Genes Don't Lie examines the impact of secrets exposed after a DNA test reveals much more than expected. It begins as a narrative drawing the reader into the story, charting a journey of discovery, then moves into a plan for treatment and support, assisting the reader to make peace with their own story. We learn through stories and sometimes we need to recreate our own.
With the cheap availability of DNA testing, people are stumbling into knowledge unprepared in unprecedented numbers and there is little help available. Who you think you are is a fragile edifice which can be so easily shattered, yet this sense of identity is vital to our resilience and well-being. This book addresses topics like identity, anger, belonging, grief, shame and family secrets which can affect us all.
Genes Don't Lie by Zetta Thomelin was published on 10 July 2025 by Grosvenor House Publishing. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.
INTRODUCTION
Genes don’t lie, but people do!
With the cheap and easy access to DNA testing now available, more and more people are
discovering they are not who they thought they were or that the make-up of their family has changed. It may have happened to you, and you want to know how to process it. It may have happened to a friend or family member, and you want to help them. I want to create a resource to help others facing such challenges to the sense of self that this brings.
It is not a new experience. In the past, finding out you were adopted would have brought the same challenges. It is now happening, though, on a larger scale. The genie is out of the bottle, and many do not know what to do next.
I had just finished writing my book, The Trauma Effect, about inherited trauma, where I shone a light upon a trauma in my family and examined how this impacted me when a new family story surfaced. I had made my peace with my family past at last, and then I found that my family story was an illusion.
An email popped into my inbox which changed everything. Yet another new family secret, about which I had no inkling, was now bobbing up into the light and I had to deal with it.
Every other book I pick up or TV drama I watch has the twist in the tail of someone discovering through DNA that they were not who they thought they were. With the increasing number of people interested in their ancestry, this can only continue to grow.
I was not the one most affected by my DNA test results; I was still my father’s child, but I discovered I had a half-sister, and it was so hard to know how to support her whilst trying to deal with my own changing landscape.
My story is far from unique. It is a story told up and down the land, but little is written to help with processing the story, the complete reframing of all you believed about your family and who you are. It was hardest, of course, for my sister, who said to me only the other day, ‘Nobody is talking about how it feels to be me, to find out I am someone other than who I thought I was’.
As I find it so therapeutic to write, I decided to write our story, our feelings, our journey, in the hope that if you share this story, you might feel less alone, and it may help your healing. If no such drama has touched your family, then maybe hearing of ours may help you to value your own story.
When I began to write, it automatically fell into the style of discourse with my father at first, a father who had become a stranger to me now. He was not the man I had loved, and I needed to get to know him again. I needed the opportunity to tell him how I felt and, if she would allow it, a little of how my sister felt. Then I could begin to understand it more. As I wrote the first section, it read rather like a novel, and I hoped this would engage the reader to follow the journey towards understanding.
The therapeutic part naturally followed as I delved deeper and deeper into the feelings of everyone concerned. I wanted to understand the emotions involved in such an experience and, very importantly, what identity means to us, as I think it is the challenge to identity that raises so much emotion. As I am a therapist, I then wanted to come up with a plan to help, presenting ideas that I have used with others on a similar path.
If such a thing has not happened in your world, some of the ideas here may still resonate, such as that of identity, loss and family constellations. So here is our story and journey towards healing. I hope that it can help your healing too.
Zetta Thomeli
Chapter one THE BEGINNING
I know about it now and there is no unknowing for any of us. I had a trigger that set my fingers tapping across the keys. It is my first time in France (the land my father loved so much) since I found out about it. My partner and I are in Paris, a city we had enjoyed separately and now want to share with each other.
Paris, the city of romance. The French, the lovers of Europe. Beauty surrounds us in the architecture, the clothes, the smells that escape the cafes and restaurants, and the sounds that pulse out of the organ at L’eglise de St-Pierre; we are entranced. There is the hustle and bustle of the streets of Montmartre, vendors touting their wares. We smile as we wander and wonder, hand in hand.
But beneath the veneer of the city are the cracks, the imperfections, and the slight smell of urine wafting up from the warming streets. The beggar with plastic bags upon his feet for shoes. The stark metaphor in Gare de Lyon, as we search for a map we can take away, to find only a vending machine for condoms, speaks boldly of the reality beneath the charm of the city, a metaphor of the city; maybe there is another metaphor there too.
I see beneath the intellect, the beauty and charm to the cracks beneath, the feet of clay, and relate it to my father, the man within.
We expect too much from the city of lovers; perhaps I expected too much of my father. I loved him too much, and now he has let me down and is not here to face the music, to see the damage he left behind him.
I cannot help but think of him here. When he was alive and I arrived in France, I would always phone and say, ‘Je suis arrivé en France, Papa’, and I would even hear his smile down the line. It is even more present here in Paris, the thought of him, the place he went from boy to man, a place he knew so well, and I want to talk to him, to shout at him. I want answers from him as I go over and over in my mind the stories he used to tell of that French side of his life, mining for clues, looking for signs of the man I did not know but thought I had.
Of course, you know Paris well, Dad. That was where you did your military service, at Le Bourget, the l’armee de l’air, following in your father’s footsteps – and such footsteps they were.
I remember the stories you told me as I wander these streets. You explained why you were here. You could have done your military service in England or in France. As you were aFrench national, you made an active choice to do it in France, but they did their military service at 21 and you were all of 18.
I remember you telling me how the other men teased you when you arrived because of the copious, nay, voluminous underwear that your mother had sent with your kit to make sure your private parts were kept safe from pressure. The men in your hut were tough lads, older than you, wise to the ways of the world. What a boy you must have seemed to them.
You said that rules in France are made to be broken. That triggers some thoughts now. You told me how you climbed over the wall to get off the air base to enjoy the delights of Paris. Did it begin then, I wonder? This young man away from home for the first time, handsome in his uniform, did you discover how women were drawn to you then? How easy it was for you? Too easy, perhaps. I had not thought of it before, so young and with Paris at your feet.
There was that night when you were caught on your way back to the base by an officer when you should not have been out. He piled you and your friends into the back of his car and smuggled you back onto the base. Now that would never happen in England. You would be on short rations for weeks.
Zetta Thomelin is a therapist in private practice.
She is the author of three other books:
The Healing Metaphor, Self-Help? Self-Hypnosis! and The Trauma Effect – exploring and resolving inherited trauma..
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