It Didn’t Start With You – a reflection

My therapist recently suggested a book called It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn. I picked it up expecting a bit of psychology and self-help, but found something deeper and far more unsettling.

Wolynn’s idea is that much of what we carry in life, the anxiety, sadness, fear, depression or shame that can cling to us, might not have started with us at all. It may have begun generations ago and been quietly handed down, unspoken but still alive.

That idea struck home. I have spent enough time in therapy over the years to know that healing is rarely tidy. Sometimes you can trace the thread of pain to a single event. Other times it feels older, almost ancestral, like something that belongs to the family rather than the individual.

Reading Wolynn’s book gave language to that sense that what we inherit is not only DNA and stories, but also patterns of emotion and silence.

It made me think again about how far we have come in the Church when it comes to speaking of mental health.

When I first sought out therapy, priests simply did not talk about such things. It was considered private at best and suspect at worst. I am grateful that the landscape has shifted. There is more honesty now and a greater acceptance that ordination does not make us immune to being human. Yet trust in the institutional Church to care well for those of us who live with mental health disorders is still far below where it needs to be.

We have made progress, but we have not arrived. Too often the Church still hesitates, unsure whether to treat mental illness as something to pray away, to manage quietly in private, or to discipline. We are learning, slowly, that compassion must be practical as well as prayerful. Until the culture fully embraces that truth, many clergy and lay ministers will still suffer in silence, fearful of being seen as unreliable, weak or, the worst, a risk.

Therapy has not always been comfortable for me. It can strip away everything you hide behind. It can feel brutal in its honesty. Yet it can also be a relief, a space where the noise finally stops and something begins to heal simply because it has been spoken aloud. It is not sacred, but it is truly human, and that is enough.

Wolynn writes about how families pass on not only their stories and habits, but also their unspoken pain. We might not know the original cause, yet we still feel its tremors. I can see that truth in my own family. Like so many working-class homes of that time, we did not talk about feelings. You simply got on with it. It was how you survived. But that survival instinct came with a cost. The things left unsaid did not vanish; they resurfaced in different forms, often when least expected.

I see the same in ministry. I meet people carrying pain that feels older than they are. It shows up as anxiety, guilt, or sadness that they cannot quite name. Wolynn’s book reminded me that the work of healing is not only psychological but also spiritual. When we bring these patterns into the light, we allow grace to enter places that have been closed for generations.

The Gospel is not about pretending that everything begins with us. It is about God stepping into the story as it really is, complicated, inherited, and half-understood, and redeeming it from within. I have come to believe that grace works both forwards and backwards. It heals us in the present, but it also reaches into the past, touching wounds that have been waiting a long time for someone to acknowledge them.

In my own life, therapy and prayer often meet in that same place. Therapy helps trace the lines and personal prayer helps release them. Both bring light. Once something is brought into the light, it starts to lose its power.

Healing is never finished. It moves in circles rather than straight lines, surprising us with what still hurts and what has quietly begun to mend.

I am still learning that faith does not remove the struggle; it helps me stay with it. Perhaps that is what grace really is, not the absence of pain, but the courage to keep turning towards the light.

⸻

Reference:
Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (Penguin Life, 2016).