What If It Didn’t Start With You

Dr Kirstey Holland 0:00

What if it didn't start with you? Mark Woon, it didn't start with you. How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle. Inherited family patterns, unconscious loyalty and becoming free to live our own life. Hello beautiful. Today I want to talk about something that sits very naturally inside the think and connect pillars of the Vitality Protocol. And I want to begin with a question. What if some of the patterns you've spent your life trying to change did not begin with you? What if the anxiety that seems disproportionate to what is happening around you? The feeling that you always need to be prepared for something to go wrong, the difficulty resting, the difficulty receiving, the compulsion to look after everybody else, the sense that you have to be useful in order to be loved, the discomfort you feel when life becomes easy, the guilt that appears when you're doing better than somebody you love, the relationships that seem to repeat themselves, the fears you cannot quite explain. What if some of these things make more sense when we stop looking only at you as an individual and begin looking at the family systems that you came from? This is the work of Mark Wollen, a clinician and author who has spent decades exploring inherited family trauma and the patterns that can continue through families. His book, It Didn't Start With You, has now sold more than three million copies and has been translated around the world. There is also a new companion workbook, which I will come back to because I think the two together are a beautiful resource in if this teaching resonates with you.

The Invisible Rules Of Belonging

Dr Kirstey Holland 2:03

But today I don't simply want to talk about trauma, I want to talk about loyalty, because sometimes what looks like self-sabotage may make more sense when we see it as belonging. The invisible rules of belonging. Every family has rules. Some are spoken, most aren't. You might have grown up in a family where nobody said, Don't be more successful than us, don't need too much, don't make a fuss, don't talk about what happened, don't become happier than your mother, don't leave, don't be vulnerable, don't depend on anybody, but somehow you learned the rule. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the emotional environment around them. We learn what receives connection, we learn what threatens connection, we learn what is safe to talk about, and we learn what must remain hidden. And most importantly, we learn what we need to do to belong. That learning can become so deeply embedded that decades later we may still be organizing our lives around rules we don't consciously know we're following. Woolen describes some of these patterns through the concept of unconscious loyalty. His work asks us to consider whether our present fears, behaviors, and difficulties might sometimes be connected to unresolved experiences or relational patterns within our families. And I think that is an incredibly interesting question. Not what's wrong with me, but what might I have learned about belonging? The

The Capable Woman And Exhaustion

Dr Kirstey Holland 3:48

capable woman. In particular, I want to talk about this in relation to women, because I meet so many extraordinarily capable women. She organizes everything, she remembers everything, she anticipates everybody's needs, she carries the emotional load. She works, she parents, she supports her partner, she checks in on her parents, she remembers the birthdays, she books the appointments, she solves the problems, and eventually she comes into my clinic and says I am exhausted. And sometimes she believes exhaustion is the problem, but exhaustion may be the consequence. So I become very interested in the question underneath all of this. Why does she believe she has to carry so much? Maybe she grew up watching a mother who carried everything. Maybe there wasn't anybody reliable enough to help. Maybe being competent got attention. Maybe having needs caused conflict. Maybe vulnerability wasn't safe. Maybe the family celebrated independence. Maybe somebody she loved was overwhelmed and she unconsciously decided I'll make myself easy. I'll help, I'll be good, I won't need anything. Nobody necessarily told her to do this, but her nervous system learned this is how I stay connected. And when she becomes forty five years old and wonders why she cannot stop, when receiving feels harder than giving. This is something that I would love you to notice this week. How comfortable are you receiving? Not giving, receiving. Can somebody cook for you without you jumping up to help? Can somebody take care of you? Can somebody pay? Can somebody compliment you without you immediately diminishing the compliment? Can somebody solve a problem for you? Can you ask for what you need? Can you say, I can't do that today? Can you rest while somebody else is working? Because sometimes women tell me they want more support, but when support arrives, their whole body says, No, no, no, I'll do it. That is interesting. We don't need to judge it. We need to become curious about it, because receiving requires something very different from giving. Receiving requires enough safety to let go of control. The mother child bond. Another

Attachment And Early Disruptions

Dr Kirstey Holland 6:33

really important part of Wong's work concerns early attachment and disruptions in the parent child bond. Our earliest relationships teach us something fundamental about the world. When I need somebody, do they come? When I'm distressed, can I be soothed? When I'm frightened, am I protected? When will I reach towards somebody? Or when I reach towards somebody, are they available? Sometimes the disruption isn't because a parent was uncaring. Life happens. There may have been illness, hospitalization, depression, grief, separation, financial hardship, relationship breakdown, a traumatic birth. A parent may have been physically present but emotionally completely overwhelmed. And sometimes parents simply could not give what they themselves had never received. That does not require us to blame them, but neither does healing require us to pretend that we received something we didn't. Both things can be true. Your parents may have done the best that they could, and something you needed may still have been missing. That is an extraordinarily compassionate place from which to begin, and I encourage it.

Why The Body Holds Patterns

Dr Kirstey Holland 7:54

The body remembers patterns. Now let's bring this into the Vitality Clinic. You know that I don't separate psychology from physiology. We are biopsychosocial beings. Your thoughts don't float around somewhere above your neck while your hormones, gut, immune system, and metabolism operate downstairs independently. They communicate all day, every day. If your nervous system repeatedly predicts threat, your body participates in that prediction. Muscle tone changes, breathing changes, sleep can change, digestion will change, appetite can change, attention changes, stress physiology changes, behavior changes, and this is why think and connect are not fluffy pillars of the vitality protocol, they are physiology. This doesn't mean that every symptom is trauma, it doesn't mean that anxiety is inherited trauma. It doesn't mean that your digestive symptoms are psychological, and it certainly doesn't mean we stop testing your hormones, thyroid, glucose, insulin, nutrients, or gut. It means we refuse to divide a woman into pieces. We ask what is happening biologically? What is happening psychologically? What is happening socially and relationally? And how are these systems interacting? Intergenerational

Epigenetics Without The Hype

Dr Kirstey Holland 9:19

trauma and epigenetics. There is also a fascinating emerging biological question here. Can the effects of severe stress or trauma extend beyond the person who experienced it? We have compelling experimental evidence that environmental exposures can influence gene regulation through epigenetic mechanisms. There is also human research examining associations between parental trauma and biological differences in descendants. But I want to be careful here. This is a developing scientific field. It does not mean that a traumatic memory is literally encoded into your DNA and handed intact from your grandmother to you. Human beings are much more complicated than that. Families transmit things through many pathways, biology may be one, but families also transmit behavior, language, silence, fear, beliefs, attachment patterns, parenting, culture, stories, expectations, relationships, and environments. So whether something reached you through biology, behavior, relationships, or some combination is often impossible to determine. And perhaps we don't always need to, because the more useful question often is what am I carrying now? And how does it affect my life now? And do I still need to carry it? I write about this in the final chapter of my book This is Perimenopause.

Unconscious Loyalty And Hidden Guilt

Dr Kirstey Holland 10:56

Unconscious loyalty. This brings us back to unconscious loyalty. Imagine your mother sacrificed enormously for you. Would some part of you feel uncomfortable having an easier life? Imagine the woman in your family struggled financially. What happens inside you when you become wealthy? Imagine your mother remained in an unhappy relationship. What happens when you create an extraordinary one? Imagine nobody in your family went to university. What happens when you become highly educated? Imagine your family survive through constant vigilance. What happens when your life finally becomes safe? Sometimes the answer is that we feel guilty, not consciously. We might consciously want success, health, intimacy, and freedom, but somewhere underneath there can be a question If I become different from you, do I still belong to you? That is a really profound question, and belonging is encoded into our genetics. And perhaps part of becoming an adult is discovering that we can love the people who came before us without repeating their suffering. You don't have to suffer to belong. I want you to hear this. You do not honor somebody else's suffering by recreating it. You don't have to become exhausted because your mother was exhausted. You don't have to struggle financially because your parents struggled. You don't have to remain anxious because anxiety kept somebody else safe. You don't have to have the same marriage, the same body, the same career, the same relationship with food, the same relationship with rest, the same relationship with motherhood, the same relationship with your own needs. You can belong to your family and become different. You can love somebody without living their life. You can understand somebody without becoming responsible for them. And you can have compassion for what happened before you without making it your destiny.

Journal Prompts To Find The Rules

Dr Kirstey Holland 13:17

A vitality reflection. So here is something that I would love you to do. Take out your journal and don't overthink these questions. Just notice what comes. Who was the strong one in my family? Who was allowed to need? Who wasn't? Who looked after everybody? What happened when somebody said no? What emotions were acceptable? Which emotions weren't? Was rest respected or criticized? Was success celebrated or resented? Was money safe to have? Was pleasure safe? Were women allowed to prioritize themselves? What did I learn I needed to be in order to belong? And then one final question. Which of those rules do I still want to live by? Because that is where choice begins. Not by blaming your family and not by diagnosing everybody, not by digging endlessly through the past, but by becoming conscious of something that has previously been unconscious. Creating

Small Experiments That Rewire Safety

Dr Kirstey Holland 14:33

a different experience. And then we need another piece, because insight alone doesn't necessarily change a pattern. Your body needs experience. If receiving feels uncomfortable, practice receiving something small. If asking for help feels dangerous, ask for something really small. If rest produces guilt, practice staying with five minutes of rest without immediately becoming productive. If saying no terrifies you, practice a small no. If success makes you shrink, allow yourself to tell somebody safe that you're proud of yourself. If you always rescue everybody, pause before rescuing next time. We're giving the nervous system another experience. I can do something differently and remain safe. I can have needs and remain connected. I can rest and still be valuable. I can succeed and still belong. I can say no and still be loved. That is how a different life begins to become possible. And perhaps this is what healing really means. I don't think healing means finding every terrible thing that ever happened in your family. I don't think we need to spend our lives excavating ourselves. I think healing can also be incredibly practical. It can mean noticing. This pattern makes sense. It protected something once. I understand why it exists, and I don't need it in quite the same way anymore. There is tremendous compassion in that, because instead of fighting ourselves, we become really curious about ourselves, and curiosity actually gives us somewhere to go.

Deeper Dive Resources And Closing

Dr Kirstey Holland 16:26

Now your optional deeper dive. If today's teaching speaks to you, I would strongly recommend Mark Wollen's It Didn't Start With You, How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. The book was revised and updated in 2025 and explores his framework for identifying inherited family patterns. And I actually think the official It Didn't Start With You workbook may be particularly useful alongside it because rather than simply reading about the ideas, it takes you through prompts and exercises, exploring family history, language, fears, attachment, and generational patterns. Yeah, and remember, the purpose of looking backwards is not to live backwards. It is to understand enough about what shaped you that you became freer to choose what happens next. Perhaps something didn't start with you, but you get to decide whether it continues through you, and that is an incredibly powerful place to stand. I'll see you in the Vitality Clinic. Have a beautiful day. Lots of love, Dr. Kirsty Holland.