My Parents, My Enemies: Generational Conflict and the Pain of Inherited Models

Why does it so often feel like our deepest wounds come from the people who loved us first?
And why—when we finally start to understand how we were formed—does it so often lead to blaming the ones who raised us?

Anecdotally, it seems that many modern therapeutic journeys begin not with self-examination, but with the naming of parental faults: narcissism, emotional manipulation, controlling behavior, lack of empathy. Some of these diagnoses are real. Others seem to arise less from trauma than from a broader cultural script—one in which the parent becomes the scapegoat for all inner turmoil. In some cases, this scapegoating becomes so entrenched that individuals feel the only path forward is to cut off their parents entirely. Stories of adult children severing ties completely—sometimes encouraged by therapeutic language—are no longer rare. The trend isn’t just personal—it’s professional. In therapy rooms and diagnostic language alike, the parents often appear guilty until proven innocent.

There’s something both right and wrong about this. Yes, our earliest wounds often trace back to our parents. But not always because they were abnormally cruel or chaotic. Often, it’s simply because they were there—constantly, closely, imperfectly. They were the first to show us how to desire. And in mimetic terms, that makes them our most powerful—and most vulnerable—models.

The Proximity Problem: Why It’s Always the Parents

A startling statistic often circulates in driver’s ed: over 90% of car accidents happen within five miles of home. At first, this seems ominous. But the explanation is simple: we do most of our driving near home.

The same is true, in a different register, of our parents. They aren’t worse than other people. But they are closer. They are the models we lived with in proximity—day after day, for years. And the mimetic risk of proximity is rivalry. As René Girard observed, we are most likely to fall into rivalry with those near us in status, desire, and access. When that nearness is bound up with emotional dependence—as in the parent-child bond—the mimetic stakes rise even higher.

Your parent isn’t scapegoated just because they did something wrong. They’re scapegoated because they were the model closest to you when your desires were being formed. And because of that, any contradiction in their example—any perceived hypocrisy, inconsistency, or control—has the power to scandalize.

This is not a trivial point. In mimetic theory, scandal is not mere offense. It’s the moment when a model both draws us in and pushes us away. It’s the unbearable tension of wanting to be like someone who also becomes a rival or obstacle. And it happens most intensely when the model lives in your house, disciplines your schedule, and decides when you eat your broccoli.

We Do Not Inherit Values. We Inherit Models.

Parents often assume their job is to pass on values. But children rarely absorb values directly. They absorb models—living examples of how desire moves, how love is given, how worth is measured. A father may tell his son, “It’s good to be honest,” while modeling the habit of cutting corners. A mother may say, “You’re perfect just as you are,” while constantly altering her own body or mood to meet external approval.

These contradictions are not merely confusing. They are formative. The child’s desire is shaped not by what the parent claims to love, but by what the parent shows they want.

Not every child internalizes the same parent in the same way. In families with multiple children, one child may find a parent’s perfectionism motivating; another may experience it as crushing. This isn’t just about memory—it’s about temperament, the emotional and psychological “interface” through which desire is absorbed. As Art and Laraine Bennett explore in The Temperament God Gave You, the same environment can feel wildly different to a melancholic child than to a sanguine one. Mimetic conflict doesn’t begin with interpretation; it begins with perception—and perception is shaped by temperament.

We often mistake this formation for some form of betrayal. But in mimetic terms, it’s the natural condition of becoming a person. You can’t grow up without absorbing the patterns of the people around you. The question is never whether you were influenced—but which contradictions you inherited, and how you carry them.

From Admiration to Scandal: The Parent as Rival

Most children begin by adoring their parents. They want to imitate everything—words, habits, gestures. But over time, as independence emerges, so does differentiation. The parent remains a model, but begins to feel restrictive, flawed, sometimes even absurd. This is the scandal moment: when the admired model starts to block desire, not guide it.

This doesn’t mean the parent becomes an enemy. But it does mean they can become a rival—not in behavior, but in desire. The child resents the authority of the one who taught them what to want. And that resentment—if unacknowledged—often persists into adulthood, surfacing as a kind of narrative scapegoating.

This is why so many adult children find it easier to say “My parents messed me up” than to say “My parents gave me desires I don’t know how to manage.” One statement is tidy. The other is existentially difficult.

The Composite Model and Mimetic-Genetic Inheritance

In mimetic theory, we are not blank slates. We are composite models—layered beings formed by years of imitation. The people we loved, feared, admired, or envied live on in us as deep structures of desire. And no models are deeper than our parents.

To say “I’m nothing like my mother” or “I’ll never be like my dad” is almost always a sign that the parent is still functioning as a mimetic reference point. Even resentment is a kind of imitation—it keeps the model alive by defining the self in reaction.

The path forward isn’t to reject the parent, nor to idealize them. It’s to see them clearly: to name how they formed you, where scandal entered, and what desires you inherited that still need purification. This is the work of mimetic clarity.

It also reveals a deeper reality: the models we inherit are not just cognitive or behavioral—they are mimetic-genetic. That is, they structure the very mode of our desire, like an existential code written into us through imitation. When Scripture speaks of generational sin, it is not only referring to moral guilt passed down like property—it is describing the transmission of scandalized models, the internalization of desires shaped by contradiction, rivalry, and unresolved longing.

We carry our parents not only in memory, but in structure. And those structures cannot be escaped—they must be worked with, reordered, or healed. Recognizing this does not diminish agency; it clarifies the terrain in which freedom must be exercised.

Christ and the Re-formation of Desire

What breaks the cycle? Not self-definition. Not therapeutic distance. But also, not immediate peace. What initiates the deeper work is the slow, often painful introduction of a non-rivalrous model—one whose authority is not coercive, whose example is not scandalous, and whose being does not provoke competition. Yet this model—Christ—does not replace prior models in a clean swap. He contradicts them, not with violence but with presence.

And in that contradiction, He brings a sword—not peace. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” Christ says in Matthew 10:34. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” The sword He brings cuts through false harmony, inherited rivalry, and the easy lie that peace is possible without truth. His presence generates a new kind of internal conflict: a gravitational shift that destabilizes the mimetic structure before it reorients it.

The process is rarely instant. Too abrupt a change can be superficial (if we pretend to imitate Christ while our desires are still governed by earlier scandals), scapegoating (if we reject our parents in order to imitate Christ without reckoning with how they formed us), or simply disorienting. True reformation often resembles interior whiplash—a struggle between the gravitational pull of inherited models and the disruptive clarity of the one who refuses to rival and yet insists on being followed. That is the space in which healing takes root.

This is why, for Christians, the imitation of Christ is not just a moral ideal. It’s a mimetic necessity. Christ is the one model who never becomes a rival. He gives being without competing. He offers desire without scandal.

In light of Him, we can reinterpret our composite models—seeing where they led us toward truth, and where they broke down. Even our flawed parents can be honored as partial models—imperfect bearers of desire—who must now be subordinated to the one Model who restores all others.

Conclusion: From Blame to Blessing

Your parents are not your enemies. But if they live in your mimetic structure unexamined, they can feel like rivals. That feeling doesn’t mean they failed. It means they mattered.

To grow is not to cast them out. It’s to reorient the desires they left behind.

You don’t heal by rejecting the people who loved you imperfectly. You heal by recognizing the way their desires became your own—and then choosing, in freedom, which ones to keep, which ones to grieve, and which ones to give back.

The language of “generational sin” may sound archaic, but it maps closely onto the dynamics of mimetic inheritance. As David Conway Doyle argues in The Sins of Parents, the wounds parents carry often become burdens their children must learn to name, reinterpret, or consciously leave behind. Mimetic theory doesn’t absolve or condemn our parents—it shows us how their unfinished formation became part of ours.

And sometimes, that begins by admitting the deepest truth of all:

They were your models.
They still are.
And by grace, they don’t have to be your rivals.