Mark Wolynn: How To Heal Generational Trauma | Wellness Force #Podcast

Because we get caught up. We get caught up locked in this idea that there's got to be a quick fix. There's a pill, there's a salve. We don't think that our own emotional work or our own search inside ourselves can lead us to our healing. Sa.

So I feel like this conversation about inherited family trauma, most people don't even know what it is. It's like a blind spot within a blind spot. And so can you just start us here with this discovery? When was it discovered? Family trauma that's been inherited, and what exactly is it, Mark?

So let's start with what it is, because my voice, if it crackles, I just have to say that the smoke here in the Bay Area has been excessive, and I did something stupid when hiking in it yesterday, and my throat's paying the price today. But anyway, inherited family trauma. It's simple. Let's say one of our parents or grandparents had a significant trauma. They lost their mother or father when they were young, or they were sent away to an orphanage, or maybe one of their siblings died tragically or a child died young. This event has the possibility of breaking the heart of the family, rigidifying the family, really. And the reaction to the trauma doesn't necessarily stop with those who experienced it, our parents and grandparents. The feelings, the sensations, the behaviors, specifically the stress response. This, we're learning, can be passed down to our children and grandchildren. And now there's biological evidence for this. You know, you ask me when it was discovered, I've got to go 100 years ago to Carl Jung. You know, he talked about there's this impersonal karma that exists within a family that's passed down from parents to children. He personally said. He said he always felt like there was something he had to complete or continue that came from his parents or grandparents or ancestors, something that they had left unfinished. And, you know, when we go into the research, the research is brand new. It's 15 years ago. You know, scientists have always suspected something like this was happening, but they had no proof. And it wasn't until about 15, 14, 15, 16 years ago that the epigenetic research started to emerge. And discoveries that children and their parents were sharing the same trauma symptoms, even though the kids themselves didn't directly experience this trauma.

It was a fascinating thing that I think we've all heard before. And it's like, well, it runs in the family. You know, like people say diabetes runs in the family. These things run in the family. In our last podcast, we did a deep dive on some of the concepts we're not going to cover on today's show. So I'll make sure that we link people to that past episode. There was a deep healing that I just want to thank you here on the air for everyone with us, thank you for your work because I was able to identify an incubator wound that relates to this inherited family trauma. And you gave us an exercise that we actually published on YouTube. And thousands of people watched Carrie and I hold each other and on the minute, every minute, give ourselves loving care and affection and just expressing what was coming up in a safe space. There is a. So thank you. There is a you're welcome. In this book right here. This book I have my filter on at Skype, but this is. It didn't start with you. How inherited family trauma shapes who we are. And this is the key mark, how to end the cycle. This inherited family trauma, it goes back very deep and it's interesting in your book there was a quote from Carl Jung. When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. You already talked about how Jung sparked curiosity in you, but how did Jung's work specifically impact your work, your career in the writing of this book?

Yeah, I've always been a believer in the idea that that which we ignore never really goes away. It submerges in our psyche and selma and then reemerges as chronic pain or disease or persistent symptoms or behaviors we can't explain. It gets rerouted in a sense. I think it's best to give a case to illustrate this. I one time worked with a 16 year old boy with a rare neurological disorder. And when he was 10 years old, he began to experience burning sensations on his skin. And his mother takes him to the doctor and they can't figure out what's going on, what's happening. There's no root cause. But when I worked with the family, she told me about his father and how his father at the same age, the boy began experiencing the symptoms at age 10, was playing with matches and accidentally burned the garage down and then the house down and the father's brother died. And the father never forgave himself for this. But the main thing is because the trauma remained unhealed and unresolved, the man's son a generation later begin to express symptoms, similar symptoms, burning sensations on his skin at the same age. The family had never made this connection. And you know, after working together, the boy's symptoms subsided. But they wouldn't have looked in that direction because we get caught up. We get caught up Locked in this idea that there's got to be a quick fix. There's a pill, there's a salve. You know, we don't think that our own emotional work or our own search inside ourself can lead us to our healing, which, you know, this is what I want to illuminate in the book, which I do illuminate. You know, we have to do our inner work to find, to mine for gold, to find the gems that will lead us to healing.

How long did you find yourself studying the work of Jung? And by the way, did you ever read the Red Book? I know that's his, one of his most famous.

I have it on my copy on my coffee table.

It's a very rare book book. It's hard to find.

Now, I've heard now it was a given to me as a gift. It's a very big book as well.

We learned from so many. It's so funny to me because we learn from so many ancient masters that are no longer with us. And the lessons that they teach us are so profound. And there is this bridge that I think exists between the past and the present. And it's filled with knowledge, it's filled with intelligence, it's filled with experience. If we can be humble enough, and this is the key, if we're humble enough to receive the lessons. You have this powerful question in your book that's called the bridging question. Now, if somebody has a persistent symptom or issue or acquired trauma from family, this is a really unique question. But everybody's got their own unique bridging question that's attached to their trauma. Can you share first how you came up with the bridging question? And how does someone decipher their unique bridging question to know how to ask about their past?

So the bridging question for me is a tool how to get to our symptom, picture how we're suffering to see if it's connected in the family history. And one of the ways we do this is looking at our worst fear. So there's a question I ask in the book, which is, what's the worst thing that could ever happen to you if things suddenly went wrong, if things suddenly fell apart? What's your worst fear? What's. What's what? And, you know, the answer to that question can be something like, I'll be abandoned, or I'll be sent away, or I'll be hated by the people closest to me, or I'll do something terrible or harm a child. I won't deserve to live. So I give people in the book a way to outline and distill down to this nugget. You know, I call the worst fear the nugget of gold. Because it's one of those questions that when we get to the answer and really distill it down, our body starts to reverberate. For example, if somebody has this fear of I'll do something terrible and I'll hurt a child, the body starts to light, it's very visceral. And then the bridging question is, have you ever harmed a child? And of course the answer will be no and or most likely, yeah. And then the bridging question is, has anyone in your family ever harmed a child? Or did anyone in your family ever feel that they didn't deserve to live for something that they did? Or was anybody in your family sent away or let people down and was ostracized? You know, we follow that language and it often leads to an event in the family history. But this language can be. It doesn't have to be verbal. You know, what I've discovered is there's verbal trauma language and then there's nonverbal trauma language. When a trauma language is verbal, you know, that's when we say something, I'll be abandoned, I'll be left. But when it's non verbal, we have to look for the events in our family history, the physical, the emotional symptoms that show up after something unsettling that happens to us. We look for the fears or anxieties that strike suddenly when we reach a particular age. Often it's the same age that something happened in the family history or a depression or a destructive behavior, or a self injuring behavior that arises in us after a situation that's similar to a trauma in our family history. This is what I call the non verbal trauma language. And it's also mirrored in our relationship struggles, who we choose, the type of relationships we pull to us. Also in the repeated ways we deal with money, success. All of this forms a breadcrumb trail that we need to follow.

And when we follow it, we get to have the courage to face it. I was thinking of this analogy as you were speaking. It was like if we have roots that trace back three generations, maybe even more, which we can explore if we just decide to have the courage to pull that out of the soil and look at the roots, the sunlight will actually kill the roots. But we have to be willing to look. We have to actually have the courage, mark, to look. By the time people find you and I know you have an extremely long waiting list for people to work with you. And that, you know, is something that's a testament to your work. Like, people are coming to you. They're attracted to you because they want to look at the root. They want to know why they keep experiencing these same patterns, broken relationships, illnesses, whatever it is, like, over and over and over again, almost like a record spinning. Why does this happen for some people? You know, like, some of us have trauma. Actually, I would say. I would think most people have trauma. Capital T, lowercase T. But not yet. Everybody manifests this trauma. Why do some people seem to have these loops and others don't? Like, what is that?

That's a good question. Why are these traumas repeating? You know, I want to go back again 100 years. Because epigenetics is just one piece of the puzzle. We know from embryology that our grandmother, when she's five months pregnant, five months pregnant with our mother, that all the eggs that our mother will ever have, all the eggs that our mother will ever have are already implanted in our mother's womb when she's a fetus. And, of course, one of those eggs is us. So there's this sharing, this biological environment that we share. And then when we combine it with Bruce Lipton's work, how a mother's emotions can be chemically communicated to the fetus through the placenta, and this can biochemically alter the genetic expression. You know, there's other factors. There's epigenetics, there's embryology, there's Bruce Lipton's work. But to answer your question directly, what anchors these traumas? What creates these repetitions when the traumas aren't talked about? This is what I find when the healing is incomplete, when the pain and grief and embarrassment and shame is so great that the people can't look at it, it goes back again to doing our inner work, confronting what's uncomfortable, what we talked about, or the people in our family are excluded or rejected. Basically, there's not been any resolution. Then aspects of these traumas can show up in later generations. Unconsciously, we'll repeat a pattern and will share a similar unhappiness as our parents or our grandparents until that trauma finally has a chance to heal. You know, going back 100 years again, Freud observed this when he talked about repetition compulsion, this idea that the trauma keeps repeating for an alt, for an optimal opportunity so the trauma can heal. And one of the things I observed is that these traumas, they're not bad. It's Not a bad thing that we keep repeating this trauma cycle. It's actually knocking on our door, encouraging us to finally open the door. Because sitting in that contraction of the trauma is the very expansion waiting to happen. But again, it's we who have to open that door and look inside. So we are going to get these repetitions until we do our inner work.

And one of the most amazing things that I think all of us want, that you deliver in this book is maps, core language map, which we'll talk about later, but there's also a map of words. There's a map to find your unique core wounding sentence. I mean, the work that you've done here, like this isn't something I've ever asked you before. And we already talked about your story on our last podcast, so people can go there and learn about your story coming up to this. But when you sat down to write this book and you started to have this consciousness download onto the pages, when you built the map and you built the core language map and you built all these maps, did you go through an iteration process or did that literally just come through in one shot and you just wrote it down right there?

No, the book took nine years. But however, books seem to write you, you don't write them. I've learned early on as a creative writer to just sit and let information come through me. I've learned that when we think, when we go toward the information, it doesn't flow. When we learn not to think and just learn to live in our sensations, to live in the flow of energy in our body, the information seems to flow to us through this amazing thing that happens by being present. You know, I remember there's that quote from Eckhart Tolle in his book the Power of Now. He said, great thinkers, it's not that they know how to think, it's they know how not to think, which is extremely true. So the book, the book took nine years. However, the information, I don't believe we own this information. I believe that this information, it's like fishing in a stream and pulling the big one, that when we're open to receive it, the information just flows through. However, on the other side, you know, I have 30 years of clinical experience working with people who suffer and wanting to help people who had know where to turn. They didn't make the link, the connection that their shutdown, their hyper vigilance, their anxiety, their depression was connected to anything. They just thought they were wired this way. So, of course, I'm always looking for, wait a minute, where does that come from. And taking things apart is also part of this process.

The question that came up for me was, do you also believe that even though the information is borrowed. Right. It's coming through and you're a messenger and you're a conduit. Do you believe that spirit chooses certain people based on their own unique suffering, their own unique learning, and their ability to hold that information and be a steward of that for the world?

I can't speak to what spirit will do, but I will say that those of us who suffer and have walked through it, have walked through our own personal hell, are more. Can hold the field of this information in an authentic way where it's coming from. Personal experience.

Yes.

So, as we know, in the first interview, I had to lose my eyesight in order to gain my eyesight or to gain a different vision.

Yeah, we're in an experience right now where a lot of people could see what's happening with COVID and forced mask wearing and social distancing and lockdowns and bankruptcy and. I mean, it's. I'm 40 years old in my lifetime, Mark, I've never seen or felt anything like this. It's as if we're in a spiritual vice, and that vice is squeezing us to the point where we're just exploding and we're having to look at all of our shadows that are popping up. And I believe it's the perfect time to have this conversation about inherited family trauma. Because when else than now, when people are being forced to be at home with their loved ones, are these things going to surface? But with that, there's also social distancing and mask wearing, a lot of emotional mirroring that happens with parents. If you look at child psychology, when a mother mirrors the emotions of the baby, that creates trust with the baby. With all your knowledge of inherited family trauma and seeing where we are now in society, how do you think that the mask wearing of the parents when they go out in public, and how is that affecting these young babies that are going to grow up? And how do we address that healing right now?

I honestly don't know. Mothers who are wearing masks in their homes, you know, people aren't mandated to wear masks in their homes. But it. But it begs a different question, which, you know, the repercussions of mask wearing, social distancing. And we can only speculate right now because there's no data to show that mask wearing and social distancing, while it's terrible isolating, disconnects us from other people, that it's Actually creating inherited traumas. And we have to hold a larger perspective that this isn't the first time that humanity has faced something like this. The bubonic plague in the 6th century, you know, killed 25 million people. And then there was another bubonic plague in the 1300s that they don't. Can't say the exact numbers, but 75 to 200 million people. And then in 18, in the 1800s, there was a cholera pandemic that killed over a million people. And then, you know, just in the last century, the Spanish flu killed as many as 50 million people. This doesn't even speak to. While the Europeans came to this country and killed over 90, brought diseases that killed over 90% of the Native Americans. You know, in 1492, there were 60 million Native Americans, and now there's 5 million. This isn't the first pandemic we've been dealing with. However, the real issue for me is in this pandemic, who close to us dies or who close to us suffers? Or what parent loses a child? Or what child loses a parent? And if the parent loses a child, how does that parent's grief or anxiety affect the living children or the children yet to be born? Or what infant or small child is separated emotionally or physically from his or her mother's attunement? These are the larger traumas we need to consider. And all these traumas live in our family histories.

So you mentioned the blue blind plague. And yes, there was massive trauma that happened in 1492. And we're in this big book of human evolution. So if we're at the highest level of consciousness now, which I believe to be true, and each of these things have happened when essentially there was not technology, we weren't able to share messages across the world. Like, now we're at a pivotal point in human evolution, in human consciousness, where the more that we can flush out the past traumas, the less we can experience trauma and rewound our children and their children. So my concern, and I'm curious how you feel about this. My concern is that right now we're in an age where we. We are all at home, and most of us are either working on the computer and businesses are barely opening back up again. Do you see a way for us to proactively embody healing right now, regardless of how you want to say, you know, are you pro mask, are you not mask? Everyone's got their unique experience right now, but how do we address this healing now proactively?

Yeah, this is an important time because many of Us are home and we don't have the driving distance to work or the distraction of traffic. It's an important time to use this time to do our inner work. And again, that inner work we talked about this last time, but just as a reminder, is to pull traction away from the limbic system, the amygdala, and to bring engagement to the prefrontal cortex, where we can integrate positive experiences that can change our brain. Basically, to put it in a nutshell, we need to practice being with the uncomfortable sensations in our body until we can reach what's beneath them. Josh, you know, the sensations that we experience as life giving sensations like pulsing, tingling, softening, expanding, releasing blood flowing waves of energy, warmth, and then we need to be able to hold these sensations in our body for at least a minute and do this six times a day. That can be enough to change our brain and calm our stress responses. Whether the stress response is coming from what gets activated from the pandemic, or whether it gets created in our early environment with our mother from a break in the attachment, or we've inherited from our fathers traumatic events in his family, or a mother's traumatic events in her family, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme what has activated our stress response. The important thing is that we attend to it and, you know, we talk about the pandemic. I think one of the important things that the pandemic is doing right now, it's acting like a blowtorch setting our trauma container on fire.

Yes, it is.

So all the other traumas that are inside this container are heating up and coming to the surface. So here we are. You know, I think the, the question about mask wearing and social distancing is often leading us into our own isolation, our own feelings of abandonment, our own feelings of disconnection. But they didn't start this, Josh. What started this is often a break in the attachment with our mother where we experience that isolation, social distancing, mask wearing, because her face doesn't match our emotional resident, there's not an emotional resonance because her attunement is off target. So, you know, when I'm. And not only that, we're not just looking at our mom, our relationship with our mother, we're looking at her relationship with her mother and our father's relationship with his mother, because all of this affects attachment. So the attachment question, is it really that I'm working with my mom's attachment with her mother, my dad's attachment with his mother, or my attachment with my mother that has been brought up by the isolation and events of this pandemic. So I look at this pandemic as don't kill me, but a beautiful thing in the sense that it's turning us inward to ourselves. It's turning us toward, ah, now we have to face isolation. Now we have to face abandonment. We could hide it in our work schedule. We could hide it in the dopamine hits we get from social media and liking people and texting. We can hide it right now. We can't hide.

There is truly nowhere to hide. I think that's hitting me in the heart. It's hitting everyone here with us in the heart. And you mentioned, like, you know, the egg that produced you was in your grandmother three generations back. I can't help but think, like, is this gender specific, the way that this trauma passes down? Because the three generations being connected to, like, my. My great grandmother who was in Italy for. But what about my great grandfather? Because they both came over on the boat together. I mean, can you imagine, by the way, everyone, like, can you imagine coming on a boat to Ellis island leaving everything you knew behind? Talk about trauma. I mean that literally. My grandfather, my mother and myself potentially almost following your work, 100% paid the price for and got to look at this separation illusion. So is it really the egg or is it the sperm? Does it matter? Gender specific? Is it all one thing?

It's both. It's both. Look, this is a brand new field right now, and some of the mechanisms of transmission aren't completely clear yet. They keep building on the science, and for that reason, much of the research has been focusing recently on the male line because it's easier to track the sperm's influence on the embryo. The egg's influence is far more complicated, however, you know, as you said, there's research on both sides of the line right here. I don't know if I mentioned this in our last talk, but it bears importance to say there's many studies coming out looking at both sides. There's a recent study in the Journal of American Medicine Psychiatry that followed mothers who suffered trauma as children, and it found that daughters were more likely to struggle with depression and bipolar disorder. And then on the other side of the line, there's a recent Tufts University that looked at men who suffered trauma as children and found that they were able to pass their anxiety through their sperm. And we know that the male sperm, it doesn't end like the female egg line, which ends when mom is five months of fetus. In fact, all the eggs mom will ever have are in her womb again when she's five months of fetus. But we, up until the time we impregnate a female, can pass forward the insults of trauma. Now, what's interesting about that study at Toju and Tufts, Tufts University, is it was the first study to show that human sperm mirrored the same changes, the same non coding RNA changes found in mice that were traumatized as pups. And as you know, a lot of the study looks at mice and looks at, you know, Josh, I know that there's been, since I last talked with you a year ago, there's been some advance advancements that have come out, some of which I was lucky enough to mention in my book because I caught the beginning of it in the book. So the book is still very current and vital, and I'm excited about that. But there's a lot of good news happening right now that this inherited trauma, this can be reversed. Researchers are now able to reverse the trauma symptoms in mice. The little mice that they traumatize in labs, when they expose them to positive experiences, it literally changes the way their DNA expresses. And that's what we're talking about here. We inherit the expression, the genetic expression of DNA. That's what we inherit. And that overactive stress response because of the expression of DNA in our mum and our dad, that's heritable. And that's what we already start operating from, this sort of, how do you say it, a software that gets downloaded at birth. But technically, you know, scientists, researchers are able now to, by taking these mice that are traumatized and exposing them to positive experiences, they're able to inhibit the enzymes that cause DNA methylation and histone modifications. There's a researcher I follow in Zurich at the Brain Research Institute named Isabel Monsuis, University of Zurich. And she would traumatize little mice in her lab by either separating them from the mother or taking the mothers and putting them in a glass tube and then returning them all stressed out to their kids. But then she finds, if she puts them in positive environments, and this is all in my book, she finds that their behavior's improved and she finds that there's changes in DNA methylation which prevent the symptoms from being transmitted to the next generation. I, this is not in my book. Remember the mice that were shocked and we talked about this last time. I know we did, yes. They were shocked every time they smelled the cherry blossom like scent.

Yep.

Well, that researcher, Brian Diaz, he had a question. He said, well, what would happen if I re. If I teach them not to fear the scent by repeatedly exposing them and not shocking them. Well, the interesting thing that happened is that they no longer had this heightened sensitivity to the scent and their sperm lost that fearful epigenetic signature that could pass to future generations. The important thing to say here is that mice aren't the only ones who benefit from positive experiences. It's how we as humans heal. You know, we, as I talked about earlier, we've got to calm our brain's stress response, whether we've inherited it or that trauma happened to us early. You know that Isabel Sweet, some of the brand new research she's doing, she's been looking at the trauma survivors from that nice attack in 2015 when that guy drove his van up in the promenade and he killed 80 people. She's been looking at the blood samples of the survivors and she's finding correlations in the blood of her traumatized mice in her lab. And she's also looking at the blood samples of Pakistani orphans that lose their parents when they're little. And she's finding similarities to these mice, that she's separating them from the mothers or bringing back the stressed mother, you know, these unpredictable separations. And she's finding, and this is what's exciting in the research right now, similar small non coding RNA alterations, similar biomarkers in the mice and the children.

The biomarkers elevated cortisol. Is it elevated hemoglobin?

Like what is the elevated, the small non coding rna. There's more of this genetic material, small non coding RNA in the traumatized mice because you know, there's a trauma that happens to us, you know, that we're driving a car and you know, our cells hit into a wall and then there's this chemical change that takes place where we, where the DNA tells the cell to, you know, use or ignore this certain genetic material based on what just happened so we can survive it. So, you know, some of the mechanisms that they're looking at are small non coding RNA alterations, histone modifications, DNA methylation. I mean there's lots of mechanisms, but these are the things that are being studied right now. And as I said before, there a lot of this research, to answer your question in a very long winded way.

A very beautiful way, I mean in.

One sentence is a lot of the work is with men right now and the male sperm line.

And isn't it funny too Mark, that if the work is transitioning for inherited family trauma over to men, that we're also in an understanding, a re understanding of what it really means to be A man, like 2020 for me, has been the most shadow, exposing personal growth, however you want to describe it, like expansion, personally, and I'm super grateful for it. But I'll tell you, sometimes when I'm going through the crucible, I'm not grateful. It's like the hardest thing for me to practice is gratitude. So for everyone who's feeling the call, let's talk specifically to men when it comes to it. First, becoming aware. Because it's on the temple, I believe, in Greece, I believe it's on the temple of Apollo. Know thyself. So if we're not aware, if we're not aware of the trauma, which is what your book provides us as tool sets for that awareness, we can't do anything as far as confronting it, coming to peace with it. Forgiveness. Can you talk about the bridge between awareness and forgiveness? Because at the end of the day, I feel like for men specifically, we have, and I'll speak for myself, a lot of pride. I've been dealing with a lot of pride in 2020. How do we let go of this pride? And how do we walk the bridge between the awareness tools that we learn in your book and then the courage to forgive and the courage to let go?

A couple things here. So the opposite, the opposite of pride is vulnerability. And when you bring up this word courage, which is really quite a beautiful word, the core of courage is cool in French or corazon in Spanish, which is heart. And when you bring up the word forgiveness, a lack of forgiveness, which really is the vehicle of rejection because we can't let something go. And you know, in the book, I talk a lot about the importance of not rejecting or excluding the members in our family, even though they were alcoholics or our dad, our granddad hurt our mom or grandfather or grandmother. Because when we reject another, many things happen. It's almost mystical in the way, because what we try to push away inside us on a subterranean level continues. So it continues, for example, if we reject our parents, we unconsciously reject that behavior in that parent inside ourselves. And then we can't see when we're the same because we've disowned it. We can't see when we're cold or distant like that parent. And it expresses in us unconsciously not only that, but when we reject that parent for being cold or distant, what do we do? But we pull in a partner who's cold or distant who plays it out for us. We actually pull in a partner who mirrors the same thing, because we're not allowed to reject or exclude anything. You know, that's the. The wall we keep hitting into, which is really saying, don't hit, get permeable, become vulnerable. So we either pull in a partner who does the same thing to us, or we take. We pull in a good partner, but then we make them distant or cold because we're like this.

Yeah.

Hyper vigilant and shut down. And after a while, the partner says, what? And stops trusting us. So we can turn a good partner bad, in a sense, through our hyper vigilance and our lack of trust. But I think most importantly here, Josh, is if we reject a parent, let's say, for treating us poorly, we often treat that child, part of us, the same way we feel we were treated. For example, if the parent couldn't be gentle with us or they. They ignored us, we can't be gentle with us. We ignore that child, part of us, we do to ourselves what they believe they've done to us. If the parent was critical or aggressive, we become self critical or inwardly aggressive. Yeah, I mean, I've seen that come.

Up in my own life. And what was really unique when I was going through your book, and I'm so excited, too, because my partner is actually gonna be going deep into your work in your program, which I know this podcast, we're going to be linking information about your program in the show notes of this show. It's near and dear to my heart because like everything you're saying, Mark, for the past three minutes, it was just like, boom, boom, boom. It was just hitting me because that is exactly what I've pulled in. I've pulled in this partner that's allowed me to see where I'm not free and whatever my projections are and how I haven't healed, my relationship with my father and how I get to do that. It's been like this recurring theme, and the thing that hit me the most that I know everybody feels that is we cannot reject something in our parent without actually seeing that within ourselves. We're rejecting ourselves as we're rejecting our parents. And the courage, in my opinion, that you spoke so eloquently was the. The heart, the corazon. Like, that's a really tricky road for people to walk because I think what we all fear, or I'll speak for myself, is like going back to the well one more time to a parent, to a father, to a mother, and saying, I love you, I forgive you. Here was my experience, and I just want to move forward with you, and then having them reject you again, I think that is what everyone's most afraid of, is like when I'm super vulnerable and I open up as an empowered masculine being. Don't hurt me again.

Yeah, so I want to. I want to talk about that. You know, first of all, I want to say, you know, we never throw ourselves in front of a moving train. You know, if our parents are not able to meet us where we are and we can't stand the flame, we can't stand the fire. Do the work inwardly first. You know, you don't have to go back to your parents. You can do it through visualization because the brain doesn't know where the healing is coming from. You know, often people that can't heal with their parents in real time, you know, from my book, I'll have them use a photograph or. And, you know, one of the pieces of work I'll have somebody do with a mother with whom they're not attached and they're rageful with the mother because this attachment was broken. I might have them put the photograph behind their left shoulder at night as they sleep. And, you know, it's like, mom, we can't do this in real life. But at night, hey, mom, please hold me when I'm sleeping so I can, you know, become. Be whole or complete or safe in my body. Teach me how to trust your love, how to receive it, how to let it in without taking care of you. Just receiving. We can do the work without seeing our parents. We really can at first. But then if we're doing well, take the show on the road and then work with your parents in real life. That's important. But there's another thing too, we need to look behind. And there's, you know, this I talk about in the book behind our Parents and what made our parent critical or distant or cold. You know, maybe mom was one of eight kids and didn't get enough from her mother. Or maybe a baby died stillborn before our mom and grandma thought mom would die too. So she didn't attune to her, terrified she would die too. And that was already broke the bond because we now know that attunement must begin in utero. And that wasn't the thinking years ago. So we have to look at. Or her parents were breaking up, or her dad was an alcoholic. What made mother critical, dad aggressive, mother shut down, father rageful. What made these things happen in the generation that creates compassion? And as you and I know, Josh, compassion is an internal state that feeds the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to reframe the stress response so we can heal the brain. But. And you know, through compassion, we enlarge areas. We engage areas of the brain that fill us with peace. You know, it's not an excuse for what our parents did.

Yes.

But it does explain, when we look.

Back, this is so powerful because there's. There's a moment, I think, in all of our lives where we just. We're tired of suffering and we've looped enough, and we just decide, okay, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to heal. And I. And I. The reason I'm wanting to have a second round with you to go over this information again is because if you haven't heard it the first time, here's round two. Here's your opportunity to heal the things that continue to pop up for you that you may not know, that you even may not know. And I think the most challenging thing for so many people is, like, they'll do their inner work. And maybe for some people, Mark, it might be a decade or more of doing quote, inner work. And by the time it comes for them to actually meet their family member. Now, obviously, if they're deceased, there's a lot more safety because they're deceased. But when they're living, what if that family member is literally just refusing, with a cold hand to do any kind of work whatsoever? Do you teach people in your work and in your book how to deal with that internal healing where they don't actually need a relationship with their mother or their father or their sister or their brother to heal? How do they heal their own?

Absolutely. You know, again, you know, let me go back to one more thing I want to say about healing with our parents, because it's important. Healing with them doesn't mean we agree with everything that they've. Let me say it this way. Healing with them means that we're in tune with what they could give as well as what they couldn't give. That's healing. My mom, she couldn't be warm or she couldn't be affectionate, or my dad could. You know, that is healing. We've lost the story about our parents. We. It no longer has a charge for us, you know, because, you know, this rejection lives on inside us. And. But many of us, because of the entrenched defense, we've become fixated on what they've done to us, and it's spoiling our lives. And then this template is forging our later relationships. And, you know, we're pulling in partners and our children.

Yeah.

And we're affecting our children. We're pulling in partners that are doing the Same. It's absolutely true what you're saying. And then affecting our children. The buck has got to stop here. We've got to do the healing. So in answer to this question that you just asked me, absolutely, we can do the work, even if our mom is a catatonic alcoholic and our father is dead. And, you know, we can do this work through visualization with a photo. And again importantly, not taking their behavior personally, which means losing the charge by looking behind them and seeing why. Look, any child in that birth order, given those traumas, would have received the same parenting. That goes for your mother in her birth order, given those traumas. That goes for your father in his birth order, given the traumas. And that goes for us in our childhood. We would have received the same parenting because of the traumas that happened. And then all of a sudden, it makes it not personal. Oh, man. I talk about this in the book, but it's so important because this is not new science. This has been around us. Harvard, back in 1950, published a test called the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study. And they. Josh, they asked one question, one question. They said, hey, tell me about your mother. Is she. Is your relationship with her? Four questions that you check the box. Warm and close, friendly, tolerant, or strained and cold. And the same as with the father. And if you checked tolerant, strained and cold. They followed you for 35 years when you were 56, 21 to 56. And they found out that 91% of the people that had a difficult relationship with their mothers had a significant health issue like coronary artery disease, cancer, alcoholism, diabetes, compared with only 45%, less than half who had warm, friendly clothes. Same numbers with the father, 82 and 50%. So, you know, I just want to encourage the listener, you know, don't follow my word. Don't do this unless it feels right in your body, but consider your physical health as well, because your life could depend on it.

Yeah. Follow the data. Like, I don't care if you're spiritual or if you're scientific. This inherited family trauma question is no longer a question. The question's been answered. It's real. It's part of your life's work. It's part of many people. It's part of many people's work, ancient and contemporary. I think about Confucius and Lao Tzu and Alan Watts and all these incredible masters that have spoken to this, but without the data. We are so fixated on data in this modern world, and I understand it. I understand why we need to have science and spirituality because we're in a very technologically focused world where things are very linear and logical thinking. And let's be honest, there's a lot of, I guess you could say, charlatans in this world that they use certain esoteric language and the way that they speak is very intoxicating and they're very charismatic and whatnot. People that are adverse to doing any kind of emotional work, I think have been scarred by someone, maybe they've been taken advantage of or whatever. In this book, in your book, it didn't start with you. Do you go over any awareness practices or inner work practices so that someone can decipher if what they're feeling is true or how to take advice from other people? Or is that not even involved in your book?

No, that's the whole last third of my book. As you know from reading it. You know, the whole last third of my book is taking time, making the time to create positive experiences to change the brain. Because that's how we down regulate the limbic system, how we calm the brain's stress response. Look, a positive experience. It can be, you know, people say, what do you mean by having a positive experience? It can be a practice of receiving comfort, support, giving that comfort and support to ourselves, which, which is essential, receiving it from an image. Maybe that photograph after a while becomes less hostile and we start to lie, enjoy lying in that bed with our mom's photo. Because, you know, in real life I don't get along with her. But yeah, it's comforting now because I've been doing this practice, you know, feelings of compassion, as you and I talked about feelings of gratitude, generosity, or having a generosity. Practice is another experience, positive experience, that feeds the prefrontal cortex. Practice of loving kindness, practicing mindfulness, ultimately anything that allows us to feel strength and peace and joy inside. Because these types of experiences allow us to down regulate the stress response. But the important thing, and I want to make mention of this, is that we've got to feel the sensations of this practice physically and viscerally. You know, we've got to feel expansion as a sensation and trust it and let it affect us, you know, and then we don't attach to the outcome when we do these practices. I'm only doing this practice because I have migraines and I want my migraines to go away. That's not the mind frame for doing personal work. We do personal work because it feels right inside. We don't attach to the outcome. You know, healing from, let's say a particular illness is never something that we can control. But I find that if we can commit to this inner practice, whatever it is, you know, compassion, generosity, feeling, expansion, being with the sensation of pulsing being with the sensation of expansion, and allow it to touch us deeply, we become expanded inside. And then our symptoms really become less important, Josh. You know, often they even go away.

That's what happened with your vision, is you healed the reconnection of love, I believe, to your mother, and you literally healed your own vision, which is effing amazing. Like, I'm. I'm sitting here going, like, how is this real in life? And we hear stories like this all the time. Because my logical mind wants to reject that. I can fix my pain with an emotional healing process, and I'm aware of that. My observer sees that. And I'm constantly reminded that I can never and none of us can fix a spiritual or an emotional problem using just our minds.

It doesn't exist.

I mean, look at Albert Einstein's quote, right? We cannot solve something with the same mind frame and intelligence of how it was created. So part of your science with this mark is core language. And I believe you even have a patent on this as well. Like this core language approach, identifying trauma, the trauma. Gram, there's deep work in this book. Can you share just the high level of this, the biology and the psychology of core language and that approach?

Core language, trauma language. So in the book, I teach people how to look for this verbal. And we discuss what verbal trauma language is. A sentence like I'll be abandoned or left or sent away or nonverbal trauma language. I get migraines every time I'm in a group of people, and that's non verbal trauma language. So I've discovered that when a trauma happens, we may have talked about this in the first show, maybe not that there are clues left behind in the form of emotionally charged words, sentences that, you know, really form a breadcrumb trail that when we learn how to follow it, you know, brings us that missing piece of the puzzle. But there's a. There's a biology to this. Why do we have to find why trauma language? Why? Look, as we know from trauma theory, when a traumatic event happens to us, Josh, significant information of that trauma bypasses the frontal lobes. Significant information, it sort of gets rerouted. So the experience of what happens to us can't be named or ordered through words because our language centers get compromised and our hippocampus is compromised. And then without language, our experiences get stored as fragments. Fragments of memory, fragments of body language, body sensations, fragments of trauma Language, fragments of images, fragments of emotion. It's like the mind disperses and essential elements get separated. We lose the story, and then because of that, we never complete the healing. And that's why it's important to look at this trauma language, because it's our doorway in. And again, the trauma language is verbal or nonverbal. You know, when we have symptoms, what happened right before those symptoms began? What happened that week or moments before? What makes it worse? What makes it better? You know, the questions I list in whatever that chapter is.

There's also a glossary in the book, too, with the terms at the back of the book.

Yeah, yeah. I give the questions in there because these pieces aren't lost. They've just been rerouted. And the important thing here is that we can heal, but there is a biological and psychological component for this. Biologically, language is lost. So we need to pull this language up. Psychologically, it's converted, rerouted into depression, anxiety, physical discomfort, physical chronic conditions. Behaviors we can't explain. Yeah.

Do you feel like there could be a passing of the torch with this book, this knowledge? The Family Constellation Institute, which I know you're a huge part of. Who do you see out there? Obviously they're there because evolution is going to continue. Who's. Who's getting the torch passed in this work? As you go towards your music career and as you go towards the things that are pulling you.

My music career. Thank you. Yeah, well, I'm still young enough now. I'm kidding. I am a lead guitarist. It's important. But, you know, that's why I give trainings, because I must pass this work forward to my students. But I also give it away in the book. There's nothing in the book that isn't that. You know, I don't keep anything. I put it all there. Someone who never sees me, never has trained with me, can read the book. I hear every day on Instagram and Facebook, Twitter, all the social media of people who have read the book and their lives have changed. Because the first part of the book, as you know, I teach people how to be detectives of trauma language. The next part of the book, I teach people how to do their trauma gram, their genogram, and link it to events in the family history. And then the third part of the book, I teach them how to have positive experiences, healing sentences, meaningful images, meaningful experiences that will change the brain. And that is being passed on daily through the book and through my training.

And through this podcast.

I mean, and through this podcast.

It's such an inspiring line of work because, you know, I came from the fitness industry where for 10 years, like 10,000 hours of people, I was telling them like, how many reps, what's their posture? It was very logical and structured. When it comes to emotions, it's this skill set of accepting what is that I believe is the most potent and what the world really needs right now. It's learning how to navigate that contextual, nuanced world. And Mark, you've done such an amazing job with this. You know, as we say goodbye and wind down, like, what's the guidance that you think we possibly didn't cover? Or what's the guidance that you just authentically want to share to our listeners about taking their trauma, this, this past trauma and actually putting the healing in their hands?

That's a good question. You know, we're all sitting in the middle of a collective trauma, right? We're sitting in the middle of RAC trauma, pandemic trauma, political trauma, safety trauma. We're sitting in the middle of it. And, you know, I'm going to go back to a similar message. But before, you know, we can be truly inclusive of others, we've got to include the ugly parts inside us that we've excluded. You know, I always feel that our inhumanity toward others is a mirror of our own inhumanity toward ourselves. And when we're split inside, we can do terrible things to ourselves and to others. However, when we treat ourselves with respect, you know, we can treat others differently. And how else to say this, but this is the time to look at our own personal healing. We've got to do our inner work and heal what's in shadow and integrate what's been fragmented in us. You know, how we've numbed out, how we've shut down, how we've split off, how we've tightened not to feel something, not to feel our vulnerability. Then from a place of more clarity, once we've learned to self regulate, we can take action in the world and then we can do meaningful deeds. Josh, you know, we can create a meaningful impact in the world. When we're clear, we can focus on what we're meant to do in life.

So many people struggle with like, what's my purpose? You know, what am I going to do in the world? What's my thing? What's my thing? I don't see it possible if the lens of inherit and family trauma is cloudy, that they could ever clearly see their purpose because, and maybe for some of us, Mark, our purpose is to actually be the one that the buck Stops here with, you know, maybe for some of us, this is your calling, this is your work. Like, this is, this is what you bring to the world. If it's lighting up in your system right now and you feel your chakras tuning in, like, that's it, like, there's the answer. As we look at this lens of past trauma and having the courage to heal and doing this work. And also in the middle of this, there's an emotional, physical, mental, spiritual component in the very center Mark, which I believe is the core of all of us. We're all born like sentient beings that are there is just our birthright is to be well. I asked you this question a year ago. Whatever your answer is, is perfect. How do you define wellness now? You know, since it's been a year since you answered that before. But share with us in this moment, like, how do you define being well, living your life well.

Well, the good thing is I have no clue what I said a year ago.

Perfect.

So I'm going right off the cuff. But again, wellness is inner work, self care, inner work. Confronting what's uncomfortable inside of ourselves. Being willing to stay with uncomfortable without splitting off. You know, rather than running to the TV or to the cell phone or to exercise or to computer do work, we take that as an invitation. What's uncomfortable to sit with a so we can confront what's deep to it. And I said this in the podcast, but I'll say it again. When we can hold and sit with what's uncomfortable inside us, we can get to something that's life giving beneath it. And those are the sensations of what you called the sentient being. We're born with sensations of stillness, sensations of expansion, sensations of vitality, sensations of the pulsing, the flow, the pulses inside our bodies, many pulses, not just a heartbeat inside our body that we can tune into. Then when we can do that, we can become more sentient. And then, as you said so beautifully, then we can contact what it is we're meant to do in this world because we can't really find what it is we're meant to do when we're distracted with feeling crappy. Yes, we, you know, and then, you know, we can do what we enjoy and then we can be a gift to the world, a gift to others. And that's what more is there to wellness. It's a gift to ourselves and a gift to others.

It's an incredible answer because I was just talking to a friend a couple days ago and, and I was saying, well, what's the Meaning of life, you know, And I. And I believe, and I'm curious what you believe. I have this sense that, like, the true meaning of life is to do whatever work is needed to actually find your purpose. And after you found your purpose, you just give that away. And that's the whole point of it all. Like, it's to find it and then give it back. And I don't know how you see that, but. But that I love just an awareness that I had recently.

I love it. I love it. So we all come in occluded in some way, and that's part of the game plan. We all come in with this software of inherited trauma, or we all have early wounding at home or in utero or as an infant. And that wounding, if we cannot see it as, oh, look what was done to me, this is terrible. But if we can see it as, okay, look at this, that I get to work through, look at this box that I find myself in, then when we can work through by doing our own personal work, just like you said, we get to shine and become who we're meant to be and do what it is that we are meant to do here. And as you said, give it away and help others heal, lead others through what we struggled with.

Markwolin.com M A R K W O L Y N N.com it didn't start with you, but it ends with you if you choose. Mark, thank you for your work. The emotional intelligence question we're always exploring on this show, like, you really hit the mark. I actually didn't know I was going to say that. I'm sure people have already said that to you before, but thank you for coming on the show, man. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your work. And I'm just so excited that. That my partner gets to experience your work and that our audience gets to experience your work. And we'll continue to preach this from the mountaintop, and everybody's going to find their way if they're willing and if they're open. So thank you so much for coming on the show again.

You're so welcome. Just for the record, I've never heard hit the mark before. No one's ever said it.

Perfect.

You get to keep that one. Very good. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed our conversation, Josh, as usual, it was wonderful.

Me too. All right, well, everyone go to wellness force.com podcast. Learn more about Mark's work. Full show notes with his programs, his book, everything. And on top of that, Mark and I are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.