177: How to End Generational Trauma in 30 Minutes | Mark Wolynn

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So I am delighted to put you on. Schedule a free call with them at kellybroganmd.com forward slash hole, W-H-O-L-E. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. Today, I sit down with Mark Wollin in one of his first interviews in three years. So I am so honored and so excited. If you don't know who he is, he is the author of the foundational text, It didn't start with you, which put me on to the world of family constellations. He's the director of the Family Constellation Institute in the U.S., and he is renowned for his work that bridges epigenetics and somatic healing. and that demonstrates how the traumas of our parents, our grandparents, and even great grandparents can live through our bodies as seemingly unexplained depression and anxiety and all sorts of mysterious phenomenon that we can't seem to otherwise decode in our own personal lives. So he's a leading expert in the field of inherited family trauma. So we get into How can you tell the difference between early childhood attachment issues or whether this is some sort of transgenerational phenomenon that started with your great grandmother? We also talk about the consequences of rejecting a parent, right? Like how that shows up in your personal life and dynamics with relationships, with money, with your health. And also why some people deal with inherited family trauma and why some people don't and how you can interrogate your family line, even if you've been adopted or don't have ready access to the lore in your own personal space. And he provides the resources for that. So I am so excited to put you onto his work. If you are not familiar, you're welcome. And I hope that this interview serves as a primer to offer you more compassion and self-insight and connection to your specific narrative. Welcome, Mark, to the show. Thank you for having me, Kelly. So as I was saying before we started recording, this is a huge honor for me. I read your book many years ago at this point. And as I'm sure many listening have, because I am a family consolation zealot, and I point to your book as the text to illustrate a phenomenon that would otherwise, I think, to many ears sound like magical thinking or like it's very loosely based in patterns that don't have any real meaning. I'm sure you've dealt with this over your career as you've legitimized what you observed in your practice. Now, with the publication of the latest edition of your book, you have even deeper, more validated, more rigorous evidence that this is a real phenomenon. But for those who are new to what it is that you have been about for the better part of your career, I want to start with some of the stories. Because when I talk about this phenomenon and I reference why somebody might even interest themselves in family constellation or looking at transgenerational patterns, I usually pull an example. I have one example that I find to be extraordinarily profound from my personal case studies that is a mom whose daughter was struggling with restrictive eating while she was abroad in college. And on further examination, she recalls that she herself was abroad in Europe at the same age and had an episode of restrictive eating, very dramatic episode of restrictive eating. And that when they, you know, explored their ancestral history, they found that the maternal grandmother had, you know, war related starvation, like rations restricted experience at the same age in Europe as well. Right. So it's one of these classic examples that makes you feel like you are a part of something that has meaning, whereas otherwise you might pathologize the identified patient and say, well, this person is, you know, this person is sick and they need help. and really myopically tune in to just like the symptoms that are presenting in a given person down the line. So I'd love to start out with some of your favorite examples. Like when you're at a cocktail party and you want to talk about what you do, you know, like how do you illustrate the phenomenon? Because there's so many. I mean, I still remember, again, years later, some from your book about like, you know, the guy waking up in a cold sweat of anxiety and his like uncle used to work on the electrical pole in the blizzard. And, you know, like it's, it's so, it's so poetic and, and fascinating. So I'd love to know these days, what are the, what are the illustrations that you use of this phenomenon? You know, Kelly, I think I'm going to tell the very first case that taught me how to look for inherited trauma. I had no idea that's even a concept back then. We're going back 35 years ago, I used to work with a population of self-injurers. And I'd always ask myself, why are they coming to me? Of course, I was a self-injurer in my teens, but I didn't put it together. But here I am working with a lot of cutters. And there's this one woman, I'll call her Sarah just for the sake of the interview. She's 24 years old, and she's cutting differently than the other cutter. She's cutting in an extreme way where she's either into her arm or her thigh or her abdomen, where she's cutting so deeply, she's hitting a vein or an artery and is almost bleeding to death. And her parents, freaking out, take her to the hospital and they think she's trying to kill herself. So they put her in a psych ward for two to three weeks, three to four weeks at a time. And one time after she gets out, I've been thinking about her case that I, you know, why is this? I'm working with all these other cutters and they work, they cut more superficially. What is it about Sarah that she's cutting so deeply? The question I had was what's trying to be communicated here. So one day when she's released, I hand her a pen. I go, Sarah, take this pen, pretend it's your razor and show me exactly what you do. So she puts the pen to her arm and she begins to make the cutting motion. And I could see she's dissociating. Her eyes are glazing over. And in that moment, I say, OK, stop right there. What's that thought? What's that feeling? What's that impulse? And she looks at me, you know, through the fog and says, I don't deserve to live. now I mean I'm looking at a 24 year old woman his life has just begun and I go what did you do did you cause an accident did you take someone's life did you break up with someone and they killed themselves and and she goes no nothing like that so I figured okay I've missed it I've got to go back into her childhood because I know it's in there I don't know anything about inherited trauma at this point and I you know I started asking the questions about her mom and her dad but she's had a great childhood. She can take the nurturance from her mom. She can go to her mom to be held and cuddled. She can go to her dad. She just can lean into them for support. So I figure it's got to be attachment. I go back into her early life and ask all the questions again. But she has a safe, secure, strong attachment with her mom. And I'm flummoxed. So basically, at this point, I go, okay, tell me about your grandmother, your grandfather, tell me about your grandparents. And remember, again, I don't know anything about intergenerational trauma. And she drops the bomb. She said, well, my dad's mom, she was an alcoholic later in my dad's childhood. So in the early part of the childhood, the father gets enough from the mother to be a good father and is able to be a good husband is able to love. But when the father's about 12, grandmother's drinking ramps up to the point where she crashes into a pole and grandpa who's in the passenger seat goes through the windshield and gets cut, lacerated on the glass and bleeds out before the ambulance comes. And in that moment, you know, my jaw drops to the ground because there's the whole case. There's everything. There's, you know, why she's cutting so deeply and who deserves to die, which isn't her. Obviously, it's her grandmother who feels that she doesn't deserve to live for taking the life of her beloved for another person, in this case, her beloved. So I go, okay, okay, okay. And because I'm a student at this point of the Psychodrama Institute, John Nolte at the Moreno Institute, I know just what to do. I put two chairs in the middle of the office, and I say, okay, Sarah, in that chair is your grandpa. Tell him exactly what you told me. And she says, well, grandpa, I cut myself. I go, no, tell him how deeply. I cut myself and almost bleed to death. And I say, add the words like you did, Grandpa. She goes, like you did, Grandpa. Now she's crying. She's making, it hits her. And then I say, okay, close your eyes. What's he showing you? What's he telling you? And she says, he's telling me he doesn't want me to do this. And when I go to cut, he'll be there supporting me. And then I say, look at your grandmother in that chair and tell her what you told me, that you don't deserve to live. And she says that. And then I said, as you didn't, Grandma, as you didn't. Now, she's never met her grandparents. They've been gone for decades. And all of a sudden, she tells me that the grandmother says the same thing, that when she goes to cut, that Grandma will be with her. So that's what she does. She goes home. She feels them with her. And she never cuts again, Kelly. That was it. And all of a sudden I go, okay, okay. I mean, this just lit my world up. I'm in my 30s at that point, and this just completely made sense. And that's how it started. I tell that case to your listeners because they're sophisticated and they've read my book, and this case was not in my original book because I thought it was going to be too heavy of a case. It extraordinary And of course I looking through the lens of a critical assessment of my own training and how when you in conventional psychiatry I sure she interacted with the conventional system to suggest that she herself might have a chemical imbalance and that it might be some sort of endogenous pathology that is related to some dysfunction of her neurochemical receptors I mean it such a sidestepping It's not even funny, let alone the consequences of pursuing treatments through the physiochemical route in neglect of this more nuanced narrative medicine. I mean, it's just like without this context, there isn't necessarily a completion, a way out, a resolution, let alone the transformation, right? Like the connection that she must have felt to her lineage, the compassion and the empathic bridging, you know, through her parents. It is beautiful. I mean, it's so. I love what you said. No way out. That's exactly right. You know, she needed to know that these feelings of needing to die, of not deserving to live, she needed to know they weren't hers. So that's, you know, that's our starting point. And she's getting it right here in the chair next to me when I'm working. And then she needed to know that this cutting, that there was, that it also wasn't hers. You know, that this had come from the history and the family. And then, of course, that lit my world up. And from from I found Bert Hellinger right after that and became one of his first students in the U.S. And, you know, that that led to everything, really. So a lot of people in my vast experience trying to transmit the nature of family consultation work, because I feel sometimes like a door to door salesman about it. Like I tried to explain to a lot of people, both in public forums and private. How would you and do you distinguish distinguish between psychodrama? Because a lot of people assume it's almost like a theatrical catharsis or expression of, you know, these these difficult to access emotions, psychodrama and what it actually is, which is a systematizing of these influences that are related to networks of family members. and it is in part mystical, right? Like it is mysterious, but you also, I often joke like, you know, you don't need to be some deep practitioner who's been meditating two hours a day. I mean, you could be like a McDonald's eating, you know, guest station pumper or whatever, and you can show up to a constellation and have your life transformed in the space of six hours in a way that just about nothing else, in my humble opinion, you know, can deliver, especially in the group field. So I'm just curious and I might take notes on how you talk about it because I really struggle. I struggle to represent what it is, what the promise is, and, you know, why somebody would pursue this type of, I mean, I guess we're getting to treatment early in our conversation, but why somebody would pursue this kind of a thing and modality methodology approach over another one, right? over a more personal exploration of, you know, their childhood history and just focusing on their own first seven years, let's say, and keep it at that. Because for a lot of us, that's enough material, right? Like the first seven years can give us enough to work with. So many of us are carrying an image that's not bringing us health. We're carrying an old image that my childhood was terrible. My mother was cruel. My immune system is weak. I mean, even if we say the words, just the energy of those words, you know, bring a sinking in the body. And so the idea of a constellation is to shift an old image we carry. And the way we do that is so we have this inner image and a constellation, as people know, as an outer image. We're seeing our family system in front of us. So physically, we're standing on, you know, it's one of the things I do in my workbook. I have people put shoes and flip flops and slippers on the floor and stand in them so they can physically feel what their mother felt when mother was pregnant with them or when they were, you know, in their early years before memory or what their father felt because he drank or what their grandmother felt who was institutionalized or what we felt is, you know, a lot of times when I'm giving the command in a constellation, I'll say, stand over here. I know there's representatives, but I'm a big believer that we can also represent ourselves. So I'll say stand over here as yourself. And I don't know what age, whether a fetus or an infant or a toddler, maybe even before memory. So we can have these experiences that are very somatic. They're body-centered in a way that allows something to come up. Whether we're watching it outside in a chair as a representative is doing it or whether we're having the visceral experience. And then we move the energy with either dialogue. Hear your mother say to you, I would have given you more if I had gotten more. A sentence like that is like, oh, my God, she would have given more if she had gone. You know, it helps connect the dots for people or, you know, or tell your mom. It was easier to push you away than to love you. You know, the things that we do, the things that are right there in our lives. So we either hear dialogue, say something. The facilitator makes a shift in the field, turning someone this way, turning someone towards someone. And then all of a sudden, again, I'm going to use that word lit up. You know, we get lit up in a way where the suffering that we've been experiencing, perhaps a lifetime, can shift in a 30-minute constellation like nothing I know. Nothing I know moves the energy so quickly, which is why I've been training people how to do this for 30 years. So there you go. And would you say that there are particular qualifications? Because I've had the experience, when I was very new to Constellation, I did a ton of group work, and I would often be chosen to represent people's fathers, right? So that was sort of like a joke about how I was always the go-to, and then I went through a very challenging window of my personal life, and I was very, I guess vulnerable. And then I was constellating, participating, and then I suddenly started to be chosen as people's mothers, right? So it's interesting. It's very interesting. So about 10 times, I'm like, everybody's dad, right? And I could feel in my body, I don't know what a man's body feels like, obviously, but I could feel in my body this kind of spaciousness, like a vacuous, you know, I don't know. Emptiness implies something that's a slightly different thing, but it was so different than the swirling, you know, cacophony that I'm used to as a woman inside of myself. And I, to this day, don't understand how that happens. Like what actually was, was it in my imagination? Is it some invocation, right? Is it just the shared intention? Like what actually is happening in that moment to allow me to express, right? So sometimes I might turn away or walk to another side of the room or feel from that place of emptiness, like just a kind of defeat, maybe a sense of nihilistic suicidality or whatever. Like I would have these things come up from and through my body, but I didn't get trained in order to express that. I didn't have any special skills that allowed me, you know, I'm not somebody, I'm not a clairvoyant. I'm not a channeler, right? So is there any prequalification or can anybody really stand in the field and benefit from this work? Because that's been my conclusion is anybody can. Well, I think it's skillful to be a good representative, which is what you're talking about. You have an openness that allows you, you know, in the, okay, first of all, I'm going to answer that, but I'm going to shift internets and systems because I lost you for a minute. I heard what you said. We can take this out later, but let me lose you for about five seconds. Totally, totally. No problem. And it might also be Riverside because I have a lot of issues. All right, hold on. Let me- Yeah, let's do that. Let me shift you to a better, I have a better system. You have an openness that allows your representing to be multifaceted. You have a huge repertoire of possibilities because of your openness. It is not the case with some people. So the big answer is yes, anybody can do it and anybody can stand as a representative. And generally, the results are going to be amazing. But because I've done it so much as a facilitator, I've seen where certain people, oh man, they do the same thing every time. Yeah, you know, that person must be pulling information from their own family history. So I begin to notice who's a good representative and who might not be based on how empty they can be to allow the energies of the field to inform them. So having said that, my constellation groups are pretty large, as you can imagine, 100 plus people. So I usually say, you know, to pick a male for your father and a female for your mother so they can have that experience. However, that you were representing men is amazing. And I love that you were able to not know what was going to happen and allow what did happen. Yeah. And it was inspired, you know, that whole early window of my pretty frequent like representation, right? So I would go to these groups and I would be a representative, which those of you who have participated know you can get a lot, right? Like the curiosity and empathy that I felt for a man's biological experience in a man's body was expanded just by these simple, you know, representation cases. But I got started, and many people listening might already have heard me talk about this, because I was in a window of some discord, to put it euphemistically, with my family of origin. And I hadn't really spoken to my mom intimately, conversationally, even for about five years. And, you know, I had seen her and we just were in a rupture. and I did my first constellation ever. Like I was, I constellated, not just as a representative. And within four days, I just felt like I'm going to have her over for tea. And we've had, I mean, this was many years ago. We've had a total, like an entirely new chapter. It was like she shrunk from this, you know, for lack of a better word, sort of like monstrous projection into just a woman. right? Just a woman I could talk to and our entire, so it just, because I had experimented with so many other modalities, you know, as seekers do and, and nothing moved the needle. And it was all so abstract and internal to myself. And this wasn't about a conversation I needed to have with her. I had had those. Okay. They didn't yield. It was about something that needed to shift in the meta architecture of my family structure. It's extraordinary. I'd love this. I'd love to speak to that. So what you did is you did enough work where you developed your core, your inner core, so you could have her over for tea. So you could connect with her in a new way. But a lot of us who haven't done that work still find ourselves shrinking or being defended or collapsing or going into caretaking mode. And this is what the work is. I took a lot of heat for this in the book because I told people that they had to repair their relationships with their parents. So, of course, the world slammed me and said, Mark Willen makes you heal with toxic parents. But they didn't read what I really wrote, that healing, it's an inside job, and it's mostly an inner reconciliation, that you can't go home until you've developed this core. If you're still going home and making your mom feel okay, your dad feel okay, there's much more inner work that needs to be done before you can attempt to heal these relationships. And the reason they have to, you know, we're bringing up a heavy topic, but the reason they have to be healed is that we will project those relationships onto our partner, our environment, our employees, our colleagues. The IRS. Yes. But also, you know, mother is food. She's nurturance. Our early environment in the womb is our safety in the environment. So when we are highly, an HSP, highly sensitive to sound and light and food and air. And, you know, my first question is, tell me what happened when you were in utero. So, but I want to talk about that bigger thing that you're bringing up about why you could call your mom, say, let's have tea, and then the relationship transforms. So when we reject a parent, there are three ways that operates inside of us unconsciously. The first way is we'll unconsciously reject aspects of ourselves. We can't see when we're the same. You know, we say, I'm never going to be cold like my mother's cold. But then we've disowned those behaviors in us, and now they're expressing unconsciously, and we're cold, but we can't see it. So that's the first way. The second way is when we haven't healed these broken relationships, we'll pull in a partner who treats us in a similar way. So we'll pull in a cold partner, or we'll pull in a nice partner, but we'll see them as cold, because our hypervigilance will be so activated that it's like we'll be waiting for this partner to say something cruel or cold or disconnecting because that's what our mother was. So, you know, good luck in our relationships if we still have this broken relationship with our mom. And then the third way that this shows up in our lives is we will treat ourself, the child part of us, unconsciously we'll treat that part the way we feel we were treated. For example, if our parents couldn't be gentle with us, we will have difficulty being gentle with the inner child. Or it basically will do to ourself what we believe was done to us. So if our parents were critical or aggressive, we'll be self-critical or inwardly aggressive. If our parents ignored us or were distant, bingo, we're distant and ignore our younger self, our inner child self. You remember from the book the Harvard Mastery of Stress study that I put in there I just say this because I think it important you know healing with our parents it not just a good idea for these projections It also imperative for our health. They did this interesting study in the 50s where they asked, I think, med students, they asked them at 21 or 22, one question, and then they followed them. It's a longitudinal study that followed them for 35 years. So the question is, describe your relationship with your mom and describe your relationship with your dad. And then they had these checkboxes. So it was either cold or tolerant. Cold and strained, that's the worst. And then tolerated, that's the next worst. And then warm and friendly, that's getting up there. And the top one was very close. So people who checked tolerant or strain, 35 years later, 91% of them who checked that for the mom had a significant health issue. Coronary artery disease, diabetes. I mean, massive, complex illness related to the relationship with their parents compared to 45%, less than half, who checked warm, friendly or close. So, you know, that's another reason why we need to heal these, not just for our relationships. Absolutely. Absolutely. The reference, though, to the dynamics that start in our early childhood begs the question I'm sure you're very used to answering, which is how do we know that a pattern we might be struggling with relationally, financially, with our health stems from these, you know, dysfunctional, for lack of a better word, dynamics with our own parents, or whether it is one of these transgenerational patterns that has just fit itself into our life narrative. Because when you referenced that case earlier and how significant it was for that woman to understand that this wasn't hers, right? I've even used sometimes in some cases that language with my own daughters, like asking, does this feel like it's yours? And I am not sure because I haven't like I've done the more immediate work with my family of origin in the field in the family consolation setting. So I haven't had one of these like remarkable experiences of something that my great great grandmother did that I'm now doing. You know, so I don't necessarily know that I would know if I was dealing with something that isn't mine and is transgenerational versus just a loyalty like right. Like a loyalty to my parents or a loyalty, you know, I for you, I like you kind of, that's the language my teacher uses in the constellation world. You know, sort of like, I will do this the way you did, right? Like I will, I will, you know, my grandmother was unmarried and single and supported herself from any of them. And here I am doing it. I did consolidate this, wondering if I was, you know, following in her footsteps because it has that feeling. Well, no, it's a great question. Yeah, no, I love that question, actually, because we want to believe in the mystical quality, and yet it's so grounded. I mean, I'm going to give the listeners some very grounded ways to tell whether it's inherited trauma or attachment trauma, let's say. So I've discovered that when we all of a sudden, after an unsettling event, begin to have a change in our own behavior, for instance, a fear or a physical symptom or an emotional symptom, something will arise that strikes almost suddenly or unexpectedly. well, could be when we reach a certain age or have experienced this unsettling event. For example, if our grandmom became widowed at 30 unconsciously without realizing she's doing so, our mom can begin separating from our dad at around 30. And if they both stayed alone, good luck for us having connection after age 30, because there'll be almost a like an ancestral alarm clock, like almost a mechanism in place that says, bingo, age 30, time to be alone. But it's not just ages. You know, it's these milestones or these events in our lives. For example, one would be one triggering event would be when we get married. Everything's fine. you know, seemingly, you know, and then all of a sudden we get married and we're shut down and we can't explain it. I had this really interesting case once where this woman adored her fiance. I mean, he was the best. And then she marries him and she's completely shut down. She doesn't understand it. She shows up in my office. And very quickly, the story is her mom is in love with this high school sweetheart. And he says, look, look, we're in love. We're going to get married. Just wait for me. I've got to go away for a while, but I'll be back. Well, she doesn't believe him. And she gets involved with this guy. And now he comes back and finds her pregnant with this guy. And he says, I'm sorry. And so now she marries the guy she doesn't want to marry and is shut down. And I remember the words my client used, disgusted and repulsed when my fiance, who I'm now married to, makes love to me, which is what her mother felt, disgusted and repulsed because she couldn't marry the man she loved. So being married is, you know, look for shifts after we hit these milestones. I'll give you another one. We move to a new place and then suddenly we become depressed, like our ancestors who were persecuted or forced out of their homeland. Another one is we get rejected by our partner. And all of a sudden, there's something that's out of sync. We go into a deep grief like, oh, I don't want to live. I feel so miserable. And we've only been with this person for two months. So obviously, it's tapping into a deeper abandonment, often a break in the attachment with our mom. So a partnership ends early, and we become forlorn, despairing, depressed without connecting the deeper loss, the deeper abandonment to this break in the attachment. I'll give one more. I'll give one more, and then I'll turn it back over. You're getting me started, Kelly. They're great. No, it's the best way to illustrate it. It's perfect. Yeah. So another one could be, you know, we have a child and then all of a sudden or we get pregnant with a child and all of a sudden we become depressed or prepartum depression or postpartum or perinatal depression. We become depressed. I once worked with this woman. It was fine. She never had symptoms of anxiety, but she gets pregnant and now she's consumed with anxiety. and she shows up in my office and I said, what's going on? And she says, well, I feel like I could harm this baby. And I asked her the obvious question, did you ever harm a baby? She says, of course not. And then I said, did anyone in your family ever harm a baby? And she's about to say no. And she goes, oh, and she remembers her grandmother as a young woman with a young baby, lit a candle, caught the curtains on fire, caught the house on fire, and can't get the baby out that's upstairs sleeping. And then she says, but we were never allowed to talk about it, which you know in constellations, this is one of the mechanisms, one of the experiences that stand in the way of why do some people repeat? I mean, we all have family trauma, but why do some people seem to materialize, manifest, inherit a generational trauma and others not? And of course, we look in the family and there's stories that didn't get told. There's family secrets that are hidden. There's traumas that never healed all the way. And of course, they seal their lips shut and seal the past shut by not talking about these things, thinking like, oh, no, if I bring this up, it'll be terrible for my children. When it's the complete opposite. The more our children know, the more our children are at ease. Anyway, I've talked enough. Absolutely. No, I mean, it's brilliant and so, so important. And I do want to ask you in a moment, like a more metaphysical question about like, you know, why are we this way as human beings? However, you touched on, you know, these cardinal events, right? And your book actually inspired me post the rupture I referenced to sit down with my parents with my phone recording and a big piece of paper and to go at least three generations back and ask about fires and divorces and infidelity and accidents and bankruptcy and these kinds of, you know, more identifiable cardinal events. because if you have the opportunity to do that with your own parents, I imagine you would highly recommend it because this is not like dinner table conversation. You might not otherwise ever, ever access something that could help you to understand why you or your own kids are interacting with a certain life milestone, as you've described, in a very sort of out of the blue kind of a way. But what happens when, you know, your parents have passed, when the secrets are so deeply buried, or if somebody is adopted or has, you know, doesn't have access to that? Like, do they just not get to participate in this whole exploration? Is it just kind of done? What do you recommend in that case? Yeah, no, no. It lives, it's in our trauma language. You remember from my book that I'm big on gathering the verbal and the nonverbal trauma language. So going back to Sarah, her verbal trauma language is, I don't deserve to live. Her nonverbal trauma language is cutting so deeply that she almost bleeds to death. So I'm always looking at both what we say and what we do, because it lives in our fears. It lives in our unexplained symptoms that arise suddenly after an event or at a certain age. It's in our self-destructive or self-sabotaging behaviors. It lives in the symptoms of an illness that appear, as I said, after we got rejected or when we moved to a new town or our best friend deserted us. It's also in our relationship. All we have to really do is look at what's going on in our relationship and we know what happened with attachment or how we deal with money or success. Remember, for a baby, for an infant, currency is the mother, her attunement, her attention. So when the mother is fully present and consistent and her love and nurturance is constant, the baby feels rich and expanded, abundant, abundant. But when, you know, that connections cut off, a baby is bankrupt. And then that's manifested later in life and how we deal with success and money. You know, no matter how much we have, it can feel like we never have enough because we never got enough from our mother. So what I want to say is all of this forms a breadcrumb trail that gives us more than a glimpse. Even if we have no information, you don't need the information. We just need to look at what we're saying, what we're doing, how we're living, how we're loving, how we're creating, how we're expressing. And it's right there. So, yes, if we're adopted and we have no information, if our parents don't talk about it, the skilled clinician just needs to observe the life and the language. And you also are an advocate of doing this work with yourself, right? So like literally just on your own and with a piece of paper representing somebody, that kind of a thing. And I imagine the workbook is in support of that sort of self-inquiry. So finding, I mean, I've been blessed with multiple incredible family consolation teachers and trainers, but not everybody has that access. And so it sounds like you believe that absent the material information from your lineage, absent a good trainer or a great group in your neighborhood, you can still do this work with yourself. You know, Kelly, what you're hitting on there is sort of my life purpose. I can't work with everybody. I wish I could, you know, but there's millions and billions and billions of people could, everybody could use this work. Yes, I would agree. But, you know, I had to figure out how I could give sessions without being there. So I put my wife on flip-flops and slippers. I put my research assistant. I called all my assistants in. And I designed in this workbook ways that people could experience a family constellation to stand as them as their young self, to stand as their mother, to stand as their ancestors. But also what I did is I walked step by step with people and have them experience something somatic. And now they're at this level now to take this and go down another level and then to go down another level. And I would watch my wife cry or my research assistant, you know, completely having a release. And I would say, OK, that's it. That works. And I wrote a workbook that I'm very proud of that does it. It does it. It literally takes you into the deepest places. And then I teach people how to navigate that themselves. So also along with asking, you know, the right questions at the right time so we can connect the dots to what we're experiencing to whether it's attachment or whether it's generational. Now, as you know, in the book that you read, what I did is I tried to walk a line between this chapter talked about attachment trauma, this chapter, I'm the generational guy, but I always know that these traumas go together. In fact one creates the other If our mom for example has traumas in her childhood in her family that creates not always the best landscape for being present and giving the fullness of her mothering In other words generational trauma creates attachment trauma It stands behind it So in fact I tell you what I seeing nowadays which is why I rewrote the book. When I work with people, even though I'm the generational trauma guy, I'm finding that 85% of the time I'm working with attachment. I didn't plan to. I didn't set out to. It's just the truth. And so I would say 85 to 90% of us have breaks in the attachment with our mother, and only 50% of us realize it. Meaning, in the zones where we have no memory, remember the 20 days after pregnancy, we have a heart, after conception, we have a heartbeat. And then 20 to 30 days, we have a neural tube, a neural groove, that which will become our nervous system. So even though we don't have cognitive awareness, we're sentient. We have somatic awareness. And we know this, that that's one of the most important times for neural development when the baby is being wired for the fetus, is being wired for safety or lack of safety, well-being or lack of well-being, calm or lack of calm, which continues into the first two years of life. So here's a three-year period where we have no memory. And most of us don't know what happened and our parents don't remember what happened or they feel, no, I'm not going to tell my child dad was drinking during that time and I was stressed. Yet it's very much important to word it in a way, oh, there was a period where I was tuned out, where I was highly stressed, where I wasn't as present as I wanted to be. and I could see that something changed in you. You stopped taking my milk or you started to not stare in my eyes. Children need to know this. We need to go home and ask our moms, Mom, what were you thinking and feeling during the pregnancy? Were you feeling trapped or did you love Dad? And was this the man of your dreams? Did you have to put your life on hold and give up your dreams? You know, were you guys separating? Was anybody cheating or drinking? These are so important. Did you take any early vacations? When I was a baby, did you leave me for a week or two to go to the shore? Or there are so many questions that we need to know if our moms are available, like you did when you went home and you asked your mom, you know, the history and your dad, the history. We've got to know this because many of us have attachment breaks and have no clue that our mom didn't want to be in the marriage at first or didn't want to have a baby at first or didn't want to be pregnant or was thinking even about giving up the pregnancy at first. Totally. One of the places I like to point people because it was so impactful for me to look through this particular lens is even conception, right? Like what were the circumstances under which you were conceived? You know, what can you divine about the energetics of it? And what kind of sex was it? Right? Like, yeah, literally. Bring up good points. Or were your parents, were you conceived out of wedlock? Were they married at the point? Did mom lose pregnancies before you and think, oh, my goodness, I can't feel her kicking. Oh, what if, you know, was she afraid that we would die too? All of this creates a morass of cortisol. So the baby, you imagine the fetus in the womb trying to reach up to feel the mother's connection, but feels this swirl of cortisol and a cloud. I would say it this way, that this swirling cortisol creates a disconnect. It clouds the connection between mother and fetus and fetus and mother. Absolutely. What are, because a lot of the folks listening are working through the process of taking personal responsibility for their role in repeated relational and specifically romantic, maybe marital dynamics that they are struggling with, right? So a lot of my body of work is about maturing beyond the victim posture so that you can appreciate the opportunity you have to influence the outcome you desire, right? So what are some of the patterns that you see and people who come to you or, you know, that you've observed through those you train with marital complaints, right? So the usual infidelity situation or even cases of different flavors of abuse or whether there's just sort of patterns of neglect. What are some of the dynamics that you think are most amenable to this perspective and this approach? Okay. So it's a great question. So the first dynamic is the bond with our mother. Again, as I mentioned earlier, if that bond is broken and how we feel we were treated, we're either projecting that we can turn a good woman or a good man bad by projecting with our hypervigilance and feeling like we're going to be treated the same way. So the first thing we're looking for is the first thing I would say we need to do is to do that work to heal the bond with our mom. Now, in terms of a systemic work, we've got to look at the generations. Did our mom and dad stay together or did they want to be together? They're cheating, infidelity, because these repetitions occur in generations. If our grandmom was unhappy and our mom was unhappy, guess what? There's an unconscious loyalty that has nothing to do with epigenetics, an unconscious loyalty that I can't be happier than they were. I can't. And then you brought up something else interesting, that if we find ourselves experiencing abuse or something in the relationship that's keeping us disconnected, there's many ways to work with that with our partner. For example, one of them is just revealing the truth, of course, saying, you know, I just can't do this to my young self. I love you so much, but I've done so much work. I just can't do this to that young part of me. So, you know, many ways to frame it, but I'm going to give this relationship another three months to see how you'd like this to go. you know you know but there's so many things we can do i i in the new book i'm writing which is will come out next year uh i i part two is all about relationship and how to navigate and heal our break in the bond with the partner which i'll come back on and say more about that later amazing i uh i'm so glad that you are still yeah nose to the grindstone because all of your insights and all of your work. It's so, so revelatory and foundational for this paradigmatic shift. And I mean, it's really an empathy generating approach. That's what I have experienced. And that empathy and compassion that otherwise feels almost like a kind of like a superego, right? Like, oh, you should feel compassion for your ancestors and your parents. It doesn't arise organically, whereas like this framework of perception, it really, it's a natural emergent phenomenon that you feel connected to, compassionate towards, and it's like a part of something that makes sense. And I wrote in one of my last books that suffering ends where meaning begins. It's really true. When you have that narrative meaning, it's such a powerful gift. So I'd love to, yeah, I'd love to wrap up on this sort of deeper question, which is, you know, you just put out this new edition because you were just brimming with new information that had to get to print. And you have this beautiful body of work that supports transgenerational patterns and what we can do to heal them. And it sounds like you're working on yet another project. So when you look at all of this now, like from an existential perspective, what do you think we're up to here as humans? Like why would designed this way? Why is it that we incarnate? And I don't know necessarily your more spiritual or metaphysical beliefs, or if you even believe in reincarnation and all this kind of stuff, but like, why would we come into these bodies to just mess with some old problems that our ancestors couldn't, like, why would it be that way? I like these kinds of big why questions with, of course, the caveat that there's no right answer, and there's no way that you would know any more than I or anybody listening. But I imagine that you've come to some preliminary theory about it after all of this time marinating with the evidence that this is real. Yeah, yeah. I feel that, as I was saying, that most of us have a break in the attachment with our mother. Perhaps that is the second break. Maybe there's a break from source at some level, and now we come into a body, and we come into this experience where we didn't get enough, and maybe that's on purpose, the traumas and the symptoms because working through and navigating through these traumas and these symptoms are the doorway that I see it. So I look at anxiety attacks as our best friend. I look at symptoms as the deepest and most profound doorway for growth, the best way to change what we haven't been able to change any other way, what we needed to go through so we could learn how to advocate ourselves, to have some self-agency, to learn boundaries, to learn how to take time for ourselves, to learn how to love ourselves. So in a sense, you're right, after 60-some years, 68 years, I look at the picture as this almost like a, what's the word I'm using? A tapestry. There's this tapestry that we have to navigate, and you can't get there until you grow. I mean, I'm not what I'm saying is not very profound, but you can't get to the next step until you've lived the previous step. You have to live through this way in which we can reach a place where we've come back to center. We've come back to core. So, you know, if you were to ask me personally, Mark, who are you? I would say I'd say, thank you. I like that question. I would say, well, thank goodness. I'm no longer my thoughts because that was no fun. and are no longer my emotions because that was no fun. I would say that I am my core, my energetic core, my life force. So what does that mean to me? Well, to be in tune with life forces, we're in tune with something that, well, it has emotion, particles, waves, warmth, heat swirling softening so in in the moment if i were to connect in who am i okay in this moment there's an infinity sign in the next moment there's a wave of you know there's there's just this greater always there deep to all the other gunk that we can access but it takes a while to get there maybe. So I write these books to help people get there more quickly. And you do everything that you're doing, shows and books and teaching to help people get them more quickly. And I guess that's what we're doing. Yeah. I love thinking about it. I mean, you've just spoken from my own heart and mind about this very deep topic. And the concept of a maturational journey is also where I've come to because otherwise it can be, you know, we can fall into this sort of spiritual meritocracy where you're trying to be the better and better and better version, more healed version of yourself instead of, you know, sort of resting back into this hero's path that involves one step in front of the next and you can only take a step when you've taken the previous, right? So it's Really, it's like a stripped of some sort of judgment, valuation, or even a more moralistic sort of, you know, I better do this so that I, you know, that's where spiritual ego can live. And instead, it's just a way, everything that we are presented, every adversity, every challenge, every symptom is just another way to piece the puzzle together of who we are and who we might not be, right? Or who we transiently are. Very well said. Yeah, I love the perspective and your work has been extremely impactful for me in formulating that and living it, embodying it and teaching it to my own kids. I mean, it's such an empowering and humanizing framework. So I'm so deeply grateful for your work. This has been such an honor, and I hope to have you on again after I read the updated edition and do the workbook myself, because there's always more that I can uncover, let alone once you're publishing yet your next. Is it already set to publish? Do you already have that in the works? It's already Penguin bought it already, and I'm working on it. It's about attachment breaks. Now, as we know, our dysregulated nervous systems lead to chronic complex illness and how we heal that in ourselves, how we heal that in our core. I spoke a little bit about that at the end, how we integrate fight, flight, freeze responses in our core and then how we heal that with the partner and then how we heal our children who have breaks with us. So that's what it would be. This is my alley. I'm excited. I will be standing by for that so thank you so much Mark you're welcome thank you for having me Kelly it was fun talking with you Thank you.