I remember a moment from when my kids were younger that still makes me smile.
I had just walked in the door after a long day, relieved to climb out of my work suit. I changed into my usual end-of-day uniform, which at the time was slippers, trackies, and a business shirt - a combination that never won any awards but always felt comfortable.
My A-grade daggy dad fashion sense was immediately pointed out by my kids. They laughed, I laughed, and in the middle of it I realised something. I was doing exactly what I watched my own dad do when I was growing up.
For years I had sworn I would never copy that after-work slippers, trackies, and business-shirt combo. Yet there I was in my forties, becoming the very image I thought I had outgrown.
It was a harmless moment, but it revealed something much deeper. We inherit far more from our families than clothing habits. The family we grow up in becomes the place where we learn how to be who we are.
- How to express emotion.
- How to communicate our needs.
- How to protect ourselves.
- How to reach for connection or pull away from it.
We often develop our sense of self in the context of that early home. Some children grow in the warmth of dependable love. Others learn vigilance or self-sufficiency. And many of us grow in a mixture of both.
When we enter marriage, we do not walk in empty-handed. We bring the ways we learned to speak and the ways we learned to stay silent. We bring our patterns of closeness. We bring our fears of conflict or our reactions to it. We bring expectations we never named and disappointments we never understood - all of these formed long before we chose our spouse.
Years of research and years of sitting with couples both point to the same truth: marriages flourish when each person becomes aware of the old patterns they carry and begins the slow work of choosing how to live differently. This is often described as emotional differentiation - the capacity to see where you came from without being ruled by it.
Scripture has been describing this for millennia in its own way with the image of leaving and cleaving: a turning from what shaped us toward the sacred responsibility of forming something new together. A new loyalty. A new identity. A new family story.
When my wife and I were preparing for marriage, we were blessed to work with a couple who understood the importance of these early stories. They helped us explore what we each learned about love, conflict, affection, and responsibility in the homes we grew up in. It allowed us to enter our marriage with more clarity and a little more humility. It also gave us a gentler understanding of each other. When old patterns surfaced, we recognised them as echoes rather than threats.
Someone once said that marriage is the riskiest activity taken on by the greatest number of people. It is a serious commitment, and it is something worth preparing for with care and honesty. Understanding our family of origin is not about blaming the past. It is about recognising the power of those early experiences and how they continue to move in us as adults. That awareness becomes a doorway to freedom, to tenderness, and to deeper connection.
“You have inherited a lifetime of tribulation. Everybody has inherited it. Take it over, make the most of it, and when you have decided you know the right way, do the best you can with it.”- Murray Bowen
There is wisdom in that simple invitation. We inherit more than we realise, yet we are not trapped by it. When we bring awareness, compassion, and grace to our own story, something new becomes possible in the homes we build now.
Marriage and family life are shaped by where we have come from, but they are not confined to it. Every day offers another chance to grow in freedom, to strengthen love, and to choose the kind of family we long to create.