Topics of generational abuse, or intergenerational abuse, have suddenly become relevant in my life. I have a parent I barely know and was criticizing one day, and I was getting all kinds of excuses which mainly boiled down to either "appeal to authority", "appeal to psychology", or "not my problem". At one point, I ragequit the conversation after making sure I had made a statement. I contacted my sister who knew all my relatives better than I had and dropped a brief comment along the lines of "I wonder why they are like this" and she responded with a "you're not being tolerant enough, they have generational abuse, cut everyone some slack". So maybe I've been influenced the wrong way when I say intergenerational abuse as a phenomenon or a concept sounds like the biggest load of BS I've ever heard.
I'm also into learning about a lot of culty topics, and recently I watched a video about one of those televangelists you see on TV that claim you can pray your stigmatized relationship orientations away, and the video was chronicling his life and how he grew up in an environment that would always put him down for his lamentations towards many of those practices, and it mentioned he became the monster he feared growing up. Genuine question here, how DOES someone become the monster they fear? What kind of free will does someone have to lack to inherit someone's monstrosity? Even when someone says it simply, such as when they say "that's just how I was raised", that raises a huge red flag, because if you don't like how you were treated/raised, why the heck are you (even consciously) imitating it?
In general, in a world where we expect free will to be valued and where that "bad times make good people" meme still floats around, how are people so unquestioning enough of their bad experiences that they consciously use the lack of their questioning of something they never liked as an excuse to do that very thing onto others?
I think it comes from the idea that regardless of how we think of ourselves, most of what we do follows our own long term habits and the models we have identified with, often from a young age. A person can even believe they are rejecting the past or their parent's influence and then behave exactly the same without noticing or even rationalizing afterward how this was not exactly what it looked like.
Your brain's best trick is to make you think your view of the world is complete and that you are using all the powers of your free reason, when in fact you only have a narrow slice of human experience behind you and are often responding to circumstances before you have even become fully aware of them or of your alternatives. Your mind fills in the blanks to support your view of yourself.
People learn a behavior because it is safe or effective in a certain condition of life, and then just keep using it even when it isn't suitable out of fear of changing something that works, however badly, or lack of imagination, or because they have identified with it as a part of their personality that they need to protect from real or imagined self-erasing forces. It feels weird and wrong and self-betraying in the moment to change how you do things, only afterwards you can maybe see the good side.
You care about these people, and it shows care to confront them when they are doing things they have said they want to avoid. But it will be a matter of many such confrontations and maybe better just saying Wow, that's not what I would have done! I guess I'm just ____ and prefer to _____ in that situation. You can reinforce some alternative options they might not have seen a lot of modeling for and in the future these options may come to mind with greater force in the actionable moment. Also, take notice when they do things well and see if you can figure out why they are more clear-headed in those cases. It will help your own feelings to see some bright spots.
Just to make this even longer... For my part I see this when I go to the doctor's. I always find myself very meek and even stupid in a doctor's office, for personal history reasons, but the solution for me is not to give myself a stern talking to about why I should stand up for myself and think critically about this important stuff. Rather, I tell myself to "channel" my old friend, who is very salty about the whole medical establishment, and just hearing his voice in my head helps keep me properly engaged through the appointments and not mentally bowing the whole time. Without his real example, I'm not sure any rational arguments would be enough to change how I actually behave. I couldn't even visualize myself doing it.
But, obviously I'm not super sure about free will, so I'm interested to see what other people say.