Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Your PTSD Inherited? With Mark Wolynn

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Have you ever felt totally stressed out in a situation that didn’t seem to warrant the feeling? Have you ever felt anxious for no obvious reason? There’s an answer for this that just might blow your mind. In the first episode of a series with “It Didn’t Start with You” author Mark Wolynn, he and the Amens discuss how the experiences of your ancestors may be causing you to react in unfamiliar and surprising ways.

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, everyone. This week, we're going to blow your mind. We are going to talk about it didn't start with you. That over the next couple of years, you'll hear me talk a lot about ancestral dragons that still

breathe fire on your emotional brain. And when I was researching that, I came across Mark Wallen and his book, It Didn't Start With You. And I love this book. I think it is so helpful, so practical. Mark is a leading expert on inherited family trauma. He's the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Award in psychology. He's the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. He has trained thousands of clinicians and treated thousands more patients struggling with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, obsessive thoughts, self-injury, chronic pain, and illness. He's a sought-after lecturer. You can actually watch some of his lectures on YouTube, which I have done. He has taught at the University of

Pittsburgh, the Western Psychiatric Institute, Kripalu, where both of us taught, the Omega Institute, where we taught, the New York Open Center, and the California Institute for Integral Studies. His articles have appeared in Psychology Today, MindBodyGreen, MariaSchreiber.com. Inherited family trauma. Talk to us. What does that mean for people? Yeah, why did you write this book? What does it mean?

This is so exciting. When something happens to our parents and our grandparents, let's say they lost a mother or a father when they were young or they were sent away or placed in an orphanage or one of their siblings died tragically collapsing the family. The reaction doesn't necessarily stop with them. The feelings, the sensations, specifically the stress response, this can be passed on to our children and our grandchildren. And now we're finding the biological evidence for this. And I wrote the book because we're walking around with a mystery that we can't explain. We have anxieties that start at a particular age or after a certain triggering event, or we have depression that we can never get to the bottom of, or behaviors we can't explain. And I've seen myself in a way as the guy with the flashlight, shining it on these behaviors we can't explain,

and then taking a peek behind the curtain to see if there's something resonant in our parents' or grandparents' lives. Now, you open the book by telling your to get insight into why this physical thing is happening to you. And several of the teachers that you went to said you need to talk to your parents. It's true. You know, I had this chronic condition for which there was no cure. Central serous retinopathy. I was the 5% that's chronic. And I began to lose my vision.

There's nothing Western medicine can do. You know, they'd say, we think it's stress. So I go on this journey to see what might be behind it. I went as far, went around the globe as far as Indonesia, working with some very wise spiritual teachers that kept shining the light for me, telling me I had to make peace with my parents. I had to go home and I had broken relationships with both of my parents at this time. And, um, well, I wouldn't know it at the time, but inherited trauma, inherited family trauma sits at the root. Uh, all my grandparents had been orphaned in some way, um, as toddlers, as babies, three of them lost their mothers when they're infants, one loses her father when she's one and ultimately loses, you know, her mother's

attunement at this age as well. And I don't know this, but this has broken parenting in my family and blocked the flow of what my mom or dad could give. So I'm very disconnected with them. And I keep hearing from these teachers, go home and heal your relationship. And before I could really do that, I had to heal what stood in the way, which is inherited family trauma. Because this feeling of being broken from a mother's love, this is what was passed down in my family. You know, I remember being five, six years old. Every time my mom would leave the house, even to go to the grocery store, I'd run into her bedroom, pull open her drawers and cry into her garments, her nightgowns, her scarves, just to smell her scent. Never connecting that this is probably all that my grandparents were left with of their

mothers was just the scent. I remember sharing this with my mom about, oh, I was 40 or something. And I said, mom, you know, you used to leave the house and I would go into your drawers and cry in your clothes. And she looked at me and said, I did that too. And my sister reading the book says, honey, I did that too. So the family pattern was pretty clear. Wow. And, and so I had to heal a break in the attachment with my mom. And in doing so my sight comes back. I didn't even link the two. I didn't even expect to have my sight come back. And, and after that, I developed a method for healing the effects of inherited family trauma. Oh, I want to hear about that. So after I read the book, I started talking more to my parents and I'm still blessed. My mom's 88, my dad's 90. And, um, and I talked to them a lot, but he told me a story of my grandfather who came from the Middle East

and he went to Los Angeles with his brother, but his brother was a bad driver and had borrowed a car and ended up getting killed in a train accident. My grandfather's 19 and my grandfather never drove again after that. And so I'm thinking, how did that anxiety come down through my dad? And my dad's not an anxious person. His favorite word when I was growing up was bullshit. I don't get heart attacks. I give them. I don't get heart attacks. I give them. But I was anxious because of my dad. But, you know, just thinking about how my grandfather's trauma could have impacted me was powerful. And then Tana, her grandmother also. Yeah. So if you believe in coincidence, which I don't really believe in coincidence, right? I was writing my book and finishing it when you right around the time that you got this book. And

he's like, you need to read this because my book is a memoir. And it's based on a lot of one of the chapters is your family history, you know, how your family history comes back to you. But I don't have all this information. It was just, for me, it was really interesting because I learned things about my family. I had no idea about like my grandmother was, um, during world war. Well, let's see, it was world war one. Yes. During world war one, she was, um, well, back then it was greater Syria. Now it's Lebanon. So she remembers, she was so, she had PTSD her whole life, terrible PTSD. I mean, I didn't know what that was at the time, but it was horrific.

And she remembers, you know, the Turks coming through and riding through with their weapons. You had to be off the streets. And she got lost as a five-year-old up in the mountains by herself for three days and barely survived it. And so she, it always affected her, but I didn't know that story. And so she went through the famine. She went through the great famine that killed over 250,000 people. And it was really crazy, but I didn't know a lot of this until I was writing my book and I did the research and I'm like, and you're making fun of me because you're like, oh, that's where you get your survivalist thing. Like, I'm always into survival camps. Right.

We live in Newport Beach. Doesn't matter. I'm like, anything could happen at any time. You don't know. But it was so interesting because he got this book right about that time. And I'm like, huh. Like, I didn't know those things about her. You know, like, and yet here I was behaving a certain way. Even if we don't have the information, it still shows up in our symptoms, our behaviors, and often triggered by an age. I was listening to both your stories, and Daniel, going to your story, 19 could be a triggering age in the family history from then forward or driving a car or, you know, these, I've learned

that there, you know, maybe we'll talk about this later, that there are signs of inherited trauma, ways in which we can tell more or less if we're carrying something from the past. And, you know, Tana, for grandma to be lost for three days in the mountains at five is also going to break her attachment. Oh, for sure. After all those things, there's no trust and safety. And so, you know, these all have an effect on parenting. You know, nowadays, with all this tremendous amount of trauma, you know, when we look at this effect of this trauma, it has the effect of blocking the love that was possible from our parents. That's so interesting.

Down at the very bottom, a lot of times I'm working with attachment because of these historical generational traumas. And do you see very often that sometimes, so sometimes people repeat those patterns, that seems obvious. Sometimes they do the opposite. I know I did the opposite with my daughter because my childhood was really chaotic. And I'm like, I'm not having kids if I can't do it differently. And so I was, we're like this and it's a little, maybe I'm a little over the top with, I mean,

I don't feel like I am, but maybe I'm a little over the top. So Chloe never had a babysitter. Never. Our 16 year old. Would not have a babysitter. Never had a babysitter. No. Because 16-year-old. Would not have a babysitter. Never had a babysitter. Because she had been hurt by babysitters. Right. And so I was just very protective. We're very

close. And so I started to struggle with a little bit of depression when she started to pull away from me. Now, thank God, I'm psychologically savvy enough to realize I'm not going to make her feel bad for it because it's normal. She's doing the right thing. This is good for her, but it was not easy for me. Like I was like, wait, what is happening?

So how would we, and we'll start the next podcast with this. Once you know that there are patterns that may not be helpful, how do you not give them to your children? Stay with us. We're here with Mark Wolin. The book is called It Didn't Start With You. It will blow your mind. I'm already, I'm so excited. This is so good. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe. So you'll always know when there's a new episode and while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code podcast10

to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.