After I escaped my abusive mother around age 9, I went to live with my Dad and Granny. My granny was my whole world, and she held our whole world together. She ran the house, cooked every meal, cleaned every mess and carried everyone’s moods on her shoulders. My dad lived there too, but he didn’t contribute much around the house. I remember their fights about money, about effort, about the invisible weight of everything that needed doing. At night, when the house was quiet, she would cry in the kitchen and pour herself another drink. I didn’t have words for the discomfort that settled in my body back then; but I can still feel it now.
As a mother, I catch myself repeating her posture: the late-night lists, the silent worry, the ache between my ribs. Even as a single mom doing it all, I sometimes feel like I’m reliving the exhaustion of generations of women who carried households almost entirely alone. They weren’t called single mothers, but they lived like they were; responsible for everything and seen for almost nothing.
It took years to recognize that this isn’t just emotional déjà vu. It’s how the body remembers what the family never resolved. Science calls it intergenerational or inherited trauma patterns that echo through DNA, nervous systems, and learned behaviors until someone notices the repetition and chooses to stop it. My body is that witness now. Your body might be too.
Reading It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn was the first time I saw these threads mapped with both compassion and evidence. It explains how unresolved family pain can live quietly inside us and how awareness begins to release it. It’s not about blame; it’s about ending the cycle. If this reflection stirs something in you, that book is linked below so you can explore it for yourself.
And if you want to go deeper into how the body keeps score of our history and how to move beyond that score my book Beyond the Score was written exactly for this space between knowing and healing. Together, they tell a complete story: where our pain begins, and where our power returns.
📘 It Didn’t Start With You — Mark Wolynn
💫 Learn more about Beyond the Score™
#generationalhealing #traumarecovery #somatichealing #BeyondTheScore #itdidntstartwithyou #healingjourney
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