Some of us dealt with major childhood abuse, while some of us dealt with parents who overindulged us. We may have been raised with a heavy hand, lack of discipline or an absentee parent. Our fathers might have been adulterers and our mothers may have been emotionally unavailable or volatile. We might have been raised with substance abuse, whether it was illegal or just too much partying in the home. We might have been raised as the least-favorite sibling. Our father might have been extremely hard on us or maybe we didn’t even know who he was. Our mothers might have coddled us for far too long, as she tried to feed some need inside.
We couldn’t possibly name every scenario. What I can say is this; whichever one describes you, if you do not heal any lingering pain from your upbringing, you will bring it into your relationships and into the way you raise your own children. As adults, we either replicate or eradicate how we were raised. We rarely go into a place of balance. Keeping things in perspective is not easy when you are choosing to parent completely different than how you yourself were raised.
A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?
Proverbs 18:14
