When a Parent is Not Good

What's included; a video clip from the episode; a blessing to read; resources to download; 6 things every child needs from their parents; 3 questions to reflect on

When someone says the word family, what comes to mind?

The image of the family is so deeply imprinted onto us: pressed into our minds, hearts, and sense of who we are in the world. What do we do when our families are sources of pain or confusion… or worse, harm, neglect or abuse?

In this episode, my friend Ashley joins me to share about a painful relationship with a parent. She puts words to the long-lasting impact that absent or abusive parenting can have on our relationships with ourselves, others, and God.

With such wisdom and care, Ashley invites us into her own internal process of making sense of her childhood, and of trying to live between the love you understood and the love that every child deserves. I hope you’ll listen in:

A clip from the podcast episode:

How can our experiences of being fathered impact our capacity to understand and receive the fathering of God? Ashley made the comparison of eating an apple: if you’ve only experienced eating sour apples, someone else may tell you that apples are juicy and sweet, but you’ve never tasted them.

Similarly, we may be cognitively persuaded that God is good, but we have no experiential understanding of the fathering of God. The fathering that we have experienced hasn’t given us a framework for the goodness of this relationship. Watch Ashley talk more about this in the following clip from the episode:

6 things every child needs:

As children, our relationship with our primary caregivers shaped our brain more than anything else. Therapist Adam Young highlights the following 6 things that every child needs from their parents:

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