It is certainly true that I can see my own behaviours as mirrors of those of family members or reactions to the behaviours of family members. I used to have the narrative that I had ‘learned’ these behaviours ‘from’ people in my family, that I was ‘taught’ these behaviours.
I now doubt this, for several reasons.
Firstly, as I inherited genetic material from my parents and share genetic material with siblings, the mere fact of similarity does not prove anything, because genetically conditioned behaviours would produce the same similarity.
Secondly, I have behaviours that are startlingly similar to those of more distant family members who grew up in quite different households, with different people, different challenges, and different atmospheres, and yet the end result in them and me was the same.
Thirdly, I was told, as a child, not to smoke, drink, take drugs, have sex lightly or casually, be mean to people, eat more than my fair share, loaf around, envy, gloat, feel sorry for oneself, and many other things, and yet that’s precisely what I did.
Apparently, as a child, I was perfectly capable of disagreeing, rebelling, ignoring, and doing my own thing.
Fourthly, I indeed had bad examples, but I also had good. If I ended up mimicking one not the other, I cannot blame the example.
The only hypothesis that gets in all the facts is that my attitudes and behaviour were a combination of the genetic cards I was dealt but more crucially how I chose to play them. Choices are made really from a very early age.
The upshot of this is that there is no one to blame, not my family, not the people around me in my childhood, not my community or the schools I attended, not what was on the television, not what was happening in society. And really very little is attributable to sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or demographic—one need look no further than people with whom one shares all five parameters and yet has nothing notable in common with.
Need I blame myself? Not blame but note that the responsibility lies with me for uncovering, discovering, and discarding what does not work in order to replace it with something that does.