Shame, guilt, pride, fear, hate, envy, greed – elements that you might despise in everyone around you. Elements which if you look deeper, you will also find in yourself. Have you ever questioned the origins of these elements? Have you ever wondered how did you end up having them and why many times, despite your disgust, exercising them feels so familiar and natural? Have you ever wished that you would not have to fall prey to these elements?

To be able to explore these questions, and to find out how you ended up having these features in your personality, you need to understand that just like you inherited your biological traits - your hair color, blood type, or the shape of your nose - you also have a psychological heritage. This includes also a dark legacy that is transmitted to you from your most close and intimate environment – your family.

This is the place where you will be exposed to your parents’ and siblings’ values, habits, mentalities, and behavior. Even if you see your family members as faultless heroes, keep in mind that they have, just like everyone else, dark elements that are transmitted to you in the form of dysfunctional coping patterns, if the members of your family fail to address them and sort them out in their own lives.

Home is where you start from and your family is the stage on which you play out your individuality. Your family is your emotional center of gravity, the place where you begin to build your identity and develop your character under the influences of the ones that surround you.

This is the place where you begin the process of developing a self, and the climate created by your parents, siblings, and other important sources of love and approval, has a great influence on how you define and identify what you perceive as good and accepted behavior.

Behavior that was often regulated by the grownups that surrounded you, grownups that did not want to see you, as a child, get hurt. Remember the early days of your life, when you were playing with other children and every now and then someone would shout from the side “Stop pulling his hair” or “Don’t throw rocks at him”. Maybe every now and then these shouts were addressed to you.

Instinctually, the people caring for you want you to disown actions and behaviors that they have disowned themselves so that you, as a child, can fit an adult’s ideal of proper play. This process is normal and useful, but from a young age, you start covering up what is happening under your conscious awareness, just to be accepted by the important figures in your life, disowning parts of you that are not rewarded with approval.

However, what you disown does not go away. It will live within you, out of sight and out of your thoughts, in unconscious darkness hiding just below the edge of your awareness, bursting into your reality under extreme emotional circumstances.

While this process is inevitable and necessary in your journey of developing the man you are in everyday life and the image which portrays what you think you are, never forget, that the self that you present to everyone else does not represent the whole you.

It is always hard to admit your own darkness, just like it was hard for your family members to admit theirs, but remember that if you fail to recognize this, you will end up projecting your unaccepted tendencies into other people, just like other people did to you.

In every family, including yours, the members of the family will play a role in the formation of each other’s dark and repressed traits. The repressed feelings and behaviors of other family members will always have a strong influence on the creation of the self that you deny, especially when the dark elements are not recognized or ignored by everyone in the family.

If you had the misfortune to be a part of a family with a very negative, abusive, or dysfunctional dynamic, your sense of identity will probably be fragmented, and guilt and shame will be at the core of the elements that you have repressed. Your parents are your first teachers, and in such a situation, their lessons are not always loving.

If they refused to accept the darkness within themselves, you will probably know the effects of rejection and betrayal. Envy, rage, and guilt coming from the ones you see as gods in the early years of your life will always form the perfect circumstances for you to develop tragic and self-destructive behaviors, which in turn, if left unchecked, you will end up passing to the next generation.

Keep in mind, that a dysfunctional environment can sometimes be masked in the bliss and glamour of goodness and perfection, where, for example, you might have a father that could not imagine that he had done anything wrong in his life, portraying the image of a saint scholar, while you, as a child ca never fulfill his expectations.

You might end up acting out unacceptable behavior, by becoming a criminal, the black sheep of the family, carrying out your father's darkness, just because he was too full of himself to observe the imperfections of his nature, compelling you to live out the dark side which he had ignored.

Have the courage to honestly analyze yourself and your origins, and take note of the things that were passed onto you by your family, either because of fear of facing the dark or simply out of ignorance and lack of understanding, and make it your goal to become the man that has the strength to face the darkness that was avoided for so long.

Understand the venom that was passed onto you and find a way to refuse to pass it on to the future generation, by becoming the man that changes, in his lifetime, the entire course of his lineage.

It is a monumental task to filter and control the darkness and destructiveness from your personality, but it is your duty to make sure that the next generation will have a better and more supportive foundation upon which to build better lives.

Recognize and accept the darkness that you have inherited from your family and find the power within you to decide and shout out loud: “IT STOPS WITH ME!” You will have to fight against deeply ingrained patterns that you learned in childhood, and this journey will require you to transform how you see and respond to everything around you, but it can be done.

Are you the man that can handle such a burden? Or are you just another that chooses ignorance and covers up in fear, passing the task to the next generation, playing the victim, and leaving his troubles for someone else to solve?

Your choice will shape the next generation!