Why building healthy relationships becomes harder when we have not made peace with our parents’ shortcomings

The way parents described their childhood and their infants’ attachment patterns matched in 75 percent of 661 pairs; kappa was 0.49, indicating moderate agreement.

🧠 The Adult Attachment Interview measures not what happened in childhood, but how it is narrated today. Even when negative experiences are described, a coherent narrative leads to a secure classification. Brief lapses in the narrative when discussing loss or trauma are referred to as an unresolved state of mind. Across 95 samples, intergenerational transmission of unresolved attachment was r = 0.21, and transmission of secure attachment was r = 0.31. r indicates how closely two measures vary together: 0 means no association, 1 means a perfect association, and a minus sign indicates an inverse association. Both fall between weak and moderate.

The bridge between them is not fully understood: parental sensitivity does not explain the entire association, a phenomenon known as the transmission gap. One prominent candidate is mentalization: among mothers with a history of trauma, trauma-specific mentalization made a significant contribution to explaining infant attachment disorganization. There is a parallel in adult relationships, too: observers rated partner interactions as higher in quality among people with coherent narratives.

This is not destiny. Across sixty-five studies, 23.6% of parents broke the cycle, while 17.1% continued it. The association between emotional maltreatment and adult relationship well-being is negative but weak: r = 0.14. There is also a point of debate: people who describe their childhood negatively but coherently are found to parent well, yet the same study called the concept itself into question.

🧭 A roadmap: build your narrative from beginning to end; name your unmet need; consider the other person along with their limitations; let go of both idealization and blame; seek help if you feel stuck. In therapy, people who voiced this need and changed their view of the other person had better outcomes.

This content is not diagnostic or treatment advice. If you are struggling, consult a professional; in an emergency, call 112 or ALO 183.

References: van IJzendoorn (1995) Psychol Bull 117(3) · Roisman ve ark. (2002) Child Dev 73(4) · Verhage ve ark. (2016) Psychol Bull 142(4) · Berthelot ve ark. (2015) Infant Ment Health J 36(2) · Waters ve ark. (2018) Dev Psychol 54(12) · Cao ve ark. (2022) Trauma Violence Abuse 23(3) · Madigan ve ark. (2025) Dev Psychopathol, ön yayın · Paivio ve Greenberg (1995) JCCP 63(3) · Greenberg ve Malcolm (2002) JCCP 70(2)

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