Many of us, as we enter adulthood, make a quiet but very firm promise to ourselves: “I will never behave like my mother” or “I will never raise my voice at my child like my father did.” We believe that the mere awareness of our parents’ mistakes, as well as the pain we have experienced because of them, is enough to protect us from repeating them. We are convinced that with the power of will and rational thinking, we will prevent history from coming full circle.
And then comes the crisis. A very stressful day at work, an argument with a partner, a crying child, physical fatigue. And suddenly – to our own horror – we hear exactly the same words coming out of our mouths, in the same, cold or raised tone from which we have wanted to escape all our lives. Instead of calm, we react with withdrawal, sarcasm or an outburst.
When emotions subside, merciless self-criticism, self-anger, shame and a poignant sense of failure appear. We ask ourselves: How is it possible that despite so much effort, I am playing the same scenario again? Am I doomed to repeat this story?
Spis treści
We inherit more than genes: biology and the nervous system
In the systemic-cultural approach (IPSK), we start from the fundamental assumption that man does not function in a vacuum, and our reactions are not just a matter of “strong will”. We are born and grow up in a specific system that shapes our nervous system from the first days of life.
We inherit much more from our caregivers than just the color of our eyes. We take over family scripts – unwritten rules about how to deal with anxiety, how to resolve conflicts, how to set boundaries and what it means to “love” in general. As children, we absorb this information not through what our parents say to us, but through how they behave and what emotional atmosphere prevails in the home.
Our nervous system learns these patterns and encodes them as a default state long before our brain develops the ability to think rationally, critically. When severe stress occurs in adult life, the prefrontal cortex (responsible for logic and planning) is “disconnected” from the power supply. Evolutionarily older parts of the brain come to the fore, fighting for survival. The brain loses access to rational analysis and reaches for what it knows best – the learned automatism, even if in retrospect we assess it as destructive.
The Importance of Culture and History: The Baggage of Generations
To fully understand our behavior, we need to look even wider – beyond the walls of our family home. The cultural trend in psychotherapy assumes that our parents were also not formed out of nowhere. They also carried the baggage of their families, historical burdens and social norms of their time.
Many families in Poland still carry an unconscious message of difficult history – post-war survival, poverty or life in constant tension. For our grandparents’ generation, the most important thing was the physical survival of the children, not their emotional well-being. On the other hand, our parents’ generation often learned that the value of a person is measured by hard work, dedication and lack of complaints.
In such conditions, showing weakness was perceived as a threat. Understanding this context, we begin to see that our parents’ emotional coldness or harshness often resulted not from a lack of love, but from the fact that no one had ever taught them a different language of emotion.
What destroys today once allowed us to survive
This is one of the most important and liberating moments in the psychotherapy process: understanding that repeating patterns is not proof that something is wrong with you. This is not a sign of weakness, corruption, or lack of emotional intelligence.
Schemes that seem dysfunctional today and make your life difficult were precise adaptation mechanisms in the past. Were your best strategy for survival in a specific environment:
- People-pleasing: If expressing your own opinion or anger in the family home was associated with punishment, rejection or caused a fight, you have learned to ignore your own needs. Tuning in to the moods of others was a way to stay safe. Today, the same pattern leads to burnout, anxiety and allowing oneself to cross one’s limits.
- Emotional coldness and withdrawal: If you experienced rejection as a child or your emotional needs were notoriously ignored, the nervous system has learned to “cut off” the feeling so as not to suffer. Today, this mechanism may prevent you from building a deep, intimate bond with your partner, because closeness is subconsciously associated with the risk of abandonment.
- Compulsion to control: Growing up in chaos (e.g. in a family with an alcohol problem or an emotionally unstable one) means that the child has to grow up quickly and take over the reins (the so-called parentification). In adulthood, such a person may live in constant tension, trying to control every aspect of life, partner and children, because the loss of control means mortal danger in their subconscious.
What used to be a rescue and a kind of armor, begins to weigh on us in adult life. The armor becomes a cage.
The blame trap – why is therapy not a courtroom?
Patients often fear that psychotherapy consists of endlessly complaining about the past and blaming their parents for all the failures. However, such an approach leads to a dead end. It keeps us in the role of a wronged child who is waiting for someone to do him justice.
We analyze the past not to pass judgments and look for the guilty, but to understand the mechanism. Understanding why our parents behaved in a certain way does not mean justifying their mistakes or consenting to the violence we may have experienced. However, it frees us from the feeling that we were “not good enough” to deserve another love. We stop fighting the ghosts of the past and start focusing on what we can change here and now.
How to regain agency? Overview of the “family suitcase”
Imagine that when you set off from home into adulthood, you received a suitcase from your family. It was packed without your informed consent. Everything was inside: both huge resources (e.g. diligence, loyalty, sensitivity, ambition) and heavy, harmful stones (e.g. fear of judgment, lack of self-confidence, tendency to sacrifice).
Psychotherapy is a safe, non-judgmental space in which we can open this suitcase together. We do it at your own pace. We bring to light more beliefs and behaviors by asking one key question: “Does this still serve me?”
Stopping intergenerational transmission is a job that requires time, courage and enormous gentleness for yourself. We are not able to erase a difficult past or change our parents. However, by regaining awareness of our own schemes, we gain an invaluable skill – we can notice the moment when an old program starts. There is a space between the stimulus (stressful situation) and our reaction. In this space, the possibility of choice is born. We no longer have to react automatically.
If you feel that you are stuck in invisible schemes that do not allow you to live as you would like, please contact us.
