You can spend your life avoiding becoming your parents and still let that avoidance decide who you become.

Defining yourself against someone leaves them in control of the map. Every decision made specifically to be unlike a parent is still a decision made with reference to them, and it can lead somewhere just as unsuited to you as their path would have been. The opposite of a life you did not want is not automatically a life you do want.

When you find yourself choosing something because it is not what they did, pause and ask what you would choose if they had never existed. Sometimes the answers match. When they do not, you have found a place where an old reaction has been making your decisions.