The study itself doesn't say anything of the sort that the article title and this thread title do.
I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
Tiny anecdote - it was only after being a parent for a decade or so that, when doing family history, I realised that my dad's parenting style -- which influenced my own so much -- was affected by being essentially fatherless; he had no direct model to base his own parenting on. WWII affecting children's upbringing ~70 years later.
I think he did a great job when I was younger, but we haven't maintained a strong bond as adults (which is my fault as much as anything); something I want to try and change with my own children.
>if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
I completely agree.
The study looked at “individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships” - each quantified. Of course, the study isn’t about the source of trauma, but I don’t think you can quantify any of these things - the source of trauma, the source of anxiety, or the source of attachment styles.
Imagine you have a very frugal parent. Maybe that early influence makes you a big spender. Maybe it makes you cheap. Maybe you spend normally, but you’re always anxious about not having enough. The same goes for other parental influence, good or bad. How does something like that show up on a chart? You can’t quantify it and you can’t generalize it.
That said: I do think your early friendships and early relationships are full of useful hints. There are a lot of things caused by your parents that might be camouflaged (e.x. because the parents are older) that your own early friendships and relationships reveal.
I could see childhood friends mattering a lot precisely because it's the thing that can save you from the problems with your parents.
Bad parents but good early friendships=turn out ok=don't show up in the data. Bad parents and bad early friendships = have it rough, show up in the data. The parents are the cause but the correlation to early friendships is even stronger because of the mediating effect.
I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.