It Didn't Start With You - Mark Wolynn And Yet

It Didn’t Start with You Show Notes
Mark is a leading expert in the field of inherited family trauma. He leads workshops, hospitals, conferences and teaching centers around the world.  Mark is the author of the book It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.
Timestamped Notes
[00:37] There are fears or anxieties that strike people when they reach a certain age or an event or depression that people never get to the bottom of and symptoms that really come from nowhere. What Mark is learning is the symptoms could actually be the residues of trauma in a person's family history that was biologically inherited from parents or grandparents or even great grandparents. Epigenetics therefore gets into what going there. There are numerous examples of trauma like when a spouse cheats, parents fight or someone dies. Trauma changes people. Any kind of trauma can create an epigenetic change.
When trauma occurs it causes a chemical change in the DNA and this can change how genes function sometimes even for generations. A chemical tag will attach to the DNA and tell a cell how to use or ignore a certain gene based on the trauma the body has experienced. The way the genes are affected can change how a person reacts or feels. They can either be reactive or overly sensitive to situations that are similar to the traumas our parents experienced therefore dealing with it better. An example is if a person's grandparents were from a war ton country where there are police everywhere and people being shot. The grand parents would pass forward skill sets like sharper reflexes or quick reaction time to help us survive the trauma they experienced. A stress response can also be inherited along with the skillset.
[04:04] People are born with fears and feelings of their parents or grandparents and think that those fears they are theirs. Mark wrote the book because most people do not make the link. These traumas are passed down in gene changes. A chemical change happens to the grandparents which may silence, activate, and turn up or down a gene. It is the gene expression that is passed down. This does not change the DNA but it changes the way the genes express. This can be passed forward for three generations.
For years it was known that something like this was happening but it wasn’t until thirteen years ago when Rachel Yehuda  a neuroscientist out of Mt Sinai Medical school in New York discovered that the children of holocaust survivors share the same trauma symptoms as the children especially specifically the low levels of cortisone. Cortisone is the stress hormone that gets people back normal after a stressful event. Holocaust survivors and their children experiencing depression and anxiety. She also found the same pattern in the children born to mothers who were pregnant near the World Trade Center when it was attacked. The babies inherited compromised cortisone levels but 16 different genetic markers like being smaller for their gestation period. A couple of years ago Racheal finds that survivors and their children share the exact gene changes in the exact same region of the exact same gene technically the Fkpb five gene.
[06:50] This research suggest that traumas are heritable. People are three times more likely to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder if one of their parents had PTSD meaning that those people will struggle with anxiety and depression. The pattern can be observed for two generations in humans but further research indicates three generations is also in effect. This was done using mice and rats which 99% of a similar genetic makeup as humans. It is easy to get a generation of mice in 12-20 weeks whilst with humans it takes 12-20 years.
At Emery Medical School at Atlanta, they take male mice and they make them fear cherry blossom scent. Anytime the mice smelled the smell they would get shocked. They noticed that thy were changes in the brain, blood and sperm but s