Mark Wolynn

Mark Wolynn is an American therapist and the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, and works largely with people whose symptoms have not responded to conventional treatment.

His clients are typically people carrying chronic anxiety with no identifiable cause, phobias with no originating incident, or depressions that predate anything in their own lives. His premise is that some of what a person carries did not originate with them, and that the family history contains the missing information.

He trained in the family constellation tradition developed by the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, and has taught at the Western Psychiatric Institute, the University of Pittsburgh, and Kripalu, and lectured internationally on inherited family trauma.

It Didn't Start with You, published in 2016, is his account of the approach for a general readership. It draws on epigenetic research including Rachel Yehuda's work on Holocaust survivors and their descendants and the Dutch Hunger Winter cohort studies, which found measurable differences in stress-related markers in generations that did not experience the events.

The method he calls the core language approach is the transferable part. It involves listening for the sentences a person uses about their worst fear, phrased in the most extreme terms, and noticing when those sentences do not fit the person's own life. The supporting questions concern what was never spoken about in a family, who was excluded from the story, and what was happening in the years around somebody's birth.

The science is more contested than the book presents it, since transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans remains unestablished and a traumatised parent raising a child differently is an adequate explanation for a good deal of what gets attributed to biology. The interview method works regardless of which mechanism is operating.