
It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are - tomhoward
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/an-excerpt-from-it-didnt-start-with-you-how-inherited-family-trauma-shapes-who-we-are-and-how-to-end-the-cycle-viking-april-2016-by-mark-wolynn/
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jschwartzi
I'm skeptical that there isn't some undercurrent of suggestion in the way the
therapist keeps pulling in family history. There's something of a just-so-
story in how each of his patients seems to have some "inherited" trauma. I'm
willing to concede that it's possible that this is the case, but the vignettes
in the article involve no small amount of magical thinking.

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johnchristopher
The problem I see here is the over reliance on Freud and Jung and epigenetic.
Freud's misconceptions aren't needed to explain how behaviour and anxiety can
trickle down from a generation to the next and epigenetic has nothing to do
with skeletons in the closet. Behavioural therapy, CBT and `modern` approaches
do a much better job at modelling all this. (I wouldn't be surprised if we see
more epigenetic and less quantum physics buzzwords in the coming years in
those kind of books).

More importantly there's the question of whether it really helps to analyse
the past in details to find a nexus point that would explain the patient's
problems or not. Behavioural activation show some promises and good results
and it almost doesn't explore a patient's past.

To be clear: I am not saying trauma can't make ripples through generations (on
the contrary, I am inclined to believe it, based on literature and personal
experience) but the model described in that article has shortcomings, relies
on refuted theories and modern models explain things better.

On the other hand we know that when a problem is well defined (it's cancer,
let's fight it!), external (I'll kick this SOB away so hard it won't ever come
back) and random (I failed the interview because I was just out of luck) then
the patient/person has a much better chance to rebound. So maybe the whole
Freudian approach works as well for some as voodoo works for others. This is
the placebo realm though and modern therapies have much better results than
psychoanalysis anyway.

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rigobert_slim
Freud's biggest contextual problem was outlined by Alice Miller in most of her
works, notably "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and "Drama of the Gifted Child".

It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood
traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the
perspective that the _parent was innocent_ and the _child was guilty_ ,
especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly misbehaved children.

Unfortunately, this continued to be the main perspective in psychoanalysis and
child development until the late 1970's/early 1980's

She gives an explanation in its simplest form in a 1987 interview with OMNI
Publications International:

 _Traditional analysis, says Miller, duplicates the parent-child relationship
with the conventional analyst in the position of power._ [...] _The child
undergoes a long inner struggle “between the fear of losing the person he
loves if he remains true to himself, and panic at the prospect of losing
himself if he has to deny who he is. A child cannot resolve a conflict of this
nature and is forced to conform because he cannot survive by himself. Therapy
should not repeat this condition.”_

fascinating read if anyone's interested, especially when she describes the
first time she discussed this to a conference of psychoanalysts:

[http://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/](http://www.alice-
miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/)

~~~
johnchristopher
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll get around it this weekend. Have you heard of
Jacques Van Rillaer ? He wrote the black book of psychoanalysis which stirred
things up in Europe some years ago.

~~~
rigobert_slim
The Black Book seems like a fun read. I'm having a problem finding a copy in
english (spanish, french, and chinese so far) but it's definitely now on my
finding/reading list!

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kstenerud
"A boy may have his grandpa’s long legs and a girl may have her mother’s nose,
but Jesse had inherited his uncle’s fear of never waking"

Wait.. what??

How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was
born?

This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

~~~
alanwatts
Many people are naturally scared of spiders and snakes. Some evolutionary
psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman claim that some fears like these are coded
into our genetics because of the many of our ancestors before us who were
killed by them.

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spangry
What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's
amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their
ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because
their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise
caution around spiders, which conferred a survival advantage in their
particular context. In our context it's maladaptive (evolution is very slow),
and so considered an irrational phobia.

~~~
alanwatts
>What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

Inherited instincts and emotions.

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nsajko
How did this pseudomedicinal rubbish get so much votes? At least tell me you
didn't read up to the obviously bunk parts before you upvoted. :[

(The strange thing is, there is sometimes an opposite trend here to consider
the whole science of psychology nonscientific.)

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niccaluim
I don't understand why we even bother teaching Freud anymore except as a
cautionary footnote. Dude basically just made a bunch of shit up and called it
theory.

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kelukelugames
My grandparents were taken away during the Cultural Revolution so my parents
grew up alone. They never had any role models for how to raise children. At
least that's why my aunt tells me whenever I complain about my parents.

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RichardCA
Just leaving this here...

[http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html](http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html)

~~~
iokevins
Appreciate the context; thank you RichardCA.

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davesque
Ohm = mc^2 ?.... seriously?

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rigobert_slim
Glad to see this reach the font page today! it's little talked about, but how
we grow up and the skills we develop to navigate childhood basically defines
how we use and develop technology. it begs the question, what kind of
technological and security environments will flourish as familial and
childhood trauma become individually resolved on a mass scale?

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sbardle
Fascinating read. I always thought there could be some kind of link between
the social trauma of The Black Death and the eruption of The Reformation.

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a_small_island
Garbage in, Garbage out.

