How often have you said?
"That's just who I am."
“Some people never change.”
“That’s the way I was raised.”
“I’ve always done it that way.”
“It’s in my DNA.”
It’s not true.
The late Carlfred Broderick, a renowned marriage and family scholar at the University of Southern California, coined the term
TRANSITIONAL
CHARACTER
"A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults, that 'the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of children to the third and fourth generation.' Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives."