If you’ve ever told someone about what your parents did to you, you may have heard words like these:
“Blood will tell.” “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“You can only raise a child the way you were raised.”
“You’ll understand once you become a parent.”
They all say the same thing: the path ahead is already decided.
The idea that abuse “runs in families” has been believed for a long time — not only by the public, but by experts. At one point it was even claimed that nine out of ten would repeat it.
But what people most want to know isn’t the story of the past, or a future someone else has decided for them. It’s what will actually happen next. When they have a child of their own, will they truly repeat it? “Will my future just be a copy of my parent’s?” For someone carrying what was done to them, few questions cut deeper.
And there’s something that has rarely been asked: how was the idea that abuse “runs in families” ever actually tested? And once it was tested, what do we now know?
Giving Up on Memory, and Following Forward
The first method researchers tried had a clear weakness. Early studies asked parents who had abused their children to recall their own childhood, and leaned on those memories. But memory bends easily — shaped by whatever is going on inside the person doing the remembering.
Someone whose life or parenting is going badly, for instance, may search the past for a reason and end up describing what their parents did as worse than it was. “I turned out this way because of how I was raised.” The wish to believe that deepens the colors of memory. Something painful but short of abuse can, in the retelling, get carved in as abuse. And when parents who are right now hurting their own children are asked to look back, their accounts lean toward the heavy side. The old “nine out of ten” was a number born of that lean.
Others describe the harm as lighter than it was. The more painful the memory, the more a person may refuse to call it abuse — shielding the parent, trying to believe the upbringing was ordinary. That same impulse can make real harm sound as if it never happened.
One person’s past can change shape entirely depending on how it’s told. You can see this plainly when a memory-based method is set against one built on records kept during childhood: even on the single question of who was abused, the people each method turns up overlap only about half the time.
So the “transmission rate” counted from memory swung wildly from study to study, high and low. And many of the old studies said to support the cycle, when later graded against strict standards, failed to meet even the basic ones.
To get a number that doesn’t swing, you have to give up on memory altogether. But is there really any way to learn what happened next without leaning on memory at all?
There was. Its scale, though, was staggering.
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