Adolescence, Identity, & the Weight of Legacy Burdens

September 3, 2025 –  Adolescence is a threshold time—a season of becoming when the question Who am I? moves to the center of life. It is both exhilarating and disorienting, a period where experimentation, conflict, and discovery intersect. Identity is not simply discovered during these years but actively constructed, through trial and error, rebellion and belonging, imitation and invention. It is also during adolescence that young people first come face-to-face with not only their own desires and possibilities, but also the echoes of the past—the family patterns, cultural expectations, and inherited wounds that shape their becoming. In the language of Internal Family Systems (IFS), these inherited wounds are known as legacy burdens: beliefs, emotions, or patterns of behavior passed down through generations that become embedded in one’s inner system, even when they no longer serve growth or wellbeing.

Trying on Selves: The Chameleon years

I think most of us can agree that figuring out who we are is an intense process during adolescence. Many of the markers of adolescence and quite a few adolescent parts that get activated point to this process. The Shapeshifter or the Chameleon nature of teenagers can be disorienting as they try on a variety of often conflicting personas. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up. Their definitive lean toward peer acceptance, the agony of being left out of a particular group—these are ways they explore who they are and where they belong. The activities and issues they throw themselves into—art, theater, sports, skateboarding, gangs, gaming—are also identities experienced, discarded, or held onto and assimilated into the whole.

One of the less obvious ways that identity forms during these years, and continues well beyond adolescence, is how young people come into relationship with the burdens handed down to them. Sometimes this takes the form of rebellion. As with a young person who recently ranted at me about his family of origin and what he wanted to disown. His words carried anger, self-righteousness, and the black-and-white perspective that is so common in adolescence. The rant itself was reactive and immature, but it also revealed something profound: his attempt to name and reject legacy burdens.

Teenagers must get some emotional distance between themselves and their family; between their identity as a family member and their identity apart from their family; between how they experience themselves at home and how they experience themselves with peers. They also begin the often painful process of dismantling the pedestal upon which their parents sit. The ambivalence here is intense. More than dismantling a pedestal, they must grapple with the reality that their parents are human—tragically flawed, marvelously wonderful, and deeply complicated.

Naming Legacy Burdens out loud

So it is with so many of the young people I’ve worked with over the years. But this particular rant struck me differently. It wasn’t his parents, specifically, that he railed against; it was family patterns passed down the patrilineal line. What I heard, more clearly than ever before, was an adolescent naming the weight of legacy burdens—out loud, with vehemence and with heartache.

Why would I want to honor a name that carries so much passed-down pain? asked the boy in his strident voice, and yet there was also a painful hitch in his voice. How many ways do kids give us this message? How often do they tell us quite clearly what those burdens are? From the father shamed by his father and his father before him, the son says, “I’m never going to be good enough.” From the mother whose mother and grandmother all had husbands who abused them, the daughter says, “I’m sick and tired of you telling me to be nice!” From the mother born into a family where anger meant that you were “bad,” the son says nothing but turns that anger on himself, quietly self-harming in his dark bedroom. These are the moments when adolescent identity collides with inherited trauma.

Systemic burdens and historical wounds

Taking a step back, we can see these individual struggles reflected in larger cultural patterns. The trends and concerns of today’s young people—rising rates of depression and anxiety, physical health issues, the epidemic of gun violence perpetrated in schools—can also be read as cultural burdens being acted out. For too long, mental health has been approached narrowly, within the confines of a therapist’s office, as if depression or anxiety were isolated symptoms of one individual’s psyche. But what if depression is a symptom of something much larger than one person’s sad spirit, even larger than one family’s dysfunction? What if anxiety is the natural outgrowth of a culture that insists we must do more, earn more, and acquire more without end?

For youth who are members of disenfranchised and oppressed groups, legacy burdens are even more entrenched. These burdens are historical, systemic, and reinforced by structures that remain resistant to change. When governments put up barriers to addressing systemic injustice, they reinforce the very injuries young people are struggling to shed. Yet the central questions remain the same for all adolescents, regardless of privilege or marginalization: Who am I? Who am I becoming? Who am I outside the confines of my family? What burdens must I give up, and which ones must I continue to carry?

Healing across generations

Adolescence is never just about one person’s unfolding. It is about family lines, cultural scripts, and collective wounds pressing against the tender work of identity formation. If we listen carefully, adolescents are not only telling us who they are becoming; they are also giving us a mirror, showing us which burdens have outlived their time. When we honor this naming—when we allow adolescents to both wrestle with and release what is not theirs to carry—we participate in something larger than identity formation. We participate in healing across generations.

Photo by: Oleksandr Umanskyi