It Didn't Start With You

How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End The Cycle

by Mark Wolynn

Core Language is the verbal expression or nonverbal expression (physical sensation, behavior, symptoms of an illness, emotion, impulse) of clues left behind from fragments of past trauma playing out inside us, a trauma that may or may not belong to us.

  • Examples:

    • being woken up at the same time each morning to a startle

Unconscious Memory

Longterm Memory

  1. Declarative Memory (also called Explicit or Narrative Memory) - the ability to consciously recall facts or events, depends on language to organize, categorize, and store information and experiences that will later be retrievable memories

  2. Nondeclarative Memory (also called Implicit, Sensorimotor, or Precedural Memory) - allows us to automatically retrieve what we've already learned without having to relearn the steps, without conscious recall (ex. riding a bicycle)