Episode 13: Breaking Free From Generational Curses: A Journey into Reshaping Family Traditions and Values

Ever felt trapped in a web of repetitive patterns that seem to haunt your family? The ones that you swore you wouldn't repeat, yet find yourself unconsciously mirroring? You are not alone. We're taking a brave expedition into the heart of generational curses - the invisible shackles that bind us to our family's past mistakes and struggles. It's a difficult and emotionally fraught journey, one that often invites criticism and resistance from the older generation. Yet, it's a journey that the millennial generation, with all its challenges and perceived brokenness, must undertake for the sake of our children.

Change is hard, especially when it involves confronting deeply ingrained family traditions and values. But don't let that stop you. This episode is about standing up against beliefs that no longer serve us, about questioning and reshaping patterns of behaviour that have been passed down through generations. It's about finding strength and guidance in the gentle nature of Jesus towards children - a beacon of hope in our endeavour to create a better life for our kids. We invite you to join the conversation, to find solidarity and understanding, and hopefully, inspiration to break free from the chains of your generational curses.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hello and welcome to All Our Little Messes, a podcast focused on healing through intentional conversations about parenting, relationships, religion and more. I am your host, veronica Winrod, and I'm so happy to have you here listening in on my thoughts today. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to All Our Little Messes. This week we're taking a little break from talking about purity, culture and obligation sex and we're just going to be discussing the problems, like the emotional issues, that people who are breaking generational curses face on a daily basis. This episode is just going to be kind of just a, you know, an episode kind of focused on solidarity and trying to build camaraderie among us, because it is very, it is very hard and it's a daily struggle for us and it's a daily struggle that a lot of us have to hide in order to, you know, put on that that brave front of we've got it all together, we've totally got this figured out. You know we're doing this and it's not easy and sometimes we don't got this. Sometimes we just feel like we're falling apart and you know we're facing problems within. You know our family structures and our family dynamics are changing and that's, you know, a big struggle for us there. And then, you know, we're facing our own emotional turmoil as well, because we're going against years and years of internal programming, trying to change things for ourselves or for our kids or for you know, for whatever reason, and so this is kind of an episode, just that we'll talk about that and kind of bring all of that out into the open, because, again, it is very hard and it's a struggle that a lot of us seem to try to hide in order to, you know, look strong to the outside world. So, in order to talk about generational curses, I feel like it's important that we understand what exactly they are.

Speaker 1: 2:53

So when I, you know, when I've Googled what is a generational curse, the first definition that popped up was a generational curse is a pattern of negative or sinful behavior that is passed down from one generation to another, and it's a. It can be anything from you know, a pattern of behavior, or you know religion, or anything like violence, you know domestic violence, or or divorce, or you know poverty, you know or alcoholism, or drug abuse, anything like that. It is passed down from one generation to the next, and so and it just becomes, you know, almost a part of the family's, their legacy. It's their legacy, basically, and so when we are breaking that you know they call us the we're breaking the generational curses, and so we're like the curse breakers, right. So that is. That is kind of like the definition, the generally accepted definition, of what a generational curse is, and so that's, that's the definition of what a generational curse is.

Speaker 1: 4:19

They are extremely difficult to deal with for a lot of different reasons. You have psychological and emotional reasons that they're very difficult to deal with, on both the individual level and then within the family dynamic as well. What I've noticed on an individual level, at least for myself, is a lot of the generational curses that I'm trying to break for my family are more behavioral than anything else. I was very blessed to grow up in a family that didn't have any kind of drug abuse or divorce or any kind of alcoholism or anything like that. My parents had a very stable relationship and a stable marriage. I didn't experience any of those types of generational curses that a lot of people experience. When I speak of the generational curses that I'm breaking for my family, I'm thinking more of things that pertain to religion and marriage structure and how I'm raising my children, because those things are so personal to an individual psyche, into our personalities. They become such an integral part of our personalities in some cases because they're so personal to us as individuals. It is very emotionally taxing on a daily basis to try to change those things and to actively take on that burden on a daily basis. It becomes especially emotionally taxing when you have your family or friends. Sometimes we'll have a difficult time understanding why you want to change those things, why you're changing the way your marriage is structured or why you're raising your kids first. This is something that I see all over the internet and in comment sections. I've said to me we raised you this way and you turned out okay. It's something that the former generation says to us on a daily basis. In a lot of cases we're not okay, we did not turn out okay.

Speaker 1: 7:27

I would say that the millennial generation is a generation of some of the most broken people I have ever come across. We are the generation that is now raising kids and we are struggling so, so hard because we have so much emotional baggage from how we were raised. We have baggage from the economy crashing, different wars that the US has gone through. Us as a generation has gone through so many different eras and it's insane and we are not doing okay. I forget what the rate was of millennials that actually own their own home, but it is abysmally low. It is so low. But we're still the generation who is getting married and having kids. Right now we're trying to change some of those patterns that we found ourselves in as kids.

Speaker 1: 8:48

So it's an emotionally taxing thing to daily hear oh, you turned out okay. When most of us are in therapy, most of us are depressed, most of us suffer with anxiety. There's more and more of us being diagnosed with ADHD every day. For millennial mothers, the rates of postpartum depression are absolutely through the roof. We did not turn out okay, we are not okay and we're really we're taking an active role in trying to change that for our kids, and so it's very it's hard for us to decide that we're going to build a better life for our kids, we're going to raise our kids in an emotionally healthy way, in a physically healthy way.

Speaker 1: 9:49

It's hard for us to make those decisions and then hear from the former generation that, oh, you turned out okay. You're just being sensitive by saying this. The things that you say happened didn't actually happen. You're just we're being too sensitive and so you know it's hard, it's hard and it's emotionally, it's daily, emotionally taxing and it takes, like it takes, a physical toll on the body as well. Just like that added, not only just the emotional stress, but the emotional stress kind of translates into physical stress for a lot of us.

Speaker 1: 10:24

And so just that constant stress of fighting against our own internal programming, because you know, when you're raised a certain way, all of those patterns and behaviors that you were raised with you, a lot of times a person will take on as basically a form of survival. So you have, say, you have a child who is yelled at constantly, who is, who grows up in a very, just, very high stress household. There's a lot of physical punishment, there's just, there's just a lot all the time. Right, that child is going to take on a lot of those traits that he was shown on a daily basis as a matter of survival basically. So people treat him with disrespect in order to survive and understand the world around him. He is going to start treating the world around him with disrespect, to the people around him, with disrespect as well.

Speaker 1: 11:42

And so we, without even realizing it, I mean like in these, because, because these patterns of behavior start, you know, very, very young and like I can see it happening with my, with my four year old, and it's terrifying to me because, like I, I'm at therapy, I'm, you know, actively reading all of the books and doing all of the studying, trying to break patterns of behavior that I have, and it's a struggle to break those patterns behavior and at the same time, prevent them from being passed on to the next kid. And so there's like some things that I haven't successfully broken that my four-year-old is starting to pick up, and it's, it's terrifying Because I'm just like I do not want you to have that, I don't want this, and so it's. It's, you know, we, he's only four years old, but he's already starting to pick up like certain patterns of behavior, so like certain things About us and about our personalities that we don't even realize Are there. We've picked up from an extremely young age, so young that you they're not even really patterns of behavior anymore, they're just like a part of our personalities after a certain point. And so we're raised with, with all of these patterns and behaviors that have been passed on to us. And Now we're finding ourselves, you know, with, you know being parents and spells as husbands or wives trying to break these, these patterns for our kids, and it's hard. It's hard and Like it's emotionally and physically taxing, on a daily basis trying to.

Speaker 1: 13:45

You know when you're, when your child or your spouse does something, your automatic response is you know a certain type of behavior that you have had from your childhood and you, you you're at a certain point in your, your mental health journey that you know the, the pattern is there, you know the behavior is there, and so, but you aren't far enough along yet that you Can stop it or that it's no longer a behavior that you have. And so you know, when something triggers it, you just automatically respond that way. And then, after you've responded that way, you're just like, oh shoot, I did it again. And then and like for me personally, that's where you know those feelings of guilt just start piling in, like, oh no, I did it again. And it's like this constant cycle of, okay, you know, try again. And then you get triggered, and then you fall into that pattern again, and then you're just like okay, so then you try to fix the situation. It's just like over and over and over.

Speaker 1: 15:00

And I will say, though, that, like as the first step to breaking those, those cycles and breaking these generational curses is recognizing that they're there in the first place and actually like taking the steps to break them. And so, you know, being being in therapy to has has helped immensely, because I, the longer I'm in therapy, the more tools I acquire to break patterns of behavior in myself, such as, you know it, just anger and things like that. And it gets easier Over time because I try to think of it as like breaking a bad habit, for example, because you can't just break a bad habit overnight, because it just doesn't happen that way. Like to me, breaking a bad habit is Is, like you know, building a good one, except it takes twice as long and it's twice as hard Because it's so hard to let go of, because it's so ingrained into us. But, yeah, these, these patterns are so hard To get rid of and so hard to get past. And then a lot of times they're they're not only difficult because of how we've held on to them, but they're also difficult because of, you know, the the role of, like family traditions and family values and beliefs in perpetuating the patterns and behaviors.

Speaker 1: 16:46

And so we a lot of times, for example, if you're trying to change a certain parts of parenting, that you know a certain way you were parented. You're trying to switch from that to you know a different methods, and you have your family, your, your, your birth family I'll just say the birth family telling you that you know you're doing it wrong, you're failing, and they believe that you know this is the wrong way to go about things. And you have all of that in your mind at all times because you know we're all hardwired to want and need our family's approval. It's, it's something that is just ingrained into a human beings DNA is just part of who we are, and so when we're trying to change things from the way our families did it when we were growing up and we're trying to do better, but you have your entire extended family, or just even to certain individuals, telling you that you're wrong and you're going to fail and you know you're being a bad parent. It's very disheartening, especially when you believe with all your heart that this is the best way to raise your kids.

Speaker 1: 18:31

It is so disheartening to hear from you know the people that are supposed to love you the most and support you the most. It is so disheartening to hear from them that they believe that you are failing and that you are a bad mother or father, like it just it's soul crushing and heartbreaking and it's really sad, and so that's like another. You know, that's another aspect of like the emotional toll that I mentioned earlier the emotional toll of like changing things that our family, that our families did, of basically breaking family traditions, breaking family values and breaking family beliefs and changing things for what we see as the better, because a lot of times, like these, these patterns and behaviors are so entwined in and their values and beliefs that they have become one in the same. So when you challenge these patterns and behaviors, they see it as, oh, you're challenging us, you're challenging what we believe in, and it becomes like this personal insult to them and it's this, it's this fight, and so in order to hang on to their, their pride and their family values and their beliefs, they have to challenge you to not do what you're trying to accomplish. And so it makes it even more difficult to to carry on with, like you know, our family mission in creating a better life for our children and and in breaking generational curses. And you know, marriages and within families and, yeah, it can become very emotionally taxing, like I mean, I myself have experienced this all the time, all the time, and it's, it's just one of those things that I am constantly praying for strength for.

Speaker 1: 20:46

There's, you know, there's a couple Bible verses that I have that I I read over and over and over, that really help encourage me to, you know, keep going and to always, you know, seek the truth and always speak the truth and to never just to never give up, because you know some things are wrong and that that will never change. Like you know, there's just, there's something that has always stood out to me especially is that Jesus was, he was very gentle towards, towards children, and he was, he was very just, he was gentle, and that was that. That's something that has always stood out to me in the Bible and, like you know, there are instances where he did express just anger towards those who were blaspheming God, and you know situations like that, but he was always so gentle towards towards children and towards women, and that is something that I really hold on to. When I, when I start to doubt what I'm saying and what I'm trying to tell people is, I try to remember what Jesus stood for and what he was fighting for and how he treated, you know, the woman at the well and Mary Magdalene, and how he treated little children. He he said let them come to me. And you know how he spoke about their innocence, how it would be better that we would be cast into the sea with a millstone about our neck rather than harm one of those little ones. You know it was its instances like that where I remember and I try to keep in mind how, how gentle he was towards, towards women and towards children, and and it really, it really helps me. It helps me keep going, especially when you know I have, I have people from you know around me on the internet and within my like my daily life and stuff telling me I should basically stop because I don't know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Or you know I shouldn't be changing things and the fact that I am changing things just means that I'm too sensitive or the things I say happened didn't actually happen. I'm making it up, you just things like that. Or I've been told I I got an email the other day, yeah, someone I didn't know they must, so they must have just watched I've read, not read listened to one of the podcast episodes and got my email from the podcast, but emailed me letting me know that you know I was a feminist and you know I was unbiblical and I was ruining. I was ruining marriages and I was letting women take control and, like the, the feminist part, I mean I feel like the term feminist has been twisted into something to mean something totally different than what it actually was originally intended for.

Speaker 1: 24:05

Being called unbiblical is like, okay, whatever, call me unbiblical, whatever I you know I read the Bible every day and I try to live my life according to what it says. So if you want to call me unbiblical, it kind of makes me doubt that you've ever read the Bible. And but the whole thing about how, oh goodness, I'm having a river trying to let women like take control or take over or whatever it was, I was just like it made me. It made me kind of laugh and it just made the whole email just absolutely ridiculous and ludicrous because I was just like I, I don't want women to take control. That's not what I'm talking about. And the fact that you know you think I'm trying to advocate for women taking control over anything is just insane. It kind of makes me wonder if you have actually listened to any of the podcasts, rather than only listening to five minutes and then becoming personally offended and freaking out.

Speaker 1: 25:04

And so, like I said, like I just you know, are there certain verses in the Bible and there's certain parts of the Bible that I read all the time and you know I take cramford and knowledge really in Jesus's life and how gentle he was towards towards children and towards women and how he always seemed to seek to empower children and empower women, like the things he did and the things he said. I mean, nobody did things like that. Nobody approached prostitutes and spoke to them. Nobody did, nobody talked about women like they were on an equal plane with men. But Jesus did. And so, like I try to, I try to remember that when I'm, you know, talking about obligation sex, or I'm talking about, you know, submission in marriage, or I'm talking about gentle parenting, and or I'm talking about books that advocate us to, you know, beat our kids with a, you know, a PVC pipe or a plumber's pipe no bigger than a quarter inch in diameter, and yes, I am quoting a book directly there and I am planning on doing a podcast episode on that book actually in the future. But yeah, I just. The Bible is is huge when it comes to helping me carry on on a daily basis with breaking these generational curses that I'm I'm trying to break, and I think it's really important that all of us find that thing in our lives that can help us carry forward and continue on our family mission.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Thank you all for tuning in today. I really appreciate it. I will be getting back into the short series on purity culture and obligation sex and a little bit on, you know, purity culture and its impact on different aspects of parenting as well. I have also have a couple of exciting guests coming up that I will be announcing on my Instagram and Facebook as well, so keep an eye there for any kind of announcements for upcoming podcast episodes. Thank you all for listening and I will see you guys next week. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of all our little messes. Please let us know how much you enjoyed it below and add any questions you have about this episode. Also, don't forget to follow us on patreon for amazing exclusive perks, including early access to podcast episodes and bonus episodes every month. We've also recently added a support group for all of our paid patrons. You could check us out on Facebook and Instagram for daily updates and insights that mirror podcast topics. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next week.