Past Present: Strengthening All RelationshipsSample

It’s impossible for kids to separate themselves emotionally from the harm inflicted on them by others. When bad things happen to us as children, we don’t have the maturity or capacity to process those events from a rational, logical perspective. Instead, we try to make sense of it all. And the easiest way to make sense of it is to internalize the blame and create a story that leaves us responsible for things that were not our fault.

If a parent beat us or verbally abused us when we were young, we didn’t have the ego strength to say “What’s wrong with Mom?” or “What’s Dad’s problem?” Instead, we make sense of our plight by concocting a story to explain our experience to ourselves:

• “I deserve this.”

• “Mom yells at me all the time because I am bad.”

• “I made Dad so mad he had to hit me.”

• “I am a disappointment.”

• “It’s my fault my parents got divorced.”

Sadly, too often we didn’t invent these stories out of thin air. Our parents may have actually said these things to us to ease their own consciences. This makes the untruths all the more powerful and hard to get rid of. They’re the very stories that become our messages of the wound, contributing to our emotional and relational pain as adults.

Most of us enter adulthood with some residual shame that was instilled in us in our formative years. We often fully believe we were responsible for what happened to us when we were kids. We believe (consciously or subconsciously) our negative inputs were our fault.

But this is the opposite of the truth!

No child ever deserves to be abused, mistreated, touched in the wrong way, shamed, discarded, embarrassed, discounted, overly pressured, neglected, left unprotected, or ignored. No child causes a divorce. No child causes the pain inflicted on him or her. Never. Never. Never! What happened to you as a child was not your fault. You are not responsible for the painful inputs that happened to you. Hold on to that truth!