Most of us assume we’re moving through life fully guided by our goals, intentions, and conscious choices. Looking ahead, we imagine we’re steering toward a desired future. We realize things beyond our control may drag us off our intended path, but we still believe that general outcomes are solely shaped by our conscious thoughts, goals, and efforts.
However, psychoanalytic thought has—for well over a century—suggested something quite different: that the long arm of the past reaches into the present, continuing to push and pull us in ways that can work against our stated interests.
At a conference I recently attended, the psychoanalyst Donald Moss captured this idea this way: We walk backwards into the future.
The more I sat with those words, the more they seemed to touch on something fundamental about the human struggles and relationship challenges I see as a psychologist. Think about the person who repeatedly chooses emotionally unavailable partners; or the spouse who becomes consumed by debilitating insecurities whenever normal marital conflict arises; or an individual who lives a secret, compartmentalized life that leads them to violate their own moral code and betray the ones they love. From the outside these patterns are confusing, often self-defeating, and incomprehensible to the person living them.
But what if they aren’t random? What if these patterns represent old solutions to long forgotten childhood wounds? And, as we’ll explore next, what if an individual’s current suffering is part of an intergenerational dynamic? What if the subtle (or not-so-subtle) self-sabotage stems from deeply buried emotional burdens that are trying to find the light so they can be dealt with?
How the past collides with the present
There is a common misconception that in trying to explore and understand one’s past, a person will somehow sidestep their sense of agency by feeling like a helpless “victim” of a difficult childhood. And, as a result, they will avoid taking responsibility for their current decisions and behaviors. This can be summarized as “I couldn’t help myself; my past trauma made me do it.” This attitude, of course, can crop up when the past is used to escape accountability, a place to hide rather than learn. But in my experience as a psychologist, this mindset is less common than you might think.
Understanding how your past shaped you isn’t the same as excusing what you do in the present. In fact, the opposite is often true. The less aware we are of the forces that have shaped us, the more likely we are to be unconsciously driven by them. Agency shrinks rather than expands when the past remains hidden. In other words, we are unable to take ownership of and change from forces we cannot see. The more clearly we understand the emotional realities that forged us (and continue to forge us), the more freedom we have to respond differently rather than simply reenact the past.
The ways in which one’s past is relevant to their current struggles is often complex. There isn’t a linear, one-to-one correlation from childhood wounds to adult decisions and struggles. For instance, the child who learned that their emotional needs were burdensome to others may grow into an adult who asks for very little, depriving themselves in different ways. Or these same childhood dynamics may turn that person into someone who is demanding and feels entitled as a means to make up for the painful lack of their earlier life. Or take the child who learned that vulnerability led to humiliation. As an adult, they may become skilled at concealment and emotional avoidance. And yet this same kind of childhood may lead to someone who struggles with boundaries, oversharing sensitive information without pausing to vet whether the listener is safe. These are just two examples of how a similar early dynamic can lead to different adult outcomes.
How does childhood follow us? We carry forward assumptions about love, trust, conflict, intimacy, dependence, and self-worth that were formed long before we had the capacity to examine them. And just as importantly, we carry forward the particular ways we learned to defend and protect ourselves against emotional overwhelm caused by attachment injuries. In this sense, many of our adult struggles are expressions of ways of being that once helped us survive.
The challenge is that what protected us at ten may imprison us at forty.
You may find yourself reacting to the partner standing in front of you at the same time as you are (unknowingly) reacting to the shadows of relationships from decades earlier. Fears of abandonment, of being controlled or intruded upon, of rejection or humiliation; these often unconscious anxieties impact how we express our needs (and whether we even know what our needs are). They shape how we give and receive love, and how we experience ourselves and others.
But if you trace these past shadows back even further, you may discover that the psychological blueprints you carry were partially drawn by others. Sometimes, the ghosts you are wrestling with in the present didn’t arise from within your own developmental history, but rather, from ancestors impacted by their own proverbial ghosts that will impact you.
The return of unspoken stories
Relational psychoanalyst Galit Atlas (2022) has written about what she calls our emotional inheritance, the way family secrets and intergenerational losses, traumas, and unresolved grief can continue to shape our lives long after the trauma-inducing events or situations have faded from memory. According to Atlas, we can carry emotional realities that were never fully spoken about, understood, or mourned. These unresolved emotional realities can continue to influence later generations, sometimes appearing as emotional undercurrents that shape relationships and psychological struggles.
Viewed through this lens, acting out may sometimes represent the return of a story that has never found words to be expressed and healed. Intergenerational trauma transmission suggests one may carry wordless, emotional burdens unknowingly, burdens that started with others before you. A parent’s shame. A grandparent’s traumatic loss. A family secret that was carefully guarded. A betrayal that was endured but never spoken about. These experiences don’t necessarily disappear simply because they remain unspoken. In some families they appear to continue exerting influence long after calendar time has passed the original events by.
To understand how these unspoken histories operate, it helps to look at how intergenerational burdens can hide behind otherwise normal, even happy, upbringings. Consider a clinical composite we will call Carolina, who struggled with anxiety for most of her adult life.
The inheritance of a perpetually-smiling household
Carolina* described herself as “an anxious person.” She had learned numerous techniques throughout the years to manage it (breathing exercises, somatic movements to release tension, listening to calming music), but she continued to live with a baseline anxiety that felt inexplicable. She described her childhood in positive terms, noting her mother was supportive and often “upbeat.” She knew she was “loved” by her father but he was undemonstrative and didn’t express affection in a direct way. According to Carolina, her mother made up for her father’s emotional shortcomings.
There was a profound loss that cast a long shadow over the family, even though it was rarely discussed. At first Carolina quickly brushed over this traumatic event while discussing her family history, believing that it played little role in the parenting she received.
When Carolina’s mother was ten years old, her mother’s teenage brother Eddie (Carolina’s uncle) died from an inoperable brain tumor. Understandably, Carolina’s maternal grandparents were devastated. Her grandfather threw himself more deeply into his law practice as an escape and her grandmother relied on her religious beliefs for comfort.
After the funeral, Eddie was rarely brought up. Carolina’s mother rarely spoke about her brother, and when she did, the conversation was often quite brief before quickly moving on to something else. Carolina would later realize how little she actually knew about the uncle whose death had devastated her grandparents and mother. There were few photos, few stories, few memories, and almost no conversations about the life he had lived. When Carolina would ask questions about Eddie, if she wasn’t shut down entirely, she could sense that the adults were extremely uncomfortable. They’d say something superficial and change the subject. And so she learned to stop asking.
The absence itself seemed meaningful. An enormous loss had occurred, yet it occupied surprisingly little space within the family narrative.
Growing up, Carolina knew that her uncle had died at a young age, but she knew “we just don’t talk about stuff like that.” In fact, Carolina learned early on that emotional pain of any kind was off-limits; her mother “preferred to focus on the positive, there was a silver lining she could find in almost anything.” And while Carolina enjoyed aspects of her mother’s upbeat nature, the disavowal of any emotional distress in the family led to Carolina shutting parts of herself down. Her own emotional pain became, in a way, almost forbidden to her.
As therapy progressed, Carolina began to wonder whether her mother’s relentless optimism served another purpose beyond simply maintaining a positive outlook. Sadness itself seemed unbearable to her mother—something to fear. Difficult emotions were quickly reframed or redirected, and expressions of distress were met with immediate reassurance rather than exploration. It was as though grief remained something to move away from rather than something to move through.
As she grew and matured, Carolina’s own emotional pain became associated with anxious danger, an internal messaging of “it’s not okay to feel this way, you will be hurting your mother if you allow these feelings to emerge.” As a result, she often experienced a low-grade anxiety that blanketed her underlying pain. What had never been fully acknowledged within the family seemed to survive as a diffuse emotional uneasiness that needed to be understood.
When silence finds another voice
In many cases a symptom (like anxiety or depression) does not shed light on the context of a person’s life that has given rise to it. In certain cases, emotional struggles point to evidence that an issue has never been fully faced within the family. Carolina’s anxiety went beyond an individual struggle that appeared out of nowhere. It emerged within a family where profound loss had been relegated to silence across generations. No one intentionally handed that burden to her, yet she grew up learning that certain feelings were dangerous. Her anxiety appeared to be connected to her own experiences, but perhaps also to emotional realities within the family that had never been fully acknowledged.
In this way, symptoms can be understood as the language of stories that have never been told.
Anxiety was Carolina’s struggle. For others, unresolved emotional realities may become intertwined with different symptoms or relational difficulties, including compulsive sexual behavior, affairs, addictions, chronic self-sabotage, or repeated relationship failures. The presenting issues change, but the underlying question remains the same: What buried emotional reality is struggling to be known?
Of course, not everyone who grows up around family secrets, unresolved grief, or emotional silence develops anxiety or struggles with acting out. Human beings are far too complex for such straightforward explanations. Even within the same nuclear family, there is no way to predict emotional outcomes, no way to apply a template that each individual will fit into. The same family history may affect close siblings in dramatically different ways. Emotional inheritance is best understood not as destiny, but as one influence among many that shapes how we make sense of ourselves, our relationships, and the challenges we encounter throughout life.
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If someone repeatedly betrays a partner, lives a secret life, compulsively seeks validation, or engages in destructive behaviors, it is important to recognize the impact of those actions. The responsibility belongs to the person who made those choices. But accountability alone doesn’t explain why certain destructive patterns occur, and it is the combination of accountability and insight that offers the most powerful potential for meaningful change.
Self-destructive patterns are often connected to fears, unmet longings, vulnerabilities, self-limiting beliefs, and adaptations that developed years earlier, even generations earlier. They may be tied to unprocessed experiences of shame, emotional neglect, trauma, or unresolved grief. They may reflect ways of coping that once served an important purpose but have since become damaging.
When we focus only on behavior, we may succeed in suppressing symptoms without addressing the conditions that created them. A symptom may be partially managed or the person may stop one form of acting out only to find another taking its place. The underlying injuries remain untouched.
But when behavior is explored within the larger context of a person’s emotional and familial life, something different becomes possible. A hidden logic behind the behavior may emerge. Buried fears and wounds become visible. We begin to recognize the struggles that belong to us, but also the emotional legacies we may have unknowingly inherited. This is why lasting change often requires more than willpower. It requires patience, curiosity about parts of ourselves we may have spent years avoiding, and a willingness to explore stories that may have begun long before our own.
Earlier, I shared an idea that we “walk backwards into the future.” We move forward through life, but what may guide us at times remains behind us, outside of awareness. Atlas’s work invites us to consider that some of what lies behind us may extend beyond our own chronological history. We may also be carrying family stories, losses, secrets, and emotional realities that were never fully spoken or understood. Healing requires turning toward what we have been unwittingly carrying, looking directly at the past so that we might finally see where we are going.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience supporting individuals and couples as they navigate betrayal trauma and other emotional challenges. He offers teletherapy to clients throughout the United States. To work with Dr. Nicastro and join his waiting list, please email him at Rich@RichardNicastro.com.
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Article References
Atlas, G. (2022). Emotional Inheritance: A therapist, her patients, and the legacy of trauma. Little, Brown Spark.
(*) Note: Identifying details and case characteristics have been changed and combined into composites to protect privacy and maintain strict confidentiality.
