Family Dysfunction

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

Stories of hopelessness turned into hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Welcome to Man Talk, brought to you by TAWCMN, talking and walking Christian men's ministry, where they're devoted to breaking down the walls of race and denomination and challenging men to take their God-assigned role. Here's our hosts, Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy. Welcome back to Man Talk Radio. And Roy, it's good to see your smiling face again. It's good to see you, Will. And what's it been? Too long?

It's been several weeks, hasn't it? Because I know we just had some hiccups along the way. So it's good to see you, sir. It's great to be back with you. Amen.

Amen. You know, today's subject that we're going to be talking about, I think everyone out there can identify with it at some point in time in their life. And so we're going to be talking about dysfunctional families.

Dysfunctional what? And again, everybody can associate with this particular topic, because what I think it drives to the core of individuals who we will encounter in our family, obviously, if we're born again, and then we encounter family members who are not born again, then, you know, that's going to add to the dysfunction and create some misalignment, some out of sync and ideal ideologies, how you think, how you interpret things, that type of thing. Yeah, and people coming from dysfunctional families, Will.

Also, I'm sure you have seen this as well, sometimes struggle with interpersonal relationships. Exactly. Depending on what the nature of the dysfunction was, if it was a trust issue that was constantly raising its head through the family, then people have difficulty trusting their co-workers or trusting even in their own family. And that leads to other problems, right?

Exactly. Because trust is essential, I think, in first of all, in any marriage relationship. And that, of course, carries over into the family. So if you don't, if the trust factor is broken, then it has to be re-merged, if you will. You have to come to an agreement. And of course, that varies with time, depending on individuals, where they are, their Christian walk with the Lord, and, you know, whether or not they are indeed submitting their self over so they could, you know, listen to God and be the most effective representative for Him in their household.

That's great. And thinking about dysfunction, if they've not had it modeled properly, even that relationship with God can be very challenging, you know, because we've talked about that in the past. If you didn't see it modeled from your parents and what the heavenly relationship was with your Heavenly Father, and then you saw dysfunction in the family, so then you've got a double whammy.

You've got, you haven't seen it vertically modeled, and you haven't seen it horizontally modeled with the spouses in your home, with your parents, and that's very difficult. And then it goes to the children, you know, and I unfortunately came from one of those families we're talking about, just being totally transparent. And people have often said, I can't believe you turned out the way you turned out.

And I said, I can't either. But it's very awakening when you become an adult and then you look back. There were so many things that, as I grew up, that I thought were just normal. And we won't get into all that, but things that I was part of every day and every week, I thought, well, everybody's in the middle of this type of situation.

But indeed, they weren't necessarily like dealing with what we were dealing with. And then down the road, there was another family that was dealing with other problems that we weren't dealing with. But to your point, to lead off, everybody has dealt with some level of dysfunction. Most people, I'd say 98% of the families have, and there are a few of those out there that are pretty doggone good shape, right? Well, I think everybody has.

I got to go with 100%. And the reason why is because if we're being truthful about family members, there's always a member within that family, whether it's immediate or extended family, that will create or cause dysfunction just because of the lifestyle that they're living. So families have people who might be same sex. You might have individuals who are heavy drinkers or individuals who are compulsive liars.

So you have some of that, and all it takes is just one route. Well, you often hear people say they've got, I'm the black sheep of the family. Is it okay to say black sheep again? Yeah, it is okay. It's okay. It's okay. That's if it's okay for me to say keep up with the Joneses.

That's a definite okay. But there's nothing about me that you got to keep up with because I'm usually trailing, so it's not a problem. But that is so true, Will, and it could be any number of things, right? And that typically happens when someone's going against the grain of what the leadership of the home is, right? So whether you're living a lifestyle that's not agreeable to your family or you're drinking too much or you're lying all the time, there's a constant sense of deception, those sort of things. And I bet most of our listeners out there are sitting there saying, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yes. If they're alcoholism, liar, trust issues, infidelity issues, all those things. And that creates major, major collateral damage as we use that term as a role of the father that he's got to try to control that collateral damage, right? So this creates a massive amount of collateral damage in a lot of homes. So we arrived at the fact, I think, that there is dysfunction. And so what does dysfunction, a dysfunctional member of the family, what effect will they have on individuals who, for example, are trying to live a lifestyle that's pleasing to the Lord? And so now you have this individual who is thrown into the mix because they're not functioning according to maybe the rest of the family, or they're not viewed in the sense of someone who is functioning normally. And I know that a lot of people would listen to those terms and they'd say, well, that's a lot of subjectivism. But we understand the premise, you know, that individuals who are not functioning according to how others look at them and that, and again, when someone is dysfunctional, they're causing chaos, right? They're causing, you know, disruption in the family, they're causing division in the family. And so, you know, in today's society, if you listen to your psychologist or sociologist, they would simply say that's normal. But for the child of God, we're trying to build on a solid foundation.

Yeah. And the thing that came to mind, Will, when you were talking about what does it cause, what are the things that happen? For me, the first word that came to mind, the disruption was the peace. Peace doesn't exist in the midst of that type of dysfunction. For me personally, and I've seen it in many families, there's a peace missing and that calmness that should reside, the home should be the safe place. The homes, the family should be the safe place. There's enough dysfunction outside the home that that should be your escape. When you get back in the house, that should be your place of peace with your parents, with your children. And it oftentimes it's not for that very reason is because of this dysfunction. And how do you fix that?

I mean, really, that's what people say. Yeah, I'm in the middle of that, but what I do about it? And, you know, we don't have all the answers other than we know who has the answer is our Heavenly Father and who can take and calm the waters. He can calm the storm and he can put peace back in the home. And that's the thing we want to leave you with today as we go into this conversation. There is hope.

There is hope to get through this. That's right. But we have to understand, too, that when Jesus came in Matthew chapter 10, verses 34 through 36, Jesus says, Don't think that I've come to bring peace, but I came to bring a sword.

And he said, Where? You will have a person or men against fathers, daughters against mothers, mothers against daughters, daughters in law, against mother in law, mother in law, against daughter. So you're going to have division from the sheer fact that you believe and you following in Jesus Christ. So that's what he meant that that that people and we we can read this throughout history. People have turned in their family members because they were born again believers.

This has been times past. Turn them in because, you know, they feared that if they were caught in a home with someone who was a follower of Jesus Christ, then all of a sudden, you know, they would say, Hey, you know, you you are part of this family, so therefore we taking you to and are going to throw you to the lions or do whatever it is that they plan to do. So so from the sheer fact that you are a follower of Christ, you're going to be looked at as dysfunctional if there are individuals who are in the household who are not born again.

Well, that goes in society, goes in workplaces, right? We were just talking about this at the I had a conversation before came to the radio station with a man that thinks like we think walks like we walk in terms of our fallen Christ. And, you know, if in today's time, let's call it what it is in today's time, believing like we believe as followers of Christ that we are viewed as the dysfunctional, of course, in society and the persecution. So that's that's that's that's the other lane of traffic, if you will, is the followers of Christ that are viewed as dysfunctional. And then the first line we were talking about was just in a normal household, not be it a spiritual delineation or separation that causes the dysfunction, just the normal human side, the old self, you know, even for those who have been born again, too often they turn back to the to the son of man versus being the versus being the son of God, you know, in their daily walk. Right, exactly. And, you know, that when we're viewed as dysfunctional, of course, Jesus said that again, you know, in Matthew Chapter five, around verse 10 or 11, he talked about he said, You're going to be persecuted for my sake. You will.

People are going to hate you for my name's sake. So he says it right there because we are we are building our lives off of the foundation, which is Jesus Christ. And so when we start building off of that foundation, we can understand the people who are in our family who are calling us dysfunctional because we used to live and do what they used to do. Right. So we used to walk and give over to that sin nature.

And the sin nature, of course, began to take over and we begin to follow it rather than following Jesus Christ. Right. Right. We know that the son of man, that being, you know, as we were born right until we become followers of Christ and born again, we become the son of God.

Right. At that point, once we've once the Holy Spirit is moved into our hearts so that the son of man doesn't disappear. It's just it's always present. And that's why the renewing of the mind, all those components of daily scripture reading meditation with the father, listening to the father is so important so that the old man, the son of man stays down because that's that's who your history is.

That's how you remember where you grew up, what you did, all those things. But the son of God being that you've been born again has to be the one that stays on the on the rise and continually renewing. Right.

Amen. Well, you know, I like using that term, the old man, the old man, because the old man refers to the sin nature. Yeah, it does.

Yeah. But I don't like old because it makes me think that you think I'm older or something like that. Maybe you think I'm old.

There you go. See, I keep my my gray shaved off. So yours is visible. But you do have a beard. I do have a little bit of chin stuff. So what's on the chin? A little wisdom. What's on the chin could be on the head. Gray is wisdom. Gray is wisdom. So that's the card I'm claiming.

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Call 336-885-1987. Welcome back to Man Talk Radio. So we're chatting about the dysfunctional families. And one of the things that comes to mind, Will, is we talked about collateral damage and I think people oftentimes if they didn't know any better and they're in the middle of it, they just don't know how. They don't recognize it, I guess would be the best way to put it.

They don't recognize it. Like I said, when I was growing up, I just didn't envision our family as being dysfunctional. But as I got out and got grown and saw, boy, how dysfunctional we were. And you know, the collateral damage is not just in that moment and in that time period of being raised or those parents parenting those children.

The collateral damage comes generation next, right? Because if a person's been raised in that and they've not found Christ as their personal savior and living a new life and versus the old man and the old souls we were talking about, then there's still that cycle will continue. And then it'll just it'll replicate itself. And that will just continue to flow through the offspring of the children of that individual until it gets broke. And that's the sad part about all this is that, and we don't recognize those things typically when in the middle of it. But this is the reality.

Clateral damage will continue and get worse over time. And I've seen that happen in the children and then the way the children grow up, not the first generation, second generation of children, and then how their lives are just all over the board. Divorces, pregnancies out of wedlock, can't hold a job, don't get along with people, trust issues, always changing friends, always moving around. All those sorts of things are byproducts of this dysfunction that I have personally witnessed.

Absolutely, Roy. And what a person does is, as you're right, it's a cyclic effect because it continues to go on through the family until such time, one of the family members come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, give their life over, and then they could witness that. But you're absolutely right, because when a person is going through the dysfunction and they're a young child, they have no idea that we're living outside of a scope of what God wants us to live, and we think everything is okay. Yeah, and that goes back to the old soul, the old self, old man, is that we think that we know best and that we think it's okay to do the things we do until we get back on the other side. And I've seen people that have accepted Christ, and I know anyone that's listening has seen this happen, that they return to the old self.

And for various reasons, lack of fellowship, lack of personal time with God, lack of that deep relationship, lack of being in the Word, lack of the larger body of fellowship, all those things contribute to that. And I think that's what's important if you're listening is that, back to our earlier comment, there is hope, there is a way to break this cycle. And as we look around society today, you can break this cycle. First, you've got to do it by making a decision to follow Christ. If you're already following Christ in the middle of this mess, you need to say, why am I still in the middle of this dysfunction? And then you need to help the folks that are in your family, you need to be praying with them, praying for them, supporting them, getting, sometimes it requires counseling too, Will. We talk about that on occasion about counseling, but sometimes it requires counseling for an individual or the family to work through some of these issues and some of the baggage that's been laid out there.

Yeah, well, and you and I know that if a family or a member of a family who was dysfunctioned and they understand that there is dysfunction and they want to seek help, then that's where it has to begin. It has to begin to where I want healing within my family, because as a family, you can be happy, but you'll never experience joy. Joy and happiness are two different things.

Joy has an eternal purpose, if you will, whereas happiness is just temporary. I'm happy when you get paid, when you get that bonus, you're happy. It's like, oh, wow, that's good that I've worked all this time and now all of a sudden the bonuses come through. Or it's a real hot day outside and you got to eat your favorite ice cream on a cone. Well, as long as you're eating that ice cream, it's like, wow, this is good. I never want it to end.

And then as soon as it ends, it's like, now I'm sad again because, you know, I finished my favorite ice cream and I want some more. I mean, in that example, you know, it's just an example. It's far deeper and it reaches far greater, I think, within each and every individual within that household.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all, Will. And, you know, dysfunction growing up for me was one of those things that looking back, as I've shared, was was so detrimental, so detrimental. And it's luckily God brought me through all that.

And I was relieved and released from it. But it it took quite some time as an adult to learn the right way to do things and what God intended for us as men to be doing with our families. And I think if you're listening today and you ask yourself, you know, what have I done that needs reparation, you know, as part of that dysfunction, it's a great opportunity to to make things right. And, you know, some of the stuff we're reading right now together is talking about that thing, right, the forgiveness piece. And for me, it struck a struck a chord that said, hey, you need to make sure you have forgiven everyone involved in that stuff you're growing up with, that you grew up with. And then also because if you don't, then you continue to live that out because God can't give you full blessing because you're still holding on to those little nuggets and the bad kind of things, right?

Absolutely. And and you are actually becoming a prisoner to the fact that you won't forgive, you know, so a person who don't forgive, that's what, you know, that's what's happening. You become a prisoner because you won't release from yourself this weight that you should release and you continue to hold on it. So and and if you see your brother go into a situation to whereas, you know, they may have, you know, done you some some harm or said something that might have hurt, you know, that then you call that out to your brother, because they would continue to go on and think that, hey, I did nothing to this individual.

And why are you not talking to me today on whatever the case may be? So and it's really not how necessarily what they say to us is what how we respond to them to say that shows the true heart of a born again believer. It does. And one of the things is you were talking through that will that part of the study is that that passes on through generations. So the unforgiveness based on the way if you're holding that the way you treat your family and you may not even recognize it to the point of how you're treating your children or your wife based on something that happened way back when that you're still holding on to. So then that collateral damage continues to impact through the generations of that.

Okay, you think you've gotten past this, but you haven't forgiven that person and you're still holding on to it. So that defines your behavior, whether it be conscious or subconscious or lack of knowledge, it defines your behavior and your actions until you totally release it, because that's another stronghold that Satan can use to really disrupt your future generations to disrupt your existing home place. Right. So those are things that we've got to be aware of.

So he is the, you know, the master of disaster as we talk about still kill and destroy or sinister minister. Yeah, there you go. So there you go. And folks that that is the reality. And I think if we'll slow down one minute to see these things that are going on in our homes and our family's homes and extended families, we can help pray through some of this stuff as well. Because your, your teenager parent, if you're listening, your teenager or young adult, they are not going to want you to get into their business, but you're going to have to get into their business, you know, and find out as long as they're in your home, find out what's going on, you know, with them, because, and we're going to be talking about this, continuing to talk about this on, on the next show. So listen to the next show, because we're going to be talking about family frustrations, rather than dysfunctions, what we're talking about now. I think we need to add family comedy in here somewhere, because family frustrations, family dysfunction. But so the few weeks down the road, we need to put family calm. There you go.

There you go. Because all all of what is happening in the home is, you know, once that child leaves, there's going to be a residual effect. Yeah, yeah, the residual effect is, and the residual effect is, is once you don't investigate, and they start bringing stuff into your home, and all things started happening to them on the outside of that home. And now they're bringing it inside the home. And now, if something happened to whereas somebody might say, hey, such and such and such, was caught with this, or was carrying this, or was had this type of paraphernalia, what are you going to do as a parent now? It's like, I had no idea they were doing this.

I had, you know, no notion that they were bringing this into my house. So the thing about it is, is yes, your children might be upset and mad at you. But in the end, it's for their own good. Right.

And so let's, this is a great opportunity to inject this here. You know, a child can't vote, a child can't drink legally, a child can't carry a gun legally, a child can't drive legally, and probably a half a dozen other things a child cannot do legally until they're after 18. So therefore, that means parents, you're responsible for what they're doing, even if you trust them, as a friend once told me, trust but verify.

And we've talked about this in the past. These phones are one of the greatest windows of opportunity, but one of the greatest windows of disaster. So folks, if you're listening, and you've got a teenager or, you know, an adolescent preteen, and you've given them a smartphone and just trusting that they're doing the right thing with that phone, trust me, they're not necessarily doing the right thing with that phone. They're too tempted.

They're natural biological growth patterns, and they're targeted. And if you haven't watched it, you need to watch it, The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which we've talked about before and see how your children's habits and behaviors on that phone become a target with algorithms being built around that child's behavior in this smart world, if you're on the phone, and all of a sudden things are coming at them that should never be coming at them. Yes, because you know, they can do as much damage just drinking alcohol. You know, they could do just as much damage getting their hand on one of the parents' guns. I mean, you know, so yes, the smartphone we do talk about a lot, but we also have to give credence to these other things that's happening that a child can get their hand on and cause this dysfunction to come into the family.

And then all of a sudden you got law enforcement breaking down your door and you're wondering what's happening. Well, the opioids is a prime example, right? Much of that medication was prescribed for their parents during the pain situations. And these, a lot of the children are getting the scripts out of their family's medicine cabinet and ODing on this. We've seen numerous cases.

And we've got a friend, we have a personal friend that's gone through that with multiple children that he was involved with in their lives that have ODed and died unfortunately from one particular school. So folks, we're so glad you joined us. We've run out of time. Will, why did you, what happened to the time? Exactly.

It just flew. Well, folks come back and join us next week. So happy you're listening to us.

We've been so blessed by what we've seen over the last year and a half, two years in terms of numbers. God bless each of you. And we will be back with you next week on ManTalk Radio podcast. Where we will be talking about family frustrations. So join us again. As we wrap up today's show, be assured that TAWCMM, talking and walking Christian men's ministry is building a community of men that are Christ followers with the desire to be servant leaders in their homes, communities, churches and work environments. Check out our website for upcoming events and regularly scheduled meetings. Drop us a note for topics that you would like to have us visit in the future. Thank you for joining us on ManTalk today. Visit us at www.tawcmm.com. Men walking the talk. This is the Truth Network.