didn’t comfort him when he was afraid or sad, and they were
even cold and distant, leaving him to weather life’s hardships
on his own. If they failed to pay attention to him and his
emotions, he would be wounded in signiɹcant ways. As a
result, he would grow into adulthood limited in his ability to
give you what you need as his child. He might be incapable of
intimacy and relationship; he could have diɽculty responding
to your emotions and needs, telling you to “toughen up” when
you felt sad or alone or afraid. All of this might even result
from implicit memories of which he’d have no awareness.
Then you, as you became an adult and a parent yourself,
would be in danger of passing down the same damaging
patterns to your own kids. That’s the bad news.
The good news, though—the better-than-good news—is thatif you make sense of your experiences and understand your
father’s woundedness and relational limitations, you can break
the cycle of handing down such pain. You can begin to reɻect
on those experiences and how they’ve impacted you.
You might be tempted to simply parent in a way exactlyopposite of how your parents did it. But the idea, instead, is to
openly reɻect on how your experiences with your parents
have aʃected you. You may need to deal with implicit
memories that are inɻuencing you without your realizing it.
Sometimes it can be helpful to do this work with a therapist,
or share your experiences with a friend. However you do it,
it’s important that you begin getting clear on your own story,
because through mirror neurons and implicit memory, we
directly pass on our emotional life to our children—for better
or for worse. Knowing that our kids live with and through