at work today · A portrait
A therapist trained in family-constellation work argues unresolved trauma in parents and grandparents can surface generations later as symptoms and behavior. The human evidence for that mechanism stays thin.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
He trained under family-constellation therapist Bert Hellinger and became director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, developing what he calls the Core Language Approach to trace a person's fears back through the family line.
Psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda and colleagues published a small study finding altered methylation at the same site on a stress gene in Holocaust survivors and their adult children, moving in opposite directions between generations, absent in a comparison group.
He published It Didn't Start With You, extending the Holocaust finding and related epigenetic research into a broad framework linking inherited family trauma to depression, anxiety, and unexplained physical symptoms across generations.
Geneticist Bernhard Horsthemke, reviewing the wider evidence in Nature Communications, argued there is so far no convincing evidence that trauma passes down through epigenetic marks in humans, unlike better-supported cases in plants and some animals.
The book remains widely read and he continues teaching the method internationally. Human evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is still thin, and mainstream genetics has not adopted his broader framework as established science.