Lisa Feldman Barrett

And then it became about her.

It became something... Not this person was doing something bad, but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she is.

Right.

So it became about her as a person, not just about, you know, her stepfather was an asshole.

And...

If you think about it, what we do in this culture when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting to actually reverse the narrative.

So we try to teach people that when something traumatic happens to them, and I want to be really clear what I'm saying, right?

I'm not saying that when people experience trauma, it's their fault.

I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them.

But sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can.

The responsibility falls to you.

And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past in some other way.

And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore.

That's called cultural inheritance.

So it turns out that, you know, there's one kind of old evolutionary theory, right?

This is called the modern synthesis, where inheritance is really your genes.

Whatever you inherit, you inherit by your genes.

And then natural selection, you know, chooses some gene patterns and not others.

And that's really how inheritance works across generations.

Most evolutionary biologists don't.