2: Invisible Inheritance | Walking through Part 1 - What I Discovered About Anxiety

Dr. Nicole introduces part one of Invisible Inheritance, explaining why she begins with stories rather than tools or clinical definitions: healing requires understanding origins, and anxiety often follows generational patterns passed down as an “invisible inheritance.” She describes two qualitative interviews conducted for the book, including one with Anne, and a follow-up interview with Anne’s daughter. Key patterns included anxiety looking different across generations but feeling the same, protective coping strategies becoming contextless inherited patterns, and pervasive silence around emotions. Listeners are invited to reflect on how emotions and stress were modeled in their families with compassion, and the next episode previews part two on “Understanding the Legacy of Anxiety.” Launch day is April 21, and pre-orders are available at nicolethaxton.com.

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• Episode Transcript

  Disclaimer: Transcripts are AI Generated.

  [00:00:00] Before we ever had language for anxiety, we had stories: stories about what was dangerous, stories about what was expected of us, stories about what to do when things feel overwhelming, even stories and narratives and roles and rules. About what do we do with our emotions anyway? Do we talk about them? Do we not talk about them?

  And most of us are living inside stories we didn't even realize that we inherited. And that's what today's episode is all about. So welcome back to this mini series behind my upcoming debut book, Invisible Inheritance. Today we are stepping into part one of. The stories we carry, and this part is really the foundation for everything else.

  It's the foundation for the rest of the book. I firstly wanna say, [00:01:00] before we dive in, if you are back after listening to episode one. Way to go. You are a trooper, because as I listened back, that audio was terrible, so please bear with me. The first episode, I mentioned that one of my favorite sayings is "done is better than perfect," and I truly believe that, and I've been wanting to record and upload this miniseries for you, behind the scenes of the book.

  I recorded that first episode in my car with my Apple headphones, and the background that you were hearing was, I guess, the air conditioning, but it was so bad. So I'm gonna do a little bit better, I promise, you know, 1% better each, each audio, but we're keeping this very simple because honestly. Who has time for complicated, right?

  So today we're digging into the stories we carry, and some of you [00:02:00] at this point, if you pre-ordered the book, probably have it in hand. So you may have read The Stories We Carry, and you may have already kind of dug into that section. I'm going to be keeping it high level today because. Even in these episodes, I don't want to give away too much, but why did I start Invisible Inheritance with stories?

  So I didn't want to start this book with tools intentionally. I didn't want it to start with coping skills. I honestly didn't even want to start it so much about anxiety. There was a little bit about that in the intro. Sort of defining the terms, I'm putting my research hat on because. I think that way after doing research for my doctoral studies, we always wanna start with defining the terms.

  And I sort of do that in Introduction One, and I lay it out for [00:03:00] you, where are we going with this book? But I didn't want to dig into the clinical stuff because. Honestly, I just find that a little boring. And I know it's crazy because most of the time people starting therapy who experience anxiety, they want all the tools, right?

  They wanna be fixed, they wanna be healed, and. The first thing that we have to wrap our heads around is that you are not broken, therefore you do not need to be fixed. And I write that in the book and I talk about that a lot, but I didn't want this book, although it is a guide and has a lot of tools throughout, I really wanted it to start with stories.

  Because what I've seen over and over again, both in my life and in my clinical work, is this: You can't heal what you don't understand the origin of. So throughout the book, I write a lot about awareness and awareness building and how important that is.

  When we are healing, [00:04:00] a lot of us are trying to manage our anxiety, but we haven't really explored or asked, where did this begin? And I'm not just talking about in your life, because there's certainly key anxiety stories or moments. But even before you, because anxiety doesn't just show up one day out of nowhere.

  It follows patterns, it follows environments, it follows nervous system dysregulation, and it follows stories, and that's the hypothesis throughout the book, Invisible Inheritance. That anxiety is generational and it is passed down in an invisible inheritance. That's where I got the title. But awareness is key.

  So again, anxiety doesn't just show up out of nowhere, and oftentimes we don't want to maybe dig into. The ways that anxiety has come up in our [00:05:00] life, that can be painful, that can be challenging. So we want to do this with a lot of grace for ourselves and for our family members. And I give that disclaimer at the beginning of the book.

  This is not a book about blaming our parents. Okay? It's not that at all. And I typically have to talk to clients in therapy about that as well. That we're not here to blame anyone. But what going back and exploring these stories and patterns does for us is helps us understand more deeply. We really can't heal or move forward from or manage what we don't understand.

  So first things first. I mentioned in the last episode that this part one, the stories we carry, consisted of two. Interviews that I conducted for the book specifically, these interviews took place about a year ago, probably, and when the book [00:06:00] idea was downloaded into my brain at 1:40 in the morning, as I mentioned, in February of 2025, I knew that I would want to start this with a narrative.

  Side note, I conducted qualitative research for my doctoral dissertation, and for those of us who are not such research nerds in the room, qualitative research is stories and quantitative research is numbers and statistics. So when I was defending, or you know, going through my dissertation process with my doctorate work, I thought, I of course want to do qualitative study.

  And I interviewed counseling supervisors. My research was about conflicts in the supervision relationship, and I had used these narrative qualitative measures to conduct interviews and create my study out of them. So I really tapped back into that, and it's [00:07:00] been about six or seven years since I did that research.

  But I tapped back into my sort of nerdy qualitative research methodologies and knew that from the get-go I was gonna conduct these interviews. I knew I would have to transcribe them and dig through them and see what I could find. So as I started doing that, I realized that very quickly this was one of the most meaningful parts for me of writing this book.

  Honestly, was conducting these interviews and sitting in on these conversations was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life and my career. And I feel like that's a little dramatic, but it's not. And you'll realize why if and when you read the book. But what I expected to get out of these interviews and what the process actually taught me and what I saw through the [00:08:00] themes of these interviews just shocked me.

  Honestly, I went in thinking I would hear about anxiety and there would be similar language used, awareness, insight. But what I found was I really had to, as a sort of putting my research hat on, think about anxiety in a new way, in a generational way. That I've never really had to think about anxiety before.

  Okay, So how did anxiety show up in these interviews and what were the interviews like? Okay, so I recorded these interviews, both of them. The first interview is with Anne.

  Anne is in her eighties, and she shared the story of her mother and her grandmother and the trauma and anxiety that they had experienced and passed down. She shared [00:09:00] a very beautiful, vulnerable, rich in detail narrative storytelling about her own life and anxiety. And I followed that interview up with her daughter by interviewing her daughter.

  Powerful, powerful stuff. So how did anxiety show up in these interviews? Well, it showed up as a high need for control, which anxiety loves control. Okay, if anxiety can control something, anything, a person, a situation. Then anxiety feels really good about that. You know, it's things that we can't control that anxiety doesn't like.

  So anxiety also showed up as emotional distance, as avoidance, avoiding emotions, not being able to connect with others emotionally. Particularly with these two women, it showed up as over-functioning, [00:10:00] and both of them are. Who I would consider an anxious achiever, which is a shout out to my weekly newsletter since 2021, The Anxious Achievers Club.

  All of us in that club are self-identified anxious achievers. Me being the club president, and anxiety often shows up in over-functioning. We do more, we do more, we do more. And really, it's ultimately back to that first one of high control, but we saw that a lot in these interviews as well. Next was silence.

  So anxiety has a way, trauma has a way of silencing us. And the book has a core theme throughout of reclaiming your voice. I have a chapter called Reclaiming Your Autonomy. I believe that's the full chapter name. There are a lot of chapters in this book. Another side note, so I [00:11:00] have not said this yet, but the chapters are very short.

  They're very brief. They're very, very punchy. This is not a 10 chapter book. This is, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of chapters. 

  But back to silence and how that was a big theme, a core theme throughout the book: being silenced, reclaiming your voice, using your voice.

  That is a chapter title. Next was perfectionism. This really came out of the interviews. Perfectionism and people-pleasing, which I see as kind of sisters. They're not twins, but they're sisters. So typically when we are. Perfectionism, it is all about control. Okay? Controlling how others see you or controlling how you feel.

  on the inside, if your insides feel very chaotic, you can sort of control everything else through perfectionism. People pleasing, on the other hand, is [00:12:00] often. As I said, they're sisters. They're holding hands. People pleasing helps others be okay with you. It makes you feel better in the world, regulated, right?

  Because if people are not okay with you, then you don't feel okay. So throughout these interviews, the theme that came up is that no one really questioned this anxiety. Okay? Trauma and scarcity and anxiety were very normal in this family line, right?

  And you'll get to read the rich narratives of these women in the book. So there were a few patterns that stood out across the interviews. I'm just gonna go over a few patterns that came up. The first one is that anxiety looked different in each generation, but it felt the same.

  So the behaviors changed, you know, whether it was silencing or mental illness or addiction, alcoholism. [00:13:00] The behaviors changed over functioning, but the internal experience—the fear, the pressure, the hyper-awareness, the shame—that was all consistent. So all of us can look very different in our anxiety, and I think that's what I came to with these interviews and throughout the book, is that anxiety feels a certain way on the inside, but what we do with it can look really different.

  I've seen that in my clients, and I've seen that in my own life. The second was that many of the coping strategies that were developed across these generations were very protective. Okay? They made sense. So our coping strategies help us survive something difficult or unpredictable or unsafe. They make sense, the coping strategies, but over time.

  When [00:14:00] these strategies get passed down, they're missing the context, right? So in one generation, if there is a coping skill of overfunctioning because of anxiety or whatever it was, or maybe abuse. That can get passed down, but the circumstances are completely different in the next generation, right? So what started out as protection, what started out as functioning, becomes a pattern.

  And the third thing that I noticed. I already mentioned this, but it truly was just how much silence existed. I write about women of the first working generation, so this was Anne, who was born in the 1940s, and women in this first working generation were very silent, and the women in their generation before that as well.

  It was perform at work, perform at [00:15:00] home, take care of the kids, take care of everyone else, do it with a smile on your face. And there really wasn't much room or time for emotions. You know, it just was sort of about survival, So a lot of them believed, you know, this is just who I am, this is how our family operates.

  And there wasn't really a language about it. It was just a continuation of patterns. So I want to share a couple of themes, memes from Ann's story, and basically Ann's grandmother—I write about this, so I'm just giving you a little taste. Okay. She grew up in a very wealthy family. Okay. But married an Irish immigrant who was very abusive.

  Okay. There wasn't any sort of safety, [00:16:00] physically, emotionally. There wasn't consistency. So when she had her daughter, Ann's mom. They were very poor. There was a lot of poverty. There was a lot of abuse. There was a lot of just survival, and Ann's mom had to become the caretaker for her mother when her father died.

  She had a neurological disorder and she had to take care of her. So she learned to control everything, right? She learned that love looked like structure and performance and caretaking, and doing things right. She grew up in a very abusive environment, and as the story goes, as you will see in the book, it's a very vulnerable story narrative.

  She went on to become very abusive herself toward Anne's father. [00:17:00] And this was passed down. Nothing was stable. There was a lot of abuse and poverty that Anne grew up in. So the older generation, according to Anne, handled things by not talking about them. Feelings were minimized.

  They were dismissed. They were avoided. And what happens is the next generation learns similar patterns. I shouldn't feel this way. I don't need to talk about feelings. I should just handle everything. Kind of gets into this parentification role where they're kind of like mini adults, and that's what Anne's daughter shared was her experience.

  So oftentimes these emotions, they just had nowhere to go. They weren't expressed, and they eventually had to come out. And what happens, I'm sort of giving away a little bit of the book, but [00:18:00] Ann is the cycle breaker for her family, which is why it was such an honor to interview her. She decided in her fifties to start therapy, 

  Was really revolutionary and ended up changing her family line forever. And that's what part one of the book is all about, giving you just a little taste. I hope you're excited to read these stories. They were incredibly powerful for me to conduct, listen back to, transcribe, and write about. I really hope they impact you in a huge way.

  So bringing it back to you, as you are listening today, I want you to get curious about your own story for a minute. Not in a blaming way, but in an understanding way. So let's ask, what did anxiety [00:19:00] look like in your family growing up? Or feelings in general, right? Were they talked about?

  Were they ignored? Did they show up as control or perfectionism or people-pleasing or avoidance, maybe emotional distance, maybe other unhealthy coping strategies, right? What was modeled for you? How did your family members, how did your parents handle stress and fear and overwhelm? Because for many of us, myself included, and I write about this throughout the book, we didn't just inherit anxiety.

  We're inheriting ways of how we respond to anxiety and how we heal from that. And this is the part that matters so much, because this work is, again, not about blaming the generations before you. We really have to come to this work with humility and a lot of grace, knowing that they were doing the best they could with what they had and what they knew [00:20:00] at the time.

  This is truly just about understanding. It's about understanding your family with love and with compassion, and I have a chapter. In the book called Growing Compassion for Yourself, and I also have one that is Growing Compassion for Your Mother, right? They were doing the best they could with what they had and what they knew.

  Because you can see these patterns, you can begin to separate from them. You can ask, what do I want to carry forward and what gets stopped with me? And awareness is where that change begins. So after Part One, The Stories We Carry, we shift into Part Two of the book, Understanding the Legacy of Anxiety.

  How this is the how. Okay, how and why. Why, why are we the way we are? Right? And we're gonna get into that in the [00:21:00] next episode. I really hope that you are enjoying this format of walking through each of the different parts of Invisible Inheritance as we are making our way to launch day. And if you take anything from this episode.

  Your anxiety didn't start with you, but your awareness of it can change everything. Genuinely, I believe. Everything, and not just for you, but for generations and generations to come. So we can be the cycle breakers. And I'm getting ahead of myself because breaking the cycle is part three, so stay tuned.

  But if this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with someone who might need it If you haven't already, you can still pre-order Invisible Inheritance. This work and everything I shared today goes so much deeper inside the book. Oh my gosh, I'm just giving you a taste, [00:22:00] and you can pre-order on my website, nicolethaxton.com.

  Launch day is April 21st. In the next episode, we are gonna talk about how anxiety is carried, understanding the legacy of anxiety, not just through stories, but through the nervous system and many other ways. I'll see you in the next one.

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