The Simple Shift That Can Transform How You Heal Old Childhood Wounds

Hello and welcome to the new series called Growing in Grace Conversations that help parents build healthier relationships with their adult children. No shame, no blame, just wisdom, healing, and hope for the journey. I'm James Moffat. Let's grow with grace together. So let's talk about grace for a moment. Grace is something that we need to give ourselves. We need to realize that if we were a child of the seventies and we experienced a maybe a childhood that was not something to be envious of, like my childhood. So we have some wounds that need healing. We have some work that we need to do. Some of that work I've already done. I'm far removed from my childhood of the 70s because I'll turn 65 this year. So I've done a lot of that work already. And as I've already alluded to, my relationship with Jesus Christ and the faith that I have in the work that He did on the cross has provided me with a lot of healing in a lot of areas and with a lot of things. And I have forgiven my parents for the things that they did and did not do. And I fully believe that they raised us kids the best way they knew how with what they had. So I just want to give you the listener, or if you're watching this on YouTube, if you're watching this video, I want you to not be ashamed. And I want you to realize that it's okay to have things to work on. It's okay to have to do the inner work. It's okay to recognize that you have things that you need healing from. You have some wounds. And it's okay for that. It's okay to, even at, even at, you know, even if you're a baby boomer like me and you're in your 60s, as you're listening to some of the stuff I'm talking about, some of my childhood memories, uh, you may go, oh my gosh, I can that resonates with me, and I and I I realize that I need to work on that. You may even go, oh my gosh, you know, some of the some of the things that I haven't worked on has caused problems with my current children. Now your children are adults, and maybe there are some things that you need to ask forgiveness for. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being vulnerable and transparent and and you know, use a little bit of humility and go to your kids and go, hey, you know, this is what I experienced as a child. I'm not using it as an excuse, but this is what I experienced as a child, this is what it did to me, this is why I raised you the way I raised you, and I want to apologize for that. There's nothing wrong with that. It will go a long way to building bridges with your children, your adult children. So, as a reminder, I'm talking about my journey as a child raised in the 70s and what that looked like for me. I also want to talk about the way it formed me as an adult and lessons learned as I became a parent. None of this is glamorous. Some of it is brutally honest and a bit painful. We need to talk about these things so that we can start healing from old wounds and become better adults and parents. And I also want to say that that as a father, it's critically important that as fathers, we do the inner work and that we're honest with ourselves, and that we can uh look at ourselves honestly, look at our past, look at who we are today, and do the inner work and uh find healing in those areas that we need to find healing in, because our children deserve to have well-rounded fathers. Our children deserve to have fathers that are emotionally present and that are spiritually present and have a good, solid relationship with their Lord, with Jesus Christ. Uh I know some of you listening to this are not uh people of faith. Maybe you don't understand what it is uh to uh maybe you don't understand grace. You may not understand the fact that Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind, past, present, and future. And I don't want to come across preachy. I don't want to preach at you. I just want to let you know that God loves you and that he sent his son to the cross to die for the sins of mankind, past, present, and future, and all you have to do is ask him into your heart and accept the that gift of grace and repent of your sins. And he will take all of that upon himself and he will give you everlasting life. And that's a such a beautiful gift. And if you have that, if you have the Holy Spirit and Jesus in your heart, it will give you tools that you otherwise might not have. So I just want to say that. And if you if you don't understand all of those things, then visit a local church, talk to a pastor, go online, uh, you know, go you download U version to your smartphone, read the Bible. Uh there are resources out there that were not available in 1970 or 1980 or 1990. We have a lot of tools at our at our fingertips that we can use. Uh send me an email uh uh james.moffat at pm.me. If you have questions, you want to talk about faith, you have questions about faith, send me an email, james.moffat at pm.me, and I'll be more than happy to hop on the phone with you, get on a Zoom call, get on Riverside in a studio, and we can we can chat. I would love to do that. So as I said, none of this is glamorous, some of it's brutally honest and a bit painful. We need to talk about these things so that we can start healing from old wounds and become better adults and parents. The silence of the seventies, why no one talked about feelings. Emotional suppression. I remember how my feelings were not welcome. No one asked me why I did something or what I was feeling when I did it. No one encouraged me to feel one way or the other or to be able to express those feelings. The toughen up culture Clint Eastwood Do you feeling lucky punk? Remember that line? I forget what movie that was. Men do not cry. That was the mantra of the seventies. Men are not supposed to express their feelings. If men do not cry, the boys were not allowed to cry. I remember getting spanked as a kid, and when I would cry because it hurt, my parents would say, If you think you got something to cry about now, let me spank you some more. Either that or they would be scolding me verbally and I would respond by crying. That would bring on the threat of being spanked.

How much sense does that make? It all it all goes back to emotional suppression.

No language for trauma. Trauma? What trauma? Life just happened to you and you were expected to suck it up buttercup. We do not have time for dealing with emotions or trauma. My parents were busy working and paying bills and providing the physical things of life for the family. They did not take the time to do any inner work. If they did, I never knew anything about it. I know that my father was an alcoholic and had a mean temper with a short fuse. Why was he so angry? I do not know. He never talked about it. He was in Vietnam and Korea while he was in the army. He didn't talk about that either. So he self-medicated, my father self-medicated with alcohol. Life was hard, life is tough. I can't imagine what it was like to have to go to a foreign country and kill people from my country. And I, you know, the only knowledge I have, the only context that I have about Vietnam or Korea are because of movies that I've seen on TV. It, you know, war is horrible. It's traumatic. And I'm sure that as a as a young man, as a as a professional soldier, he saw things that caused a lot of trauma in his life. And back in the 70s and 80s, men that came back from those wars just didn't talk about it. They didn't share it with their families. They suppressed it. They pushed it down. And because they they didn't deal with those things, I'm not saying every soldier that went to Vietnam or Korea that they didn't deal with those things. Maybe they did. Parents who didn't know how to comfort. Bingo. Parents who didn't know how to comfort refers to parents who may have provided food, shelter, rules, or even love, but struggle to emotionally soothe, reassure, validate, or emotionally connect with their children during pain, fear, sadness, or distress. Let me repeat that. Parents who didn't know how to comfort refers to parents who may have provided food, shelter, rules, or even love, conditional love, but struggle to emotionally soothe, reassure, validate, or emotionally connect with their children during pain, fear, sadness, or distress. That's probably because they didn't have that in their childhood. They didn't receive those things in their childhood. How do you know how to be compassionate towards your children? It's because you experienced compassion in your life, either as a child or a young adult. How do you model mercy and forgiveness towards your children when you didn't have mercy or forgiveness in your life as a child or as a young adult? That's kind of how it works. It's hard to model those qualities to your children if if you didn't if it wasn't given to you. And again, we parent the way we were parented, and our parents parented us and did the best they could with what they had. And the things that they didn't have, we didn't inherit those things. So how can we expect to give that to our children, our current children? Or hey, even our grandchildren. Parents who didn't know how to comfort. Parents who didn't know how to comfort refers to parents who may have provided food, shelter, rules, or even love. That can look like dismissing emotions. You're fine, stop crying. Avoiding emotional conversations. We don't talk about feelings trying to fix instead of listen. Wow, I've been guilty of that a million times. Trying to fix instead of listen. There are probably times that my kids came to me as I was parenting and were trying to tell me something. And I wasn't actively listening. I wasn't practicing active listening. I was listening as a fix it man. They were telling me things about their day or an incident in their lives, and I was listening in the way to, in other words, I was like, okay, how can I fix this? How can I fix that situation? Instead of just listening to what they were telling me and allowing them to express themselves and express how they were feeling about that situation, I was trying to fix it.

We don't talk about feelings.

Trying to fix instead of listen, becoming uncomfortable with vulnerability, responding with anger, criticism, silence, or withdrawal when emotions appeared, minimizing pain. Other people have it worse. My parents did this not because they were cruel, but because nobody taught them emotional comfort either. Children raised this way often grow into adults who struggle to self-soothe. Feel guilty for having needs. Fear vulnerability. Shut down emotionally. Become hyper-independent. Confuse advice with comfort. Feel uncomfortable with emotional intimacy. Comforting a child emotionally usually sounds like I'm here. That hurt, didn't it? You're safe. Your feelings make sense. We'll all get through this together. I didn't have any of that as a child, ever. A concise way to phrase the idea some parents knew how to provide but didn't know how to emotionally comfort. Or they may have loved deeply, but lacked the emotional tools to soothe pain. A child doesn't just need correction and provision, they also need comfort and emotional safety. So to be brutally honest, I want to say that I think my parents did love us in their own way. I mean, they adopted us from an orphanage in Germany. They did a lot to do all the paperwork and jump through all the red tape and hoops, governmental hoops that they had to jump through in order to to um adopt my sister and I and bring us back to America. So I don't want to paint them as monsters. They weren't monsters. I think in their own way they loved us. They loved us in a in their own messed up way, right? They loved us the best they knew how. And maybe because their childhood was full of rules and f uh, you know, a regimented living. You know, my dad was his his dad passed away when he was a child. I guess he was seven or eight when his dad died of pneumonia back in the 30s and 40s. I guess pneumonia was kind of a death sentence back then. Uh and and so I think he did the best he could what he had. I he didn't have a lot of emotional intelligence because it wasn't taught to him. I think his his mother, who raised eight kids by herself, she was so busy trying to provide for those children and putting a roof over their head and feeding them that maybe she just didn't have a whole lot of time for emotional support or demonstrating love to her children. I I don't know. I I remember her name was Fred Muffet. Why her name was Fred, I don't know. But her name was Fred Muffet, and uh she passed away in 1980 when I was graduating from high school, and I remember the funeral and all of that, and I remember from 1976 to 1980 when my mother would go to Austria to visit her sister, Aunt Pali. Uh my grandmother stood between us kids and my dad and his temper on several occasions, and she was the only person that I ever knew in my life that could stop him in his tracks. And I was very, very thankful for uh the beatings that that she stopped and kept from happening to us kids. And she was a wonderful person from what little I can remember of her. But I can only imagine, having been a parent and being a parent now, I can only imagine how tough it was back in the 30s and 40s or 50s, I don't know. You know, women raising, you know, multiple children like that on their own. I don't know what support systems she had in place, I don't know any of that. I just know how rough it must have been. And so so I want to give my adoptive father some credit. And again, neither one of our adoptive parents were monsters. They just didn't know how to to love us correctly, they didn't know how to support us emotionally or spiritually. Some parents knew how to provide but didn't know how to emotionally comfort, or they may have loved deeply but lacked the emotional tools to soothe pain. A child doesn't just need correction and provision, they also need comfort and emotional safety. So I want to say if this resonates with you, if part of my story might be part of your story, I want to encourage you to look deeper into that. I want I want to encourage you to uh exercise self-care and do whatever it needs to whatever you need to do to uh get some clarity on those things. I don't know, it might be a family member, a mentor, a friend, family counselor. You can go to local churches, they have pastoral care, whatever you need to do to heal some of those wounds and uh help you to be a better person and a better parent. Uh your kids, your children, even your adult children uh will benefit from that, and they will thank you for that. They might not thank you today, but later on down the road, they'll thank you for that vulnerability. They'll thank you for your honesty. And there's hope. There's there's nothing in this life that we can't fix. There's nothing in this life that we can't get healing from. So I'll say, don't be a victim any longer. If this growing in grace series is doing anything, I want you to know that that, you know, it's not a forever thing. It's not a life sentence, it's something that you can fix. You can identify the problem and you can fix the problem. And you probably can't fix the problem yourself. You may need some help doing that. So thanks for spending time with me today on Growing with Grace, episode three. If today's conversation encouraged you or gave you something to think about, I'd love for you to stay connected, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Uh if you're watching it on YouTube, it's right here at the at symbol, ABC Parenting Adult Children. My website is parentingadultchildren.org. And you can leave a uh episode review, a listener review there. You can uh send me a message, you can write me an email, talk PAC at at uh proton.me. Talk PAC at proton.me. I had to think about it. I have so many email addresses. So I'd love for you to stay connected, subscribe, subscribe to the channel, subscribe to the podcast. If you're listening or watching, share with another parent he might need it, and keep growing with us. Remember, it's never too late to heal, to listen, and to love with grace. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you.