Family Patterns

Four Braids, and the Study Nobody Has Done

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  11 min read

The photographs live in a shoebox inside a bigger box, in the spare room, the coldest room in her aunt’s house and the quietest.

Sunday, the flat part of the afternoon, the two of them on the floor with their backs against the bed, everything smelling of cardboard and old paper and butter mints.

Her aunt is doing the family story, in the order it always goes. Her father, in a borrowed suit, at a wedding. Then Loreta’s father, on a step, squinting. Then the cousin — thirty-six now, in a picture from last Christmas, with the same face on him.

Loreta is forty-five and has spent thirty years watching for her father in herself. What she notices this afternoon, a photograph in each hand, is that in nine minutes of family history nobody has said one word about who those three men married. Her grandmother, in that same wedding picture, half out of the frame. Her mother. The cousin’s wife of eleven years. Like they just arrived, she thinks. Like they got assigned.

Then her aunt puts the lid back on the box and asks about the neighbors and the fence, and Loreta says something back.

A rope, not a chain

The question underneath that afternoon is the one people bring to a consulting room: is that thing in me because it’s mine, or because I grew up next to it long enough to learn the tune?

The answer is four things rather than one. People picture a chain, identical links, so that anybody attached goes where it goes. It is a rope: several strands, each weak alone, none of them the rope.

Temperament, substantially heritable and not what you have been led to believe it is. Gene–environment correlation, the unglamorous name for the fact that the same hand provides the genes and the house. Selection — who marries whom, which almost nobody mentions. And rules: what a person learned, before anybody said it was teachable, about what people are for. Some of those can be examined at a kitchen table. At least one cannot.

What a heritability figure actually means

Rhee and Waldman pooled fifty-one twin and adoption studies of antisocial behavior and found roughly forty percent of the differences between people ran with genetic differences between them. That is a long way from destiny, and it leaves most of the variation to everything not inherited. For narcissism the figures scatter with facet, instrument and country, and the honest statement is not a number.

Here is what such a figure means. Plant one handful of well-mixed seed corn in a good bed and another in a poor one. In August the plants within each bed vary, and since every plant in a bed got the same soil, all of that variation is genetic. And the good bed is knee-high while the poor bed is at your ankle — and that difference, the one you would notice from the road, is one hundred percent soil.

So a heritability estimate is not a percentage of a person, and not a ceiling on change. Visscher, Hill and Wray put it plainly for a genetics readership: high heritability does not mean an outcome is fixed, because environments can be changed. Eyesight is substantially heritable and spectacles work.

The same hand gives the genes and the house

Which is why nature versus nurture is the wrong shape for a real family: the two arrive together, from the same person. Sandra Scarr and Kathleen McCartney described three ways they travel as one — the parent who supplied your makeup also built the room; a child pulls particular behavior out of the adults around him; and as he gets older he selects surroundings that fit him.

That middle one is the surprise, and Ayoub and colleagues found it in a thousand sets of twins: some of how warm parents were, and more of how stressed, traced back to influences arriving from the child’s side. It excuses nothing anybody did. It says the arrow runs both ways — so the question is what is passed, along which route, and which routes can be interrupted.

Who marries whom

Now the strand that hardly ever gets discussed. Assortative mating: people do not pair off at random. They pair with people who resemble them, on some things far more than others.

Picture a town where every carpenter marries a carpenter. Two generations on, the town is thick with carpentry and everyone there will tell you, sincerely, that it runs in the families. That is concentration without transmission, and it produces exactly the appearance that makes people say the phrase.

Here the size is the point. Horwitz and colleagues assembled the largest picture of partner similarity anybody has, and for ordinary personality it came out real and small — extraversion around .08. Couples match strongly on what a culture sorts people by, and barely at all on the shape of their personalities.

Against that baseline, hold up the antagonistic traits. Kardum and colleagues, measuring a hundred dating couples, found Machiavellianism around .40, and read it as assortment at selection rather than two people growing alike. Boutwell and colleagues, in a large American birth cohort, reported partner similarity for antisocial behavior around .51, slightly decreasing the longer couples had been together. The resemblance was there at the start.

So the family concentrates the trait from both sides of every couple. A child there is not getting one difficult parent against the moderating influence of an ordinary one.

And the sentence about the women means something other than what it has been meaning. The women in my family always end up in bad relationships usually lives as a statement about damage. Part of it, not all, is a statement about selection: who was in the room, on what evidence, and how fast.

Be exact, because this can be picked up by the wrong end. Selection is not consent, and choosing is not causing. What gets selected is a first impression formed in a few weeks out of material somebody chose to present, and nothing here moves responsibility onto the person it was done to. What changes is the category of the problem: who is in the room, what counts as evidence, and how fast somebody moves inward can all be looked at alone in a kitchen on a Sunday.

And a hundred couples is not many, one cohort is one cohort, and none of it can say why people assort — by preference, or because a church or a town only ever puts certain people in front of you. Dorotea, sixty-two, put it better than any paper does: “We all thought we were picking. We were picking out of a bucket somebody else filled.”

What people are for

The fourth strand is the one that can be reached. Relational rules: what a person learned about how people work before anybody told them it was a lesson — like the rules about the thermostat in the house you grew up in, which you did not know were local until you spent a winter in somebody else’s.

The one that matters most is what people are for: company, or an audience, or a service, or a threat to be managed before it manages you. That is where do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us stops being a question and becomes a setting somebody left on.

A temperament is a pull, with no content in it. A rule is a sentence, and a sentence can be written down and disagreed with by the adult doing the looking. Only one of the two can be examined at a kitchen table.

The study nobody has done

There is no long-term, multigenerational, genetically informed study of families high in these traits. Nobody has enrolled a set of grandfathers, followed their children and their children’s children across forty years, recorded who partnered with whom, and reported what actually travels. Everything above is assembled out of adjacent research built for other purposes: twin studies, adoption studies that stop at early childhood, conviction records that measure convictions rather than conduct, and a great pile of questionnaires filled out by undergraduates.

So the sentence people say in a therapist’s office — my grandfather, my father, now my brother — has never been directly tested. The reasons are nobody’s negligence: four decades, more money than the field has, and the cooperation of the people least likely to agree to it. A reader who is told where the floor ends can trust the floor.

An elevated risk is not a prophecy

There is one place a real number exists. Besemer and colleagues, pooling twenty-five publications covering more than three million children, found the odds of a conviction genuinely elevated for children of parents with convictions — lower once household circumstances were accounted for, and with no conclusive evidence of cause. The great majority of those children do not follow their parents, which is worth saying out loud if you grew up in such a house. An elevated risk is a true fact about a bend in the road. It is not a prediction about your drive.

Where a family pattern stops, what differed is usually dull and mostly unchosen: a grandmother across the yard for eleven years, an easy temperament, a school that suited somebody, money that arrived at the right moment. Where such a pattern continues it is not the mother’s failure; where it stops it is not the son’s achievement.

So if you recognized your own family here, you have not been handed a forecast about yourself or about your children, and if what you recognized was your own hand rather than a relative’s, that is not a verdict either. What you have is a rearranged question. Not which of them am I — that one has no answer, and thirty years of asking produces a person who has never been off duty a single day. The workable question: what did I learn about what a person is for, where is it still running, and what am I going to do on the next Thursday evening when somebody disappoints me?

That one can be answered by Thursday.

Loreta and Dorotea are composites. Each is assembled from many families and belongs to none.

This material sits close to real distress, and reading about a family line is not the same as being alone with one. If it brought up more than you expected, a therapist who works with family patterns is the right person to take it to.