What Did You Inherit?

Some patterns don’t begin with us. They arrive through family stories, survival habits, old fears, and ways of coping that once made sense for someone else.

Today’s edition is about looking at what you inherited without blame, and remembering that anxiety was not the only thing passed down. Strength, resilience, and the will to keep going came through too.

Today’s Quick Overview:

🔬 Science Spotlight: How anxiety gets passed down…
🗣 Therapist Corner: Anxiety as generational inheritance…
📰 Mental Health News: Autism waits and OCD fears…
🫂 Community Voices: Questioning a long friendship…

You've survived endings before. The version of you that made it through those is still here. Can you trust that version again?

As this week ends and September keeps shifting, what would it look like to trust the version of you that's survived this far? Not confidence. Just trust.

Understanding anxiety as something inherited can shift the story from personal failure to generational pattern. But which part is still hardest to hold without blame?

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The Things I Learned Without Choosing

Many of our core assumptions come from family, past relationships, or early experiences accepted long before we ever thought to question them. This worksheet offers a quick way to audit those beliefs. Fill out the sentence starters, then mark each response: keep, question, depends, or revisit. It’s a straightforward tool to help you see what’s serving you and what might be time to update.

Anxiety as Inheritance: Understanding Generational Trauma

Stephanie Estrada-Novelich, MA, LMFT

Why We Accept Physical Inheritance but Not Mental Health

It is widely accepted by society and supported by evidence-based research that many of our physical ailments are inherited, passed down to us by generations before us within the make-up of our cells. And yet, while similar evidence-based research has emerged regarding our mental health, that social acceptance is still lacking. Why? That answer might lie within our perspective.

When Labels Get in the Way

When discussing mental health, and specifically anxiety and trauma, it can unfortunately be easy to get stuck in an interpersonal perspective. We label ourselves with a formal definition. We blame ourselves or others for a family history of symptoms which we do not understand. We find confusing formal criteria of a diagnosis that comes up during a quick internet search.

When removed from that, understanding these terms as experiences of mental health rather than as a label assigned for our mental health can make a difference. When put simply, anxiety is an experience of fear, particularly the fear of the unknown. Trauma is a stressful experience which alters our life.

Understanding Generational Context

Understanding how our mental health can be inherited—specifically intergenerational anxiety and trauma—these broken-down definitions provide a clearer point of reflection. In reflecting on our life, or the lives of our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents from a historical context and relational context, we can assist in reframing our interpersonal perspective.

Historically, events such as wars, genocide, persecution, economic crisis, famine, and migration are all life-altering stressors contributing fear. And rightfully so. More so from a relational perspective, we can reflect on what it was like to navigate these events whilst also navigating their marriage, raising children, their family of origin, and making ends meet to keep everyone alive.

These experiences for many of our ancestors shaped their lives with focus on necessity and survival for their generation. While doing so, they unknowingly built unintentional patterns of anxiety for the next generation.

From Individual Blame to Generational Perspective

Understanding intergenerational anxiety and trauma as an inheritance can be less focused on individual blame on ourselves or others from an interpersonal perspective. Rather, it reframes it as a larger generational perspective.

At one time, inherited anxiety had served a purpose to survive and overcome all those events. Whilst unknowingly providing patterns of anxiety, it simultaneously provided a window of greater resiliency for new generations.

Recognising and understanding the layered origins of these inherited patterns can be a starting point to develop change. This begins through building awareness to how they manifest in your own life. From there, you can create habits which support you in managing experiences of anxiety.

The Hope in Our Inheritance

Whilst our current sociopolitical climate is rife with stressors which rightfully so increases our own experience with the fear of the unknown, there is hope. These stressors directly create life-altering events, yes.

But more than any other time in history, we have continued to destigmatise conversations, access, and resources to share our mental health experiences with our loved ones. We can engage in community with others across the globe with similar experiences. We can seek support from professionals when needed from the comfort of our own homes.

We may have inherited a purpose to survive and overcome, which unknowingly came with anxiety and trauma. But we also inherited the strength, tenacity, power, and resilience to continue to move forward.

Stephanie Estrada-Novelich is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Clinical Director, Undergraduate Mentor, and Content Contributor from California. She is a child of immigrants whose work centres the generational intersection of complex trauma, self-worth, and family dynamics from the lens of a bilingual first-generation professional. She is passionate about providing accessible and equitable trauma-informed mental health services to underserved communities. In her free time, she engages in self-care through attending fitness classes, tending to her houseplants, and travelling with her family. Connect with Stephanie through Latinx Therapy.

How Your Parent's Anxiety Can Become Your Anxiety

Read the Study

The Research: A review in the Journal of Neural Transmission examined how anxiety passes between generations, finding it travels through several pathways at once, both behavioral and biological.

The behavioral pathways are the most visible. Children learn fear by watching how their parents react. Anxious parents also tend to be overprotective, frame ambiguous situations as threatening, and accommodate a child's anxiety in ways that unintentionally confirm it.

Reassurance, avoiding hard situations, treating distress as something to rescue from: all of it comes from love, and all of it can quietly teach a child the world is more dangerous than they can handle.

The biological pathways start earlier. High maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing nervous system before birth. Anxious parents often struggle to offer the calm presence that helps children learn to self-settle. Genetics play a role too, though only 30 to 40 percent of anxiety risk is heritable. Environment shapes the rest.

Why It Matters: This isn't about blame or destiny. If you grew up with an anxious parent, some of what you feel may be your nervous system responding to old patterns rather than actual danger, and patterns can change.

If you recognize yourself as the parent here, understanding how modeling and accommodation work makes it possible to do something different, through real support and practice.

Try It Today: Notice where anxiety shows up in situations that aren't objectively dangerous. Ask whether the reaction belongs to the present moment or whether it might be older than that. Just getting curious about the difference is a useful place to start.

The same lineage that handed me anxiety also handed me survival. Tenacity. Whatever it took to get my family through things I'll never fully know. I can hold that today without flattening it into just damage.

Think of one thing in you, a stubbornness, a protectiveness, a refusal to quit, that might have looked different in an ancestor who needed it to survive something real. What does it mean that it made it all the way to you?

You're allowed to look at what you inherited without blaming yourself for carrying it, or blaming whoever passed it down. They did what survival asked of them. So did you, for a long time. That's not excusing anything. It's just seeing the whole picture.

Pick one fear or pattern you carry that you suspect didn't start with you. Don't dig into the history, just ask: what might this have been protecting someone from? What real threat could have made it make sense once? Notice if that question shifts anything, even a little.

"I've Been Friends With Someone for Years, and I'm Not Sure If I Actually Like Them"

Shared by Devon

Sarah and I have been friends since high school. We’ve lived in the same city for years and stayed close through breakups, job shifts, and everything in between. But lately, I’ve caught myself just dreading our plans.

Last month, while she was complaining about work for the hundredth time, I realized I wasn't even listening. Then she made a passive-aggressive comment about my outfit and passed it off as a joke. It made me pause and look at our pattern: she’s consistently negative, competitive over small things, and we don't have much in common beyond our history.

The hard part is that ending a 20-year friendship feels huge and dramatic, especially with mutual friends involved. So for now, I’ve just been going through the motions by accepting invites even when I don't want to go, mostly because of inertia.

I know staying quiet isn't a long-term solution, but opening that conversation feels impossible when I'm not even sure what I'd ask her to change.

Share Your Story

Have a mental health journey you'd like to share with our community? Reply back to this email. All submissions are anonymized and edited for length with your approval before publication. Each published story receives a $10 donation to the mental health charity of your choice.

Evening Reset: Notice, Write, Settle

Picture a river fed by sources you can't see from where you're standing. Tributaries that started far upstream, carrying water from places you've never been, shaped by ground you never walked. What reaches you is all of it, the clean and the murky, the fast and the still, everything that happened before it got here. You didn't choose what came down that river. But you're standing here now, and what you do with the water is yours. Tonight, think about what's come down to you, and what you want to keep carrying, and what you're ready to let settle.

Spend three minutes writing: what did I inherit that cost me something? What did I inherit alongside it that carried me through? Have I given that second part as much attention as the first?

Close your notebook and ask: where did I meet an inherited pattern with curiosity instead of shame today? Where did I give myself credit for the resilience that got passed down too, not just the anxiety? What's one strength in me that might be older than I am, something that survived in my family before it ever reached me?

Article: "Understanding Intergenerational Trauma and Its Effects on Mental Health" (Verywell Mind)

Read: "Understanding Intergenerational Trauma and Its Effects on Mental Health" (Verywell Mind)

This article offers a reader-friendly overview of how trauma and stress responses can echo across generations. It frames inherited patterns with context: what once helped a family survive may later show up as hypervigilance, anxiety, mood struggles, or difficulty feeling safe. It helps readers move away from blame and toward curiosity. Instead of asking, "What's wrong with me?" it invites a gentler question: "What did my family learn about safety, survival, and uncertainty, and what am I ready to understand differently?" Medically reviewed and accessible.

You didn't only inherit their wounds. You inherited what got them through.

"It is not only their wounds that carry on inside of us, but their resilience, wisdom, and power." — Layla K. Feghali

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Coming Monday: The vigilance that never turns off, recognizing that caregiver hyperawareness kept your loved one safe but staying on alert all the time comes with a real cost you're allowed to name.

Researched and edited by Natasha. Designed with love by Kaye.

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*The Daily Wellness shares educational content only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice and diagnosis. Please consult a licensed provider for personalized care.