The invisible inheritance from our parents

The scripts we inherit

Muzamil opens by pointing to a pattern so common in Pakistan that most people don’t even realize they are living it. Parents in every household, knowingly or unknowingly, hand their children a blueprint for how to live. This blueprint comes partly through direct instruction, but mostly through implicit messaging. A parent may never say “you will only be valuable if you make me proud,” yet through their reactions, their expectations, and the way they respond to the child’s choices, that message gets absorbed.

Ali explains the mechanism: “So, you learn all of that with your parents, or with your caregivers at the start. So you learn all of that with your parents, or with your caregivers at the start.” What is learned early permeates the rest of your life. Even when you grow up and leave home, that script remains active, shaping career decisions, relationship patterns, and how you define success.

When pride becomes a burden

Muzamil observed something sharp on Instagram. He asked people what they live for, what their goals are. The answer returned again and again: “I want to make my parents proud.” There is nothing wrong with this desire itself. Parents have every right to feel pride in their children. But there is a difference between being happy because your child is thriving, and requiring your child to achieve specific things in order for you to feel proud.

“I always ask questions like this, I want to make my parents become happy, become proud. And it’s very good thing, I’m not, I’m not, I don’t want to demonize it,” Muzamil says. But he raises a hard question for parents: Do you create a certain definition of what that child’s life should look like for me to be proud of him, or should I have a very open-ended view where I’m simply proud that my child is a seemingly normal person in the society and is able to continue?

The eastern cultural weight of honor and pride is real. For many listeners in Pakistan, the bar for parental approval is not just about being healthy and happy. It is about achievement, status, career, marriage timelines, and social standing.

Communication styles that echo across decades

Ali brings up a subtle but powerful mechanism: how your parents communicate (or fail to communicate) becomes your communication style. If your household operated on avoidance, where problems were ignored and feelings were expressed indirectly through actions like silence or withholding affection, you learn that as normal.

“If you have a passive communication style at home, chances are, that you go outside and you will see your relationships, your friendships, and then when you have a friend, you don’t say anything, right? Maybe you start ghosting them,” Ali notes. The child grows up and repeats the pattern without understanding why. Friendships end abruptly because the person was never taught to have a difficult conversation. Only when things become a crisis does the communication happen. Only when things break does the person finally explain what was bothering them all along.

The weight of inherited trauma

Muzamil and Ali dig deeper into something most people in Pakistan don’t talk about openly: intergenerational trauma. Pakistan is 73 years old. Partition, wars, terrorism, decades of political instability, the trauma of losing loved ones. And unlike external problems that can be solved, inherited trauma operates silently through behavior.

“We don’t see them as a self-harm,” Ali explains. A parent who drinks to cope, a parent who isolates, a parent who self-sabotages through reckless choices. The child watches and learns: this is how you handle pain. If the parent never heals, never enters therapy, never confronts that trauma, it gets passed down.

“Getting therapy for yourself is one of the best gifts you can give to your children,” Ali says. Breaking the chain of intergenerational trauma is not weakness. It is the highest form of parental love.

The independence dilemma

This brings Muzamil and Ali to the tension at the heart of growing up in South Asian families: how do you become yourself while still honoring your parents?

Ali frames the therapist’s dilemma: “As a therapist, I fully value your autonomy and your ability to choose. But I also know that if you spend five years becoming what your parents wanted, you will likely grow to resent them. Worse, you will grow to resent yourself.” The question Ali asks his patients is blunt: “Would you rather choose the pain of doing something that you really don’t like because your parents wanted you to, or the pain of doing something that you really love at the risk of upsetting your parents?”

Ali’s own answer, grounded in experience, is that if your socioeconomic situation is stable, the risk is worth it. “Break the chain,” he says. Because the chain breaks either way. Either you break it by choosing your own path, or your child breaks it by choosing theirs. The chain cannot stay broken unless someone owns that choice.

Responsibility as freedom

Muzamil points to something crucial: in Pakistan, many young people don’t own their decisions. When something fails, the blame is redistributed. Parents to blame. Society to blame. The system to blame. But people who become successful often do so because they take responsibility early.

“This is the reason why he is a responsible member of the society,” Muzamil argues, “because he knows that my decisions, if I go to jail, it is my decision. I have to own up to the consequences.” This ownership is not cruelty. It is maturity. It means you are not a passenger in your own life.

Muzamil will be a parent soon. The conversation ends not with answers, but with the question every parent faces: What kind of legacy will I leave?