There are truths that feel uncomfortable because they dismantle the idea that we start from zero. One of them is this: we do not arrive in life emotionally blank. Long before we had words, memories, or awareness, we were already registering information. Not through the mind, but through the body.

You may carry fears, anxieties, or a persistent feeling of not belonging without being able to explain their origin. They are not always related to your visible childhood. Sometimes, the root lies even earlier. In the pregnancy. In your mother’s emotional history. In an internal climate that received you before you took your first breath.

This is not poetry or vague spirituality. It is biology, psychology, and cellular memory dialoguing with one another. Epigenetics has put it into scientific language. Human experience had already intuited it for centuries.

The important question is not whether this exists. The question is what you do with that information once you recognize it.

Your personal prequel: why look so far back

We tend to look for explanations in childhood. An event, a scene, a phrase. Something concrete we can point to. That brings relief. It organizes the narrative.

However, there are emotions that do not fully fit into that storyline. Fears without a scene. Sadness without a memory. A constant internal vigilance without an apparent threat.

Many people say: “I don’t remember anything from that stage, so it can’t influence me.” The body does not work that way. The nervous system does not wait for conscious permission to learn. It registers conditions. It registers climates. It registers safety or the absence of it.

Various studies show that babies gestated in contexts of loneliness, stress, rejection, or fear may develop a greater predisposition to anxiety, hypervigilance, or emotional insecurity. Not because they experienced something rationally, but because they were formed within a specific emotional field.

It is like being born with a radio already tuned to a certain frequency.

Maternal inheritance: the memory that travels through the body

Your story does not begin with you. It begins before.

The egg from which you emerged formed when your mother was in your maternal grandmother’s womb. This means that a part of you was present while your grandmother went through her own pregnancy, with her emotions, tensions, joys, and fears.

We do not inherit only DNA. We inherit context. Emotional regulation. Energetic and epigenetic information that leaves subtle marks on the way our system responds to the world.

From molecular biology we know something key: mitochondria—responsible for cellular energy—are inherited exclusively through the maternal line. All your cellular energy comes from that female lineage. It is not a metaphor. It is a biological fact.

That is why what is unresolved in the maternal line does not disappear. It transforms. Sometimes into repeated patterns. Other times into physical symptoms. Other times into emotional choices that seem to make no sense.

Science calls it transgenerational transmission. Life presents it as an opportunity: to see, to understand, and to release what did not begin with you.

Investigating your beginning without looking for culprits

This work is not done with quick questionnaires or prepackaged answers. It is done with honest curiosity.

If you can, ask. What was the pregnancy like? What was your mother experiencing at that time? Did she feel accompanied? Was there fear, loneliness, conflicts, grief, silence?

If you cannot ask, observe. Family stories often have gaps. Abrupt changes of subject. Nervous laughter. Silence also speaks.

Write everything down. Even what seems insignificant. Patterns do not appear all at once. They reveal themselves when given space.

If you feel emotions you cannot locate in your conscious biography, do not dismiss them. They may be echoes of a time when you did not yet exist as an individual, though you did as a forming body.

The welcome factor: how did you arrive?

There is a simple question that is often revealing:

Did you feel welcomed into this world?

I am not talking about explicit words. I am talking about an internal sensation. Of belonging. Of rootedness.

Many people live with a constant impression of being “just passing through,” of never quite fitting in, of needing to prove their worth to stay. When this feeling intersects with prenatal stories of ambivalence, fear, or rejection, the map begins to take shape.

Difficulties with attachment, extreme independence, or emotional dependence often have earlier roots than we think.

The abandonment wound: when support was not there

The abandonment wound is born from a deep perception: I was not emotionally held. It does not always imply physical absence. Sometimes mom or dad were there, though not emotionally available.

This wound often develops in the first years of life and is reinforced by implicit or explicit messages such as:

“Figure it out on your own”

“Don’t exaggerate”

“I don’t have time right now”

The internal message that remains is devastating: to be loved, I must adapt.

On an emotional level, fear of loneliness appears, easy crying, recurring sadness, and an intense need to be seen. Mentally, constant doubt arises and difficulty making decisions without external validation. In the body, it may manifest as lack of tone, a hunched posture, or a feeling of little internal support.

The internal phrase is often clear:

“Without you I am nothing.”

Abandonment, emptiness, and addictions: the attempt to fill what was missing

Abandonment leaves a void that is not reasoned. It is felt.

To avoid feeling it, we look for substitutes:

Food that soothes

Alcohol that numbs

Intense bonds that distract

Excessive work

Screens

Relationships that hurt less than silence

Addictions are not moral failures. They are survival strategies. At first they relieve. Then they become necessary. Finally, they define identity.

I have seen a deep connection between unnamed pain and forms of punishing the body. Eating unconsciously. Sleeping little. Drinking without limit. The body pays for what the soul could not express.

Even tattoos, in many cases, function as a way of saying: “This existed. This hurt. I am here.”

It is not about judging. It is about listening to what the body has been saying for years.

The way out: from punishment to care

The good news is that none of this is a sentence. The body that learned to survive can also learn to feel safe.

Healing does not mean erasing the story. It means stopping living from it.

When a conscious adult decides to care for, hold, and listen to the inner child who was not accompanied, something profound reorganizes. The nervous system learns another way of being in the world.

Not fast. Not perfect. Real.

A reflection to carry with you

You did not choose the context in which you began.

You can choose what to do with that information today.

Understanding your maternal inheritance is not about staying trapped in the past. It is about freeing yourself from repeating it without realizing it.

Sometimes, healing is as simple—and as challenging—as saying:

this did not begin with me, and even so I can transform it.