What do we really inherit?

We tend to assume, quite spontaneously, that we know what we inherit.

Our mother's eyes.

Our father's nose.

A house, sometimes. A bank account. An object that has passed down through the generations.

And then there are those phrases we say almost without thinking:

That's just how we've always been in our family.

In my family, the women are strong.

My father already had that fear.

I get that from my mother.

But there is also everything we don't connect to anyone.

Those things we simply believe to be true about ourselves.

One day, I realised something that almost stunned me: I had a great many fears.

Not necessarily fears whose origin I could explain. Some were so deeply woven into the way I functioned that I didn't even see them as fears.

They were simply there.

And a question arose:

What, in what I call "me", actually began with me?

It is this blurry zone that I want to explore.

Not to prove that we "carry our ancestors within us", but to try to understand what may continue to act in our present without our always knowing very well where it comes from.

And, as always in Let's search together, to try to distinguish what we know, what we are beginning to understand, and what we do not yet know.

What we already know

The first answer is obvious: we inherit a genetic heritage.

But very quickly, that first answer is no longer enough.

Our genes alone do not determine what we become. Their expression interacts with a multitude of factors: our development, our physical and social environment, our experiences, our living conditions.¹

I have already explored this porousness between what we call "us" and our environment in Where does the outside world end and where do we begin? — Neither fortress, nor sponge.

And we inherit through far more ordinary channels still.

We learn.

A way of speaking. Of keeping silent. Of loving. Of working. Of being wary. Of dealing with money. Of reacting to conflict. Of considering risk or security.

We grow up surrounded by family stories, but also by an era, a culture and a collective history.

Part of what we pass on therefore requires no mysterious mechanism at all.

We see it, we hear it, we learn it — and then sometimes we repeat it.

But what can really cross a generation?

This is where things become more uncertain.

For several decades, epigenetics has enriched our understanding of the relationship between genes and the environment.

Researchers such as Rachel Yehuda have, in particular, studied biological changes associated with severe trauma in survivors and their descendants.²

This work is fascinating.

It is also often interpreted far more broadly than it actually allows us to claim.

Observing biological differences associated with parental experience does not mean we have shown that an ancestor's memories, fears or traumas are passed on as such to their descendants.

The possible mechanisms are many and intertwined: biological, developmental, psychological, familial, social, cultural.³

So what do we really know about what crosses a generation?

And what do we truly know about our own lineage?

Probably much less than we imagine.

Repeating is not the only way of remaining attached

There is, in fact, another possibility.

We discover a family behaviour and decide:

I will never be like that.

My parents did X? I'll do exactly the opposite.

That is already a shift.

But the past then continues to determine our direction.

We no longer reproduce the model: we build ourselves against it.

In the model of autonomy I encountered notably through transactional analysis, this is called counter-dependence.

The word says quite well what is going on: I no longer do as the other does, I do against the other.

It is already a movement. But doing the opposite is not yet necessarily knowing what suits us.

Another question then arises:

If I am obliged neither to reproduce nor to oppose, what becomes truly mine?

When the new reproduces the old

And then there is something more subtle still.

We may have changed while others — including those closest to us — continue to recognise in us an earlier version of ourselves.

It can be irritating. Their gaze keeps sending us back to something we truly were, but which is no longer enough to define us.

And today, "others" are no longer only our family, our friends or our colleagues. They are also all the digital traces we have left behind us, and now the artificial intelligences that try to reconstruct who we are from what is already visible.

Much of what they know about us comes from the past: what we have written, published, watched, liked, repeated.

They can be right about our past and yet wrong about our present.

Even an ultra-fast artificial intelligence can lag behind a human transformation already under way.

There is a paradox here that strikes me.

We create technologies whose capabilities are advancing at a dizzying pace, to the point of surpassing us today in certain fields. And yet those who design and use them also continue to reproduce very old behaviours: rivalry, domination, the pursuit of power.

The evolution of our tools and that of our behaviours do not seem to be moving at the same pace.

We are extraordinarily good at improving what exists: faster, further, more efficient. But improving is not necessarily creating something new. A radically new technology can even amplify an extremely old human behaviour.

So what would a truly new behaviour be? Not a better version of yesterday's. Not its opposite. Something else.

And to bring that something else into being, perhaps we do not need to reject everything that came before us.

What we inherit is not only what harms us

When we talk about transmission between generations, our gaze easily turns towards what hurts.

Traumas. Secrets. Loyalties. Repetitions. Fears.

Or, at the other extreme, towards what is passed on materially: property, objects, money, land.

And why should invisible inheritance be made up only of wounds?

We may also have received an aptitude. A resilience. A creative gesture. A particular way of observing. A relationship with the living world. A courage. A curiosity. A way of caring for others or of moving through uncertainty.

Some of these transmissions probably have fairly simple explanations.

Others are harder to trace.

And perhaps we have learned so well to look to the past for the origin of what is wrong that we have stopped seeing certain resources there.

Perhaps we can also go back into what came before us to rediscover possibilities we had stopped seeing.

Neither repeating nor erasing

So what do we do with all this?

Perhaps transforming what we inherit consists neither in reproducing it, nor in erasing it, nor even in systematically doing better.

It might first be a matter of looking at the pieces that are there.

This one suits me. I'll keep it.

That one no longer suits me. I can let it go.

This one, which I had rejected because it belonged to those who came before me, perhaps deserves to be looked at differently.

That one can be transformed.

And perhaps I can also create something that wasn't already there.

This is where I love the image of Tom Thumb and his pebbles.

A transformation does not necessarily need a giant stride.

One tiny different behaviour.

Then another.

An experience that slightly contradicts what I believed to be inevitable.

A conversation.

An encounter.

A new way of responding to an old situation.

Little pebbles.

By laying down new traces, something that seemed to constitute our identity can gradually lose its obviousness.

Not because we have erased our history.

But because it is no longer the only possible story.

Perhaps that, in the end, is what interests me most about inheritance.

Not only understanding what the past has made of us.

But discovering what we can make of what came before us.

The question would then no longer be only:

What do I need to free myself from?

But also:

What has been passed on to me that perhaps still asks to take shape?

I don't know the answer.

But perhaps it is precisely there that something truly new can begin.