Ep 56 with Mark Wolynn

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a Love Letter 2 Embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm sitting with someone whose work has fundamentally shaped how I practice as a somatic psychologist and how I understand what my body is actually carrying. Mark Wollen is the world's leading expert on inherited family trauma, director of the Family Constellations Institute in the United States and the author of the international bestseller, It Didn't Start With You, How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, a book that has now been translated into 39 languages with a newly revised edition that includes a decade of human research that wasn't available when the first came out. Mark developed the core language approach, a clinical method for tracing specific words and fears people carry in their bodies back to traumas in previous generations, traumas they didn't live through, but that are shaping their depression, their anxiety, their chronic pain, their relationships from the inside out. He's also trained in family constellations, cranial sacral therapy, myofascial release, breath work, and psychodrama. And he's a poet, published in The New Yorker, too. I want to be transparent. I have given this book to more books than any other single resource in my practice. I cannot tell you how many copies of this book I've bought. I've read it multiple times, not just as a clinician, but as someone doing my own work with what's been passed down through my own lineage. What I find so striking about Mark's work is the question at the center of it. A question I think so many of us have lived inside without having language for. Why do I feel something that doesn't belong to me? It was an absolute honor to spend time with Mark. I truly hope that you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with Me, Ailey Jolie. So now that I have you here, my first question for you is a question that I often ask every guest right at the start of our time together. And I would love to know from you, Mark, what being in your body means to you.

Mark Wolynn: 03:06

It means being attuned to the sensations of life force that are moving in our core. So we're not identified with our thoughts, which are always changing, or our emotions, which are always changing. Instead, we're in tune with the feelings, the movements, the waves of energy in our body. I'd say most of us have sensations

Mark Wolynn: 03:28

in our body that feel intolerable. You know, fight-flight-freeze responses from traumas that happened to us when we were small or they were passed down in our family. So many of us have tightness or anxiety or a feeling of wanting to jump out of our skin. Yet to heal, we need to learn to be in tune or be with these sensations, even if they're uncomfortable, until we can reach what's beneath them, which are sensations we experience as life-giving, sensations such as pulsing or tingling or softening or expanding or blood flowing or waves of energy, warmth, whatever, sensations of life force in our core. So not out here as much, really in our midline along our vagus nerve, sensations that actually can calm our vagus nerve. And then we need to be able to hold those sensations for at least a minute and practice that maybe six times a day. And that can be enough to change our brain and calm our nervous system.

Ailey Jolie: 04:35

Thank you for kind of really embodying right off the bat one of the things that I have really loved about your book is that there's a depth underneath the depth that you bring in, and you even named it there of like there's sensations under the sensations that tie into life force. And I, at least for me, my understanding of life force is very rooted maybe more in young, which is like kind of like vital, effervescent, creative place. And so I'm gonna bring this into your book because I have read it actually quite a few times as you commented on. And I know the book has been translated into 39 languages. It's given millions of people language for something that probably was in that deeper lair that they couldn't name. And I would love to hear from your perspective what you think the book unlocked for people or what you've heard it has unlocked for the people who've read it and have given you feedback.

Mark Wolynn: 05:27

Well, it gives people, you know, an understanding of things they couldn't explain. So many of us are walking around with unexplained anxiety, unexplained depression, obsessive thoughts, chronic health conditions, and we have no clue. You know, we try to do the work in our childhood, but the deeper places would be our early childhood where there's no memory, or even what's been passed down epigenetically, the fight, flight, freeze responses from our parents, grandparents, and sometimes even our great-grandparents, where we are experiencing fears, uh, phobias, thoughts that feel out of context with our life

Mark Wolynn: 06:10

experience. And so the book has unlocked for people. Oh. So it gives people an idea, like, okay, there are some territories I haven't looked at. I haven't looked at the traumas in my family history and that I need to do my mom's traumas, my dad's traumas, my grandparents' traumas, often around the same age. And we'll get into that later, why the ages are important. But also, I need to ask my mom if she's still alive and if she's not, her sister, our cousins, you know, what happened before I had memory? What happened when she was pregnant with me? Did she want to be pregnant? Did she like my dad? Did she feel trapped? Did they have to get married? Did she lose a baby before? I I these are all on my website. They're questions, that trauma questions that those of you who want to know a whole shebang of questions, um, you could find them on my website.

Ailey Jolie: 07:07

When you were writing the book, were you trying to put forward something that didn't have language just yet? Because that's what I really received from your book was. And you gave it in that answer there. And if that is true, you were trying to give language to something not named yet. What was that process like for you in trying to distill something that can feel so ethereal or mysterious or embodied or unconscious? Because, at least from my perception, you did a really beautiful job of illuminating the shadow.

Mark Wolynn: 07:39

Thank you. This was the first major book on the subject. And there was not a lot of understanding of inherited trauma. So I give it to the editor, and we're ready to roll. And the editor says, There's not enough science in here. So I had to spend another year because the science wasn't there. And then finally, right in that year before it got published, all the science started to come out with rodents, mice, and and and rats and some humans, but not as much as I needed, which is why I wrote the revised edition. I was telling A Liv this before we got on, because there's a whole slew of science which came out in the past 10 years with humans, which is uh what I was hoping for. That's why I had to rewrite the book.

Ailey Jolie: 08:30

What has shifted in the field, or maybe in your perspective of the cultural understanding of inherited trauma between the time you first published the book and today, with the new revised version coming out? What have you noticed change?

Mark Wolynn: 08:46

Well, that's just it. You know, the first time I wrote the book, I had to focus on the research done with mice because mice share a similar blueprint with humans. Over 90% of the genes have counterparts in humans. But, you know, people would say, okay, that's mice and we're not mice. Well, everything that was said in that book is now backed up with the human experience. So what I did is in the last 10 years, there's a ton of research with humans. I'll tell you a little bit of it. I'll save the goodies for the book, but I'll tell you some. For example, there's a study with that came out of Syria that worked with war-related violence with three generations of Syrian refugees. And this just came out last year in 2025. And what the researchers discovered was an intergenerational epigenetic signature of violence that they could find embedded in the genome for three generations. So specifically, the you know, the grandmothers who experienced war violence and they were pregnant and they're directly exposed to the war. Their daughters were also prenatally exposed. And then because the daughters in the womb are carrying the egg of the next generation, the third generation was germline exposed to the violence. So they could see that there were changes. I believe they were changes in DNA methylation, which is one of the mechanisms of epigenetic transgeneration transfer. So I'll tell you another study. There's a 2017 study that comes out of Brazil, where they looked at Brazilian grandmothers who were exposed to violence from their partners, partner violence, and while they were pregnant with their daughters, and then their daughters would go on to become mothers themselves. And the researchers discovered that these grandmothers were able to pass the effects of the violence onto their grandchildren through changes again in DNA methylation. What that does is it blocks the proteins from attaching to the DNA and then suppresses its expression. Those are some of the changes. There's uh research with Pakistani orphans who lost their mothers and their fathers. And what they discovered is that the orphans had the same epigenetic changes as the mice that they had been working with about 10 years prior to that, that there were changes in levels of non-coding RNA. And they could see that's another mechanism for epigenetic transfer. They could see changes in the orphans, which backed up everything I said in the first book. So I was excited, but I wanted to get all this research out with humans, and there's a lot, lot more.

Ailey Jolie: 11:47

I'm gonna ask you a question that's kind of deep inside me as I'm hearing you speak, because I've been deep in a whole lot writing. So as you're talking about your the revised version, I'm like, oh my goodness, I want to go read this and get all the goodies of name. But I am curious for to hear from your perspective. For me, the realm of intergenerational trauma and inherited trauma unlocked so many doors of understanding for myself, similarly to my first exposure to maybe polyvagal theory. And I would love to hear from you maybe what you've noticed in how people accept or reject or push away this idea and this phenomenon of inherited trauma. Because I often find in my clients it's it's a bit scary, it's a bit touchy, it's a bit taboo, even though, at least for myself, and when you really step into it and explore it, it can be so liberatory and give you so much more life force back and so much understanding. And yet, it at least in a lot of spaces, it hasn't hit the same cultural zeitgeist as maybe polyvagal theory. When I hold them, I'm like, these two things are like equivalently equally to be understood and held, specifically for clinicians and how they can benefit their clients and everyone else around them.

Mark Wolynn: 13:04

So I'd bumped up against that in the beginning, but I think the zeitgeist has finally expanded to the point where I don't think people question it. I mean, there's articles in every science journal now and every medical journal and drama psychiatry. And this there's so many studies right now that point to epigenetic transfer. Fight and flight-freeze responses from traumas that never healed live in our body. We know that. So when a trauma happens, our body responds viscerally. So we with this fight, flight free, fight is tight to defend against the threat as blood starts to move toward our extremities, the body tightens so we can defend. Flight is get me out of here, get me away from the threat. So it's a contraction or a recoil, another visceral response. Freeze is to shut down the experience because it feels pretty terrible. So we numb out or we feel empty, hollow, disconnected, dissociated, disappeared in our body. Now these reactions can pass forward,

Mark Wolynn: 14:20

imprinted in our parents and grandparents, sperm cells and egg cells. So this trauma information or or the response to the trauma, this is what's passing forward to us. And then as a result, we're being born with altered brains that are preparing us biologically to cope with the traumas that our parents and grandparents had, but we didn't experience them. They did, but we've got the experience living in our body. Technically, I'm gonna get technical for a minute. So these epigenetic tags, these chemical responses in the cell, they're like information-rich molecules, and they latch onto the DNA and they act like dimmer switches, controlling which sections of the DNA get used and which do not. So which genes get turned on and which genes get turned off, enabling us to deal with the trauma that I that they had. You know, it's like here we are with the dials set to 10, waiting for a catastrophe that never arrives, but we've got the trauma response in our body. So what is being passed forward technically is, as I explained, changes in DNA methylation, which blocks the protein from being transcribed, and then histone modifications, that's another mechanism, and then the levels of non-coding RNA, which affects, of course, gene response. So those are three of the main mechanisms that we see passed forward. So to your question, do I have to fight to get this heard? Not anymore. When my book first came out, and this is one of the things my book is known for, I brought awareness to it. I said, hey guys, we can't just look at the childhood. Uh, we've got to look, well, you know what my book did, Ailey. It went half into attachment and half into generational trauma. And the new book does that even more. I go deeper into attachment as well, because it's so important because we have no memory during the most important time for neurodevelopment, which we can talk about later.

Ailey Jolie: 16:42

I'm so happy to hear that there has been this shift and that it's coming in and it's being more well received because, again, as I've named, it's been so influential, not only for myself, but for my clients. And I would love, before we go into some of the pieces that you named just there, to have you, the expert, the one who brought it into the zeitgeist for us all, for you to describe what is inherited trauma.

Mark Wolynn: 17:06

It's everything I said and then a lot. I recently worked with a 40-year-old woman, and she didn't understand why she left all her relationships. After a few months, literally, her longest relationship was nine months. Otherwise, her life is great. She's a very successful, she's a lawyer, she has lots of friends. But when I asked her, what happens to you in a relationship? What do you feel when you get in a relationship? And she told me these words, which, you know, for me, as you know, when you read my book, I'm big on trauma language. But she said, I feel trapped and disconnected. And then she used the word and disgusted whenever they make love to me. Now that's pretty strong words. And I'm thinking to myself, who was disgusted? So I go, tell me about your family history. And she said, Well, let's start with my mom. And I go, Okay. My mom, when she was young, was in love with her high school sweetheart. Now, the high school sweetheart tells the mother, Now, my client's not born. My client's not born yet. The high school sweetheart says, Look, I've got to leave town for a little bit, but I'm gonna come back. And when I come back, I promise we'll get married. Well, she doesn't believe him. She thinks she's being dumped and she gets pregnant by another guy. Now, when the guy returns, the first guy, the high school sweetheart returns, he finds her pregnant and refuses to marry her. So reluctantly, she marries the client's father, but she doesn't love him. She loves the first guy, and she lives this trapped, unhappy life, disgusted whenever he makes love to her because she can't have the guy she wants. Look, our children are our legacy. And we really have to ask this question as parents, what are we really handing down? We need to realize that the reaction to a trauma doesn't necessarily stop with the people who experienced it. The feelings, the sensations, specifically the stress response, the way our genes express, this can pass forward to our children and grandchildren, affecting them in a similar way, even though they didn't personally experience the trauma.

Ailey Jolie: 19:32

I love that you included an example. And I want to ask a question that loops back to something you said at the start of our time together. And you mentioned the importance of age and kind of these developmental milestones. And I would love to hear a little bit more about knowing the history of when certain things happened to our parents or grandparents, how that impacts our own experiences. Because I know when I read that in your book, I started to do some digging around, okay, what happened to the women in my lineage when they turned 16? And I was like, oh wow, all of us have had this experience. And for me, that felt a deeply spooky. But also I became very, very, very curious because I was like, there is something here. And this is a pathway towards my freedom. And I love those words you use there. Also the legacy that I may leave behind in my children when they come to be.

Mark Wolynn: 20:26

You know, if we look in our family history with curiosity, we will find connections, just like you said. I often see patterns of first sons going off to die in war, or patterns of people who died in nefarious or violent ways, and then patterns of schizophrenia. But there are definitely signs that we can look at in our own life that can lead us into that rabbit hole we're talking about, of the curiosity in the family history. So look, most of us feel like we're carrying something that doesn't belong to us. You know, we have a fear or a sadness or grief, or we're struggling with a health condition that we can't explain. Many of us have panic attacks or chronic exhaustion or an autoimmune illness. I've discovered that we can begin experiencing some of these things suddenly and unexpectedly, like a fear or a symptom when we reach a certain age. I want people to be curious about this. It's not just an age like we talked about. It can be a milestone or an event. This makes me want to tell another story. So this woman I worked with, she's oh, probably in her I want to get this right. She's probably in her forties, but ever since she was seventeen, she's had severe anxiety and chronic pain in her body and an obsessive terror. Of harming someone close to her. So I gather these details because they're important. And I ask her, you know, what happened to someone at 17? And did anybody ever harm anyone close to them? And she thinks I'm a genius and says, How did you know that? Well, I don't know that. I just listened to her language. And she tells me that at 17, her father was drunk with his best friend. And they were riding in a pickup truck. The best friend got out for some reason. The father backed up and accidentally ran over his best friend, killed his best friend in the truck. If you listen to this woman's trauma language, she told me, I'll do something terrible, harm someone I care about. It'll all be my fault. Well, that's not her language. That's the father's language. But it lives in her. And the interesting thing about that is the age 17, which helped us locate it, just like you looked at all the women at 16. Now, I want to let the listeners know that it's not just ages, it's events or milestones. For example, as soon as we get married, you know, we shut down and we can't explain it, like the story I just told you before. This woman, when she gets in a relationship, she shuts down and she can't explain it, aligned with her mom's experience. Or here's another event. We move to a new place. Suddenly we become depressed, like our ancestors who were persecuted and forced out of their homeland. That's a big one. Or we get rejected by our partner. And even though we only dated this person for two months, but oh, I want to die. I don't want to live anymore. You were only together two months. But the grief is insurmountable because it's taking us back to a much earlier grief, often a break in the attachment with our mother at the same age. So we have to look at why am I having such a visceral, severe response to somebody that broke up with me after two months when it's just two months? We have to be curious about these things. I'll give you another one. Everything's cool, and then we get pregnant or we have a child, and all of a sudden there's this ancestral alarm clock that's ringing, ringing inside of us, which makes me want to tell another story. I once worked with this woman, you know, she doesn't have anxiety, she's fine, but then she gets pregnant and she's consumed with anxiety as soon as she becomes pregnant. And and I asked her, I said, So wait a minute, you didn't have anxiety in your teens and early 20s, and when you were young, she says, No, it all came on when I was pregnant. And I, of course, asked her, What's the fear of being pregnant? And she says, Well, I'll do something terrible. I'll harm my baby. And that's the word she used. And again, that's trauma language, which we'll probably get into later. So I said to her, Did anybody in your family

Mark Wolynn: 25:10

ever harm a baby? And she was just about to say no. And she said, Wait a minute. My grandmother, before she had my mom and the rest of the kids, she got pregnant, had a baby, lit a candle, caught the curtains on fire, and then caught the house on fire, but she couldn't get the baby out, which was sleeping upstairs, and the baby died. And then she said, but we were never allowed to talk about it. And that's one of the keys of repetition when we're not allowed to discuss these events in our family. That contributes to the reliving to the repetition. Knowing this with this woman, you know, once we make the link that she's carrying her disinherited terror from her grandmother, we could work with it easily and break the pattern.

Ailey Jolie: 26:04

Can you say a little bit more about why the silencing of these stories leads them into the repetition?

Mark Wolynn: 26:12

Of course. I can always say more about that. See, I'm a big believer that we have to talk about the events in our family history, even if they're uncomfortable, that we have to more or less shake the family tree to see what falls out. You know, what family secrets that nobody talks about, but we heard it once when we were a kid, or what traumas never healed all the way, or what stories never got told, because these look, most of us have trauma in our family history, but not everyone manifests generational trauma, inherited trauma. I love this question because some people seem to relive and others don't. And epigenetics, that's just one piece of the puzzle. But there's another piece, and what I found that anchors these traumas, what creates these repetitions, is not only when the traumas aren't talked about, which is a big one, but also the healing is incomplete because the pain or the grief or the shame or the embarrassment is too terrible. Or there are people in our family that we don't like, so we push them out. We don't like the alcoholic grandfather. And then that sets up a pattern of alcoholic men in the family because this guy's been excluded or rejected. Basically, when there's not been any resolution, then aspects of these traumas show up, they can show up in later generations and unconsciously will repeat the pattern or share a similar misfortune until that trauma finally has a chance to heal. So that's the genius in it. It keeps repeating. Here's what I'm getting to. The genius in the system is we have many opportunities to heal it all along because it's begging to heal. The I say this in the book, but the contraction of a trauma is seeking its expansion.

Ailey Jolie: 28:12

Thank you for that description and also for bringing that into the light. I can't say how beneficial it was for my own life and my own healing and breaking some patterns that made no sense to me, but was really asking those hard questions about my family story and being honest about some patterns I was noticing in myself and doing that investigative work. And you named something there that I think is really important and it was subtle in your answer. But the space around almost finding resolution with some of our family members, instead of like pushing them away, even though it's the alcoholic grandfather, or maybe they were really harmful or they hurt us. The one thing that I really took from your book, being in a family system where there are members who I'm not going to have resolution with in personal, you know, interpersonal relationships, that's not safe. But that doesn't mean that I can't heal the relationship and do some of that work. And so I would love to spend some time with you exploring that concept of how we do that when maybe that family member isn't safe or they're not accessible or they've already passed on, what that looks like when we are still living maybe in some of that repetition and wanting to heal these things that we've inherited. And yet some of the people are maybe not so accessible or not so safe for us to do that work with.

Mark Wolynn: 29:28

Okay, that's a great question. And I often take a lot of heat for that. So people say, Mark, you're saying that I have to heal this relationship with my alcoholic father, my alcoholic mother, my cruel mother. And I'm saying that often we cannot do it in person because just like you said, there's the parrot still causes harm. There's a lot of danger. But still they have to heal inside of us. That has to happen. Or everybody becomes our alcoholic mother and our alcoholic father,

Mark Wolynn: 30:05

and we're living a guarded, hyper-vigilant, untrusting life because the pattern never heals enough. So, number one, listeners, never throw yourself in front of a moving train by going back and healing with your parents as long as you're still shrinking or collapsing or going into caretaking mode, because that's not going to do it. You only go back and heal with them in real time when your core is no longer carrying a charge. So when we can live in our, this is all goes back to being in the body. When we've done enough inner work where we can be the mountain, and whatever is going on outside is not pushing us over. Like I said, we go back, the parents, and and we're frozen, or we shrink, or we lose our core, or we defend. Don't do it. Heal with images, heal with a photograph. I teach this in all my books, particularly my two new books, my my workbook and my revised it didn't start with you. I have lots of practices, how to heal when parents have caused harm. Now, we're not just talking about parents. Many of us have the story of the alcoholic philandering grandfather who cheated on our grandmother, had another family, um, left our grandmother with 25 kids. No, I'm kidding, she didn't have 25 kids, but she had five kids, and we had that story. And nobody talks about this guy or likes this guy because he's the criminal in the family. And then it sets up this pattern of repetition. Family constellations 101 is nobody can be excluded or rejected or cast out or pushed out for whatever reason, and that includes our parents. So there are three unconscious ways that rejection operates inside of us. And I said these are unconscious because watch what happens. The first way is we will unconsciously reject aspects of ourself. We won't be able to see when we're the same as that parent we don't like. For instance, my mother was cold and cruel. We can't see when we are cold and cruel. We've disowned it in ourselves. We've said, oh, I'll never be like her. Then we are like her. It is expressing this unconsciously. So that's the first way it operates unconsciously. The second way, and probably more dramatic, is we'll pull in a partner who treats us in a similar way. If our mother was distant or ignored us, we pull in a partner who's distant or ignores us. Or if our mother or father was aggressive or or drinks, we pull in a partner that drinks. So we'll pull in a partner who treats us similarly, or we'll pull in a nice partner, but we're waiting for them to treat us similarly. So we're like this, hyper-vigilant and untrusting. And then, of course, they end up treating us terribly because we don't trust them. So we actually are creating the nightmare we're afraid we're going to experience. Now, the third way this happens is we will treat ourselves, our inner child, the way we feel we were treated. So if our parents couldn't be gentle with us, we have difficulty being gentle with our inner child. We'll do to ourselves what we believe was done to us. So if our parent was critical, we'll be inwardly critical. If our parent was aggressive, we'll be inwardly aggressive, self-critical. If our parent was distant or ignored us, we will be distant and ignore that inner child part. Now, I'm not done. I have one more thing I want to talk about. Those are the three unconscious ways rejecting a parent isn't good for our relationships or our inner child work or really seeing ourselves. But there's a probably a fourth and most dire way it operates. And I talked about this in the book. Remember the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study? Healing with our parents isn't just a good idea. It can affect our health terribly. Remaining broken with them could cost us our lives. So what they did at Harvard is they asked one question about the mother and one question about the father. And then they followed these people around for 35 years. And they found, here, I'll just do the mother one. If someone described their mother as the relationship with their mother is strained, cold, they tolerated her. Numbers were similar with father.

Ailey Jolie: 35:20

So how do we begin that process of keeling that relationship? And I know you write about it in the book, but I would love to hear it from you because A, your answers are so eloquent, but your language is so specific. It can be a barrier, as you've named, in engaging with your book because it can, I think sometimes people don't even read the full sentence and they just jump to like, oh, he's telling me to go do, I don't know, individual therapy with a parent.

Mark Wolynn: 35:48

I take so much heed for this. So I rewrote the book and reworded it just so you must get that. I'm not saying to throw yourself in front of a moving train. I'm saying if you don't heal at least inwardly in your inner images, you're running that story with everyone in your life. You're still running the same story. So we've got to complete, as my work is always about, complete the healing process. So to heal, how do we heal? You're asking a great question. Well, we've got to have positive experiences that can change our brain. So let's go back to the parents that are harmful that we can't heal with in real time because we haven't done enough inner work and our body is still shattering when we see them. So we can work with their photograph, we can work with their higher self, we can work with our mother. If she had gotten more from her mother, she would have given more. There's many images you could use, but positive experiences create new feelings and sensations in the body, which is getting back to what I said earlier when you ask me, what does it feel like to be in our body or to be in the body? So these new feelings and these sensations that are associated with these positive experiences we create through the healing process, they not only create new neural pathways in our brain, but they also stimulate the release of feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, or stimulate feel-good hormones in our body, like uh estrogen or oxytocin. Not only that, but we can change the way our genes express. The very genes involved in the body's stress responses have been proven to change from positive experiences. So we we can change even the way our DNA expresses. So, what are these positive experiences I'm talking about? Well, let me ask you a question. How do you feel, listeners, when you do your gratitude practice? What happens in your body? Close your eyes for a minute. Feel grateful about someone or something in your life and then feel your body. So gratitude is one of these positive experiences, receiving comfort and support, which is what I teach throughout my books, how to receive comfort and support from our ancestors, parents, grandparents, even when there was none, accessing feelings of compassion, generosity, loving kindness, practicing mindfulness, ultimately anything that allows us to feel strength and peace or joy inside our bodies, because these are the types of experiences that feed the prefrontal cortex and can help us reframe the stress response as our nervous system has a chance to calm down, it has a chance to downregulate. We know from the mindfulness studies that, and they're all out there, that practicing mindfulness shrinks the amygdala, you know, the limbic brain, and thickens the prefrontal cortex. So, as I said earlier, basically to put it in a nutshell, we've got to be with what's uncomfortable on the top, our anxiety, our shutdown, our freeze response, our dissociation, be being able to be with what it's like to leave the body. Wait a minute, I'm leaving. Let me stay in and feel how I leave and what really lives in. Oh, I don't have to leave. I can attend to a rapid heartbeat or a feeling of tightening in my solar plexus. I can, or nausea. Wait a minute. I'm gonna put my hand on that nausea and see it as an inner child and say, I've got you. I've got you. I'm not gonna leave. I'm gonna hold you. You're just a you're just a young part of me. And and then we can access those sensations deep that I was talking about earlier. Warm, pulsing, expanding, releasing, softening. For example, I know I'm jumping all over the place. Forgive me. If you ask me, Mark, who are you? I'd say, oh, thank you. I love the question. And I'd say to you, okay, let's see who I am. And I'd put my feet on the floor and I'd relax my feet and I'd relax my hamstrings and I'd drop my pelvic floor and I'd inhale up my midline, up my vagus nerve, straight up. And then on the exhale, I'd expand my awareness, my consciousness, and I become that movement of life force, which in this moment is an infinity sign. And then if you ask me in the next minute, who are you? I'd say, I don't know. Let me see. And then I'd go in and I go, oh, cerebral spinal fluid reaches it point, reverses. I would access something in my body that brings me calm, my heartbeat, my breath, my something that I can feel that allows

Mark Wolynn: 41:00

me to feel safe in my body. Well, now after a gazillion years, because I'm a gazillion years old, after a gazillion years of doing a lot of meditation and inner work, I've learned to identify. Like the very first question you asked me, I've learned to identify not with thoughts, not with emotions, but with sensations of life force.

Ailey Jolie: 41:18

You bring in something that I am very curious to ask you about because it could just be my projection, or maybe I am picking up on something. But one of the things that I really love about your book, but also the way that you answer questions, is there seems to be this beautiful blend of some of the realm of spirituality or the ethereal or numinous or mysterious with this deep grounding also in clinical knowledge. And I would love to hear from you which one of those two things, and it could have been something else, if you do feel like those two things are there for you, of course, led you into the realm of really wanting to dedicate your life into bringing awareness to inherited trauma.

Mark Wolynn: 42:00

I look at symptoms as an opportunity for growth. Always as a doorway into ourselves. So somebody is a panic attack, that's your best friend. Somebody's depression, that's your best friend. Let's get in there and feel what's going on inside. Somebody has tightness, I go, at your best friend. This is the way your body is communicating with you, even if it's going into chronic health conditions, that still is your best friend, the doorway into yourself, the best way to change something that we haven't been able to change. So if there's some way that we've been reacting from trauma responses and it hasn't been able to change any other way, you know, maybe we've needed to learn boundaries, or maybe we've needed to add learn how to advocate for ourselves, or learn to speak up, or take time for ourselves. Whatever it is, put ourselves first. The symptom creates a bunch of painful experiences. It's a dark night of the soul, really. We enter the dark night of the soul, and then we drop all the gunk that doesn't work. No, I'm too sick to see that person who eats my energy. No, I'm too tired to deal with it. We finally learn how to spiritually fend for ourselves, to put ourselves first, to become a higher octave of ourselves, to raise our frequency through the symptom, through the doorway. So for me, symptoms are really spiritual in the sense that that's how our body is communicating to us.

Ailey Jolie: 43:45

This is such a beautiful answer. Thank you for sharing. I'm glad I asked the question. And this will be my last question for you, but it's been something I've noticed in all of your answers, but also something in your book. And you speak about the core language approach, which is This idea that when we're in distress, the words that we use are not random. And I would love to just spend a little bit of time pulling this idea apart because it's something I deeply resonate with. It's something that stayed in my mind and how I speak to myself and also with clients. What is that in your perspective that's coming forward for the listener who's unaware, maybe hasn't read your book? How would you describe that phenomenon and how can it be used to really serve us?

Mark Wolynn: 44:28

So when a trauma happens, it leaves fragmentations, at least pieces of us that aren't put together for all over the place. Stress responses, emotions, reactivities, physical feelings. And one of those things I've found is that when a trauma happens, our language centers go offline. And the experience often in language bypasses our frontal lobes where we can make sense of it. Instead, it's kind of living out here as a trauma fragment. So when we can access this trauma language, it's another one of those doorways giving us information about our self or what happened in our family system. For example, okay, so I developed a tool which I'll share with people. It's in the book called the Core Sentence. And this core sentence can differentiate between the types of trauma that we've experienced. Specifically, am I struggling with attachment trauma? Am I struggling with generational trauma? I don't know. I just have these trauma responses and this language that the clinician is pulling out because people who read my book, if you're a clinician and you're reading my book, you will learn this model and you will be able to gather, because that's our job, to gather the fragments of language and help our client. We become the family hippocampus in a way, helping our client piece together what hasn't been pieced together. So,

Mark Wolynn: 46:00

do you want to see how it works, the core sentence? Yeah. All right. Listen, do not try this at home. No, I'm kidding. I'm going to ask the question, but please don't do it if you don't feel well resourced. Only do it if you feel well resourced that you can live into this answer and explore it further. So the question is if your life were to fall apart, if things went terribly wrong, if your life suddenly went south, what's your worst fear? What's the worst thing that could happen to you?

Ailey Jolie: 46:34

Mine would be I'd be exposed.

Mark Wolynn: 46:37

I love that answer because that could go two different ways. Now I'm going to ask you to deepen it, like I'm asking the listener. Ailey, if you would be exposed, what would be the worst part of that? I was going to say, if you don't want to go, please don't, but it that you're doing it is cool. Excellent. Let's go.

Ailey Jolie: 46:58

My cognitive mind already is creating a story where this comes from, but the kind of felt instant language is my badness will be seen.

Mark Wolynn: 47:07

Brilliant. Okay. This is so brilliant. Now I'm going to take it down one more time. You know, I'm going to go with badness. If your badness were seen, what will happen either in you or what will they do? What's the worst part of that? What's your worst fear if your badness is seen? I will I'll be exiled. Thank you. Now, her worst fear. Her, I'm talking about Haley. Now the listeners are the therapists and you're the client. No, kidding. Your worst fear is I'll be exiled, which is exposed. Okay. If if I'm exposed, then my badness will be seen. But the worst part of that is I'll be exiled. And that can take us either into a trauma response to the abandonment with the mother or to a generational. So already am armed working with Ailey here. I'm armed with the tools. So here's I'm gonna do what's called in the book the bridging question. And I'm gonna ask two of them. Don't answer yet, because I'm gonna ask two different bridging questions. One is when you rocked the boat with your mom, when you didn't do as she wanted or needed, could you feel her pull away? Don't answer yet. Could you feel her pull away? Which would have been the child feels exiled from the mother. Don't even answer at all. This is private, or you can't, but I want to teach the listeners how to use this to go attachment and then to go generational. And then the next question, Ailey, would be Was someone in your family bad? Did they do something bad? Were they exposed? Did someone have an affair? And then were they not liked? Were they hated? Did they drink? Did they have an affair? Did they have another family? Don't answer this either. I'm saving you. But you see how it can go, folks? It can go to attachment. If she rocked the boat and she felt bad because she went off script with her mom and then felt exiled from her mom, that's an attachment issue. But if she answered, no, my dad or granddad or blah, blah, blah, did this and then they were hated, then it's a generational issue. And we know just where to go based on your trauma language.

Ailey Jolie: 49:34

Thank you for giving both the listener and me that deepening of the three questions and letting me kind of play with that with you so that we had an example and leaving it with those two questions because it is so powerful. Because then you really do get that clarity around okay, where are we starting to investigate? And what is this piece here? I absolutely adore your work. I give your book so often to my clients. I'm so grateful for everything that you do. Thank you for being willing to take some heat for people who maybe don't slow down and read the full piece of literature and what you've put forward. And just again, I'm very grateful for your time and your energy and what you've put out into the world. So thank you for being here today, but also all of your other endeavors before this moment.

Mark Wolynn: 50:21

Hailey, thank you for having me. I, as I said earlier, I love the depth of which you've read this book. And I so appreciate being on a podcast where somebody just isn't firing questions for, you know, it feels kind of sometimes disconnected. But with you, what we had, I feel a real engaged, warm conversation where we were able to smile a little while we talked about the deep stuff, but we were able to go really deep into the deep stuff. So thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Ailey Jolie: 50:52

Thank you. So if you got to the end of this episode, you've probably figured out that I am quite a fan of Mark Wallen for so many reasons. One thing that really stuck with me while we were in the interview and after we stopped recording, and that's the idea that Mark puts forward that the contraction of trauma is seeking its expansion. And I want you to stay with that for a moment because I know those words can feel maybe even a little bit jumbly and confusing, but I really pull them out because I think it reframes everything in regards to how we relate to symptoms. Most of us, and I include myself in this, have been conditioned to treat pain, anxiety, chronic tension, shutdown as problems to fix, as evidence that something is wrong with us. And what Mark is saying, what his work demonstrates again and again, is that these responses are not dysfunction, but they're intelligence. They're the body's way of pointing us towards something that's asking to be met, sometimes something that's been asking for generations. And

Ailey Jolie: 52:00

this is a radical reframe. And it's one I've landed in my own clinical work in a way that shifts everything. When a client comes in carrying a fear that feels too big for their life, too specific, too visceral, too out of proportion to anything they've personally lived through, I've learned to get curious. And this curiosity was inspired by reading Mark's book, to get curious about where the fear might have originated, not to pathologize it, not to explain it away, but to honor it as information, as a fragment of a story that didn't get to complete itself. This is what Mark means when he talks about becoming the family hippocampus. I mean, what an amazing image. When he says this, what he means is helping someone piece together what was never pieced together before. And that phrase has really stayed with me because it captures something so essential about what we do as somatic practitioners. We're not just working with the person in front of us, we're working with the echoes of everyone who came before them, held in the tissues, encoded in the nervous system, showing up as language that doesn't quite fit. Mark demonstrated that live in our conversation with me, and I really hope you heard it. He asked me his core question, and I answered, My worst fears, I'll be exposed. I was absolutely not gonna miss an opportunity to experience Mark's brilliance in real time. And so when he asked me this question, you heard me very honestly say, I'll be exposed. My badness will be seen, and I'll be exiled. And I could feel, even as I said those words, that they carried a charge that was bigger than my own biography. And that's the thing about inherited trauma. When you start to feel the edges of it, you know, not because someone tells you, but because your body recognizes that something your conscious mind hasn't caught up to yet. And my fear of being exiled is absolutely 110% is inherited trauma. One thing that I also really hope that you, the listener, received from this time with Mark is something that I even name in the interview that sometimes gets missed when we pick up the book, and sometimes we can miss the language. Mark addresses it really directly. His work isn't about going back to the people who caused harm and forcing a reconciliation. He was so crystal clear about that, and I really appreciate it. I even loved how he brought in a little bit of playful language about not throwing yourself in front of a moving train. As Mark said, if you're still shrinking, still collapsing, still losing your core when you're in the presence of a family member, that's your nervous system telling you it's not safe there. The work happens inside first, in your inner images, with a photograph, with a higher self of a parent who couldn't show up for you because they didn't get enough of it from their own parents, whatever. Whatever that is that led them to not be supportive, you can work with it. You can work with it in your internal world. And this, I would say, is deeply somatic work. It's not cognitive forgiveness, it's felt resolution. I can also share that this has been so profound in my own life and my own journey of healing, where resolution with a family member is never gonna happen because the harm was too big, too hard, and too painful. But that doesn't mean that I don't have a felt sense of resolution today. I deeply do. And one of the reasons was because I read Mark's book almost religiously. I'll use that cliche with words. I read it almost religiously for about a year and a half of my life while I tried to reconcile this relationship. And I did that because of the study that Mark mentions in our time together. And this is the Harvard Mastery of Stress study that Mark referenced. He shared that 91% of people who describe their relationship with their mother as strained and went on to develop a significant health

Ailey Jolie: 55:45

issue within 35 years, compared to less than half of those who felt warmth and closeness. That's not a soft finding. That's the body keeping a very precise score. It tells us that healing our earliest attachments isn't just emotionally important. It may be one of the most consequential things we do to our physical health. That's why I got so obsessed with reading this book, even though the family member that I don't expect resolution in the physical life is not my mother. Nonetheless, this study deeply inspired me to do the inner work that Mark writes so beautifully about. I also want to take this moment to name the cultural moment we're in because there's been a wave of oversimplification around intergenerational trauma, a tendency to use it as an identity rather than a doorway. And I believe that Mark's work offers an important corrective to that. He's not saying your suffering is your grandmother's fault. He's saying your body may be running a program that was designed to protect someone in a context that no longer exists. And that once you see it, once you feel it, you can change it. The emphasis is always on agency, on healing, on what Mark calls raising your frequency through the symptom, not the doorway. That's why I took from this conversation more than anything that symptoms are not failures, they're invitation, that the body holds stories it couldn't tell, and we'll keep telling them through our own language, through our own pain, through our patterns until someone finally listens, not with their mind, but with their body. And when someone does listen, when that connection lands, finds its context, that's when the contraction finds its expansion. That's when the nervous system can finally excel. If anything in this conversation stirred something for you, a fear that felt too big, a pattern you can't explain, a sensation that doesn't seem to belong to your life, I want you to know that's all worth paying attention to. Not with panic, but with curiosity. That's the beginning. Mark's revised edition of It Didn't Start With You is out now, along with his workbook. I'll link everything in the show notes. His work is foundational and I cannot recommend it highly enough. He also has the most infectious energy, which was so delicious to be in the presence of. I truly can't say enough good things about him. As always, if you want to go deeper into this kind of embodied exploration, that's what we do in Embody. I have a whole module around inherited trauma that's deeply inspired by Mark's work. And you can find out more at embodymethod.com. I'm also on Substack writing about embodiment, desire, trauma, and what it means to come home to yourself. You can find me there at alejolee.substack.com. Thank you for being here. I truly hope you enjoyed this episode, and I look forward to spending time with you again. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and commits our more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship with you and your body.