ABSTRACT
Nearly everyone was raised and influenced by a family of one type or other. Family experience is carried over multiple generations and becomes a Weltanschaungen or worldview—a set of unspoken, largely unlabeled assumptions about the nature of relationships. Because these patterns were communicated from birth, they were present before language developed. Unlabeled experience is typically uncritically internalized. Dimensions of daily life such as the acceptability of emotional expression, closeness versus distance with friends or acquaintances, and style of handling crises are all shaped by multigenerational family history.
