From Broken Boy to Mended Man | Patrick Morley

Hiding inside every man is a little boy. He can be healthy and strong. Or he can be... Afraid. angry and broken.

He's never really gotten over the wounds of his childhood. Is there a way to break the cycle of pain? The cycle of rage? Is there a way to go from Broken boy. To mended man.

Uh Maybe your parents were nice like mine, and so the idea of forgiving them seems a little easier. But maybe they were just mean people, maybe they were toxic. But the point is that healing is definitely possible. Men are being healed. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr.

Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, author of Man in the Mirror, Dr. Patrick Morley, describes his healing journey from broken boy to mended man. And he'll give a positive plan for you or a man you know on how to heal from childhood wounds. And this is a summer best of broadcast.

You can find our featured resource at the website buildingrelationships.us. Our guest is Dr. Patrick Morley, author of From Broken Boy to Mended Man: A positive plan to heal your childhood wounds and break the cycle. And it looks like I know the fellow who wrote the foreword to this book. Gary, why do you think this is such an important topic for such a time as this?

Well, you know, Chris, there are a lot of wounded men out there. I'm just going to read you the first paragraph in this forward that I wrote because I really feel this is true. I say through my forty years of counseling men who have experienced childhood wounds, I've never read a book that I've found more helpful for those men than the book you hold in your hands. It is practical, understandable, and doable, I think, because it's written by a man who has walked the road.

So I'm excited to have Dr. Morley with us today because I think this is a topic that's gravely needed in our society today.

Well, let's meet him. And we promised him we were going to call him Pat, but I'll say it one more time: Dr. Patrick Morley is founder of Man in the Mirror, a global ministry impacting thousands of churches, millions of men. Motivated by his own search for meaning and purpose, he started a Bible study with a handful of guys in 1986, and that study is still going. It now reaches men around the world every week.

He's written some 23 books, including The Man in the Mirror, which was named one of the 100 most influential Christian books of the 20th century. And our featured resource today, as I said, at buildingrelationships.us is from broken boy to mended man. Just go to buildingrelationships.us.

Well, Dr. Morley, welcome to Building Relationships.

Well, Dr. Chapman, thank you for having me. It's such an honor. I just cannot get over the fact that I'm able to actually be on your program. You've just.

Been a hero of mine forever. And so thank you again for the gracious words of that forward, too. In fact, After you read it, I was thinking, well, we could wrap it up right now.

Well, I've given it my opinion. When the program's over, they're going to have their own opinion, okay? True enough. True enough. As we start, let's talk just a little bit about the global impact of the man in the mirror and how that all got started.

Give us a little background on that and your perception of how God has used that.

Well, it's interesting because my background is business. I was a real estate developer. My first life philosophy was that money will solve my problems and success will make me happy. I quit high school. In the middle of my senior year, so there were some problems at home.

Nice, very nice parents, but very passive and permissive. And so Um I was a broken boy. I didn't understand any of that at the time. I Really just felt like I and I pretty much From about eight or nine years old, had the sense of feeling like I was on my own to figure out life. Uh and I became very successful in business.

Broken boys tend to become especially irresponsible or they become the responsible son, depending on whether they want to prove that their parents were right or wrong about them. And so I became the responsible son, became quite successful. And I was just sitting around one day. I said, wow. There's just got to be more to life than this.

There just has to be. And so that's when I started the Bible study that Chris referenced. and started teaching men about the the problems that we face. And it wasn't until quite some time later, though, that I actually had the revelation, the epiphany that. The reason that I was struggling so much personally with All the demons that came in the middle of the night was because of childhood wounds that had never really been properly processed.

Well, no question about it. That book, Man in the Mirror, tremendously helpful to a lot of people. And I think this book is going to be the same. You say there's an epidemic of lonely hurting men carrying unresolved pain. Uh how do you know that's true and what does that look like today?

Well, Gary, my favorite thing to do You know, we write books, we teach churches, you know, we do all these different things. But my number one favorite thing to do is to meet with men one-on-one. And I've literally met with thousands of men one-on-one to hear their stories. And for a period of 40 years, meeting with two or three guys a week like that, it adds up. And so when men try to put into words what they feel like is holding them back, what's keeping them from feeling fully alive.

And if they're a believer fully alive in Jesus, they will inevitably mention one or more seven things. You know, I just feel like I'm a in this alone. I don't feel like God cares about me. Personally. Not really.

My life doesn't feel like it has a purpose. It feels random. I have these destructive behaviors, they keep dragging me back down. My soul. feels dry.

My most important relationships, they're not healthy. And then finally, I just don't feel like I'm doing anything that's going to make a difference and leave the world a better place. Yeah, I kind of my Organizing paradigm is that what do men want that they need that I have to offer? And so, when since I am a broken boy, and since I have a theological education and a doctorate degree and all these different things, and I've studied this and I've been through it personally. I've just really felt a calling to go ahead and put this all out there.

And it's not the normal thing that someone would do, but I just felt like called by God that it was something I was supposed to do. La Pet, this is your twenty-third book. but it took you six years. before deciding to move ahead and write it. What took so long?

Well, NetNet, my mom and dad, Are We were really nice people. And I believe that they wanted to do the right things, but they were never. trained, equipped, or discipled to B godly. Parents. My dad was abandoned when he was two years of age, and so he never felt the scratch of his father's whiskers.

He never heard. A father reading him a bedtime story. He never Tossed the ball in the backyard. He never had his hair tussled, never wrestled on the living room floor with his dad, never heard a truck door shut in the driveway. At the end of a day, signaling that his dad was about to re-enter the family orbit.

And so basically, what it meant to be a man, a husband, and a father was unexampled to him. And so he was left a guess at how to be. uh a dad to me and a Husband to my mom. And so, net of all that is that he did the best he could, but there was this intergenerational dysfunction that got transmitted to him. He never was able to do anything about that.

So I didn't want to, so the answer to the question is, and my mom and dad and I, we did reconcile. And for the last half, for the second half of my life and the last part of their life, we had a very loving and hugging, affectionate relationship. That we did not have for the first 35 years of my life.

So I didn't want to throw them under the bus. And it just took me six years to figure out, to noodle around to figure out how I could honor them. But yet still tell the true story. And so I finally got it, got it all sorted out in my head, but it took like six years to do that. And yeah, that's the answer to the question.

I can understand that. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to put them down and yet you want to be honest. And when did you personally begin to realize your childhood wounds and how they had impacted you?

Well, there are kind of two answers to that question. I uh when I left home, I washed my hands with my parents. I joined the army and um If it wasn't for my wife, I probably would have had no contact at all. But I became a follower of Jesus through the influence of my wife at the age of twenty four. When I was twenty five years of age, my parents invited us to come out to their home for dinner.

My brother had been off at war, and w the family had not been together for several years. It was Thanksgiving, and so my mom and dad were there, my three younger brothers, my new wife, and myself. And we were that. Family that would say grace, but we would say, God is good, God is great, and we thank you for this food, amen, as quickly as we could, you know. And so, on this particular day, though, my dad said, I'd like to pray today.

And so we bowed our heads and he said Lord Mom and I would just like to say thank you. And then he started blubbering and he excused himself and went into the master bedroom. I went in after him. I said, Dad, Dad, are you all right? What's the matter?

He said, No, I'm okay. I just need a minute. And I said, well, what's going on? He said, well, it's just that your mother and I. Never thought that we would ever see our four boys together in the same room again.

And Something softened in me that day, and because I was a new Christian and starting to grow. I just chose to unilaterally forgive my mother and father that day for everything that had gone before, and it was real.

Now, I didn't have the, I didn't know what I was doing, okay, at the time, but that began, did begin a process that took me another 28 years to come full circle. And in fact, that's why I wanted to write the book, because I do now know that a man can do in a few months what took me several decades to do if he will apply himself and actually do this book, not just actually do the book. This is a summer best of Building Relationships broadcast. For more ways to strengthen your relationships, go to buildingrelationships.us. You'll see our featured resource by doctor Patrick Morley, From Broken Boy to Mended Man, A Positive Plan to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Break the Cycle.

Find out more at Building Relationships. US Well, Pat, as you've described already, you were one of those herding men. Do you really think it's possible for men to go from broken to mended? which is really kind of the theme of the book. Yes, and the answer is absolutely yes.

In fact, you know, the book's only been out a little while.

So it's September, but it came out in March, so not that long. But I'm getting correspondence like every single day from men. I got a text last night from a guy who had mentioned the book to a man. He got it. He's a pastor.

He got it. He was reading the book on an airplane and he was crying because he was identifying with everything that was being said. He had to stop reading the book on the airplane and finished it when he got home. And it's had a tremendous impact because he's for the first time able to understand all of these emotions or where these emotions are coming from that have always been inexplicable. And that was my case, too, as a broken boy.

I talk about nine characteristics of broken boys in the book. Just the first one is: you have a hard time believing that people really care about you. And so, if you have experienced a sense of abandonment, or if your parents were always angry and demanding, or if they were. Overly permissive, or even maybe enabling parents, then there's a good chance that you struggle with trusting people or a sense of feeling of abandon. That's certainly.

true of me. Another characteristic is you are easily angered. I never lost my temper. Not one time did I ever lose my temper. at the office.

Mm. But what I would do, because there the stakes are so high, you know, in terms of your prestige, getting. what you want done in terms of projects or sales and so forth, or even job security itself could be at risk.

So I would bottle it up and bring it home and then some little thing would set me off in. Boom, just like that hair trigger and But I had no idea what was going on, you see. Yeah. And so. Wouldn't this really got sorted out as when My mother died at the age of 53 and I didn't feel anything.

I didn't cry. I wasn't sad. I didn't miss her. And I thought that was odd, so I made an appointment with a counselor. And she helped me to put into words the father and mother wounds that I had never been able to articulate.

It was from that point forward. From the age of 53 on, and that I've spent a couple of decades now studying this and working with men on this issue. And I know that men. Can be mended, can be healed, because healing is all about pain. And pain can be identified, it can be faced, it can be grieved.

Wounds that have been made against us, by the way, these wounds, these are things that they're not your fault if you're listening today and you have childhood wounds. It's not your fault, but you're really the only one that can do anything about it now. But you can get to a place, no matter how toxic. I know this sounds crazy. Maybe your parents were nice like mine, and so the idea of forgiving them seems a little easier.

But maybe they were just mean people, maybe they were toxic, maybe they still are. Maybe when you invite them over to dinner, they're making snide remarks about your wife and they're bossing your children around. And maybe you do need to set up some boundaries. And I'm showing you how to do that in the book as well. But the point is that healing is definitely possible.

Men are being healed. Let's go back to your own childhood again, Pat, and describe a little more fully what was it like? I mean, you say your parents were good parents, but what were the things that were either missing there or what was going on there?

Well, I would say that they were nice parents. In terms of good parents, They really had never been trained. If you're listening today, And you could say my parents were encouraging. or my parents were affirming then that would be a sign that you had had good parenting. But what if you can't say that?

Uh in the book I identify seven negative parenting styles, and I'll tell you mine in a moment. You might say, if you can't say that they were encouraging, you might say, well, my parents were. Passive. Or my parents were absent, that could be death, divorce, workaholism, you know, at first or or addictions. Uh my parents were permissive, you know, like just let you have the run of the place and didn't have enough structure or Or maybe you would say my parents were enabling.

And that means, you know, all parents are supposed to help their children, but Uh enabling is doing for children things that they should or could be doing for themselves or maybe not holding them responsible when they do something they shouldn't do. Uh or maybe you might say my parents were um demanding. Uh or my parents were angry. I had a guy put a fence in our yard here a little while ago and he said I felt like I grew up in Oswitch. He said you just I had to walk around on eggshells.

So if you grew up in an angry home, that's probably, you know, maybe if you played at your friend's house all the time instead of your own home, that might be the case. Or my parents were belittling is the seventh negative parenting style. And uh this is your parents making fun of you or in sometimes in public. shaming you for body parts, things like this. Uh these things are so destructive and demeaning.

In my own case, Uh my parents were very passive because they Had never been equipped to train, as I said earlier. And then, secondly, They were very permissive. I pretty much could do whatever I wanted to do, and so I use that permission to get into a lot of trouble. Yeah. as some of our listeners probably can relate to as well.

And what made my um childhood so confusing is that my parents were really nice people. They they really were. But as my counselor pointed out, That doesn't mean that they were good parents uh just because they were nice people. She said that I think that you have been abandoned, gross abandonment, possibly even abused. And when she said that, I went ballistic, to be honest.

I I began defending my mom and dad, but Over a period of eight sessions, and only took eight sessions, she was able to help me really understand and look at things and uh in a more professional way and really understand what had been happening in my in my family.

Now, the book you have divided into three parts.

So tell us what those three parts are and why you structured the book in that manner. Uh so Gary, I'm all about giving them the practical help they need. the practical help that they've been looking for. Uh and very much focused on solutions, not problems. But here's the situation.

If you're trying to solve the wrong problem, you can only succeed by accident. And so I see this all the time. Men don't really understand what the problem is. And so the first part of the book, the arc of this book, part one, is unraveling what happened to you, really understanding childhood wounds. What you should have gotten, the right cocktail of love structure, roots and wings, and when that goes awry, you end up with one of these seven negative parenting styles that I mentioned.

And then also that evolves into adult behavior and nine different characteristics of adult children with unprocessed childhood wounds. And in part one, just really helping a man understand How he got To the place where he is. You know, uh, just a sidebar: in in our Christian world, uh it's n uh our normal process is is that we help someone become a follower of Jesus and get forgiveness for sins and salvation, and then we begin to help them. equip them and disciple them to move forward. But what I've discovered, and many people, and I know you have too, is that.

If you don't process The problems that got you into the dire situation that made you want to turn to Jesus in the first place. That doesn't mean those problems go away. They don't just disappear.

So you have to work through them. And so the purpose of this second part of the book is To show men a biblical healing process that's been around for thousands of years. And there's seven different stages of this. And everybody's different, and the stages are not necessarily one right after another and sometimes uh so like getting out of denial and facing the truth. That's one of the stages.

Grieving what the childhood that you should have had, that you deserve to have. and actually come to a place where you believe that you did deserve to have a different childhood. You know, one of the problems that uh men who grow up with childhood wounds is that they feel like they deserved what they got in some cases, not all cases.

So anyway, the second part of the book then is about that healing process. understanding what happened Healing it. And then the third part of the book is about breaking the cycle for the next generation, for your wife, if you're married or w i or if you ever do get married, and your children, if you have them or or ever do have them, and then also for your friends and and uh colleagues and other people around you that may also be struggling with uh these kinds of childhood wounds.

So that's it. The three phases of the book.

So describe like the kind of damage that a man carries from childhood into adulthood. I don't mean we can go into everything, but just give us an example of that kind of thing. Yeah. Well, one of the characteristics is that you are oversensitive and frequently misread what people intend. You're prickly.

You take things the wrong way. I have a friend, he's doing better now, but when he had four young children, he would walk into the family room and 15 minutes later he'd be sitting by himself. He he was So oversensitive, he took everything the wrong way, and then he made these prickly remarks. even his own family didn't want to be around them.

So that would be one of the ways. And then of course anger. is uh a very profound response mechanism for men who have childhood wounds that have not been addressed. It's just a way of self-defense, if you will. Yeah, just simply not knowing.

how to process conflict. And and then also having had childhood Memories of their parents being angry with them and lose their temper with their children, so they they themselves grow up with this bottled up anger and then they pass it on to everybody else. Yeah. What steps do you teach someone to help them shift their perspective to being compassionate? uh toward their parents instead of just blaming them and having being angry with them for the bad things that happened.

One important concept that Jesus teaches. is the the concept of unilateral forgiveness. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus said, forgive us Our sins as we forgive those that have sinned against us when they humble themselves and come to us on bowed knee and beg for forgiveness. It doesn't say that. It just says, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.

Parenting is a privilege and a sacred responsibility. to give children the right uh cocktail of love, structure, roots, and wings. and to give them the emotional and the relational and the spiritual It's not just putting a roof over the head, of course, we all know this. But it is protection. In fact, the essence of manhood is to identify and protect sacred things.

there's nothing more sacred that needs protecting than a man's family.

Well, Pat, let's talk to the man who sees what you're saying. They understand what you're talking about. But they don't have a clue as to what to do, that is where to begin.

So what's a first step in breaking destructive family cycles? Yeah. Here's the big picture. If you're listening... And you've identified with anything that we've been talking about here today?

And you maybe are suspicious. Maybe you know that you have childhood wounds that uh you've never processed. Maybe you're just suspicious that that might be the case, or maybe you've been in a deep state of denial. We all compartmentalize bad thoughts, but denial is something different. It's emotional amnesia.

We literally block things out and literally cannot remember them. But now your interest has been peaked a little bit.

So the first question to ask is, I would like you to picture yourself five or ten years down the road. And then look to behaviors, the unwanted behaviors that you have right now. Or the fears and anxieties that you'd like to get rid of right now. And ask yourself, what will be different five or ten years from now unless you take some action? to do something about them.

That's why I wrote this book. I wrote it for you. I'm known for personal vulnerability, but I'm also known for. giving men practical resources. And that's why The book is filled with practical exercises, reflections.

Discussion and reflection questions at the end of each chapter, so you can do that by yourself or in a small group. There are several writing exercises to help you put down on paper.

Some thoughts to help you clarify your own thinking about what happened to you. And then some positive steps that you can take with your own wife and your own children and with your friends. to be that cycle breaker, to be that guy that the other men hope that they can become someday too.

So I hear you saying that first of all you identify, you know, what what are you going to be like in ten years if you don't deal with some of this stuff. And then you decide I'm going to take some steps. And when you do, this book is going to be a guideline for you. That's what I see, and that's what I hear you saying, right? That's it.

That's it. And I'm also telling men and women, women are reading the book too.

So this is my 23rd book, and usually I know that when I do an interview like this, most people are not going to go out and buy the book.

So I always try to give Value in the interview.

So this is something that they can take away because even if they don't end up with the book. But guys, this is different. That you can't just listen to this interview today and get what you need to heal your childhood wounds. In fact, You're not going to be able to get enough to heal your childhood wounds just by reading the book and getting the intellectual knowledge about it. I'm telling men and women, this is not a book that you read.

This is a book you do. You have to do the book. But if you will do the book, God will show up. It may be that you go all the way to healing. And if your childhood wounds have been on the more mild side, you might go all the way to healing.

Or you might go uh a certain distance down the road It might incite you or encourage you, or, and I do this in the book, encourage you. if you do feel like you need to get professional help is to seek out a counselor. In fact, they even have a link on how to find a counselor in the book.

So it's a just it's a book filled with practical help. That pet you you alluded to, the spouse. of a man who has these pains. What do you say to that wife who's caught in this kind of cycle? How does a woman married to a wounded man become an instrument of love and help for him?

Hmm.

So it's not a simple answer in one sense, but it is in another. I mean, because the woman herself might be. A broken woman, you see, a broken girl. Or she might be a person who's not a follower of Jesus, and her own temperament might not be well suited to be a coper with these kinds of things. But here's what I would say, and I would encourage women to do.

If you have a husband and you suspect that because of his behavior or your knowledge that he has some children, childhood wounds that have never been dealt with. Is that You would Not try to fix him.

So that is absolutely the worst thing that you can do. And you probably already know that because you may have already done it or you've seen somebody else do it.

So I'd encourage you not to do that. I would encourage you to, most of all, pray to our Savior and our Lord. And our God to help your husband. But then, on a practical level, I'd really encourage you to get a copy of this book for yourself and read it so that you can understand what he's going through. That will give you more empathy toward him, and it'll also give you some practical ideas to understand how.

he could be helped. And then the final piece, so prayer. you know, read the book for yourself. For your own knowledge or for your own personal life if that's the case. But then consider suggesting that your husband read the book.

Do not give the book At him. Does that make sense? But do give the book to him. I have a. Uh a friend Who got a copy of the book?

Didn't read it, his wife read it. And she just said to him one day, and she had that tone of voice. She said, You know, I really think you should read this. Yeah. And he understood what she was saying, and he read it, and it really did help him.

Mm. Yeah, I've sometimes said to women, ask him if he'll read the first chapter. Yeah. That's good. If you read the first chapter, you'll probably read the rest of it, you know.

That is very good.

Now, your book gives, as it were, a game plan to process pain and and then come to the place of forgiveness and then building better relationships. Give us some examples of the action plans that have that have helped men.

Okay.

Well, I mentioned that there are these nine different characteristics. Um of Broken Boys. I mean, I could write a book on any one of these things, right? But instead, what I've chosen to do is. Give the guy that's reading it a page or two.

Of information so that he can identify with it. For example, Characteristic number four, you're not sure what healthy male behavior looks like. And then I tell the story in there that When I did join the Army, I rose to the rank of Specialist 4 in the minimum amount of time. And then when I would have been promoted to E5, which is a sergeant. I didn't get the promotion in the minimum amount of time.

So I started Bugging my master sergeant every day and asking him, you know, what did I do wrong? When are you going to promote me? And finally, he sat me down and he said, son, let me give you some advice. the more you pester me, The less motivated I am to promote you.

So you can see my launch into manhood, it was just very, very awkward. I had no situational awareness. A very low emotional intelligence. I was, I just, I floundered. And that's, you know, if you're listening, maybe you were not fathered or mothered or mentored or coached about what it means to be a man.

And so as a result, you like me, you were unprepared for adulthood because Your parents just didn't know how to equip you or didn't equip you to become independent.

So it could be college advice, it could be vocational advice.

Some information about the opposite gender.

Well, first of all, I I never heard the words I love you. or I'm proud of you, Or we believe in you, no recollection of any of those kinds of words. And so I just didn't have the nurture to enter into adulthood as is with healthy male behavior. And so in the book, I spent a couple of pages on that. And then At the end of this, I have a reflection exercise.

For you, the man. to evaluate yourself in this area. And I'll just read it. It says, how often do you feel like You know what healthy male behavior is in a given situation. And then you have five choices: never, rarely, sometimes.

usually or always, This is helping give a man A a a map. Uh Where he is, how he got there, and then moving forward in this healing process, there are also exercises for him to do. to actually, you know, pray prayers to go through acts of forgiveness. Just every chapter has different kinds of exercises and reflections for the man to do to make it very practical. Pat, you mentioned earlier that this is a process.

It's not something that can be done overnight. But typically, how long do you think a process is if a man seriously sees these wounds and hurts and really wants to move in the right direction? How long might that process take?

Well, Gary, it's going to be different for every man, of course, you know that, depending on the severity of the wounds. And but I would say that most men should be able to make immense progress in as little as two or three months. And I say that from personal experience. I experienced about a 70% or maybe even 80% improvement just by going through eight professional counseling. sessions.

The feeling that I had at the time was I I knew that I was a follower of Jesus. But somehow I just felt dull. I I didn't feel that the luster of the gospel. I didn't when I read about the abundant life, I didn't feel abundant. When it says in scriptures that Christ came to make us alive, I didn't feel fully alive.

And uh s but here's the thing. In a matter of a couple of months, that radically changed.

Now that doesn't mean that everything Was fixed or made well or made whole right away. In fact, even today, I still walk with the limp. Eric Erickson's Famous child development theory. The first task of that is trust versus mistrust. And so if a child in the first few months or years of its life makes the decision that the world is not a safe place.

then even when you heal your child with wounds, you're still going to be dealing with some of that first characteristic that you have a hard time believing that people really care about you.

So I still struggle with that. When I walk into a room today, unless I'm filled with the Holy Spirit, I still my natural tendency is to be suspicious that people are really not gonna not gonna like me.

Now I don't actually act on that that much anymore, but every now and then it does rear its head.

So You're going to walk with a limp. Let's be completely transparent about that. But that doesn't mean that you can't feel fully alive in Jesus. You can. Mm.

Absolute absolutely. What what do you say the man who Sees he needs help. Maybe he is working through this book. He's making some. progress.

But let's say that anger is one of the characteristics that he's exhibited and he's tried to deal with. And so he's made a few steps forward, feeling good about himself, and then something happens and he has an outburst of anger and hurts his wife or kids or whomever it is. How might he feel at that point and what does he do at that point?

Well, he's going to have different voices in his head, right? He's going to have the Holy Spirit who's going to be, first of all, loving him, but also. Encouraging, convicting him to make it right. But he's also going to have the voice of the devil in his head as well. saying, see, I told you, you you your di your mother was right, you're going to end up just like your dad.

You're never going to be any good.

So you're going to have those voices in your head.

So it's a little bit of a whack-a-mole kind of a thing. But here's the thing, the way I look at it, And my experience proves this out, is that Each time you have an episode, you go through the process of, first of all, repenting or changing your mind about it and asking for forgiveness. And it's like cutting a piece of string in half.

So half is gone, but half is left. But the half that's left is not as big as it was before. And then the next time you have an episode, you cut the string in half again.

So a little bit of it goes away when you. apologize and ask forgiveness. But Half of the string is still there. But again, it's not as long as it was before. And so you do and you can make progress over time with this.

Yeah, yeah. What about the man who denies that anything really bad happened in childhood, or he recognizes that, yeah, there were problems back there, but it doesn't affect me. It doesn't affect me. Uh what do you what do you say to that guy? He's probably not ready for the book.

It's a fascinating thing that when it happened when I was writing the book. When I was in college, I used to race Motocross, and my mom and dad came to see me race one time, one time. That happened to be the day that I got into a nasty accident and got flown to the hospital in a helicopter.

Well, my mom and dad didn't come my mom and dad didn't come to the emergency room and they never called to check up to see how I was. Yeah. Well, now you think you would think that that would be that would be such a devastating memory that it would just have you know, really ripped me apart, right? Yeah. Until I was literally until I was writing the book, I literally had no recollection of that.

It was by writing the book, reliving everything, you know, that memory came back to me and I s but and that's what the that's how powerful denial is. But the the process of of facing the truth Then is what I'm trying to help men do so they can get out of denial, and that's really to actually try to help men remember. The the man who does read the book I'm going to guide him through a process of remembering. The the goal of getting out of denial, facing the truth, is remembering what we've been trying to forget or what we have forgotten.

Well, Pat, as we come to the end of our time together today, can you tell us a story about someone who has taken a similar journey to yours and has now found freedom? Yeah, my best friend for seventeen years was uh a man who ran our Bible study, I the one I teach. I made a deal with him, I'll teach and you do everything else. And so We would go out to lunch in a movie every Friday, and we did that for 17 years until he passed away. And uh he grew up in a home That was extremely dysfunctional.

And his father was a belittler. and and uh a demeaning person.

So One day, my friend Jim, when he was about ten years old, had his friend in the neighborhood Timmy over to play and as Timmy was getting ready to leave. My friend's Jim's father Open the door and in front of my friend Jim, who's ten years old at the time, says to Timmy. Timmy, you can come back any time. I sure wish I had a son like you. Mm.

Well, I mean, how do you get over that? And then all the other things that the father would have said as well. But here's the thing. Jim was able to process his chattered ones. and was able to come to a place to of forgiveness.

His father, in particular, was toxic, and so he was never really able to have a a relationship with him again. Unlike me, I was able to. uh have a relationship again with my dad. That happened at the age of thirty-five for me, but never happened for Jim. But he was able to uh become a follower of Jesus.

To get married, to have his own family, and be a loving husband and father and a man of service. who love to serve other People. That never would have happened, though, if he had not found rest for his soul. By becoming a follower of Jesus, you know, Jesus said, Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened. And I will give you more work to do.

Yeah, he says, Come unto me and and I will give you rest. You'll find rest for your soul and and Jim did find that rest. Yeah. Well, my prediction is that God's going to use this book to help a lot of men look to God and walk with God through this process of finding healing from the wounds of childhood. And I also want to say this.

I think a lot of counselors who may be listening today, this book is going to be a great tool for Christian counselors to use in the process of helping men walk through this journey.

So, Pat, again, thanks for being with us today. Thank you, Gary, and thank you, Chris and Andrea, as well. I appreciate it. And to all you men out there, I pray every day that God will give you all the fullness. of the abundant life and the you two fully alive in Jesus.

And that is my prayer every day.

Well, what a great resource for any man listening who has some unresolved hurts and for the people around him who love him. If you go to buildingrelationships.us, you'll see that book by Dr. Patrick Morley, From Broken Boy to Mended Man, A Positive Plan to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Break the Cycle. Just go to buildingrelationships.us.

Well, that's it for our summer best up broadcast for today.

Next week, if you are lonely or you know someone who is, help miss the conversation about cultivating deeper connections. Before we go, let me thank our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Backing. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry at Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.

Let me help you sort through tough questions that lead to ultimate answers. I'm Michael Rydelnick, and each weekend on Openline, I offer biblical, honest, and down-to-earth insights and encouragement to help you understand God's truth and apply it to daily life. Join the Bible study on Open Line with me, Dr. Michael Rydelnick, every Saturday. Yeah.

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