Family is the Foundation – But We No Longer Know of What

Original text was published in Czech magazine Psychologie Dnes 2/25. Translation by AI

When we realise that our current problems often didn’t originate solely within us but are the result of a broader family context, we may feel a sense of relief. The relational and economic environment we grew up in has a significant influence on the attitudes and expectations we bring into adult life.

“What are your grandparents’ years of birth?” I ask clients after they’ve recalled their parents’ birthdates. For several years now, I’ve been sketching out each client’s genogram during the first two or three sessions. On a large sheet of paper, I map not only the people who made up their original family but also previous generations who had an impact on my clients’ childhoods and adolescence. Sometimes, though, this is a difficult task. How much do we actually know about our families?

As a psychotherapist, I form a professional view of my clients’ problems. Over time, every therapist develops a unique style, shaped by theoretical training during psychotherapy education, experience with a particular client group, and their own personality and life values. At the start of the therapeutic process, I always explore my clients’ family history. I want to know where their parents came from, how they met, under what circumstances my clients were born, and what relationships existed in their extended family. This information helps me empathise with my clients’ stories and connect their present-day struggles with the past. However, we can’t simply assume that all our problems stem from childhood or are solely the responsibility of our parents. Still, the relational, situational, and economic climate in which people grow up plays a major role in shaping the values and attitudes they adopt and the expectations they carry into adulthood.

An only child longed for by a financially stable, well-functioning family will likely follow a very different life path than the middle child of a mother who was abandoned by her original partner after childbirth, found someone new, and had another baby within two years. Despite social experiments and efforts toward equality, our starting positions are never fully comparable. Accepting the fate we were born into and (still) living our own life can be a long process of self-discovery.

We also connect key moments from our personal history to major historical events that affected every family—though often in very different ways. In the Czech and Slovak context over the past century, these include both world wars, and the years 1948, 1968, 1977, and 1989.

Blind Spots

Sometimes I’m surprised by how little clients know about basic facts concerning their direct ancestors. I imagine how isolated families may have felt without grandparents, but also how necessary it sometimes was to sever old ties in order for a new family to try to develop on its own. The blank spaces on the paper speak volumes—not only about missing data but also about missing parts of one’s own history. This emptiness may reflect the inability to understand certain patterns or to find compassion and empathy for one’s ancestors—regardless of how they behaved. Forgiveness is its own discipline, one we often only reach in the later stages of therapy.

Reconstructing the Past

We can never fully reconstruct the past. Fragments of stories, family myths, and old photographs cannot truly capture the troubles, dilemmas, or difficult decisions our relatives faced. But a perfect reconstruction isn’t the goal of therapy. What matters far more is understanding the kind of community we were born into and how we were shaped by our surroundings—by the behaviours and (un)lived values of others. When we realise that our present struggles are not entirely our own making, but part of a wider family context—marked by pain, injustice, unprocessed anger, and failed attempts at a better life—it can bring relief. But reaching such insight requires work. Without relevant information, the process is filled with silence, tough questions, and vivid imagination.

Novels Not Just for Women

Thankfully, we can find inspiration in literature. In recent years, several novels have offered well-researched insights into the lives of our grandmothers' and great-grandfathers’ generations. Karin Lednická’s The Leaning Church saga portrays life in the Karviná region starting over a century ago; Alena Mornštajnová’s Hana, The Little Hotel, and other works explore the complex times of World War II; Kateřina Tučková’s The Goddesses of Žítková and White Water focus on persecuted groups of women during the communist era; and Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes tells of the unimaginably harsh fate and partial emancipation of women in the East. All these authors narrate compelling stories of ordinary people in ordinary times, through a remarkably refined, almost therapeutic lens.

Even though these works don’t describe our own families, they offer a richly detailed picture of the eras our ancestors lived in. They depict marriages formed mostly for economic reasons (as women couldn’t survive without men, and men couldn’t manage without women), the importance of family ties that were crucial to survival (in the absence of a social safety net), and the harsh parenting styles designed to ensure future material security for parents once they became dependent.

Our task is not to judge that era. Our task is to understand the positions of our ancestors, who acted according to the values instilled in them by their parents, in a world vastly different from ours. Perhaps we are only now beginning to realise that even our own children and grandchildren will grow up in a world entirely unlike the one we knew.

Working with family history in therapy offers a paradoxical opportunity: it helps clients see their difficulties from a broader perspective, thus relieving them of guilt or a sense of failure. At the same time, it opens the space for deeper understanding and acceptance of their family legacy—including mistakes, traumas, and unspoken stories.

Family is the Foundation……

of the state!, we might be tempted to say. But we also know that this era is long gone. The postmodern chaos that surrounds us on every level has entered family relationships too. Every family role is being questioned, every stereotype demands a new definition. Are our societies collapsing because families are falling apart? Or is it the other way around? Do we even need each other anymore?

We can adapt Pavel Kosorin’s aphorism from this article’s title into the simple phrase: Family is our foundation. Without knowledge of our family and our ancestors, we may be doomed to keep searching for who we are—often through repeating the same life problems or unconsciously adopting patterns that do not serve us. Understanding our past does not limit us; on the contrary, it gives us freedom. The freedom to decide what we carry forward from the family story, what we choose to change, and how we’ll write our own chapter. This process may take time, but it brings greater inner peace, reconciliation, and acceptance—not only of ourselves but of our families too. And that may be a meaningful legacy our descendants will one day appreciate.