In the Old Testament we are told that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. At first this seems a judgmental relic from a different culture, a way of explaining inherited illnesses or chance misfortune. However, there can be another sense, which accords with what can be found in modern psychology and what I have seen in my discussions with people. A lot of behaviours which we see in adult life are actually responses to the unconscious traces left by experiences had in childhood. In general these experiences allow the child to make a judgement about the world, as either predictable, stable and nurturing or uncertain and precarious. Our parents all had their own emotional and relationship patterns and ways of dealing with anxiety. These patterns were primarily played out in their relationship to each other, which impacted upon us as a child. From this we drew our conclusions as to how to deal with the world, and how to develop our own relationships. This parental wound - or the places where our parents got stuck - has a huge influence on our own inner life. The inner world we form as a child will replicate what we see in the outer world and then as an adult we gravitate towards situations that replicate this inner world dynamic.
We tend to do this by repeating the pattern or by being determined to do the opposite. However, because the opposite behaviour is undertaken in response to the parents' way of behaving, we are still defining ourselves by it and end up strengthening the dynamic rather than weakening it. A lot of adult neurosis or anxiety can be understood as a part of the self looking to discover its full development away from the narrow confines of the family of origin. A repeating way of doing things or a rigid personal style is a clue to the original place of lack or neglect. Our minds love habits, even when they hurt us.
One way this appears in our adult life is that we project onto others, or onto work, the parts that we instinctively know we were lacking when young. Projection is the process of attaching some aspect of your inner life onto someone or something on the outside. And often we project the underdeveloped part of ourselves onto another person, thus ironically repeating the dynamic which was present in our family of origin. We look to another person to fill in our missing pieces in our own emotional development, sometimes without realizing that we are simply reinforcing the lacks which we inherited. The only true way to recognize the limited nature of the early strategies which we have incorporated into our personality and begin the slow work of healing by no longer acting on them.
