I couldn’t wait to get out. By the time I was 16, I was counting down the days until I could leave home. On the outside, I looked fine. I was thriving in high school, but no one, including myself, fully knew the toll that growing up in a dysfunctional family had taken on me. Both my parents grew up in alcoholic, physically abusive families, and so as often happens, my father became an emotionally and verbally abusive alcoholic and my mother a codependent. When I left home for college, I went as far away as I could convince my parents to let me go, but I don’t think they knew that I was running away from them.
When I finally escaped, I thought I was free—free to leave my past behind and seize the unscripted future in front of me. As a believer, I thought faith, grit, and intelligence was all I needed to overcome the patterns in my extended family. I was the survivor! Yet, I was unaware of how my experiences in my family of origin wounded me in the core of my being, and I was carrying those wounds into my future.
No matter how functional or dysfunctional our families were, we are all profoundly affected by our upbringing. God created us to be known and loved, and He created the family as the environment for this to happen. Within a dysfunctional family, children are deprived of the safe, loving environment that is essential in order to grow into adults who love God, self, and others well. These childhood experiences shape our identity and follow us into adulthood. Robert Subby, therapist and addictions expert, in Lost in the Shuffle, describes that children in dysfunctional families accumulate relational, spiritual, and emotional brokenness.
When we are unwilling to face the pain from our past, it surfaces in destructive ways within ourselves and toward others. Charles Whitfield, MD in Healing the Child Within, describes that we may face emotional problems such as anxiety, fear, anger, emptiness, shame or numbness, or a variety of physical symptoms such as aches, pains, and gastrointestinal issues. Furthermore, when we are unable to grieve our losses, we often find ourselves in dysfunctional relationships with a tendency toward self-destructive addictions or other destructive behaviors. Our wounds inevitably affect our relationship with God, who is seen through the broken lens of our family of origin.
Our spiritual journeys have as much to do with knowing ourselves as with knowing God. If we desire for God to transform us, we must know ourselves. As children of dysfunctional families, much of our identity is buried under wounds and defense mechanisms that were developed to protect us from further wounds. We essentially don’t know who we are. In order to let God into the deepest places in our soul, we must be willing to face our painful pasts to uncover our true identity in Christ and then grow fully into the person that God has made us to be.
For many years I was stuck. I was stuck in my marriage. Stuck in my friendships. Stuck in my faith. It wasn’t until I began revisiting my past and understanding the pain and loss from my childhood that I began to see a new kind of transformation in my life. It took a difficult season in my marriage and family to wake me up to the hard work that I needed to do in my soul.
HEALING FROM OUR DYSFUNCTIONAL PAST
1. Identify the Hurt
When we grow up in dysfunctional families we accumulate numerous loses over time that we often are unable to process or grieve without help. As children and then as adults we can use defense mechanisms to cover up our losses such as denying or avoiding the loss, intellectualizing it, repressing our feelings, or using addictions to medicate our pain.
To heal, we need to be willing to revisit the painful parts of our past. Journaling, sharing our story with a trusted friend, small group, or support group, or seeing a therapist are safe ways to begin exploring our past. I have found each of these elements invaluable to my healing. I meet with an excellent therapist that knows more about me than anyone else in the entire world. I have a dear friend with whom I have shared openly and authentically my grief, anger, struggles, fears, and victories. Her unrelenting empathy, encouragement, and love has been a lifeline for me. Journaling has been the key tool that I’ve used to identify and process my past and feelings as well as pour out my heart to God. Finally, my small group has been a constant source of support as I’ve struggled through my healing process. Still, my journey is not done, and I doubt it ever will be.
2. Grieve the Loss
When we allow ourselves to feel the pain of our past, identify the losses, and share the losses with a safe person(s), we are able to free ourselves from the pain. Much of grieving is simply feeling our feelings related to our losses that we were never able to feel before. Grief has its own timing. For many of us who have hidden our emotions and tried to forget our experiences, grieving will be a long process. Steven Tracy, professor of theology and ethics and founder of Mending the Soul, says that “as we grow in emotional health, we will feel more, and as we do so, we’ll increasingly be able to recognize what our emotions are telling us about the state of our souls.”
The thought and process of grieving can seem overwhelming when our pain is so great. I have cried more tears than imagined possible, but I have discovered my heavenly Father who “wept” and is “acquainted with grief.” During the most difficult times, I’ve pictured myself collapsed on the floor with God covering me or as a child crawling into His lap with His arms enveloping me. Psalm 91:4 says, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.” Our heavenly Father is with us in our grief. Allowing God to be with us as we share our unedited pain and tears with Him, and then allowing Him to love and accept us as we are is foundational to our healing.
3. Change Old Patterns
The defense mechanisms that we developed as children to survive within our dysfunctional families eventually stop serving us as adults especially, not only in our relationships with those closest to us, but in our relationship with our heavenly Father. In fact, Christian psychiatrist, Curt Thompson, indicates that 70 percent of marital problems are issues related to our childhood and family of origin. As children, we learn the rules of our dysfunctional families, and we take on roles that serve us to protect us within the dysfunctional system. As we take a closer look at our childhood and ourselves we will begin to see areas in our lives that are not working—these old rules, patterns, and roles that need to be abandoned.
Steven Tracy says, “The goal of facing our brokenness is not to wallow in the past but to reclaim it in such a way that it loses its destructive grip on the present.” Many of us have difficulties giving and receiving love, resolving conflict, trusting, and taking care of ourselves. We may have low self-esteem, control issues, fear of abandonment, or boundary problems. These are all issues that can be explored one by one, again with trusted friends, a group, or a therapist over time.
I needed to take a painful look at my own issues surrounding shame, fear of intimacy, attempts to control others and my environment, and codependency. It can feel difficult and even humiliating to look at our own sin and brokenness, but it is only when we are willing to stand naked in front of God that we can fully experience His grace. We will never be 100 percent free from the effects of our past, but God can heal and transform us when we live in truth.
4. Live in Freedom
It takes hard, exhausting work to heal the wounds from our past, but as we heal we find ourselves, unique, flawed, yet fully loved by our heavenly Father who has always been with us. When we live as fully loved children of God, we can accept ourselves free of shame and guilt, and we can step into being more of who God made us to be. Healing and transformation are never finished. As children of dysfunctional families, the wounds from our past have weighed us down, and we often don’t even realize the weight of what we have been carrying for most of our lives. As a teen, God gave me the verse, Psalm 147:3 which says: “[God] heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
God never wastes our pain. Through my journey from childhood to adulthood, God pursued me as my Father and spoke to me my identity as His daughter. I have experienced God as faithful and close at every stage, and my faith has grown stronger through the struggle. I never would have experienced God’s provision and power so dramatically in the absence of my great need. And, I am learning to feel and express myself in new ways, to minister without shame, and to fully embrace my unique gifts. I’ve seen God change me miraculously as well as gradually. My life and ministry have a unique shape and depth because of my pain. I’m seeing God break patterns in me and my family that likely have been with us for generations.
My prayer for all of us who are adult children of dysfunctional families is that we may claim the freedom that is ours in Christ, not wasting the moments from our past, but allowing God to bring wholeness and new life into our beings which will in turn enrich the lives of those around us.
