How different are we from our parents?

How Different Are We From Our Parents?

And why that question is a seed for the next 200 years

I think about my mother or father often when I sit in meditation or in a grief ceremony. My mother was a single working-class woman who held things together through sheer will and the support of a village of aunties and neighbors. She is a renowned psychologist now but she did not have access to therapy or healing practices when she needed them the most. She moved through her trauma mostly by moving past it.

I love her for it. And I also know that I am doing things she never had the chance to do.

Many of us are. We are the first in our families to sit in therapy, in meditation halls, in grief ceremonies, in contemplative retreats. We are asking questions our parents could not afford to ask — not because they were less intelligent or less caring, but because these containers simply were not available to them, or the survival pressures were too acute, or the culture around them said: push through, don't look back, be strong.

And so a question worth sitting with is this: how different are we from our parents, really?

We Carry Them — and We Are Also Not Them

The honest answer is: both more different and more similar than we tend to think.

Their unhealed patterns are necessarily within us. Our nervous systems learn by watching the nervous systems closest to ours. The emotional habits of a household transmit like weather — not through explicit teaching but through daily life, through what was said and what was never said, through what was grieved and what was swallowed. We carry our parents in our bodies in ways we are still discovering.

And yet: we are not fixed stones. We are rivers.

In my article You Are a River, Not a Stone, I explore the Buddhist teaching of anattā — the insight that there is no permanent, unchanging self sitting at the center of who we are. Your liver cells were not there eighteen months ago. Most of your body has already remade itself multiple times over. And if the physical body is in constant renewal, so is everything else — the nervous system, the emotional body, the patterns of reaction we thought were "just who we are."

This is the actual basis of hope. If human beings were fixed entities — stones with permanent natures — then inherited or current trauma would be destiny. But because we are processes, patterns that were grooved by circumstances can, with the right conditions and loving support, begin to flow differently.

We are not our parents. We are also not separate from them. We are the river that continues from the river that was them.

What We Are Doing That They Could Not

We are doing therapy. We are meditating. We are sitting in grief circles and letting ourselves weep for things we were told not to cry about. We are reading, questioning, contemplating. We are learning to feel what our parents' bodies did not have space to feel. We are building language — for trauma, for attachment, for the ways systems of oppression live in our nervous systems — that simply did not exist for the generation before us.

This is not a reason for self-congratulation. Plenty of what we do is also bypassing, performing, or intellectualizing. And our parents had wisdoms we are losing — endurance, groundedness in human community, invisible realms and land, the know-how to actually fix things.

But we are, genuinely, doing something new (or rediscovering what our well and healed great great great ancestors did). And that matters.

When a pattern that has run through a lineage for generations — a particular flavor of shutting down, or of rage that doesn't know what it's protecting, or of chronic self-abandonment — when that pattern is met with honest attention, with love and curiosity rather than shame, something shifts. Not just in us. In what we pass on.

Planting Seeds for 200 Years from Now

I want to go further than personal healing, because I feel that individual healing that stops at the personal is missing something.

If we are rivers — processes without fixed selves, made of the same water that was our parents and their parents before them — then we are also the water that will be flowing two hundred years from now. The question is what we are doing with the channel we've been given to shape.

In my article Humans: A Keystone Species?, I explore what it might mean for humans to become, once again, a species that holds ecosystems together rather than one that extracts from them until they collapse. A keystone species — like the wolf, like the beaver, like the salmon — has a disproportionate positive effect on its ecosystem relative to its size. It does not dominate. It relates. And through its relationships, it makes the whole more resilient, more biodiverse, more alive.

Empowered Indigenous communities around the world have lived this role for millennia — shaping fire regimes, tending forests, building treaties not only with other human nations but with bear nations and oyster nations. They understood themselves as participants in a community of life, not managers of resources. And the ecosystems they inhabited flourished for it.

At some point in deep history, all of our ancestors held that relationship. The question is whether we can find our way back to it — not by pretending we are people we are not, but by doing the serious work of becoming people who can hold it again.

This is what our healing work is actually for. Not only to feel better. Not only to stop passing patterns of harm to our children. But to become the kind of humans who can listen to a watershed, who can grieve the loss of a species, who can make decisions with seven generations in mind rather than seven quarters.

The therapy, the meditation, the grief ceremony, the contemplative practice — this is the portal. Not the destination. The destination is a humanity, two hundred years from now, that functions as a keystone species in its local bioregions. That has rebuilt treaty relationships with the more-than-human world. That organizes its economies around the logic of the gift rather than the logic of extraction.

The Seeds We Are Planting Right Now

We will not see that world. But we are in the ground of it right now.

Every pattern we interrupt — every inherited trauma we compost rather than pass forward, every time we choose curiosity over shame, every grief we allow to move through the body fully — is a seed. It changes what the river carries. It shifts what the next bend looks like.

And every healing that stays only personal, that doesn't turn outward toward the community, the ecosystem, the watershed, the invisible realm of ancestors and future beings — that healing is incomplete. We are rivers. Rivers nourish everything in their path.

So yes: we are different from our parents. We can be grateful for that. We can be gentle with ourselves about how partial the difference is, how much we still carry, how much we still can't see. And we can be clear-eyed about what the difference is for.

We are healing our lineages so we can plant seeds for lineages we will never meet. We are learning to be rivers so that the water that flows two hundred years from now can be clean enough, and wide enough, and wild enough to nourish a world that is genuinely alive.

That is worth the work.