Scientists originally believed that it was strictly our parents’ genes that became the blueprint for what would eventually become us, and that with just the right amount of guidance and nutrition, we would develop seamlessly according to plan. But newer research is showing that the person you have become is predicated more on the history of your parents — and perhaps more astonishingly, their parents — than simply the environment you grew up in.

In his book, It Didn’t Start with You, Mark Wolynn states that “the history you share with your family begins before you are even conceived. In your earliest biological form, as an unfertilized egg, you already share a cellular environment with your mother and grandmother… This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body — three generations sharing the same biological environment.1 This isn’t a new idea; embryology textbooks have told us as much for more than a century. Your inception can be similarly traced in your lateral line. The precursor cells of the sperm you developed from were present in your father when he was a fetus in his mother’s womb.”2

While the particulars of the events that shaped the lives of your parents may be obscured from your vision, the residual impact of those particulars is what shapes your being as you come into existence. It’s not what you inherit from your parents, but also how they were treated throughout their lives, up until you are conceived. Everything along the way, crossing multiple generations, influences how you relate to a partner, the world around you, and the children you conceive. And for better or worse, research indicates your parents tend to pass on the parenting that they themselves received.

So, when it comes to figuring yourself out and why you feel or react a certain way about something, look back to connect the dots of your lineage rather than feel powerless about how you feel. Most of our patterns and approaches to the world begin to form before we’re even born. Looking back can provide clarity about why we do the things we do by helping us understand that our “foundation” is laid by the generational experiences that preceded it.

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1. C. E. Finch and J. C. Loehlin, “Environmental Influences That May Precede Fertilization: A First Examination of the Prezygotic Hypothesis from Maternal Age Influences on Twins,” Behavioral Genetics 28(2) (1998): 101.

2. Thomas W. Sadler, Langman’s Medical Embryology, 9th ed. (Baltimore: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009), 13.