I know blaming your parents sounds a little cliche, but I read recently that even your ability to find happiness is often determined by that of your parents. So not only do your parents help to give you all your physical attributes and pass down certain habits and traits, but they help to determine your emotional disposition also. Never mind those thousands you spend in therapy, you may possibly never be happy!

Environment is definitely a factor and depending on how much time you spend with one parent or the other could also help determine how much your parents rub off on you. There are so many things that we get from our parent’s yet aren’t even aware of, much less that we can control. Not saying I don’t believe in the power of choice, but isn’t choosing to not be like our parent’s sort of like fighting the wind?

I remember someone looked at me and said, “now I know where you get your laugh from” after they had met my mother and heard her laugh. I’m like, really? At the age of 30 I didn’t think I did too much of anything like my mother (okay, I knew some things, lol). Take it a step further and go back to your grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Since we are insiders, it’s much harder to tell than an outside that wow, I am really like some of the people in my family. Both of my parent’s enjoyed writing or said they had a gift for it, hmmmm. I have my mom’s short temper in certain instances, I know that. Both my parent’s are eerily alike with dry sense of humors and their fascination with electric toothbrushes that I happened not to inherit.

So when people go around with chips on their shoulder’s towards their parents, or don’t like them, you gotta know that either they can’t like themselves too much or they are just in denial that they themselves are pretty much just like them. Life does has a way of playing those types of cruel jokes.