Removing the Parental Legacy

Our families bequeath to us many different things: heirlooms, family stories, medical histories, genetics, behaviors, personality traits, property, money, and a role in our family of origin to name a few. Our parents, for ill or for good or sometimes both in any given moment, are not only our caregivers, but the gods who form and control our childhood world. They are the symbols of what it is to be male, to be female, and become our primary relationship model for how we will interact with these types of beings. They help us define ourselves through relating both with the parent who is “like me” and the one who is not. They represent for us how the sexes interact with each other, how they interact with the outside world, and they teach us who we are and how we should react and interact within our family and all its dynamics. There is very little about our lives which parents don’t dictate or control, all evidence to the contrary when dealing with a two year old or a teenager.

Through our teens and our twenties we work on individuation and go through the startling process of realizing our parents are neither gods nor particularly powerful like they seemed in our childhood. They shrink in size from Titans to humans and we see all their foibles and personality quirks, their unique choices and how those choices are not necessarily something we will continue in our adult life. We create our own life choosing what of their universe to keep and what to leave behind. This can be a very turbulent process and the years are full of drama and dynamic change which can be exacerbated by any abuse or dysfunction which existed in the home during childhood.

Parents, consciously or unconsciously, build for us a structure, a template which we can use in order to navigate the world. This can be seen in the roles children play in the family such as Only Child, Oldest, Middle Child, Youngest, etc. Each of these is a simple fact like eye color or height, but also a role each child must fit into and affects how we see ourselves throughout life. Psychologists study these phenomena enough they have become part of the majority culture’s understanding of families and children. In fact they are bandied around in conversation like Astrological signs. For example: “Oh, they were an only child. That explains it” or “They must have been a middle child to need so much attention and…