Welcome to the show!

Today’s guest is Johanna Lynn. Johanna’s work revolves around the dynamics of family relationships connected to our well-being and success in life. She runs workshops and helps individuals reach an awareness of how their painful patterns are most often linked to the patterns in their family of origin, and helps them get to the root of these issues.

We talk about something called epigenetics and how it plays a role in who you are. And we talk about why your beliefs and behavior patterns are almost invariably linked to your upbringing and the people who raised you, and how Joanna helps people excavate this.

We’ll get to that interview is just a moment.

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Alright, back to our interview…

Interview with Johanna Lynn on the Family Of Origin

Brian: Johanna, welcome to the show today. We’re so glad to have you.

Johanna: Oh, thanks, Brian. It’s great to be here.

Brian: I want to jump into the first question.

Question: Being that your expertise revolves around the family of origin, I want to ask a question that I think a lot of people have when they go to a therapist or perhaps somebody who does the line of work that you do. There’s always a lot of talk about going backwards to explore our past when we’re feeling stuck. I’m wondering, why do we always hear about that need to go backwards?

Johanna: I think if we don’t look from where the pattern comes from or where we’re stuck, it stays our reference point. It’s where we make our decisions from. We really want to make change from that forward decision-making place so that we’re not making decisions about tomorrow, next week, next month, based on the painful parts of our past. The longer I’m in this work, the more I’m really aware that our family is the greatest pattern maker of our lives.

Brian: Yeah. I’ve heard that so much and I’ve come to believe it to be true myself. I believe I still have some work to do there. There are some grey areas that I need to explore but I am believer in that. I want to get deeper into that and try to understand that. I have a scientific mind and I can be a little bit of a skeptic. I like to explore things from all angles to make sure I’m confident in what I believe, and can really endorse it. I’m wondering if we can go back into the science of this and have you help us explain that.

Questions: I understand that there’s a gentleman, Dr. Bert Hellinger, and a type of science called epigenetics. I was wondering if you could explain what that means to us. Who was he and what does epigenetics actually mean?

Johanna: Absolutely. What’s really interesting about your question is it dates back almost 50 years now. Bert Hellinger is a German psychotherapist that has written – I don’t even know the number of books – many, many, many, on how we hold the family in our bodies and how we live out these relational patterns, these unresolved pieces of our family history so that we can understand the influence in our day-to-day lives.

Over the last dozen years or, we’ve seen science finally catch-up to what this work has observed for almost five decades. The new emerging understanding of science is that the unresolved experiences, the traumas, and how we relate gets imprinted onto the very DNA of our system right from our parents and our grandparents.

What that means is – let’s look at it even from an evolutionary perspective – we are born ready and prepared to deal with the experiences that our grandparents and parents lived through. That might look like the body’s way of safeguarding – meaning, ‘If I ever find myself in a war again, or if I’m ever dealing with famine, the body knows just what to do’. Where that might get us into trouble is that right in this moment in history, we’re not faced with challenges like that. So instead, we might live with a hyper-vigilance, high anxiety, or we’re always on edge.

Once we can begin to look at where these things come from, we can really get a handle on the responses that we’re having in the world. The recognition of this work is we are not simply the individual faced with fears, challenges, and things that are the human condition, but we’re really part of a larger picture. I often like to say we’re a lot more like a computer in the sense that we share an operating system with our parents and our grandparents. Their experiences are really influencing how we view life, our perceptions, and beliefs, so much more than one would really realize.

Questions: When you say that, are you talking about that from a literal standpoint? What I mean is certainly we have exposure to our parents and grandparents – most of us, hopefully – when we’re young. We’ve lived in the same time period and we’re influenced because we’re in the same environment. Is that what you mean? Or are you actually saying that some part of our DNA or our genes is carried through? Let’s say, our grandfather has a trauma – is that trauma somehow imprinted into our DNA and carried through to us?

Johanna: That’s exactly what I’m saying. When a trauma happens, it changes the way our DNA expresses. Now, this is what’s given to you through your mother and father through you.

What’s very, very interesting is when women carry babies. When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mom, all the eggs for all the children she would have were being grown in grandma’s womb. The very first imprint of who you are and what’s going on for grandma – whether she is feeling loved and supported, or there are a lot of financial strain, worry, and stress – this is the initiation, the first expression of what life will be like for you. We are impacted so far before our very first breath.

Brian: That is absolutely surprising and fascinating to me. I’ve heard of nature versus nurture but it’s almost like you combine the two together. When you’re talking about your grandparents, environment might have affected them in a way that actually literally carries through into their genes (which is the nature part) and that gets implanted into you eventually. I’ve never really heard that concept before. It sounds fascinating.

Questions: How do we know this for sure? Is this the science that you’re talking about that’s been catching up in the last 50 years?

Johanna: Yes. The work began about fifty years ago. The science is much fresher than that. We’re looking at about the last twelve years.

Brian: Okay.

Johanna: There’s an amazing scientist out of Mt. Sinai, her name is Rachel Yehuda. She’s looked at “the stress that affected one generation will be played out in the next.” It may look a little bit different, meaning, our grandfather was a prisoner of war – let’s give a really extreme example – and your dad was emotionally closed or very guarded based on how his body expresses the trauma of his father. And now you, the grandson or the granddaughter, expresses it differently yet, perhaps with high anxiety or fear of being, let’s say, in an airport or busy streets. Large groups of people make you feel very, very nervous and you think, “Gosh, I’m not that way in any other part of my life, how does this make sense?” A lot of what this work does is it makes sense of what you’re up against because we’re looking through the lens of family history.

There are many, many clients that I’ve worked with that have seen every physician, naturopath, allergist, everybody you can imagine, but those specialists are not taught to look at and include all of the family history to understand what might actually be at the root of why there is chronic depression and a lot of nervousness around stepping fully into a long-term committed relationship. All of these places and feelings come from somewhere.

Brian: Yeah. I’m going to choose to look at this as very good news. I hope the audience does as well because what I just took away from what you said is that – for some of these issues that we deal with in our lives that are keeping us stuck, it doesn’t mean that there’s something about you that’s broken, it could very well be that you’re dealing with, let’s just call it, baggage of previous generations – and there are things you can do to overcome that. Like we say, sometimes, it’s not your fault, it’s just bad programming. It seems like there’s actual science to back this up now. I think that’s, hopefully, good news to a lot of people. Moving on from there, let’s talk about what we can do about it.

Johanna: Yes, of course. To that point you were just sharing, Brian, one of my most influential teachers wrote a book and as you were sharing that, the title popped into my mind. It’s called, It Didn’t Start with You But It Can End With You. This idea that what we might be looking at in regards to what you’re challenged with today, the resolution may live within your family system. People that have the type of training that I do know exactly