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

Outside your awareness, her absence triggered feelings you had decades ago when you were being raised by working parents.

David Wallin writes in Attachment in Psychotherapy, “That which we cannot verbalize, we tend to enact with others, to evoke in others, and/or to embody.”68

When an individual can’t (or won’t) do the inner work to heal their pain, the wounds get passed through the generations, metastasizing through our family tree in the form of mental afflictions, patterns of fear, and even physical injury. Until someone in the younger branches has enough support and awareness to face and grieve that ancient grief, it

Although the undermothered often have some sense that there was something they missed and that this “something" affects them yet today, we seldom see the correlations in a direct way.