How much does your family of origin affect your relationship with God?

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It is also a great challenge for us especially to be a good example to the young ones. Their view on God may depend on us. They mirrored God in us. I wondered what they might see?!
 
My parents, most of my siblings support me in my faith so much…I can go to them with questions,pray with them and generally talk faith with them anytime.There’s quite a few of us ,so life experience enhances the (name removed by moderator)ut as well.There’s a couple of religious in the family clan which is a real real blessing,
we can talk about anything.
Sometimes I can be guilty of taking for advantage all the family support,can’t envision what it would be like to go it alone,or have opposition.I need to put myself in others shoes and try to understand more.It must be so
difficult for many of you with out family support :confused:
God will reward you for your huge efforts and trials x
 
I am not really into Mary devotions, probably because of my relationship with my mom. She was always emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically abusive. She is also pretty irrational. I do not have a lot of respect for her. While Dad enabled her and made quite of few of his own mistakes, I still respect him to a degree. My mom is probably the reason I don’t get along with members of my own sex.
 
Hahaha !

I work in a retirement community.

Plenty of shenanigans (and STDs) to go around
 
When I was a child I would say, the adults pretty much all directed me back to my parents. I don’t think I ever had a particularly close relationship with anyone else? I was homeschooled, so it was pretty much parents and the adults at youth group.

In some ways I think the question of whether my parents were “loving” was a distraction. I don’t think that my parents intended to do me harm, or didn’t want me, or anything like that. Looking back, what I see is a mix of temper and anxiety on the part of my mother that resulted her seeing deliberate defiance in everything, to the exclusion of other possibilities. This included seeing attempts to talk things over, or any expression of frustration or hurt, as dishonest attempts to evade responsibility.

To her mind, she was attempting to restrain an undisciplined, unruly, defiant child so she could have a productive adult life. The only loving option was to increase her attempts to maintain control. If she failed, her child would grow up to be godless and undisciplined, unable to make it on her own and without faith.
 
For some reason I can absorb articles on faith,in book form,on podcasts etc easier when i discover them myself rather than parents discovering them and sharing them with me.
 
My relationship with my father was traumatizing and is currently non existent. My mother and I talk regularly, but we have never had a strong motherly relationship. As a kid, I often perceived her actions and interactions with me as being distant and cold.

Still, I have a conception of what a good mother does and what a good father does. It is based partly on good relationships I have observed and the Bible. And, now that I am a wife and mother, I live according to this understanding.

So, even though my personal relationships with my parents aren’t great, I can still relate to the idea of God as father and Mary as Mother.
 
My parents were nonbelievers, but the love they gave me in early childhood made it pretty easy to love God my Father. And although my family life went to pot after my dad died when I was 9, that, too, helped deepen my relationship with Him–as did the support and example of my believing neighbors, who became my second family.
 
If only we could have a school or course for good parenting it would be better 🙂
 
All the more you ask for the Blessed Mother’s help 'coz she’s not like our imperfect earthly mothers. You can try. God bless you!
 
When I was a kid, I often get scolded by my Mom and Dad. I have 5 siblings and my Mom and Dad are working. We don’t have any househelp and both my parents’ are kinda hot-tempered. I can think of my childhood as a mess but happy because we are together. Right now, when I talked about it with my Mom & Dad, they would laugh with tears in their eyes and a little bit embarassed. Raising kids surely is not an easy feat but I think they both tried. I thank God for them.
 
In any kind of relationship, misunderstandings is quite normal.
 
I think for me the difficulty is in how long it took to really understand that it wasn’t just me. The insistence I got was that I was just too young to understand, and that my parents loved me and were acting to do what’s best for me. So if I felt unhappy or frustrated or unloved, it was because I was immature and not doing what I ought.

And I think that’s what carried over for me - the idea that a loving relationship with an authority figure included getting hurt a lot and not really understanding why, and if you felt happy and safe it was because they didn’t love you enough to discipline you properly.
 
I can understand why that kind of manipulation would make things a challenge for you. I think if I were manipulated in that way things would be different. I was abandoned by my father and often felt neglected by my mother unless I broke a rule. It comes with a different set of challenges.

Where I am right now is in a process of coming to terms with what happeneded. Part of that is accepting that my parents did the best they could and they did what they thought was best for me. That allows me to forgive them, let myself off the hook, and more forward with my life.
 
For me the idea that they did the “best they could” never helped. It just sounds like an excuse to me - sure, they hurt you terribly, but it was all ok because they did the best they could! It’s back to the same thing I got told as a kid, you’re so lucky to have loving parents and you shouldn’t be upset or hurt because they’re trying to take care of you. It doesn’t seem to push towards forgiveness so much as back to the old pattern of pretending it didn’t matter or it wasn’t that bad.

I’ve seen the destructive force my mother can be like now. Either she can do better, or she’s not fit to be in wider society.
 
Here’s the thing: all the anger, pain, and anxiety that I held on to (especially for my father) was only harmful and destructive for me. I paid the consequences. My life was the one ruined. My father had abandoned me and was off living his life while I rotted in my own skin.

The acceptance of the idea that he did what he thought was best was for ME it was not for him. It allowed ME to move forward and to let MYSELF off the hook for all the anger and self-destructive behavior I was holding on to. So that I could stop tearing MYSELF apart and move forward.

He was and is still wrong. He still has consequences attached to his actions including jail, health problems, issues providing for himself and no meaningful relationship with his family. He is not off the hook. None of us have ignored what happened or even pretend everything was ok simply because he didn’t know how to choose a better way. The history is still there, but WE have been able to move forward through maintaining a positive assumption and forgiveness. He is just no longer allowed to hurt me or contribute to me wanting to harm myself.

YMMV
 
Right. We can’t control other people’s behavior. We can only control our own reactions and responses to it.

Or as Everclear sang, “You’re possessed with a power bigger than the pain.”
 
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I think it can affect my relationship with God, if I let it. I was blessed to have an amazing RCIA team who could support me through these kinds of difficulties, and priests with whom I could talk openly and frankly to help me better understand. And I’ve happened upon confessors who were equally amazing in helping me understand and come to terms with what I’ve experienced and how it affects my faith – some of whom hadn’t ever met me before I walked into their confessional!

What it has shown me, over and over, is that God knows what I’ve been through. If I believe what the faith teaches, it was part of His plan, to make me who I am today. And so when I struggle, I can turn to Him. And He knows and understands and will give me the strength and the tools to keep growing closer to Him as long as I keep seeking out that closeness. And He isn’t going to punish me because I’m a work in progress.
 
Keep in mind for me, a significant part of the original hurt was the constant claim that it was all being done from love and from a desire for what was best for me. The problem had to be me, the bad child, not my good loving parents who only wanted what was best for me. And if they do make a mistake, it’s not ok for you to be upset or hurt, you should instead be grateful that they love you so much to make the effort to discipline you. It was constantly reinforced by my parents and by others that they were only doing what they did because they loved me, and that any hurt I felt was because I was too much of a rebellious child to accept that.

Healing required being able to set that aside and say, this wasn’t about me. It wasn’t in my best interest. This was about my mother’s failure to control her own temper. I was the target because I was there, not because I was bad. Keeping on telling myself that she meant well was keeping me trapped in guilt and shame for being the bad, nasty, rebellious child who couldn’t just accept how great her parents were.
 
It can’t be both?

It can’t be both that your mother thought she was doing the right thing out of love for you AND that it totally crossed the line because she couldn’t control her temper and then out of shame manipulated you into thinking you should just be thankful that she loved you enough to try?

Because, if it could actually be a both/and situation and if you could hold that positive assumption I think it would lead to a healthier and happier outcome for you because you would be operating from a place of positivity and acceptance rather than a place of negativity and anger. It’s hard to get to “happy” from negativity.

Just something to ponder. I’m not saying you need to do this now or even that you have to do it this way, but finding a way to move forward in positivity and acceptance will allow you to thrive.

You just have to be careful that the narrative you create is one of truth.

For me, my father did actually think he was doing what was best for me. He was living a very destructive lifestyle that put our family in danger. Now, what I wanted him to do was to give up that lifestyle for the sake of our family. And, I hated him for not doing what he should have done. Even though my feeling were/are valid, it is still true that he thought he was doing the right thing.
 
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