Recover or Repeat

How healthy was your house growing up? Were you blessed with nurturing relational parents that shared God's love with you and modeled how to parent appropriately? Well then stop reading right now and thank God for them.

However, if you weren't so blessed, you have a choice to make. You can recover from your families past examples or you are destined to repeat it with your kids. It will be hard to break those patterns of dysfunction. If you want to be the transitional generation rest assured it will take God's help and discipline on your part. If you don't, you will see the same dysfunction in your children when they are in relationships with their own family.

I am a transitional generation person. My family is dysfunctional as far back as we can gather data. Alcoholism, abuse, incest, codependency, divorces, incarceration. You name, my past generations are entrenched in it. However, God got a hold on my heart at a tender age and chose to break the pattern.

I have had to work hard to avoid some of the environmental programing I grew up with. However, it is paying off. Most of the dysfunction from my past family is not yet showing up in my kids. It is well worth taking the hit for your kids and doing the hardest work. Your children will be able to grow into healthy adults with families of their own. They will model healthy choices to their children and so on. You, with God by your side, will have changed to course of your family history.

Your legacy will be functional individuals that love the Lord and can relate to important people in their life in healthy ways.

Do the work! Do the work with God! We can help and He can help. Whatever you need to do, do it. Your children are counting on you to not repeat but to recover!

What are some of your battles with breaking through the dysfunctional patterns. Share it with us here in a comment or email me and we can talk it through. It is not to late to join the Confident Parenting class on Tuesday night. Much of this reflection is from the first chapter and last night's group time.

Bless you all for the journey you are on to create a legacy of your own.