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

BATB score: 7/10 🥹

epic deep deep stuff about forgiving your mom and dad ❤️‍🩹

Best as: it’s a research textbook proposing, justifying, and dissecting the sole premise that “maybe the trauma we’re experiencing may not be ours but rather our parent’s, our grandparent’s, and/or our great-grandparent’s trauma (that is left unsolved)”.

Best to: an extremely debatable premise that needs further research and exploration but definitely a great initial effort by Mark Wolynn 👏 [2016]

Best for: my psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists to kindly read this book and apply their expert opinions and translate these ideas into their practice wherever applicable

BATB lingering thought: the exercise and frameworks shared in the book to self-diagnose and self-heal require 💯 devotion from the readers (of which I am too lazy to do)

Best quotes: “Anger is often an easier emotion to feel than sadness.”

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

“The greater truth would be that the love you longed for was not available for your mother to give.”

“If we truly want to embrace life and experience joy, if we truly want deep and satisfying relationships, and health that’s vibrant and resilient, if we truly want to live up to our full potential, without the sense of being broken inside, we must first repair our broken relationships with our parents.”