I’ve talked to a lot of people who grew up in broken homes, and there tends to be a common trait that holds them back in life.
No matter if they were abandoned or abused in other ways, they tend to carry their parents’ flaws as if it’s their own, and they measure their value based on how they were treated.
This is because it’s habitual for them to point the finger back at themselves when they lack the understanding as to why they’re being mistreated or why their world is crumbling around them.
Children often ask what they did wrong when the adults around them destroy their world and never properly reassure them that the responsibility belongs to the adults running the show, and not the child participant.
Because children can’t adequately comprehend adult relationship dynamics or behavioral problems, they improperly answer the question that circles their mind: “Was this my fault?”
What inevitably happens to the child who determines themselves as being the reason for adult dysfunction is that they measure their value as a human being based on their treatment.
In other words, if the people who created them can’t even treat them properly, then maybe they aren’t of significant value.
Every child is deserving of love and a baseline of innocence, but when both are ripped from their grasp, they will enter a developmental territory they are unable to navigate alone.
If I were to use myself as an example, decades of self-reflection and therapy were invested to fully absorb (and believe wholeheartedly) that it was not my fault that my father wasn’t there nor was his absence a determination of my value.
It’s the hardest hurdle to leap over because it’s the oldest and most entrenched narrative about who we are.
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It’s a habitually repetitive narrative that many children have been repeating to themselves quietly and every time they fail at something or life doesn’t go their way, this mantra of their low value gets validated.
This is an internal minefield that is unfair for children to navigate and when they make a misstep, the adults focus on the explosion rather than why there are so many explosives lying at the feet of our children.
I tend to see struggling children responding in one of two ways in how they express it: They either express it internally or externally.
Meaning, they display their frustrations or low self-esteem externally, by punching walls or hurting people, or, they stay incredibly quiet about what ails them because the battlefield is within.
I was more often an internal fighter and even if I expressed traits of being depressed, I would always claim that everything was fine when it wasn’t. I mean, how could they prove otherwise if I’m not doing anything externally?
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The external fighters always get found out but the world punishes them for not being able to handle the world their parent or parents created for them. Their hopelessness is on full display in the most anti-social ways possible, but we lament the symptom and not the root problem.
Beyond having parents be accountable for their failures, it’s important to rewrite the script of this child’s internal dialogue.
We must stare in the face of forgotten and mistreated children and verbalize that they are not responsible for their parents’ shortcomings.
They are of value because they are made in the image of God and this value is innate for every child brought into this world.
But there is to be a strong emphasis with understanding that their value doesn’t increase or decrease depending on someone else’s negligence.
Express sorrow for them being born into an unfortunate circumstance but remind them that where they start in the race doesn’t need to determine how they finish.
And explain to them that just because someone important in your life doesn’t love you doesn’t mean you should be equally loveless to yourself.
I was able to move forward when I completely understood that my father didn’t love me, not because I am less than, but because he chose not to.
My life excelled when I recognized how many people do care for me and that fixating on the negligence of one man, my father, made me negligent in appreciation for what love I did receive.
Your parent(s) may have failed you but you don’t need to fail yourself.
"dysfunctional" and "families" are kinda joined at the hip -- very few, if any, are perfect, qualify as the Waltons or the Cleavers. Reminds me of Erma Bombeck's "Family: The Ties That Bind. And Gag!"; of, author unknown, "Running With Scissors": and of Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue".
Reminds me too of a couplet or two from Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayham's The Rubyiat about Man asking God for forgiveness, and of Man granting God the same.