What I inherited besides genes: a family's emotional legacy

For the colour of your eyes, you ask genetics. For why an unexpected bill sets off panic even though there is enough in your account — for that you have to ask your family. Somewhere between genes and upbringing, a third inheritance is passed down: invisible, written nowhere, and at work every day. Your relationship to feelings. To money. To work, the body, conflict. Sentences you hear in your own head in your mother’s voice.

In this piece the two of us map out that emotional inheritance: everything we inherit besides genes, the sayings it hides in and — what is often forgotten — that an inheritance is not only a burden. From the same family that gave you anxiety about conflict, you may also carry toughness, humour and values that keep you upright. So the end of this piece is practical: an inventory that helps you separate what to keep from what to hand back.

If you are interested in how emotional patterns carry over into partnerships, I wrote about that in the piece on the emotional baggage we bring into a relationship — this time we go wider: to the whole legacy you carry, even when you are on your own.

An inheritance you won’t find in any will

How does something nobody hands over get passed on at all? Above all, by example. A child learns by watching — with his classic studies of social learning in the 1960s, Albert Bandura showed that children take on adults’ behaviour purely by observing, without a single word of instruction being spoken. A child doesn’t listen to what their parents say about anger; they watch what their parents do with anger. They don’t listen to sermons about money; they feel the tension at the kitchen table when the bill arrives.

To example are added family rules (spoken and unspoken), the stories that get told and the silences that don’t. Research on intergenerational transmission consistently shows that patterns of parenting, of emotion and of risk for distress pass from generation to generation along psychological and social routes, not only genetic ones (Serbin and Karp, 2004). Exactly how that mechanism works — from modelling to epigenetic hypotheses — I explained in the piece on intergenerational transmission; here we are interested in the contents of the parcel, not the postman.

And the contents are wider than they seem at first glance. Let’s go through them area by area.

The relationship to feelings: what you were allowed to feel at home

Every family has its own unwritten emotional rulebook: which feelings may be shown, which are hidden and which do not exist at all. In some houses anger belonged to the father alone, and sadness to nobody. In others you were allowed to cry, but not to ask for anything. In others still, the only acceptable state was “I’m fine”.

You inherit that rulebook before you can speak. In adulthood it shows up as an automatic move: the feeling that wasn’t allowed gets rerouted to this day — anger into irritability or a headache, sadness into work, fear into control. If you recognise that anger was taken away from you as a child, I have devoted a whole piece to exactly that: the child who wasn’t allowed to be angry.

In my work with people I notice that this is the deepest layer of the inheritance — because it isn’t felt as a rule but as reality. A person doesn’t think “in our family grieving wasn’t allowed”; they simply “aren’t the sort of person who cries”. Only once the rule is seen as a rule can they ask whether they want to keep it.

Money, work, the body, conflict: four chapters of the same book

The emotional rulebook has other chapters, which we carry just as invisibly:

• Money: at home, was it security, shame, power or endless worry? A child of a family that lived through scarcity may, decades later, feel guilt at every purchase — or may spend precisely because they cannot bear scarcity even symbolically. Both are the same memory with opposite signs.
• Work: in some homes work was a value, in others the only measure of worth. “In our family nobody sits around” sounds harmless — until you notice that as an adult you can’t rest without a bad conscience, and that burnout is knocking at your door with the same logic it used with your parents.
• The body: how were bodies talked about at home — weight, food, illness, ageing? Was illness hidden as a disgrace, or shouted down as a failure of will? Our relationship to our own body is often an exact transcript of the relationship our parents had with theirs.
• Conflict: at home, was there shouting, silence, or “carrying on as if nothing had happened”? A child of a shouting family may avoid conflict at any cost; a child of a silent family may not even recognise they are in conflict until the relationship falls apart. What your family did with tension, you do today automatically — until you decide otherwise.

These four chapters speak loudest in a partnership — because that is where two different inheritances meet. He comes from a family where money was discussed openly and as it came up; she from a family where money was taboo and a quiet worry. To him, her silence about the bills looks like hiding; to her, his thinking aloud feels like pressure. Neither of them is “difficult” — each is simply speaking the emotional mother tongue of their family. Until they see this, they argue about money; once they see it, they can start talking about inheritance. And the same holds for all four areas.

Sayings: an inheritance in the form of sentences

The easiest place to catch an inheritance is in the sayings — the sentences repeated at home so often that they became furniture. Try which of these (or their cousins) live in you:

• “What will people say?” — the rule that the view from outside matters more than the truth from within.
• “You don’t complain about work.” — the rule that tiredness is not information but a disgrace.
• “It’ll sort itself out.” — possibly faith in life, but possibly a ban on planning and on asking for help.
• “We owe nobody anything.” — a pride that makes accepting support hard in adulthood.
• “What happens at home stays at home.” — a loyalty that can turn into silence even when speaking up is needed.
• “It’s not that bad.” — a comfort that teaches you your measure of pain doesn’t count.

Sayings are not innocent, because they don’t sit in the mind as opinions but as truths. Within therapeutic frameworks, psychology calls them core beliefs or rules for living; two things are worth knowing. First: each of these sentences once protected something — “what will people say” really did determine survival in a small community. And second: a sentence that protected your grandmother may now only be limiting you. Checking whether inherited sentences still hold isn’t disrespect; it’s maintenance.

An inheritance is not only a burden: what your family gives you to stand on

I have to pause here, because conversations about family patterns easily tip into a distortion: everything that comes from the family gets marked as a wound. That isn’t true and it isn’t fair — neither to the family nor to you.

From the same family you carry burdens from, you usually carry strengths as well. The toughness of people who survived wars, displacements and shortages and still got up in the morning. The humour that may be the only language of tenderness in your family — but it is a language and it works. The industriousness that, alongside its shadow, is also a genuine capacity to make things, to see them through, to persist. Values: honesty, hospitality, care for those weaker, respect for learning. Recipes, songs, stories, the sense of belonging somewhere.

This isn’t a consoling pose but a research finding. Ann Masten, one of the leading researchers of psychological resilience, condensed decades of study into the conclusion that resilience is not a rare gift of the exceptional but “ordinary magic” (2001) — built out of perfectly ordinary resources, with family bonds at the top of the list. And research on family narratives (Duke, Lazarus and Fivush, 2008) shows that what gives children most solidity is the so-called oscillating narrative: “our family fell and got back up” — neither an invented idyll nor sorrow alone, but the whole.

It is also striking how often the burden and the strength are the same thing seen from two sides. The hypervigilance of a child from an unpredictable home becomes, in adulthood, an exceptional radar for moods — a gift good therapists, teachers and leaders have. The stubbornness that gave your parents grey hair is the persistence that finishes a degree while working. So the task is not to cut off everything that comes from what was hard — but to take the compulsion off that same quality and leave it a choice: a radar you can switch on, not a radar that never lets you sleep.

If you see only burdens in your inheritance, the sheet is not yet complete. Ask yourself: what did this family give me that got me this far at all?

Inventory: does this serve me or limit me?

So how do you tell what to keep? I suggest a simple exercise I call an inheritance inventory. Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns. In the first, write what you carry from your family — everything, indiscriminately: sayings, habits, stances, reactions, values. Don’t censor. In the second column, test each item with three questions:

• Does this serve me today or limit me? Not “is it good or bad” — a great deal is both. “Reliability at any cost” serves you at work and limits you when, ill in bed, you can’t bring yourself to cancel a meeting.
• Whose voice is this? If you hear a particular person behind the sentence, you have your answer. You are allowed to respect an inherited sentence and retire it all the same.
• Would I knowingly pass this on? This is the sharpest filter. Imagining your child — real or hypothetical — internalising this very sentence quickly shows whether it is a value or a wound in a value’s clothing.

The items that pass all three sieves deserve more than keeping — tend them and say them out loud, because strengths are passed on just as quietly as burdens and deserve a better contract. And for the items that fail: recognising is not the same as removing. An old pattern takes its leave slowly, with practice and often with support — I write about how the cycle is actually broken in the closing piece of this series.

Gratitude without idealising, anger without blame

During an inventory, another emotional pair almost always speaks up, one people experience as a contradiction: gratitude and anger. “How can I be angry at parents who gave me so much?” Or the reverse: “How am I supposed to be grateful to people who hurt me like that?”

The answer therapeutic experience offers is: both are allowed to exist at once. Gratitude without idealising means acknowledging what you were given without having to deny what hurt you. Anger without blame means taking your pain seriously without reducing your parents to culprits — most of them were passing on what they themselves had received, with the resources they had at the time. Understanding the circumstances doesn’t cancel out your experience; and your experience doesn’t cancel out their effort.

Watch out here for a trap I know well from the therapy room: the guilt that speaks up the moment you think about your family critically. That guilt is often part of the inheritance itself — a guard making sure the rulebook doesn’t get read too closely. When guilt is a legitimate compass and when it is an inherited overseer, I unpacked in the piece on healthy and toxic guilt.

In the therapy room I often see that it is precisely the permission for simultaneity — I am grateful and I am angry — that is the moment when something loosens in a person. As long as they have to choose one or the other, they are torn: they either betray their pain or betray their people. Once both are allowed, they are no longer the judge of their family but an heir going through the estate — with open eyes and a soft heart at the same time.

If you want to see the whole inheritance

You can do the inventory on your own and you will see a great deal. But an inheritance is systemic by nature — a single saying only takes on its real meaning once you see which stories and generations it travelled through. That is why, in therapy, I most like to explore emotional inheritance alongside a genogram: a map of three generations on which you can see where “you don’t complain about work” came from and everything that sentence once held together.

That is exactly what my 90-minute session A Look into the Past is for: together we draw your genogram, map out the burdens and the strengths, and choose where to begin. You can find the details on the Services page, and a message through the contact form reaches me too.

Until then, perhaps this: the next time one of those inherited sentences speaks up in you, try simply noticing it and saying — thank you for protecting me once. Now let me check whether I still need you. That is the whole difference between an inheritance that carries you and an inheritance you carry.