Should You Let Your Past Determine Your Future?
Should your past decide what comes next? Yes and no. Think about a grudge you've carried so tightly that it tied your own hands, kept you locked into the same moves year after year. Resentment takes prisoners. People in that grip spend the rest of their lives convinced they can only repeat what came before, or else arrange their whole behavior around dodging some trap they once fell into. You've probably heard of superstitious behavior. It shows up when one event happens to come right before something good or bad, and the person decides they'd better keep doing that thing, or keep walking into that situation, or steer clear of it forever, when the connection may have been nothing but a coincidence. Gamblers do this. So do athletes.
You were given a mind. Use it. Learning isn't supposed to end, and finding one answer to a problem doesn't mean that answer is the one you reach for every time afterward. Stay flexible. Stay inventive. Lean on the capacities you came into the world with instead of reaching, by reflex, for whatever fix the next person hands you. Borrowed solutions are a lot like borrowed shoes. Someone else's might not fit your circumstances at all, and wearing them can leave you with blisters, hammer toes, bunions, take your pick.
Even the "facts" you picked up as a kid can be wrong, and they can quietly trip you. When parenting is decent, children end up with a reasonably true picture of themselves, their strengths and their weak spots alike. Parents loaded down with their own troubles can damage a child, sometimes for good. Try stepping back and looking at the home you grew up in through somebody else's eyes. Kids are easy to fool because they so badly want to be loved and wanted. Some are raised by parents who are still children themselves, parents who see their own kids as competitors. Not much good for the child tends to come out of that.
Our conscience speaks in a voice of authority, and often that voice is just echoing whatever a parent said to us decades ago. Teachers, grandparents, neighbors leave their marks too, shaping both our conscience and our sense of who we are, for better or worse. Here is a reality check: do the rules your parents handed you still make sense now that you're grown and on your own? A lot of what we do runs on habit, which is fine when you're climbing onto a bicycle. Because so many of these responses fire off automatically, they're stubborn to change even when they work against us. Ever had your buttons pushed and found yourself reacting before you'd even registered it, handing control of your own behavior over to whoever pushed them? That someone might be a demanding or clingy or controlling parent, or a defiant kid who has no respect for you, who figures he's your better and means to run you rather than be run.
The tougher a pattern is to shift, and the more it undercuts you, the stronger the case for getting professional help, since digging through old experience can stir up anger and depression. Pushing too hard or too fast into your own past, without a steady hand alongside you, can knock you off balance. As I write this I'm rereading Toxic Parents by Dr. Susan Forward. The book is a good resource, and she herself cautions readers against carelessly mapping this kind of material onto their own lives. She puts that warning near the end.