“Carried Feelings” or “Inherited Story?”

photo credit: Daque­lla manera

Often in ther­a­peu­tic cir­cles we speak of “car­ried feel­ings,” a con­cept that refers to how clients appear to carry the unre­solved feel­ings of one of their fam­ily mem­bers. For exam­ple, we may say that some­one is “car­ry­ing” their dad’s anger or their mother’s sad­ness. I have often seen evi­dence of this sort of emo­tional trans­fer­ence. But upon closer exam­i­na­tion, I have con­cluded that it is more the “story” or beliefs, rather than the feel­ings, that get “car­ried” from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. What appears to be “car­ried feel­ings” is, in actu­al­ity, the nat­ural feel­ing response that comes from believ­ing the “sto­ries” we have taken on as our own.

I refer to this notion of “car­ried sto­ries” as “lin­eage beliefs/stories.” In other words, we inherit the beliefs/ideas/stories of our parents/caregivers which, when believed, invoke in us the same emo­tional responses we see in them. We absorb these “sto­ries” as our own and never ques­tion their valid­ity, even though they may not be grounded in real­ity at all! We believe them and then suf­fer the emo­tional con­se­quences that come with believ­ing them.

For instance, my father had a “story” about women. He saw them as unsafe and untrust­wor­thy. He exhib­ited his dis­trust of women through dis­tanc­ing behav­ior, often exhibit­ing irri­ta­tion in his inter­ac­tion with the females around him. My brother appeared to “carry” my dad’s feel­ings about women, act­ing much the same way towards women as dad had. No amount of try­ing to con­trol his feel­ings helped. It was only as he began to rec­og­nize and ques­tion the “story” he had “inher­ited” from dad about women that he was able to make sig­nif­i­cant changes in his feel­ings towards women.

What sto­ries and beliefs are you car­ry­ing from your fam­ily of origin?