We like to think we’re self-made. That who we are is a product of our choices, our grit, our dreams. And sure, that’s part of it. But if you pause long enough to look over your shoulder, you’ll see the shadows—of your parents, your grandparents, maybe even people you’ve never met—moving behind your steps. Their words echo in your mind during conflict. Their fears slip into your decisions when no one’s watching. Their habits, loves, silences, and wounds often find strange, familiar shapes in your own life. We don’t start from scratch. We inherit.
Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune makes this hauntingly literal. The characters in the story don’t just inherit their family’s wealth or title—they inherit memory itself. Full consciousness of all their ancestors lives inside them. For Alia, one of the story’s most tragic figures, this legacy becomes too much. Among the thousands of ancestral voices in her mind, the loudest is her grandfather, a sadistic tyrant. His presence slowly overtakes her. What began as memory becomes possession. She loses herself to the past. And while most of us don’t walk around with entire personalities from our bloodline fighting for control, the metaphor lands. When we don’t recognize the patterns we’ve inherited, they can end up living us, instead of the other way around.
Real life isn’t as fantastical, but it’s no less complex. Maybe your father never talked about his feelings, so now you fumble to name your own. Maybe your grandmother survived by controlling every detail around her—and now you panic when things feel uncertain. Maybe rage ran through your family like a hidden river, and now it erupts from you in moments you don’t expect. Science has a name for some of this: intergenerational trauma. Family systems theory describes how certain emotional patterns—fear, shame, control, avoidance—repeat themselves, sometimes for centuries. Even our genes can carry the effects of unhealed wounds, like chemical scars passed on from generation to generation.
But Herbert doesn’t only show the danger. He offers another way. Alia’s younger relatives, the twins Leto and Ghanima, also inherit ancestral memory. But instead of being overtaken, they face it. They learn how to distinguish between their own voice and the voices of the past. Ghanima chooses to protect her mind with a mental construct. Leto, more daring, embraces the entire weight of history, so he can take a path no one ever has. He suffers for it—but he changes everything. He becomes the turning point. In doing so, he shows us something profound: the past can shape us, but it doesn’t have to own us.
The idea that the past echoes through our lives isn’t new. Long before psychology gave us language for it, ancient texts grappled with it. In the Hebrew Bible, the language of blessing and curse often points to how deeply a family’s behavior ripples across time. “The sins of the fathers are visited on the children,” the text says, but not as some cosmic punishment—it’s more of a warning. What we don’t confront tends to repeat. But just as powerfully, these same scriptures describe a God who shows kindness to thousands of generations. In other words, what we choose now—healing, kindness, truth-telling—can ripple forward just as powerfully as what we’ve inherited.
You’ve probably seen both ends of the spectrum. A friend who repeats their father’s rage, even though they swore they wouldn’t. A cousin who channels their mother’s warmth and makes every room feel like home. A co-worker who’s constantly anxious about money, shaped by years of scarcity growing up. A mentor who broke the cycle of addiction and now helps others do the same. These aren’t just quirks of personality. They’re echoes—and responses.
The point isn’t to blame everything on your parents or to romanticize hardship. It’s to realize you’re not alone in your story—and that your story didn’t begin with you. Nor will it end with you. The challenge, and the invitation, is to notice what you’ve inherited. To sit with it. To ask: what have I received that needs to be carried forward? What patterns need to break? What needs to be laid down? What do I want to pass on?
Sometimes, confronting the past means therapy. Sometimes it means breaking a silence at the dinner table. Sometimes it means sticking and working it out even when the urge to leave seems so much more natural. And sometimes it’s as quiet as choosing patience when anger comes easily. These small decisions are where the future shifts.
We’re not doomed to repeat the past, but we are called to reckon with it. Whether you see that reckoning as psychological work, spiritual growth, or both, it’s sacred either way. Because what you choose to carry—or release—doesn’t just affect you. It reshapes the lives of those yet to come.
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Written by Joshua George
