It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

the DNA responsible for transmitting physical traits, such as the color of our hair, eyes, and skin—surprisingly makes up less than 2 percent of our total DNA.14 The other 98 percent consists of what is called noncoding DNA (ncDNA), and is responsible for many of the emotional, behavioral, and personality traits we inherit.

Visualizing Your Mother and Her History

Pain does not always dissolve on its own or diminish with time

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

—Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

When a parent is rejected or disrespected, one of the children will often represent that parent by sharing the rejected behaviors. In this way, the child makes himself or herself equal to the parent by suffering in a similar way. It is as though the child is saying, “I’ll go through it, too, so that you don’t have to go through it alone.” Loyal in this way, the child continues the suffering into the next generation. It often doesn’t stop there.

Those of us who feel that we didn’t receive enough from our parents, especially from our mothers, often feel that we don’t receive enough from life.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.

—Carl Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

It’s important to restate: not all behaviors expressed by us actually originate from us. They can easily belong to family members who came before us. We can merely be carrying the feelings for them or sharing them. We call these “identification feelings.”

Evolutionary biologists back up this premise. They describe how our amygdala uses about two thirds of its neurons scanning for threats. As a result, painful and frightening events are more easily stored in our long-term memory than pleasant events. Scientists call this default
mechanism a “negativity bias,” and it makes perfect sense. Our very survival depends on being able to screen out potential attacks. “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences,” says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, “and Teflon for positive ones.”4

Let’s look at that again. The emotions, traits, and behaviors we reject in our parents will likely live on in us. It’s our unconscious way of loving them, a way to bring them back into our lives.