Inherited Fate by Noemi Orvos-Toth: First born? You're a leader Second child? You have lots of friends Younger sibling? You start revolutions!

The young couple sitting in the psychologist’s office were distraught. Their five-year-old had gone from being a cheerful, well-balanced child to one who woke up crying uncontrollably during the night. They were desperate to find out what was making her so distressed.

After talking to the parents, the psychologist asked their daughter to draw a picture of her family. The little girl happily drew all the family members, then turned the paper over and sketched out another figure. ‘Who is that?’ she was asked. ‘I don’t know, but they’re there,’ she answered.

Her parents were astonished. Yes, they admitted, there had been someone else – a child who had died of leukaemia before the little girl was born. They were so terrified of this tragedy happening again that they never spoke of it, either to their young daughter or to each other. How could she possibly have known about the dead child?

Psychologist Noemi Orvos-Toth tells this story to illustrate how our family history, the role we play in the family hierarchy and the secrets we keep from each other have a profound and lasting influence on our lives. In this riveting book she suggests that, to paraphrase Philip Larkin’s famous lines, it’s not just your mum and dad who mess you up, it’s also your ancestors.

This concept of ‘transgenerational trauma’ originated from studies of the children of Holocaust survivors. Even those who were shielded from the knowledge of their parents’ or grandparents’ suffering ‘bore the distant imprints of the horror’ in the form of anxiety disorders and depression.

She tells a story from her own family to show how ‘man hands on misery to man’ (Philip Larkin again). Her grandmother lost two babies before she had a healthy child – the author’s mother - who ‘my grandmother could never love freely and without anxiety’. As a child, Orvos-Toth was always aware that her mother and grandmother were terrified she would get ill, because in her family ‘an ordinary household accident or childhood illness immediately projected the horror of death’. Now she finds herself overprotecting her own children in the same way. ‘That’s how we pass on the torch of fear from generation to generation.’

Startlingly, Orvos-Toth maintains that our emotional development begins even before we are born, and that the circumstances of our conception often affect our later behaviour. One of the first questions she asks her clients when they start therapy is whether their parents were in a good relationship at the time of their conception and whether they were looking forward to having a baby. (Figures show that, worldwide, 56 per cent of couples respond to a positive pregnancy test with fear rather than joy.)

Growth in the womb is not only physical, she says, since ‘the embryo is alert, listening, responding, and above all learning’. If the mother is excitedly looking forward to the birth, the embryo swims in ‘happiness hormones’. If she is stressed by the idea of motherhood, this memory is stored in the embryo at a cellular level.

A Czech study of babies born in the 1960s showed that children from unwanted pregnancies had difficulty regulating their emotions and controlling their tempers. As adults, they were more likely to become alcoholics and criminals – ‘an initial lack of love acts like a thread that runs through our lives and it is difficult to unpick’.

Orvos-Toth is particularly interesting on the way your position in the birth order influences the way you develop, which she neatly encapsulates in the phrase: ‘no two children grow up in the same family – at least in a psychological sense’. Firstborn children, coddled and fussed over by anxious first-time parents, tend to be leaders rather than innovators, more likely to occupy senior positions and earn more than their younger siblings. More than half of American presidents were the firstborn.

Younger children, whose upbringing tends to be more relaxed and slapdash, constantly chafe against the older sibling’s power, and are more likely to lead revolutions and come up with innovative concepts. Second children are also keener to seek contacts outside the family and tend to have more friends than eldest siblings. As a second child who has always suspected that my sister never got over my arrival, I especially liked Orvos-Toth’s comment that the birth of a sibling ‘removes the firstborn from the throne of exclusivity’.

At times Inherited Fate reads like a plea for everyone to have some therapy, since ‘all our families are full of traumatised ancestors who were maltreated, abandoned, sexually abused, persecuted or expelled’. But fear not: the book does offer a DIY course to improve your mental health.

Each chapter ends with an extensive list of questions such as: ‘to what extent did you feel loved and accepted in your family?’, ‘how much did you feel that your parents understood you and sensed your inner world?’ and ‘how did your family let you know when you had touched on a taboo?’

She stresses how bad secrets are both for your psyche and for the family bond. ‘Memories we have tried to forget and suppress, fears we have tried to deny, burden our relationships,’ she writes. ‘It’s very rare that distorting the truth can fulfil a protective function, yet we still keep trying.’

The more stories children know about their family, even stories going back several generations, the more they will be able to cope with life. After the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, researchers talked to the children of those who had died. The ones who could talk easily about their family roots recovered faster and suffered less from post-traumatic stress. Family stories, endlessly retold and repeated and embellished, appear to operate like fenders on a boat, protecting us from the worst effects of a collision.

Seamlessly translated from Hungarian, Inherited Fate suggests that while we can’t undo the past, understanding it can positively influence our present and our future. This enthralling book will make you think more deeply about your own relationships, and the things that have been left unsaid.