Repeating your parents’ mistakes: why this happens?
Have you ever made a quiet but very firm promise to yourself? – “I will never yell at my child like my mother did.” – “I am not going to sulk and remain silent like my father.” “In my family, there will be none of those constant money-related reproaches”. We utter these words silently when we are hurt or feel injustice or want to shield our future from the shadows of the past.
You are an adult now. You have your own life, your own family. You are in the kitchen and a phrase escapes your lips. That exact one. The one you hated as a child. The heartbreaking tone which brought you to tears. Or you catch yourself, just like your mother once did, anxiously calling your spouse every half an hour, unable to cope with worry. Or, like your father, you are immersed in your work, retreating into a silent stupour instead of talking about a problem. The promise is broken. The mistake is repeated. And right afterwards, comes a feeling of shame, a strange sense of betraying yourself and despair: “Well, I am just like them.”
Why does this happen? Are we simply doomed to be copies of those who raised us, even in their worst traits?
However, it is not fate or genetics. It is a more complex and profound process that, fortunately, can be understood. And the first step is to realise what drives us.
Imagine the very first and most important school of life – our family. We do not come into this world with an instruction manual on how to live, love, argue or raise children. We learn it by carefully watching the two most important people in the world. Their behavior, their reactions, their ways of dealing with anger, joy and conflict: this is our textbook on human relationships. The neural pathways in our brain are formed based on this experience. Even if we did not like the lesson, it was learned. It is our habitual, ‘default’ way of responding to the world. In stress, in fatigue, in moments of uncontrollable emotion, we do not compose a new response. We pull out the most familiar one from our memory archive, the one we saw a thousand times. Even if it is a bad one.
But there is a second, more subtle reason. Sometimes, by repeating a mistake, we are unconsciously trying to... fix the past. It sounds paradoxical, but it is true. A woman who grew up with a cold, distant father may repeatedly choose similarly emotionally unavailable partners. Why? Deep down, a child’s hope lives on: “This time I will be able to melt his heart, earn his love and heal that enduring pain.” She repeats the scenario to finally change the ending. A child, who was constantly shamed, when becoming a parent, might excessively praise his own child, being afraid of inflicting the same pain. But this immoderate praise is just the flip side of the same coin of shame. We are still having a dialogue with the past, not with the real person in front of us.
There is a third “anchor”, and that is love. Yes, strange as it may seem. Through repetition, we maintain an invisible bond with our parents. To do differently would mean to mentally separate from them and acknowledge that their path was wrong. And for the child-like part of our psyche, this is tantamount to betrayal. Subconsciously, we may fear that by becoming “better”, we will lose their love or our place in the family system. We remain loyal to the family, even at the cost of our own happiness. It is a loyalty no one asked for but one we carry as an unspoken vow.
So, is this a vicious cycle? Not at all. The very fact that we notice these repetitions, that they cause us discomfort and shame, is already a glimmer of awareness. It is the very crack through which the light of a different choice can break.
It all begins with simple, yet difficult, observation, without any judgment. The next time you catch yourself in a familiar gesture, phrase, or reaction – stop. Do not scold yourself. Mentally say, “Stop. This is not my voice. This is an echo.” Try to trace what triggered it. Fatigue? A sense of helplessness? Specific words from your partner or child that touched an old, childhood wound? It is like taking a mechanism apart. When you see every cog, it ceases to be scary magic.
Then, ask yourself: “How would I truly want to act? What kind of response did I lack as a child?” Imagine an ideal, supportive parental figure in that situation. What would they say? How would they act? At first, it will be just a thought experiment, a game. Later, you will be able to try on this new role for yourself, even if just for a second. At first, it will feel awkward and unnatural. But new neural pathways are built exactly this way: through repetition of a new experience, even if it feels artificial at first.
The most important thing is to show yourself the very compassion that might have been lacking in the past. You are not “broken” or “bad”. You are a person who grew up under certain conditions and learned to survive within them. Those old patterns in childhood may have helped you cope. Now they are obsolete. You have every right to replace them with new ones, which are more effective and kinder.
Breaking this cycle does not mean rejecting your parents. It means gratefully accepting from them the valuable things they were able to give and with sad but firm understanding, leaving their burdens where they belong – in the past. It means building your own house, using the bricks of their experience, but now according to your own, unique blueprint. Not to prove something to them but so that within the walls of this house your own free voice can resonate.
And when your children one day make their own childish vow ‘not to be like their parents’, they may not even understand that the very possibility of having a different choice is your most important and quiet gift to them. A gift that begins with a single question which you asked to yourself in silence: “Who am I now? An echo of the past or the author of the present?”
