How you love, is learned. In proverbs 22:6 it says, “to train up a child in the way he should go”, but what if you were trained wrong? Nature vs. Nurture applies to the lack of nurturing. Its absence will shade how you survive based on what you took in through your senses during the first 9 years of your life. If you’ve been trained to be the scapegoat, or the golden child or the addict, that was nurtured according to the level of inner healing that your parents needed. If they were raised with abuse, hostility or chaos and did not search for their own recovery, than their responses to past pain became natural reactions, which nurtured you in a continuation of their environment.
Behaviors start out as beliefs about ourselves because caretakers were shaping them according to their lack of faith. Addicts are made, anger issues are made, promiscuity is made, liars are made. We are trained when we are small to react just as those generations before us. If you trained me to be quiet as a child because your opinion was more important than mine because I couldn’t possibly know better, than the scripture says I will not depart from that when I grow up. That’s why we loose our own voice and decision making abilities and grow into a submissive adult or one who turns to pleasure after conflict. From that we will not depart because it becomes ingrained.
My neighbor had a Pomeranian who grew up in the pen with a pot belly pig. It snorted just like a pig instead of barking because its role model taught it to be like itself even though they were different animals. It by nature was a dog but unaware of his identity, so nurture cultivated behaviors that were foreign to it, convincing it of being a pot belly pig, something completely contrary to original design. When we don’t have training and direction in the ways of love and acceptance, we will morph to be accepted by anything or anyone else, even while causing us confusion, and nurturing us to believe lies.
I’ve worked with families who for generations called their children “bad” to control them and it flows out of everyone’s mouth as a curse and defining quality. I’ve worked with teens who give one word answers because it is the surest way to gain back control over a domineering parent who silenced them with a look. I love the kids who figure out a way to get their needs met outside of the home through lying because they believe the truth will get them into trouble under their own roof.
Pathological lying is taught, and it directly shades their view of God with the same need to hide from untrustworthy authority. If we don’t get corrective training, than what we were taught won’t depart from us.
If you were trained to be judgmental and self preserving as a child to escape ridicule, that just means you need to re-parent yourself. The small child within who is frozen in the past messages about himself from others, is exiled from healing until all the measures you have used to protect yourself get addressed. And that takes spiritual strength, the strength of self to partner with Holy Spirit because the patterns and themes that have played out in your life aren’t working anymore. Once that revelation is grasped, those parts that keep you programmed to react out of someone else’s teachings, will want something better.
To detach from familiar training that no longer helps you, like talking about others behind their backs because the rents did it and thought you weren’t listening, you will need to get to know that part of you who thought gossip was normal. If picking fights and then giving the silent treatment was a way to make you submit, it nurtured you to feel like a burden. The parts of you who are trapped in the past still believe you are a burden to your spouse, co-workers and friends, but they need updating of the adult you are today. Every part within was nurtured toward survival.
Yet those parts who hold memory of shame, abuse, neglect or judgment are still working endlessly to protect you today by showing up in times of conflict or confusion. The more we try to change ourselves by nurturing new behavior without understanding the motive behind the parts of us that are suffering, the louder they get and make us act out. The way we should go seems like an impossibility because nature never had a chance to form a firm foundation. Now we have the opportunity to recognize the positive intention behind negative behavior which represent parts of our whole person, and build on sturdier ground.
If nature was the litmus test for raising the child up as it should go, all of us would know our worth as the spiritual beings God created us to be. We lost sight of who we were naturally, through the lack of healthy nurture, so we sabotage good things and push away inner-healing because hope has been deferred. It’s better to learn the right way than to un-learn the wrong way but unfortunately what is ingrained early on, lasts. When we finally realize that what we were taught isn’t working anymore, parts of us surface in hopes of laying down their burdens, and it can happen one at a time or in tandem with multiple parts linked to similar memories.
You see, our suffering is most impactful when we don’t have words to explain our emotions which become “parts” of our personality. They fear erupting the frozen inner child who has been exiled and work overtime with bad behavior to keep us from knowing our true identity. Unfortunately but fortunately, God created us for deep connection so when love and acceptance isn’t primal, parts of us go searching for it at all costs, sometimes to the point of idolatry. With enough pursuit of anything that we lacked as children, we will accept a counterfeit. Some will look for a surrogate family in church, affiliations or friends, but eventually, the emotions which drive belonging and community will cause dis-connection because dormant pain wears all of our relationships down.
The unspoken sins of the fathers that are felt but indescribable, discerned but held in our subconscious, become the legacy burdens that play out generation after generation. It is the need to give back those roles inside ourselves to ancestors who have gone before us, so then our internal systems will calibrate to the natural instincts we were born to cultivate. If everything in our life goes back to the fundamental establishment of who we really are, than anything that twisted up our insides due to pain, can be re-nurtured. That is why labeling people as their behavior or harping on sin, will never change them. Re-learning to love and accept oneself comes with the belief that change is possible. It is possible to re-wire your brain pathways and completely change your personality by getting back to who you were always meant to be.
Everyone has an internal family system waiting to let go of beliefs and lies that promote sibling rivalry between its parts. Arguments inside your system stem from polarized viewpoints on a subject much like a brother and sister conflicting with each other in the outside world. For every disconnect in relationship there is a part of you that holds onto that rift and goes into protection mode so you don’t re-live it. The unspoken judgments you make about yourself or others outwardly, are compartmentalized to parts that continue to rival inwardly.
The hurt you experienced, imprints on your brain and established an expectation for its repeat. A response might be to stop talking to your sister which manages the rejection, but a reaction to gossip about her could arise from a guilt part who cut things off. Rather than scolding yourself for sin, God wants to unburden the sting of it one protective part at a time because only He knows when it started, where it embedded in your body and spirit and why you cope that way. This is the importance of allowing our brains to function as God planned, and heal thyself.
Our inner most being is where Holy Spirit resides and it is capable of immense transformation when we learn that parts of us destroy connection in our everyday routine because they think they have to. Those parts perform on our behalf when we don’t live up to the expectations of our household and we have to cope with disappointing parents who have their own issues with their parents.
An absentee father is a big deal, he could have been present but emotionally unattached. Or he could have been your abuser which shaded all relationships thereafter because trust in SELF was disconnected and the parts who helped during the assault, overpower your actions from that point on. Patterns of action that continuously react to that original trauma have historically anchored themselves for survival. For who and what we couldn’t control in our childhoods, parts of us have fought back and aided us through forming either cautionary or self-defeating behavior.
But God calls us to abundant life. There is more. There is always more. The parts of yourself that you judge and dislike really were created to help you when you were powerless and pained. Now is the opportunity to get to know their stories in order to set them free.
How we protect ourselves through coping behaviors is a direct result of the distance we have between those in authority and our heavenly Father, yet we still have the ability to learn a new love language. We can look at the pain of the past through a curious lens and find out that we naturally want to be healed. God isn’t angry, inconsistent, disappointed, aloof, or harsh just because your earthly one was. The ultimate revelation is that God in heaven would be known as a loving parent to you, without the distortion of parts who label you, criticize you, or remain exiled deep within your internal system.
He has never left you nor forsaken you, and neither have the parts of you who picked up the broken pieces of your SELF, especially those you dislike. With intention and curiosity, all parts can become who they are called to be, while you get back to who you were always meant to be.
Psalm 68:5 says, “He puts us into families”. Where we have been surrounded by others but still feel lonely, our internal family system can become our own best advocate. Our internal family is a system of phenomenal intrigue and personal connection without our acknowledgement of it, but every part of it wants to be known. All the ways in which we protect ourselves from repeated suffering, have exhausted themselves and desire to get rid of the responsibility that plagues them. Our inner children want to be released from the cyclical patterns and fears that caught and suspended them in time so that you are free to relate to the essence of your true SELF.
The prison that your emotional parts have been trapped in, will take on the new role of understanding, it’s a promise. God wants to repair the broken down walls with healed up parts who no longer react and respond like your parents or anyone else in your ancestral line, no longer prisoners in a negatively nurturing system, but a naturally loving one. An exchange of a lackluster love life with yourself is your right as you trust that everything you need is already inside of you, and they long to be one big understanding family.