Lessons for Ministry From It Didn't Start With You

Imagine that you are a therapist. A man comes in struggling with severe insomnia, which has spiraled into worsening depression and dropping out of college. He has been to doctor after doctor for treatment, but nothing has worked. 

As you listen to the man tell his story, you discover that this all began soon after he turned nineteen. Soon after his birthday, he woke up in the middle of the night, startled awake by a cold feeling. He couldn’t get back to sleep because he feared that if he fell asleep, he would never wake back up. The man has nothing in his personal history that could explain these feelings.

However, as you learn more about the man’s family, you find out he has an uncle he didn’t know existed until recently. This uncle froze to death at the age of nineteen, and overcome with grief, his family never talked about him again. 

Talking about and resolving this untold story helps this man to overcome his depression and insomnia. Not medication. Not sleep therapy. Resolving this untold story. 

The world, and the book It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn, is full of stories like this: people suffering because of unresolved trauma somewhere in the family. This book describes this research about how unresolved trauma can be passed on to future generations. You can pick up a copy here.

This line of research began with research on the children of Holocaust survivors who had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Researchers found that the children, like their parents, had low levels of a stress hormone called cortisol. These low levels are typical in those with PTSD because the stress system is so overrun that the body sometimes stops making this hormone. These low cortisol levels can lead to depression and anxiety, and many of these children developed these mental health problems. 

So, the bodies and brains of the children, who had not experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, were affected in ways similar to those of their parents. 

Researchers have since found similar findings in the children of women who were pregnant and were in the World Trade Center on the day of the 9/11 attacks and the children of veterans with PTSD. 

Overall, this research showed some preliminary evidence that PTSD can be passed along to the next generation, even when the next generation doesn’t face that trauma. These findings encouraged researchers to examine what other effects of trauma can be passed on.

The effects of trauma can be transmitted to the next generation through DNA, which shapes how we look and act. 

In science class, when you did Punnett squares and talked about experiments with pea plants, you learned about chromosomal DNA, which is involved in our physical traits. Chromosomal DNA only makes up 2% of our total DNA, and how it is expressed is not affected by our environment. 

The other 98% is noncoding DNA. This type of DNA is how we get our emotional, behavioral, and personality traits. Unlike chromosomal DNA, how noncoding DNA is expressed can be changed dramatically based on the environment of the person supplying the DNA or their child. For example, traumatic experiences can sometimes change how our DNA is expressed, which can then be passed along to future generations. 

Noncoding DNA expression can be especially affected by the environment of the mother’s womb as she carries her baby. Repetitive fear and anger can activate noncoding DNA to make a baby more reactive to situations that could cause anxiety and anger. This activation prepares the baby for a stressful environment that can cause fear and anger, but this reactivity to stressful situations can lead to difficulties in nonstressful environments, leading the child potentially to be more hyperactive, impulsive, and anxious. 

Additionally, women’s eggs and ovaries develop while they are in their mother’s womb, so if your grandmother experienced severe stress while she was pregnant with your mother, the noncoding DNA in the egg that eventually became you could be affected similarly. Similar things can happen with men’s sperm. 

So, if your grandmother, father, mother, or anyone who contributed to their DNA experienced trauma, this could have affected the DNA passed on to you to make it almost as if you had experienced their trauma yourself.

The good news is that preliminary animal studies have found that positive, low-stress environments can reverse these effects. 

Now that we know some of the mechanisms of trauma’s effects being passed on, how can we know if someone is suffering because of unresolved trauma in their family line? 

First, as in the story told above, unexplained medical or mental health problems may be due to unresolved family trauma. 

Second, our language can point to this unresolved trauma. Wolynn says that the language we use to describe our worst fears, our complaints about life, how we describe others, how we relate to others, especially in marriage and family life, and more, can be clues leading to either a repressed trauma we experienced or a family history of trauma. For the sake of brevity, I can’t describe all of the potential ways this can show up. Still, I recommend picking up a copy of the book for exercises to find the core language we use and resolve unresolved trauma.  As a word of warning, some of the healing exercises are a bit New Age, so I recommend some caution. However, the exercises for discovering your core language are pretty solid. 

This line of research is still very new, but it shows that unresolved trauma can be passed along to future generations. This research is not meant to cause guilt, anxiety, or shame, but it is instead an invitation and an encouragement to healing and something to be kept in mind in the healing process. (You can visit this page for Catholic healing resources).

Additionally, Wolynn spends a large chunk of the book discussing how this unresolved trauma can appear in parenting and relationships. We often meet people in the Church as they begin marriage and family life. This idea of unresolved family trauma could be an important layer to add to preparation, to see what we may be passing on and what may need to be healed. 

Overall, I think these ideas can benefit ministry, and I highly recommend picking up a copy of It Didn’t Start With You to learn more.