A female baby is born with all the eggs she will ever have. While in the womb, the mother, the fetus and her developing eggs that could one day become a child, all shared one home. In It Didn't Start with You, Mark Wolynn suggests that some of our deepest fears and patterns may have started with our parents, grandparents, or people further back whose stories we never fully heard. Have you ever reacted to something with an intensity that didn't quite match the moment, a dread that seemed to come from somewhere older than you? Are the shared allergies, how you hold your pen, or the anxieties of biting your nails a familiar thread you noticed in a parent, a cousin, a picture of an elder? Your DNA is the script, and epigenetics chooses which lines get highlighted and which get muted.
Epigenetic transgenerational inheritance illuminates how the world your maternal grandmother moved through may have reached into the tiny egg that would one day become you, leaving subtle marks and accents shaping the way your genes speak. The emotions, traumas and joys of your ancestors imprinted into the fabric of your DNA. Chemical tags on our genes can switch them up or down in response to stress, nourishment, and safety, without changing the code itself.
Some of the research Wolynn draws on is striking. Studies of people who survived the Dutch famine of 1944-45 found effects in their children’s children’s health. Rachel Yehuda's work with Holocaust survivors and their children found altered stress-hormone patterns in the next generation. In animal studies, mice trained to fear the scent of cherry blossoms had offspring who startled at that same scent, and grandchildren with a greater sensitivity to cherry blossoms than the two generations that came before.
The ancestral and indigenous wisdom have known this all along. But for scientists the picture is still emerging, and scientists debate how much is truly epigenetic versus passed on through environment. That doesn't weaken the larger point, because inheritance also travels through behavior. Children learn what's safe and what isn't by watching us. A parent who grew up with scarcity may hoard, over-worry, or struggle to receive. A grandmother who survived loss may have trouble with closeness, and her children learn that distance equals safety. Silence works the same way: what a family can't talk about often gets acted out instead.
Wolynn points to the language we use as a doorway in. The phrases we repeat when we're distressed, the way we describe our deepest complaints, can echo a family story we never consciously learned. This is the part I love most. Resilience travels too. The same research on survivors, points to adaptive stress responses, and families also pass down recipes, rituals, humor, faith, and the knowledge that people have lived through hard things before us. The question isn't only "what wounds am I carrying?" but also "what strengths came with me?" The wombs in the bodies around you today hold the generational traumas, stories, voices, and wisdom that will welcome the generations that follow. And the environment today is shaping, modifying, and altering the eggs chosen to lead the world that comes next.
Think about your own history, your own ancestral stories, your own epigenetics and ask yourself where you began. You are not a prisoner of what came before you, and you are not the end of the story either. You are the bridge between everything your ancestors survived and everything your descendants will inherit. Name what hurts. Keep what heals. Say out loud what was never said. Each time you choose awareness over reaction and tenderness over silence, you rewrite the story. For yourself, for those who came before you, and for those who are not yet here. What we carry is not only a weight. It is a lineage and you get to decide what it becomes.
Reflection prompts
Which fears or reactions feel bigger than my own history explains?
What did my family never talk about?
Which rituals or values from my lineage do I want to keep?
What would I like to stop passing on?
Closing thought
Seeing a pattern clearly is often the first step in loosening it. Healing work, whether in therapy, in conversation with family, or in ritual and reflection, can be a way of changing what the next generation inherits.
This post is for reflection and isn't a substitute for professional care.