We inherit more than eye colour and bone structure from our parents. We inherit rules, silences, habits, beliefs. We inherit the shape of our parents’ presence or absence, the flavour of their neglect and the confusion of thinking this is love.

Every week in my therapy practice I meet people living out their inheritance, their family dysfunction: re-enacting childhoods, becoming the parents they despised, clinging to survival strategies that are slowly killing them. “I think I have a problem,” they tell me, “but I can’t see it.”

American writer David Foster Wallace summarised the problem well:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

A fish doesn’t know it’s wet. A child doesn’t know her childhood is unhealthy.

While physical abuse leaves marks, covert dysfunction is absorbed as normal and most of us don’t question what feels normal. It can remain unrecognised until someone else – a spouse, a friend or a therapist – points it out. Sometimes loss, such as a divorce, is required for us to finally accept something fundamental, something we assumed was normal, needs reconsideration.

Oliver’s* father had spent the last 15 years of his........

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