Sometimes, the patterns we repeat in relationships have less to do with conscious choices and more to do with heritage. Some families keep their distance emotionally, while others feel entangled in each other’s lives. The reason may lie in what I describe as our ‘emotional DNA’ – the unseen inheritance that carries forward the echoes of past attachments, losses, and defences.
Early Bonds, Lasting Blueprints
In my books A Victorian’s Inheritance and ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph Over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability, I explore how our ancestors earliest relationships shaped psychological blueprints that can shape the way we love, trust, and relate to others.
In A Victorian’s Inheritance, I traced the life of my great-grandmother Ann, who lost her mother to tuberculosis at just four years old. That loss, the loss of siblings, and the desath of her firstborn left a profound imprint on her ability to form attachments. Attachment theorists would recognise in her story what they call disorganised attachment – when the person who should provide safety also becomes a source of fear.
Ann turned to alcohol to numb her distress, becoming unpredictable and emotionally unavailable to her children. Her depression and coping mechanisms then became part of the family’s emotional inheritance, passed silently through each branch of the family.
Separation That Lingers
In ‘Yet’, I examined how medical practices in the 1930s and 1940s shaped children’s emotional worlds. My father, Harry, was hospitalised for tuberculosis at two and a half years old and separated from his mother for years. He was aloowed one visitor for only one hour a month.
He remembered being told his mother would come when the clock’s hands reached a certain position – but she never did. From that moment, he internalised a belief that people could not be relied upon. Like many children institutionalised under such rules, he developed a mask of independence that hid deep loneliness and emotional damage.
Echoes Through Generations
In researching both books, I discovered how early emotional wounds echo across time – and how awareness can break their hold. My grandfather, Walter, grew up with a mother unable to provide consistent warmth because of her alcoholism and unprocessed grief. He learned to rely on himself, finding safety in distance.
My father’s separation experience mirrored that emotional withdrawal, though born of different circumstances. Both struggled, both sought control where they once felt powerless, and both partnered with women whose own upbringing carried echoes of emotional absence.
Psychiatrist Myrna Weissman’s long-term research, cited in A Victorian’s Inheritance, found that nearly 60 per cent of grandchildren with two generations of major depression developed depression or anxiety themselves. These inherited patterns arise not only from biology but also from the subtle emotional climates that shape us, even before we can speak.
Choosing Healing Over Repetition
Awareness of these patterns can be the first step to healing. When my father met my mother, Doreen, something shifted. He described a moment when she lightly touched his arm: ‘My reactiveness drained away. I knew everything was going to be okay; I had someone at my side.’ One gentle connection began to soften years of defensive distance.
Walter stayed contained to the end of his life, yet Harry, born a generation later, showed that change was possible. Healing did not mean rewriting the past but making new choices: to learn to reach out rather than withdraw, to trust despite fear activating his nervous system, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and raising his blood pressure, his heart rate and speeding up his breathing.
Questions to Explore Your Own Emotional Inheritance
Reflecting on these themes in your own family can be illuminating. Consider:
- How do you respond to closeness and distance?
Do you feel safer pulling away, or do you fear being left alone? These instincts often trace back generations. - How did your caregivers express or manage emotion?
Look at what shaped them, too – what wounds or absences may they have carried forward? - What family patterns repeat, even in new forms?
Perhaps emotional avoidance shows up as overwork or perfectionism. The surface changes, but the need for protection remains.
Rewriting Our Emotional Inheritage
Every family has what therapists call ‘ghosts in the nursery’ – unresolved griefs that whisper through generations. Yet once we see these shadows clearly, we can choose differently. We can give our children – and ourselves – a differnet leagcy built on understanding, compassion, and connection.
The past shapes us, but it does not have to define us. Recognising our emotional DNA gives us the freedom to transform it.
Interested in exploring your own emotional inheritance?
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Further reading:
Find A Victorian’s Inheritance and ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph Over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability in my shop, or read my article How Key Psychological Theories Can Enrich Our Understanding of Our Ancestors for deeper insights into family resilience and attachment.