I’ve been thinking a lot lately about family patterns and how easily they move through generations.
For instance, a father speaks to his son the way his father spoke to him. A mother worries because worry was normal in the house she grew up in. Generational trauma comes with promoting childhood shame, anger, silence, control, people pleasing, walking on eggshells, or emotional distancing.
To be fair, most of it didn’t start with our parents – they inherited it too. Added to that was ‘their’ current environment as well. When you sit with that and think about it, it gets harder to resent people who were just repeating what life taught them – most of them were just trying to survive.
What I find myself genuinely curious about is something else though. Why do some people just follow the same routine with their children when others suddenly see it? Why does one person in the family stop and think this doesn’t feel right anymore. Why does one child grow up and decide the cycle ends with them. Same house, same parents, same emotional climate, and yet one person becomes aware enough to question all of it.
I don’t think it usually starts as some big conscious moment either. Sometimes it’s just exhaustion from feeling like a hamster on a wheel. Or it’s hearing yourself speak to your kid in the exact tone you swore you’d never use. Sometimes it’s the look on your child’s face and realizing you know that look because you used to wear it.
Most of the people I know who’ve chosen to change aren’t trying to become perfect parents. They’ve just reached a point where they can’t keep passing on something that was passed to them – they know it’s wrong. And honestly, I think that’s one of the bravest things a person can do. To carry years of inherited behavior and still choose to soften, to become aware, to pause and reflect before doing the same. Choosing mindfulness over reaction.
If that’s you, you were probably called the black sheep growing up. The weird one, the too sensitive one, the difficult one, the one who asked too many questions or felt things too deeply. Nobody really understood you, and a lot of the time you didn’t feel loved for who you actually were. You felt loved for who they wanted you to be, which isn’t the same.
But that thing in you they couldn’t understand was the same thing that ended up breaking the cycle. The sensitivity they told you to toughen up, the questions they told you to stop asking, the feelings they told you were too much. That was the awareness breaking through – that was the part of you that refused to go to sleep.
If that’s you, I hope you know what you’ve actually done. You took the hit so your kids wouldn’t have to, you sat with feelings nobody in your family knew how to sit with, you did the uncomfortable work without a guidebook, often without anyone in your life really understanding why it mattered so much to you. That’s no small feat, generations behind you couldn’t do what you’re doing, and generations ahead of you will live differently because of it.
You should be proud of that, and I mean really genuinely proud. Knowing you chose to be the one who changed it.
Josiph Alvaro, Josiph Alvaro