Intergenerational transmission: how patterns pass on without us noticing

You swore you would never say that sentence. The one you hated as a child. And then one evening, tired, in the middle of an argument with your child or your partner — out it comes. In the same tone. With the same gesture. For a moment it seems as if someone else has spoken through you: your mother, your father, perhaps even a grandmother you never really knew.

We call this intergenerational transmission: patterns of experiencing, responding and relating that travel from generation to generation — mostly past our awareness and almost always past our good intentions. But the word “transmission” can sound mysterious, almost mystical, so in this piece I answer the question that mysticism cannot handle: how exactly does it happen? Along which channels does a pattern travel from your grandmother to you?

The answer matters, because every channel is also a door: where a pattern enters, it can also be stopped.

Transmission is not a curse — it is learning

First, let us set the frame. Murray Bowen, the founder of family systems theory, described the multigenerational transmission process: families pass on their levels of emotional maturity, their fears and their ways of coping with anxiety — not evenly, but differently to different children. The child on whom most of the parental anxiety was focused as a rule carries more of it onward; the child who had more room of their own, less. Across several generations, very different branches can grow from the same trunk.

The crucial thing in Bowen’s view is that nobody is to blame. Your parents did not “infect” you, any more than their mothers infected them — every link in the chain worked with what it received. Transmission is not a conspiracy and not a curse; it is an entirely natural side effect of the fact that a human child learns everything most important at home, long before they can put it into words. Everything that travels along that route — from attitudes to money to which feelings are permitted — I have set out in my piece on a family’s emotional baggage. Here we are interested in the mechanisms. There are four.

Incidentally, Bowen’s account also explains something that puzzles many people: how a brother and a sister from the same family can be so different. “The same family” does not in fact exist — every child grows up in their own version of it. The firstborn alongside young, uncertain parents; the youngest alongside tired but more relaxed ones. One is born into a calm period, another in the middle of a crisis, a third just after a loss. And above all: a different share of the family anxiety and a different role attaches to each of them. So it is no contradiction if you carry the weight while your brother seems “unaffected” — you received different inheritances from the same house.

The first channel: I watch you, therefore I learn

The simplest and most underrated channel is observational learning. In the 1960s the psychologist Albert Bandura showed, in a series of famous experiments, that children learn behaviour simply by watching — with no reward, no punishment, and not a single word of instruction. Children who watched an adult handling a toy roughly reproduced that behaviour faithfully.

At home this means: a child does not listen to what you say about anger — they watch what you do with anger. Whether conflict brings a raised voice or an icy silence. Whether father apologises after an argument or acts as though nothing happened. Whether mother ever says “I can’t manage, I need help” or holds out until she drops. Every such scene is a lesson, and by adulthood a child has sat through thousands of them. That is why parents’ sermons are so powerless against their example — and why we adults so often discover that we are repeating not what our parents told us, but what they lived.

In my work with people I meet this channel most often in small, everyday forms that hardly seem worth mentioning. Someone says they cannot rest without a guilty conscience gnawing at them — and a moment later remembers that they never once saw their mother sitting down; she even watched television with an iron in her hand. Another person realises that at every conflict her first move is to soothe everyone around her — exactly as her father spent decades smoothing the peace between her mother and grandmother. None of this was learned deliberately. And that is precisely why it is so stubborn: what you learn without words is hard to call into question with words.

The second channel: attachment is inherited — but not through genes

The second channel is deeper and starts earlier: in the first year of life, in the thousands of tiny exchanges between an infant and those who care for them. Out of these exchanges a child builds their attachment style — a fundamental answer to the questions “can I rely on others?” and “am I worth caring for?”.

And here comes one of the most powerful findings in developmental psychology: attachment style is transmitted to a significant degree from parent to child. In a 1995 meta-analysis, the Dutch researcher Marinus van IJzendoorn showed that from the way a parent talks about their own childhood (measured with the Adult Attachment Interview), we can predict with roughly 75 per cent accuracy what kind of attachment their child will develop. Put differently: a child’s security is woven to a large extent out of how far the parent has worked through their own story. Not out of what happened to them — but out of how far they have brought it into awareness and made sense of it. That is both the most sobering and the most hopeful figure in this piece: it means that working on yourself is not selfish — it is a legacy. How attachment styles work in adult relationships I describe in detail in my piece on attachment patterns.

The third channel: rules that are written down nowhere

Every family has its rules. A few are spoken (“we don’t argue at the table”), but most are not — and it is precisely the unspoken ones that are most powerful. What was never talked about in your family? Which feelings were allowed to exist and which were not? What happened to the one who was “too much”: too loud, too sad, too much themselves?

A child does not receive these rules as a list; they read them off micro-signals — off when mother freezes, when father changes the subject, what brings on a silence. And because the rules are unspoken, they cannot be contested; they are absorbed like air. Taboos and secrets are a particular form of this: subjects the family gives a wide berth without anyone knowing why. A secret can shape a family’s behaviour for generations after everyone who knew it has died — I write about that mechanism in my piece on family secrets. Rules are also transmitted through roles: who in the family is “the strong one”, who “the difficult one”, who “the sunshine”. A role assigned to you at five can still be deciding at fifty what you allow yourself in relationships.

The fourth channel: a nervous system learns alongside a nervous system

The fourth channel is the quietest, because it does not run through behaviour or words at all, but through the body. An infant cannot settle itself; its nervous system is regulated alongside an adult’s — through touch, voice, the rhythm of breathing, the expression on a face. The developmental scientist Ruth Feldman calls this dance biobehavioural synchrony: during an attuned interaction, the heart rate, hormones and behaviour of parent and infant literally come into alignment, and it is that alignment which builds the child’s later capacity to settle themselves.

This means: the child of a chronically frightened mother learns alongside her that the world is dangerous — not because anyone told them so, but because their nervous system resonates with hers day after day. The child of parents who settle themselves under stress gets the experience built into their body that arousal can subside. So part of a family inheritance is hidden not in beliefs but in muscle tone, in shallow breathing, in how quickly you are thrown off course and how long you need to come back. And that is why understanding is often not enough when working with deep patterns — the body needs new experiences, which I write about in my piece on body-oriented psychotherapy.

And what about epigenetics?

Intergenerational transmission is often discussed today in the language of epigenetics as well — the chemical marks that affect which genes are expressed, without altering the genetic code itself. The researcher Rachel Yehuda and colleagues found changes in the expression of stress-response genes in the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and raised the question of whether the consequences of trauma can also be inscribed biologically in this way.

Honesty is needed here: this is a promising but young field. Yehuda and colleagues themselves warn, in a 2018 review, that in humans we cannot yet separate how much of the difference found travels along biological routes and how much along all the routes described above — through upbringing, attachment and environment. Headlines of the “trauma is written into your grandchildren’s DNA” type are therefore a sensationalist shortcut that science does not (yet) support in that form. For you, though, the practical message is much the same regardless of what future science shows: your family’s history has left traces in you. And traces are not fate.

Transmission is not fate: where the chain breaks

This is the most important part of the piece. None of the four channels operates like a law of nature; all of them are forms of learning — and what a person has learned can also be unlearned. Van IJzendoorn’s figure has another side to it: among parents who had a difficult childhood, the children with secure attachment are as a rule those whose parent has worked through and made sense of their own story. Researchers call this earned security. The chain, then, does not break where childhood was ideal, but where somebody looked their own childhood in the eye.

Bowen would add: it breaks through differentiation — the capacity to stay in contact with your family without being carried off by its currents. Not by fleeing to the other side of the world (distance does not erase a pattern, it only freezes it) and not by blaming, but through slow, conscious work: seeing the pattern, understanding its history, and responding differently at the key moments from what it dictates. What that looks like in practice — the concrete steps by which the circle stops with you — I have set out in my piece Breaking the circle.

Psychotherapy can play an important part in this too — and not merely because of the talking. If a pattern was learned in a relationship, it is also unlearned in a relationship: the therapeutic relationship is a space in which, over weeks and months, the nervous system gathers the experience that it is possible to be seen without being punished, and to be in distress without being abandoned. It is really a fifth channel — the same mechanisms that brought the pattern, only this time working for you. Why it is the relationship with a therapist that heals, I have described in more detail in my piece on the therapeutic relationship.

In practice, breaking the chain starts with very concrete questions that you can put to yourself today:

• What did I learn at home about feelings? Which ones were allowed, which forbidden — and what do I do today when a forbidden feeling appears in me or in my child?
• How did my family handle distress? Silence, outburst, work, drink, humour? And which of these responses is my automatic one today?
• Which of my parents’ sentences do I hear coming out of my mouth? Not only the words — the tone, the timing, the intent as well.
• What was I not allowed, that they were not allowed either? Rest, joy, success, softness?

The answers to these questions are not comfortable, but they are the ticket in. And it matters to know this: the goal is not to become a perfect parent or partner who passes nothing on — that is not possible and not necessary. The goal is to pass on less fear and more choice. In attachment research the difference shows up clearly: children do not need parents without a history, they need parents who know their own history.

Where to start: first you see the pattern, then you can let it go

The first step is always the same: the pattern has to be seen. As long as it works from the background, you serve it; once it has a name and a history, you have a choice. For this, the genogram — a map of three generations of your family — is the most useful tool I know: on a single sheet it shows which of the four channels carried to you what is getting in your way today. That is why I also use it as part of the service A Look into the Past: in a 90-minute session we draw your genogram together and look for the threads running through it. There is more about the session on the Services page.

Let me close where we began — with the sentence you said even though you swore you would not. That moment is not proof that you are condemned to repeat. It is the moment when the pattern came out into the open and showed itself. And a pattern that shows itself is a pattern you can work with. Your ancestors did not have that possibility; most of them did not even have words for what they were carrying. You do. That is not a small difference — it is exactly the difference from which a new generation of the story is born.