Why We Inherit What We Resist

Family conflict often looks, on the surface, like a disagreement between generations. A father and a son do not get along. A mother and a daughter keep clashing. Two generations look at the same thing and somehow always arrive at opposite conclusions. Sometimes the conflict becomes intense enough to leave wounds that last for years.

But if we look at these conflicts for long enough, something rather strange begins to appear. Two people may say completely opposite things. Their values may seem to stand against each other. Yet the way they handle disagreement is often remarkably similar.

This is the deeper layer of what we may call inherited character. It is not merely about whether a child has a similar temper to a parent, or whether both are introverted, impatient, stubborn, or sensitive. The more important inheritance is often a psychological pattern, a behavioural pattern, a way of thinking. A person may spend his whole life resisting his father, only to discover at a certain age that his tone of voice, his way of getting angry, his standards for judging others, and even his way of avoiding problems have all begun to resemble the very person he once least wanted to become.

So the real question is not only where two generations disagree. The more revealing question is where they are using the same underlying logic. The father says, “You must do this.” The son says, “I will never do that.” On the surface, they are completely opposed. But if both speak in commands, both cannot tolerate uncertainty, both treat disagreement as betrayal, and both use emotion to pressure the other person, then they are still living inside the same psychological system. The conflict is on the surface. The inheritance is underneath. Opinions may be opposite, but the structure may be the same.

Literature gives us many examples of this.

In Thunderstorm, Zhou Puyuan is the centre of family authority. He speaks of order, dignity, reputation and family honour, but behind these words are repression, deception and domination. The younger generation appears to resist this family, but it does not truly escape the structure. Zhou Ping fears his father and resents him, yet his own way of dealing with emotion is still evasive, concealed and weak. He is not a simple copy of Zhou Puyuan, but he has inherited the Zhou family’s deeper structure: the inability to face truth, the inability to take responsibility, and the tendency to drift between power and desire.

Ba Jin’s Family shows a similar pattern. The old patriarch represents the traditional family system, while Juehui represents rebellion and departure. On the surface, this is a conflict between old and new values. But the more complicated figure is Juexin. He knows the old system is wrong, yet he cannot truly break away from it. His obedience, sacrifice and compromise are not merely personal weakness. They are the result of long training within the family structure. If a person is taught from childhood to preserve the larger order, suppress himself and obey his elders, then even after he realises that this is wrong, he may still lack another way of acting. The tragedy of Family is not only that the old system crushes the young. It is also that even when the young can see the problem, they do not immediately gain a new capacity for life.

Dream of the Red Chamber is even more like a long scroll of family destiny. Jia Baoyu spiritually resists the careerist and hierarchical logic of the Jia household, yet he cannot truly leave the world that household has given him. He dislikes official ambition and the utilitarian order of the family, but his sensitivity, avoidance, dependence and powerlessness are also products of that environment. The Jia household does not simply pass down a set of explicit ideas. It passes down a whole way of sensing the world. How people love, how they fear, how they lie politely, how they decay inside prosperity, and how they lose vitality within order — these things are transmitted more deeply than any family rule.

The same is true in world literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude is almost an allegory of family inertia. The Buendía family repeats similar forms of desire, loneliness, pride, obsession and failure across generations. Each generation has its own concrete life, yet there seems to be an invisible mechanism within the family, pulling people back to the same place. Names repeat. Destinies repeat. The ways of loving and being lonely repeat. This is clearly not mere biological inheritance. It is the inheritance of a way of existing. If a family understands the world in the same way for a long enough time, it will keep producing similar people, even when those people appear to be taking different roads.

The Brothers Karamazov is another powerful example. The vulgarity, desire, indulgence and irresponsibility of old Karamazov do not appear in his sons in identical form, but his spiritual shadow is scattered across all of them. Dmitri inherits passion and impulsiveness. Ivan inherits inner division and the pride hidden inside reason. Alyosha tries to move towards faith and love. The brothers seem to move in completely different directions, but each is responding to the same spiritual ruin left by the father. A father influences his children not only through what he says, but also through what he fails to carry, fails to repair and fails to give.

In The Thorn Birds, family destiny is also not caused by one single decision. It forms slowly through emotional repression, religious prohibition, misplaced desire and the inability to express intimacy in a healthy way. People believe they are making personal choices, but very often they are repeating problems the previous generation never resolved. Emotional debts are passed on, and the next generation continues to pay them in a new form. The name changes, the setting changes, and the explanation becomes more reasonable, but the structure remains.

Psychologically, the most obvious layer is imitation. Children do not only learn what parents say. More importantly, they learn how parents handle things. If parents quarrel in a certain way, children learn a way of quarrelling. If parents avoid problems, children learn a way of avoiding. If parents express love in a certain grammar, children learn that grammar of love. If parents humiliate others, children may unconsciously learn that humiliation is an effective tool of communication. This learning is not classroom learning. It happens through daily tones of voice, facial expressions, silences and repeated family scenes.

A deeper layer is the reproduction of trauma. A person who was hurt in childhood does not automatically become gentle as an adult. On the contrary, he may use the same method of harm on others. The method is painful, but it is familiar. Human beings instinctively return to familiar structures, even when those structures are not happy ones. A person who was controlled may deeply hate control, but once he feels unsafe, he may control others in order to ease his own anxiety. In this way, the person who resisted control becomes controlling. The person who resisted coldness becomes cold. The person who resisted humiliation may one day begin to humiliate others.

There is another more hidden layer. Many people’s rebellion never truly escapes the previous generation. They merely reverse the old values. If the father is extremely frugal, the son becomes extremely wasteful. If the mother is extremely controlling, the daughter flees from every form of closeness. If the older generation is obsessed with saving face, the younger generation becomes obsessed with despising it. This looks like a breakthrough, but it is still being defined by the thing it opposes. Real freedom is not simply doing the opposite. It is the ability to build one’s own system of judgement. Otherwise, a person has only moved from positive dependence to negative dependence.

Philosophically, a person never grows out of a vacuum. The self is formed through family, language, memory, bodily experience and social relations. We think we inherit certain ideas, but before that we inherit a way in which the world appears to us. What counts as important, what counts as shameful, what deserves fear, which relationships require obedience, which desires must be hidden — these judgements enter a person’s life structure very early.

A family, then, is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a psychological system maintained over time. It has its own language, taboos, rewards, punishments, emotional climate and way of explaining itself. To grow up inside it is like breathing a certain kind of air. You may disagree with the system, but you cannot easily avoid being shaped by it. You may leave the family house, but that does not mean you have left the reactions it has planted in your body.

This is why self-breakthrough is never merely a private achievement. At a deeper level, it is a breakthrough from family inertia. A person’s real maturity is not simply that he finally dares to oppose his parents. It begins when he sees what he himself is repeating. He begins to realise that the thing he most dislikes may be growing inside him in another form. This discovery is uncomfortable, but it is necessary. Only when repetition becomes visible can repetition begin to stop.

To change family destiny is not just a beautiful phrase. It first means making the unconscious conscious. For several generations, people may have lived through instinct, emotional reaction, fear and social face. Then one person in the family suddenly stops and asks: why do we always speak like this? Why do we hurt those closest to us in this way? Why can we not express love properly? Why do we mistake control for care, sacrifice for morality, and silence for strength? The asking of these questions is already the beginning of a loosening of destiny.

Of course, family inheritance is not only shadow. A good family can also pass down reading habits, aesthetic capacity, responsibility, the ability to express oneself, a public spirit and a capacity for learning. When many outstanding people emerge from the same family, it is not simply because of good genes. It is often because that family has preserved a certain spiritual climate over time. A child who grows up in such a climate naturally learns that knowledge matters, expression matters, creation matters and dignity matters. He does not have to build everything from zero, because several generations of lived practice have already lifted him up.

So the key is not to deny inheritance, but to distinguish what we are inheriting. Some things should be preserved. Some things must be ended. In reality, they are often mixed together. We inherit the older generation’s resilience, but also their fear. We inherit their diligence, but also their repression. We inherit their sense of responsibility, but also their roughness in intimate relationships. Part of life is slowly separating these things. Which parts are vitality, and which parts are merely defence mechanisms? Which parts are wisdom, and which parts are fear left behind by history? Which parts are love, and which parts are control in disguise?

Real breakthrough does not mean becoming a completely different person. That is not realistic. The real breakthrough is that old reactions no longer automatically govern us. If a family used anger to solve problems, we can learn to use expression. If a family used silence to preserve dignity, we can learn to use honesty to repair relationships. If a family used sacrifice to create moral pressure, we can learn to build healthy love through boundaries. If a person can do this, he changes not only himself. He also changes the direction of the family system.

Perhaps the parents can no longer change. Perhaps much of what the previous generation left behind can no longer be recovered. But beginning with this person, the next generation does not have to inherit the painful patterns in full. Family destiny is not a mysterious curse. It is inertia formed by long repetition. Since it is formed by repetition, it can also be slowly rewritten through new repetition.

At this point, I should add one clarification. This essay is not meant to suggest that everything discussed here comes from my own private experience. There is certainly some first-hand experience in it, but much more comes from second-hand experience, social observation, literary experience, and long-term life in both China and Australia. More importantly, this is not merely a collection of experiences. It is a reflection formed through long engagement with philosophy, psychology, literature and real life. Experience itself is often scattered. Only after sustained thought does its underlying structure begin to appear. What interests me is not one particular family story, but why people from different families, different cultures and different periods often repeat similar destinies at similar points.

The reason family stories in literature move us so deeply is that they are never simply other people’s stories. Each of us carries our own Jia household, our own Zhou family, our own Buendía family and our own Karamazov family. We all come from some system, and we all carry things we did not choose. Maturity is not looking down on the previous generation after seeing through it. Maturity is seeing clearly, then neither repeating blindly nor spending one’s whole life trapped in resentment.

Real freedom may begin on the day a person finally understands that there is a family shadow within him, but he does not have to become that shadow completely. He can acknowledge it, understand it, recognise it, and then stop at the crucial moment. He can choose another way of speaking, another way of loving, another way of facing conflict. This is the beginning of breaking family inertia. It is small, and it is difficult, but it is not imaginary. A family may take several generations to form one destiny. It may also begin, through the clarity of one person, to form another.