@@CHAP@@ Introduction:
@@CHAP@@ The Secret Language of Fear
In a dark time, the eye begins to see …
—Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”
This book is the fruit of a mission, one that has led me around the world, back home to my roots, and into a professional career that I never could have envisioned when this journey began. For more than thirty years, I have worked with individuals who have struggled with depression, anxiety, chronic illness, phobias, obsessive thoughts, PTSD, and other debilitating conditions. Many have come to me discouraged and disheartened after years of talk therapy, medication, and other interventions failed to uncover the source of their symptoms and allay their suffering.
What I’ve learned from my own experience, training, and clinical practice is that the answer may not lie within our own story as much as in the stories of our parents, grandparents, and even our great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, also tells us that the effects of trauma can pass from one generation to the next. This “bequest” is what’s known as inherited family trauma, and emerging evidence suggests that it is a very real phenomenon. Pain does not always dissolve on its own or diminish with time. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, even if his or her story lies submerged in years of silence, fragments of life experience, memory, and body sensation can live on, as if reaching out from the past to find resolution in the minds and bodies of those living in the present.
How does this happen? As you’ll learn in this book, memories of trauma are imprinted in our parents’ and grandparents’ sperm and egg cells. The feelings and sensations of the trauma—specifically the stress response, the way the genes express—can pass on to the children and grandchildren, affecting them in a similar way, even though they didn’t personally experience the trauma. As a result, we can be born with altered brains that prepare us biologically to cope with traumas that are similar to the ones our parents and grandparents experienced.
What you’ll read in the pages that follow is a synthesis of empirical observations from my practice as director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco and the latest findings in neuroscience, epigenetics, and the science of language. It also reflects my professional training with Bert Hellinger, the renowned German psychotherapist, whose approach to family therapy demonstrates the psychological and physical effects of inherited family trauma on multiple generations.
Much of this book focuses on identifying inherited family patterns—the fears, feelings, and behavior we’ve unknowingly adopted that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation—and also how to end this cycle, which is the core of my work. You may learn, as I did, that many of these patterns don’t belong to us; they’ve merely been borrowed from others in our family history. Why is this? I strongly believe that it is because a story that needs to be told can finally be brought to light. Let me share my own.
I never set out to create a method for overcoming fear and anxiety. It all began the day I lost my vision. I was in the throes of my first ocular migraine. No real physical pain to speak of—just a cyclone of dark terror, within which my vision was obscured. I was thirty-four years old and stumbling around my office in the murk, fingering the desk phone for the 911 buttons. An ambulance would soon be on its way.
An ocular migraine is generally not serious. Your vision becomes muddled, but usually returns to normal in about an hour. You just don’t always know that while it’s happening. But for me, the ocular migraine was just the beginning. Within weeks, the vision in my left eye began to disappear. Faces and road signs soon became a gray blur.