There’s an interesting unconscious phenomenon that happens in families that has an enormous impact on the development and life trajectory on the children born into that family:
Parents pass on their fears, insecurities, unresolved processes, and unrealized potentials onto their children.
To be clear, I am not parent-blaming here. All human beings do this in one form or another. It’s a product of being an imperfect, ever-evolving being, and that’s a beautiful thing. No child is born into a family of parents that are perfectly mature and enlightened adult parents. We’re all figuring it out as we go and doing the best with what we know and the cards we were dealt.
So, naturally, this projection process happens for all children, and all children will go on to pass something else onto their own children. Such is the mysterious process of human evolution. This process is also largely happening out of our conscious awareness. Parents are not intentionally doing this. They are living and adapting based on the current circumstances of their lives. With whatever emotional inheritance has been passed down to them throughout the generations that came before them.
Unconscious and automatic processes have driven the survival of our species for hundreds of thousands of years. But each generation experiences a whole host of situations in life based on the environment and time they live in. Throughout life, they accumulate certain unresolved wounds, fears, and insecurities. There is also some form of a life they didn’t get to live, some sort of sacrifice they made, and therefore some unrealized potentials that they currently house within them.
Of course, unconsciously, they end up living this out through their children.
In my family, for example, I am the child Brazilian immigrants. I was raised by my mother alone. She had a rough life back in Brazil, and didn’t have much opportunity to be educated or have a stable life. The American dream was the ideal for her, and she wanted her children to become everything that she never got to be. This put a ton of pressure on us as her children to be something for her as a sort of homage to the sacrifices she made in her life to continue her own generational destiny.
But in many ways, we couldn’t meet that for her. We had different circumstances. We lived in different times, in a different environment, in a different context. We had our own evolutionary predicament to attend to. Living out the American dream was not as important to us as it was to her, and this created a chasm between who she wanted us to be and who we actually were.
You see, parents, if you can’t see your child for who they actually are, versus who you idealize them to be, you can never experience authentic intimacy with them. And you can’t let go of your idealization of them until you realize that what you’re projecting onto them is what you actually want for yourself. Children are their own people. They belong to the world, not to their parents. They’re here to fulfill there own individual purpose, not their parents’ ideals.
And if you can see them and accept them for that, it is a beautiful thing. It will be hard work to let go of your fears and projections, hopes and idealizations for them. But it will be life-giving. Your connection with them will flourish.
And for the children of parents receiving this type of projection, and feeling stuck and guilty because of it, I feel you. It’s hard. we don’t want to disappoint. We want to appreciate everything they’ve done to get us this far. But we cannot live in their shadow forever. We have to eventually individuate and grow into ourselves. We have to go live out our own unlived lives and unrealized potentials.
If we don’t, we will continue passing on these projections to future generations until someone is willing to tolerate the discomfort of breaking the cycle. So if nothing else, instead of looking back with guilt and worrying about what you owe your parents, look forward to what you owe your children and grandchildren instead.
You owe them your own inner work.
You owe them the hard work of your individuation.
You owe them you becoming the most authentic and best version of you that you can become, so that they can feel the freedom of doing the same.
Every human is trying to survive and adapt. This looks different in each life. Each life has a different set of things they need to direct their energy toward.
My mother was doing her own part to move her lineage forward. She did something different than the rest of her family did. She took the risk to come to a new land in search of a better life, and she saw it as our duty to do the things that she never got to do because of the sacrifices. She wasn’t aware she was doing this. Again, this is a process that’s happening automatically, out of our awareness, driven by the survival instinct produced by our gut and limbic systems.
When you didn’t get to become who you wanted to become in your life, you live vicariously through your children. And this is a recipe for disaster, because they can never be the things you wanted to be for yourself but didn’t get to. They are not you. They are them. They have their own unique set of things to become, based on the context of their lives which likely differs from yours.
If nothing else, they live in a different generation and era than you did. They cannot fulfill what you wanted for yourself in your era. They need to do what’s best for them in their era. This puts enormous pressure on your children and strain on your relationship with them. Because they either sacrifice their own fullest, authentic expression to try to mold to yours and what you want for them, based on your projections.
Or, they will go on to live their own and that might cause a rupture in your relationship with them if you resist their dissent from your ideal and they find it necessary to rebel against you to pursue their own individuation.
But, if you can accept their unique path in this life, and take charge of pursuing yours, you may just find an intimacy with your children that is greater than any other type of connection with them you thought possible. You would come to know their soul and they would come to know yours.
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“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
— Carl Jung