The other night, I sat down and asked my Dad a simple question. What was your father’s name?

It had dawned on me that I didn’t know, or didn’t remember. My Dad’s parents split when he was little, and through a series of unfortunate events, he ended up being raised by family acquaintances who became the only grandparents I ever knew on his side. His mother died fairly young, and his father estranged himself from him. I met him just once.

When I was about twelve, we got a call from a woman who said she was marrying my grandfather and wanted us to attend the wedding, and so we did. My Dad had had no contact with his own father for over 30 years by then, so it was an awkward meeting. The man shook my father’s hand when introduced. Shortly after the wedding, he passed away. There was no love lost there.

Despite growing up with a mother who didn’t want him, a stepfather who was an abusive alcoholic on the periphery of his life, a father who abandoned him, and no real guidance, my father became a remarkable human being. He’s kind, empathetic, always learning, always growing. He has traveled to almost every country in the world, immersing himself in culture, history, and tradition in an effort to understand humanity better. At one point, he even tried being a Buddhist monk, taking a vow of silence for months, just to learn about it. He’s caring, loving, emotional, and deeply involved in my family’s life. He’s devoted to my mother in a way few people are devoted to anyone. He loves me unconditionally, and as an adoptee, that has been life-altering for me.

All this made me think about just how we turn into or away from our family patterns.

Some people respond to childhood injury by saying, I will never be powerless again. Others respond by saying, I want to understand why people hurt each other and do better. Both are survival strategies, but only one seems to loosen the grip of inheritance.

I started thinking about how often we assume patterns reproduce themselves automatically, as if harm moves through families like a gene, immutable and unquestioned. But my dad is proof that something else can happen. It wasn’t through denial or erasure, but an active turning toward understanding. My dad didn’t grow up safe, and he certainly wasn’t guided. But he grew up curious and introspective, and it seems those are two powerful tools when dismantling family patterns.

I haven’t stopped thinking about how little he had to work with, and how much he managed to build anyway. About how easily this could have gone another way. Because for every person who turns away from the damage they grew up with, there’s someone who understands it intimately and still repeats it. Sometimes perfectly. And that’s the part I can’t stop circling.

It’s tempting to believe that recognizing a family’s dysfunction is what saves us from repeating it. We think that once we can name what was wrong, we’re free of it. But experience suggests something more complicated. Some people can map their childhoods with precision and still find themselves walking the same paths. Ever heard your own mother’s dreaded words come out of your mouth? Yeah, same.

I’ve spent years in therapy because I became increasingly aware of how easy it is to pass things on without meaning to. Patterns don’t need intent, they just need proximity. One of the harder things I had to confront was my instinct to fix. I’d always thought of it as care, responsiveness, and love. But my therapist reframed it in a way that turned it all inside out. There’s a huge difference between helping and fixing. Helping supports someone while they find their own footing, but fixing steps in before they can. It resolves discomfort quickly, but there’s a cost. Fixing centres the person who intervenes and creates dependence. It communicates: I don’t trust you to figure this out on your own.

What made that so hard to swallow was realizing how much fixing gave me. I gained a sense of usefulness, control, and relief from watching someone I love struggle. But that relief belonged only to me, not to them. For them, it meant being infantilized, having independence and agency taken away. I did this with my former spouse, with my kids, with friends. I was basically the Vanilla Ice of relationships. If you’ve got a problem, yo, I’ll solve it.

I vowed to do better for my kids. Now, I’m not interested in perfect parenting, but I am interested in not confusing my own hangups with my children’s needs. If I want them to grow into independent, curious, capable people, I have to tolerate their frustration without rushing to erase it. I have to let them wrestle with things I could easily relieve.

You can’t guide someone toward a life you haven’t examined yourself.

What I didn’t understand for a long time was that just examining your past isn’t the same as resolving it. You can recognize a pattern, name it, even resent it deeply, and still be governed by it. Recognition happens in the mind, but resolution has to reach the body. And most of us are way better at the first than the second. We can tell the story of what happened to us with clarity and insight, while still reacting to the present as if we’re still back there, small and scared, braced for impact.

Unresolved harm and trauma doesn’t always show up as repetition. It shows up like instinct, certainty, and as the feeling of being right. It arrives disguised as self-protection, boundaries, or strength. It feels earned and justified.

Here’s a good example. Someone who grows up with volatility and withdrawal learns that emotions are dangerous when they’re expressed too freely, and that silence can be just as punishing as rage. They learn that love can vanish without explanation, and that being “good enough” is never a stable state. In that environment, attunement becomes survival. They learn to read moods quickly, and learn when to disappear and when to perform. Over time, that vigilance hardens into identity. It doesn’t always feel like anxiety, it often feels like competence.

Over time, certain lessons sink in without ever being stated outright. It’s ingrained into people being told that time is scarce, that disappointment leaves a mark, and that other people’s feelings carry more weight than your own. In that landscape, obligation doesn’t need to be enforced, because it’s felt deeply. Requests are rarely just requests, because everything arrives layered with context, history, and consequence. You learn to anticipate what will hurt someone else and adjust yourself accordingly, often before you’re asked. Eventually, the guilt stops feeling like pressure and starts to feel like responsibility. That’s how expressing you want something different is perceived as a kind of moral failure rather than a preference.

This is how someone can recognize their parents’ harm and still recreate its shape. Approval of the way they were treated isn’t part of the equation. The nervous system learned early that connection without control was unsafe, and it reaches for what once kept it intact. Knowing better doesn’t automatically produce new responses under stress. Without repair, the body just defaults to what once worked.

The hardest thing for me to accept is that people don’t repeat harm because they misunderstand it. The familiarity is comforting, and power is soothing. Until those truths are faced honestly, recognition is just decoration rather than transformation. It takes a lot of work to dig into this stuff and really make changes.

There’s another layer that makes these patterns especially hard to dismantle. If things eventually “work out,” the harm gets reframed as necessary. If relationships continue, if everyone’s technically still standing, the past becomes acceptable. I survived. I function. Things are fine now. And if that’s true, then the way it all unfolded must have been tolerable. Maybe even formative. Maybe even good. But survival alone is a pretty low bar. Continuity isn’t the same as healthy, and maintaining contact isn’t proof that something was safe or loving. It just means the child adapted well enough to live through it.

I want more than that for my kids.

That’s why I don’t think of all this therapy work as breaking cycles once and for all. It’s more like ongoing interference. Catching myself in moments where certainty feels good and asking who it actually serves. Noticing when urgency is really my own anxiety. Learning to pause long enough to choose something less familiar.

Inheritance isn’t just what we’re given, it’s what we reach for when we’re tired, afraid, or overwhelmed, and that’s what makes it so difficult to outrun. It isn’t interrupted by understanding it once, but by noticing, again and again and again, when it tries to speak through you.

Doing better, for me, looks less like fixing and more like restraint. There’s a lot less certainty, more listening, and a willingness to let my children live lives that don’t need to justify mine. And while I’m sure I’m not doing this all perfectly, at least I’m doing it with my eyes wide open to the baggage I brought to the gig.