes, but rather his epigenes that because people think, oh, well, I inherited this.

So I'm going to have schizophrenia or I'm going to be bipolar. And it's not so. It's really what happens to us that turns on or quiets those genes that make us vulnerable. But knowing that is just so important. And easier not to judge, I think, when we understand. Well, my goodness, we are out of time. So, Mark, I hope we become friends. I'm so excited and just so grateful that you wrote.

It didn't start with you you which you can get on amazon or barnesandnoble.com you can also get the uh audiobook of it which has just got a ton of positive reviews you can go to mark woland w-o-l-w-o-l-y-N-N.com and learn about workshops and his appearances and courses that he has done. And I'm just grateful for the work you do. Such good information. It's just so important. Such great insight. Thank you.

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