Generational patterns are emotional, behavioral, mental, and relational patterns that get passed down from generation to generation, often in a repetitive or cyclical way.
Some of these patterns are passed down through conscious teaching, but more often they are passed down unconsciously and automatically, normally through interaction, modeling, and imitation. These patterns all interact to shape who we become in our lives and how we approach our adult commitments and relationships.
As humans, we are a social species and we evolved to learn from others. Knowledge about how to live, interact with the world, and adapt to life’s demands is transmitted from generation to generation. This transmission happens largely outside of awareness and often without being questioned.
Two Types of Generational Patterns
Repetitive or Recurring Patterns
The first type of generational pattern is the passing down of knowledge about living in the social world. This can be beliefs about relationships, beliefs about the self, emotional reactions, coping mechanisms, relational behaviors, values, principles, and so on. Many times these patterns are referred to as culture and cultural evolution.
Oftentimes, these are passed from generation to generation without ever being questioned by any given generation. We just do things because that’s the way our family and culture do it and that’s how they’ve always been done. However, some knowledge about living that was adaptive under specific contexts becomes maladaptive in another context.
For example, a father who immigrated to the United States at a young age to try to make a better life for himself learned that he could become successful by presenting a certain image to the world and always performing.
He then raises his children with these values:
“Dress to impress.”
“First impressions are everything.”
“Appearance is the most important thing.”
“The world is a stage.”
“Fake it until you make it.”
The children go on to repeat these belief patterns, however, it leaves them feeling empty and disconnected from their authentic selves. Additionally, they grew up in a generation where authenticity began to matter more, or at least be more accepted.
It was acceptable for them to have colorful hair and wear casual clothing in the workplace. It was welcomed for them to share their vulnerabilities and admit when they didn’t have all the answers as a leader. So the learned behaviors that were once adaptive for the father’s generation became maladaptive for his children’s generation.
Cyclical Patterns
The second is a cyclical process that stems from unresolved emotional attachments playing out throughout the generations. Whatever unresolved attachments a particular generation has will be projected onto the next generation, which will lead to the next generation reacting to the projections. So the patterns end up repeating in a cyclical way from generation to generation.
This pattern is a result of an reactive process that people are unaware they are participating in and perpetuating. It will continue until one particular generation becomes aware and decides to interrupt the pattern and do something different.
So for example, a mother who was abandoned by her parents might unconsciously work this out in her own parenting by promising to “never do what her mother did to her.”
She will reactively polarize to the other end of the spectrum and potentially end up being overinvolved with her children. In turn, this might impair their development, or they might feel so suffocated by her that in order to cope they break off contact and stay at a distance in their adult lives.
As a result, she ends up reenacting her abandonment wound through her children, and they will likely go on to repeat some version of this with their own children unless they become aware of this process and choose to work through it.
Patterns Can Be Adaptive or Maladaptive
Adaptive Patterns
Adaptive patterns are ones that help an individual “get along in their environment with greatest success and least conflict with others.” They make sense for the current context the individual is living in and helps them survive and thrive in their environment.
Maladaptive Patterns
Maladaptive patterns are ones that cause more harm than good in the individual’s life, relationships, and his or her environment. Sometimes, patterns that were once adaptive for previous generations are no longer adaptive in the current one. Because they get passed down automatically and unconsciously, they end up becoming harmful instead of helpful for this generation.
How to Apply This In Your Own Life
1. Awareness
Are you aware of your emotional and relational patterns? If so, are they all adaptive for you and the people around you? If you take the time to map out your generational family system — about 3 generations should be good — you might find recurring patterns across the generations.
This is a powerful way to start recognizing the forces that shape who you become in your adult life. They have been in the evolutionary making for a long time and operate largely outside of our awareness.
2. Questioning
Sometimes what gets passed down to us is incredibly adaptive for the context of our specific generation and the environment we live in. But, sometimes they’re maladaptive and need to be reflected on, questioned, and better understood.
Which patterns did you learn in your family system that are no longer serving you in your adult life? Which patterns are stopping you from creating the type of life you want to live, whether that’s in your relationships, in your profession, or in your general lifestyle? Which patterns might even be causing you harm?
This is the stage to reflect and question and figure out what steps you might want to work on changing.
3. Evolving
In this stage, you put what you’ve learned into action. This is all about slowyl adopting new beliefs, behaviors, and coping mechanisms so that you can live more of the life you want. You might also find motivation in breaking a cycle so that you can help set up future generations to do something differently than every other generation that has come before you.
Whatever doing something different might look like for you, this is the stage where you work do actually do it differently. This part of the journey is normally the hardest. Changing ingrained patterns that took decades to form takes hard work. Progress is gradual and cumulative normally over years and decades. But know that change is possible if you really want it.