Episode transcript
When Faith, Family, and Pain Collide in Real Life
Well, hey, friends, welcome to the Life Renovation Podcast.
We're your co-hosts, Glendie Loranger and Elizabeth Morrison.
And together, we're breaking down the walls that divide us through meaningful conversations around faith, family and sexuality.
Morning, Elizabeth.
Good morning.
Hey, we both had kind of a similar experience this weekend.
We both attended the Thorn.
We did, yes.
Yeah.
You want to go first?
So the Thorn, it's like Cirque du Soleil meets like an Easter play.
Like the gospel.
Yeah.
Gospel meets Cirque.
Yes.
Yeah.
So there was like acrobats and there was like all these characters.
Jon was telling the story.
It was so cool.
It was so well done.
It's a friend of mine, a personal friend of mine, whose sister wrote, she and her husband wrote, the Thorn as a theater production for youth way back when.
And now it's in performing arts centers across the country.
And so they opened in Spokane this last weekend and I was pretty blown away.
Yeah.
It was like something I've never seen before.
Yeah.
What was your favorite part?
They just had this really cool relationship, how they showed Satan tempting other people.
They used lights and just his character was so creepy.
It was just so real, especially the garden, when they had Jesus in the garden and Satan around him.
So Satan wasn't your favorite character, right?
Oh, he wasn't, but I just appreciated.
I just appreciated how they depicted him because I think most of the times people don't.
Yeah.
And we were at a performing arts center where, I mean, not everybody there was Christian that we know of.
Yeah, it was a really cool depiction.
And then the crucifixion on the cross was hard to watch.
I don't know.
I bawled.
So good.
Anyways, if you have a chance, go see The Thorn.
It was so good.
But that's not the topic that we're gonna cover this morning.
We got some other things to talk about here on the podcast and we're gonna take a pause.
We've been doing the state of faith, family and sexuality.
So we did state of the church and then state of sexuality with Joanna Hyatt.
That was an incredible interview.
If you haven't listened to that, you might wanna pause this one and go back.
And so we have one more to do, state of the family, but we're gonna pause this because we realized that some of the topics that we've covered, some of the subject lines that got brought up with state of the church and state of sexuality might have kind of spurred some things in you.
So we wanna take a little different approach this morning and we're gonna talk about pits today.
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Understanding the Emotional and Spiritual Pits That Keep Families Stuck
So let's do a little word association.
Our producer's over here doing armpit farts.
All right, Elizabeth, first thing that comes to mind when I say the word pit.
Okay, okay, so hear me out.
So you said the word pit and the first thing I think of, there's this Winnie the Pooh movie and they're trying to catch a monster.
So Pooh and his friends, Piglet, Rabbit, Tigger, all of them, right?
They're trying to catch this monster and they build a pit to catch him in, but then they end up falling in the pit themselves.
There's this super funny bit where they're trying to get out of the pit.
They're trying to get Piglet to help them.
And there's just so many miscommunications between all of them.
It's hysterical.
So we'll link it for those of you that haven't seen this.
Yeah, that's what I think.
I never thought we'd be linking Winnie the Pooh movie in the show notes, but okay, there you go.
I love that.
Yeah, so that's me.
Okay, I raised boys, right?
So I think of my oldest, Reed.
I didn't get his permission.
So Reed, if you're listening, I apologize.
He's had so many stories told on him, but when he was in sixth grade, he wanted to be a man, so bad.
And he would literally, every day in the shower, he'd be looking at his armpit, like examining it.
He wanted armpit hair.
And he'd come in and go, mom, what do you think?
And I'd be like, no, just peach fuzz.
Sorry, dude, just peach fuzz.
And there was this one day where he starts screaming from the bathroom, mom, mom!
And I'm like, I go running and thinking that somebody's dying.
And he's like, I have armpit hair!
And he was so proud of his armpit hair.
So when I say pit, I think Reed's armpit.
That's what you think of.
So tell me you raised boys without telling me you raised boys.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
There you go.
I can speak testosterone with the best of them.
Yeah.
And so, you know, laughs aside, the word pit in today's episode isn't gonna be those funny anecdotes that we have.
It's gonna be more of that place that you find yourself in that you can't get out of, that place that you feel stuck.
So a bit more serious.
And Webster defines this pit as a low or poor psychological state.
For example, spiraling downward into the pit of despair.
And we see this in scripture too.
In Psalm 40, one through two, it says that I waited patiently for the Lord.
He inclined to me and he heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire, and he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.
That's so good.
So the big question for today is, how do I get myself or someone I love out of their pit and make sure that we or I don't end up there again?
The big question again right there.
How do I get out of a pit?
And if you think about a pit, especially the way Elizabeth described it, spiraling downward, there are pits that we have jumped into with both feet, knowingly jumped in and found ourselves staring up these high walls going, how the heck do I get out of here?
That question that all of us have asked, how did I get here?
And then there's pits that some of us have been asking and some of them have been thrown in.
It wasn't by our doing at all, and yet we find ourselves in a pit, because a pit's a pit.
The walls are mud and slime, steep, dark, and not an obvious way out.
It can literally paralyze people and dictate our behaviors.
I think so often we know we're in a pit when we kind of take a look at some of our behaviors.
Are we isolating?
Are we lashing out?
My devotion this morning was really interesting, just as we're talking about pits.
I was in Proverbs 18, and in 18.1, it says, whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire.
He breaks out against all sound judgment.
And I was like, isolation.
I see isolation as just a reaction.
When I'm so stuck, I don't know what to do.
I'm just gonna hole up, pull in, pull the covers over my head, nobody else comes in.
But then verse two says, a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.
I thought about that.
There are people in a pit who are so stuck and they just want to lash out.
I'm gonna just tell everybody everything I think and I don't care how it affects anybody.
That reaction to a pit can be harsh for the people that we know and love.
But Elizabeth and I are just gonna go a little personal here with a couple of the ways that we found ourselves in pits.
You wanna rock, paper, scissors?
See who goes, no.
Elizabeth, volunteer.
Yeah, I did.
And my name's written first on the sheet, so thanks to the notes.
Yeah, so we wanted to speak from places that we have gotten out of.
And so, something that I've journeyed through is just debt, financial debt, feeling like you don't know how you're gonna make your ends meet, feeling like you will always have to owe the government or the car place or whoever funds.
And so that was something that I've journeyed through over the last, I'd say 10 years after graduating college and being where I am now.
Just something that really, I think a lot of people have gone through and feels really good when you get out of it and look back and see where you've come from.
But when you're in it, it's just all encompassing.
You just look up and you're like, what do I do?
Yeah, the pit of debt.
I hadn't thought of that one.
Probably the biggest one that comes to mind for me is a pit that I was thrown into because I suffered sexual trauma all through my early years and then well into my teen years from extended family members and being thrown into a pit like that.
You can almost develop a victim mentality and then you end up operating, making decisions out of that victim mentality in just regular everyday decisions.
That's a hard one to get out of.
So both of those, a pit that I was thrown into or obviously there were some things that I actually decided and operated out of with that trauma.
So with that trauma, Elizabeth, there was a lot of healing that had to happen.
Six years of counseling and prayer ministry so that I could step out of that victim mentality and learn what it looked like to live as a survivor.
And that's really my journey out of the pit, was becoming a survivor and not living as a victim.
I love that.
So Elizabeth, as you and I were comparing our notes for this podcast, we discovered something about these pits that we have both been in, that a lot of times they had almost a generational component to it.
Almost like we could see cycles or patterns from generations past where family members had jumped into similar pits.
And so if you're wondering how the heck do pits relate to faith, family, and sexuality, most of the time they relate to family because oftentimes the pits that we find ourselves in have generational patterns.
And that can mean that addressing those pits, trying to climb out of that, can create a lot of fear, right?
Because it involves people we know and love, maybe people that we still live with, people that were in relationship, our family.
And so generational patterns, we're hoping, in this episode, to give you some tools and tips to how do you get out of that pit, but also how do you address the generational pattern piece?
Yeah, and so some examples of that, if this is kind of a new concept, it comes from, as children, we learn things from our parents.
We learn good patterns and bad patterns, and we bring those into adulthood.
And they lead us to either be really successful or to have these spaces where we get stuck.
And examples of that are money, like I had said, debt, relationships, maybe broken relationships, faith, body image, addictions, hobbies, beliefs.
All of these things can be informed by a family of origin, and they become the places that we get stuck if it's not healthy.
And so those things can land us in trouble, and we don't know where to go from there.
And so we're gonna bring some resources to you.
One of those is called the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.
It's by Pete Scazzero.
And he explores the concept, and he says that the blessings and sins of our families going back two to three generations profoundly impact who we are today.
And then he looks at Abraham's storyline as an example.
So if you don't know much about the Bible, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are four generations of the same family.
We find their story in Genesis.
And when you look at their story, you see patterns of abundant blessing.
God comes to Abraham and he says, I'm gonna bless you.
I'm gonna make your descendants more than the stars in the sky.
You won't be able to count them.
And so he does, right?
He has this huge family that becomes all of Israel.
But with that, we also see all of these patterns that are these pits, these areas that they're getting stuck in.
So things like lying, favoritism between a child and a parent, estranged sibling relationships, marriage, intimacy issues, all of these you can see in those four generations.
And so it further proves that parents can pass on really amazing things to their kids and the really hard things if they're not dealt with.
You know, science hasn't figured out if this is necessarily nurture or nature, but the fact still remains that we pass along something to the generations that we raise.
Replacing Lies With Truth and Finding Freedom Through Faith
And so how do you break those cycles?
How do you even know if you're in a pit, if you're experiencing that isolation, you're isolating and feel like you're in the bottom of a pit looking up going, what the heck do I do with this?
Or you feel yourself just angry all the time, always irritable, lonely.
There's a lot of different ways that these pits can cause different behaviors in each one of us.
How do you break the cycle, especially?
How do you realize whether or not it's a generational pattern and break that cycle?
So we're gonna address that when we come back from this break.
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So how do we break that cycle of generational patterns, generational cycles that have thrown us into a pit or where we stepped into the pit?
And I think the first thing that we have to address, we're gonna give you five how-to's here, five steps.
The first thing that we have to address is identifying the pattern in your own family.
Sometimes it can be right in front of our eyes and we can't even see it.
It's just what we've lived for so many years.
I think so often dysfunctional patterns, we normalize them in order to survive them.
I know I did with the sexual trauma I experienced as a little kid.
I had to normalize that in order to walk out in the kitchen and act like everything was normal.
And in many ways, in order to hide some of the secrets.
And so we need to intentionally examine our family line and see if there's a pattern there.
And I want to give a real caution here because this could feel a little bit like hunting down accusations against family members.
And that's not what we're trying to say at all.
What we're trying to see though is those big areas where you feel like you are experiencing just emotional baggage, looking back through your family and looking back through the history that you know and saying, gosh, is this something I saw grandma and grandpa experience?
Is this something I saw mom and dad experience?
What do I know about the generations who came before me?
Is there divorce?
Was there unplanned pregnancy?
Was there debt like Elizabeth was talking about?
Was there sexual trauma like I was talking about?
Any of those can throw us into a pit as we emulate.
As we follow those who came before us.
So identifying that harmful generational pattern, it actually begins, it becomes a pathway to freedom for us out of the pit.
And it's not an excuse or a way to excuse or even pardon bad behavior or blame others.
We don't want to just air our family's dirty laundry just to air the laundry.
The goal here is always an internal renovation of the soul as we climb out of that pit.
So I think the first step here is to look back.
What did you inherit?
One of the tools super helpful to me, I remember quite a few years back, Beth Moore had written a book called Breaking Free.
And I know some of you out there will have done that Bible study.
It's a little bit older, but Breaking Free actually had a family map in it.
And in that one of the things I loved about the way Beth approached that family map was it wasn't just looking at mom and all the ways mom did me wrong or all the ways dad did me wrong or my grandpa, right?
It was looking at what are the beautiful positive influences from maternal side and what are the negative influences that came from the maternal side and being able to map those out.
And that actually really helped me kind of take a look at what was a generational pattern that I wanted to break.
I didn't want to pass on to my own kids.
So step one is identifying whether or not this is a generational pattern.
Step two would be identifying these agreements.
Jon Acuff calls them soundtracks, but they're the things that run through your head and they're lies that you believe or they're assumptions that keep you trapped.
And so in Jon's book called Soundtracks, he says that those are the thoughts that you always go back to.
That if you listen to any thought long enough, it becomes part of your personal playlist.
And so Jon's entire book is about how to stop overthinking and to start rewiring your brain to form healthy behaviors and healthy thoughts.
So examples of these are, I'll never lose this weight.
My health will always be bad.
It's just part of my DNA.
I'll never get out of debt.
My marriage is destined to fail.
The odds of retiring early are always against me.
My family will never believe that I was sexually abused.
And all of these things keep us stuck.
And those are really direct, I'll never statements.
But most of the time, these are those beliefs that we think, no, I'll never change.
Or I'll always be destined to do that.
Those are hard, powerful statements that we tell ourselves.
And we don't believe we're telling ourselves that until we really think about it.
Yeah, it takes some intentional looking, listening.
They're soundtracks, right?
So listening.
I'm just gonna pause right here.
Elizabeth and I have mutual friend who's really intently looking at her own life and trying to identify some of those lies she's believing.
And she often can't hear it come out of her mouth.
But if I repeat back to her what she just said to me, she'll be like, oh, maybe that is a soundtrack.
That's not true.
You know, you get married and you realize, oh, this family that I now belong to, they have a lot of unhealthy patterns, right?
And so you're comparing, okay, what did I grow up with the beliefs that I have?
What did he or she grow up with?
And how do we bring those together to form a new family line?
And sometimes that's the beautiful thing about marriage is that you get to say, hey, that's not actually reality that you need to go do with this and this and this, and that there is freedom.
And that's the beautiful thing about bringing two people together is they can help each other.
They can help each other and they can actually stop some of those generational patterns.
I know that was one of the things for my husband and I, we want this stopping with our family.
It stops here.
Yeah, powerful.
The third step is to be intentional, to fix the problems now and take the time to do the work now.
As an example, if we had video on, you would be able to see that we are sitting in the middle of a construction zone.
No pun intended, our building flooded massively between the last two podcasts that we recorded.
And so our studio had to be reset.
There's dust everywhere.
Without planning it, we are in a renovation of our own.
Within just a few weeks, actually within one week of launching this podcast, we had the flood.
Yeah, we did.
That's crazy.
So with that, you know, our board and our team, we're coming together.
We're trying to figure out what to do next.
And now that all the walls are open and the ceilings are open, the advice that was given to us was to fix everything you can now before you put the walls up.
Before we try to like really get out of this mess, I mean, we really would love for our center and our building to be put back together.
But the reality is that it's gonna take time, maybe up to a year before this place is fixed again.
And while we have the space and the time and we can see things, we wanna fix it.
So the leaky pipes, the rotted out wood, the faulty electric, we wanna fix that now.
And so that's our advice for step three.
While you're opening these wounds, maybe it's financial like mine, you really start to figure out, okay, what else is down there, right?
What else is help is sitting in this pit with me that's helping to keep me trapped and identify it.
And we know that that seems counterintuitive to trying to get out by digging yourself further, but it really is gonna help to not bring you back there again.
I hear you saying be intentional.
Yep.
Here's where we're at.
We're talking about identifying whether there was a generational pattern, identifying any greements, sound tapes or sound tracks that you're saying over and over to yourself, being intentional.
And then once we've identified those lies, we have to fit those out of our mouths.
Once that soundtrack has been identified, that one like Elizabeth said, I will never get out of debt.
That's a lie from the pit of hell.
And we need to spit that out and replace it with the truth.
John 8.32 says, and you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
I was thinking about this from a renovation standpoint and the flood that we're in.
We repeat what we don't repair.
We will have another flood if we don't address our faulty sprinkler systems.
It will happen again.
We could just cover this up, repaint the walls, put up new wallboard and everything else and make it look pretty again, and it will repeat.
So just want to give all that to you.
We replace the lies with the truth.
So step four, we've talked a lot about identifying lies and agreements and being intentional.
Step four, after you know those lies, you've identified that soundtrack is really to replace that lie with the truth.
Here's what's so important about that.
The truth is not just a pathway to freedom.
It's not just what sets us free.
It's what drives our motivation.
It's what drives our relationships.
And so when we replace that lie with the truth, we literally can revitalize relationships.
We can step out in life and work and family in new ways.
You know, Elizabeth was just describing our flood and talking about our walls are wide open.
If you think about this, we repeat what we don't repair.
That's true for this flood, for our building, right?
If we don't repair those sprinkler pipes and we just cover over the walls, new wall board, new paint, make it all pretty again, we will have another flood.
The same is true in our own lives.
If I recognize this soundtrack that says I will never get out of debt, or like me, I have to control everything because I want to make sure the outcome is something I'm happy with.
That was a big one for me.
If I just continue in that way and don't ever work to replace that lie with God's truth, then it just repeats over and over and over.
So a little funny story about that whole control piece.
I'm going to give you all something, you can't use it against me.
You got to promise.
My nickname in my family, The General.
Isn't that awful?
What does that tell you about my controlling nature?
My sister and her brother-in-law actually taught their son, so my nephew, at two years old, to salute me.
Oh my gosh.
He walks in for Christmas, and he stops and he salutes me.
I'm like, no, no, that's not okay, you guys.
I drive an orange car, so they named it The General Lee.
Do you know what movie that comes from?
No, I do not.
Talk about Generations.
Our producer's over here going, I know, I know.
And I know that so much of it is related to the trauma I suffered, right?
But I have this control bug that wants me to step into God's role.
I want to play God in my own life so often because I want to know that the outcome is going to be something that's prettier than what was.
I don't want to go through the hard stuff.
Here's the amazing way that that played out is once I identified that I have to be in control of everything, I decided to replace that lie with another phrase, God's in control.
That's my truth.
God is God, I am not.
God is in control.
And so that's one of the ways that I continually, because I have to address this on a daily basis, right?
That I'm not controlling the staff, controlling my kids, controlling my husband, and I'm not always successful there.
But when it's on my radar, it's replacing that with God's truth.
Reminds me of Psalm 41 through 3.
It says, He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in Him.
God will use our journeys out of the pit to show Himself to others if we let Him.
Yeah, and that's just the end of the verse that we shared at the beginning.
So powerful though.
Yeah, how God changes that around and takes us from darkness to being able to use it to help other people like our stories today.
Yeah, and sometimes it's just inch by inch by inch that we step up and out of the pit.
Sometimes we need other people to help us.
So if you're going, I am paralyzed down here at the bottom of the pit.
I just want to encourage you reach out to a counselor.
We recommend everybody has time on the couch, reach out to a life coach.
You can email us here at Life Renovation Podcast.
If you need some resources, we're going to link a lot of these in the show notes.
But I want to add one last step.
We've identified four steps.
I want to kind of give a 4.2, because we're talking about family and we're talking about generational patterns that involve family.
If you've identified a family pattern that's destructive or that has thrown you into a pit, sometimes you may need to set a boundary.
And that would be the final recommendation that we would have.
There have been several people that I've talked to who have experienced trauma related to family and have had to set boundaries with kids.
Like kiddos don't get to be around this particular family member alone.
I don't know, Elizabeth, what are some of the other boundaries that you've heard people set or that you've set yourself?
Yeah, so like going off of the debt conversation, there was the boundary of if I spent over a certain amount, I would have to share that with my ex-husband and vice versa when we were married.
Just trying to keep accountable towards this goal that we both wanted to get out of debt.
And we both had different spending habits, and so we had different boundaries with each other based on the spending habits that we had grown up with.
Yeah, so setting healthy boundaries.
Here's the amazing thing.
In Galatians 3, 26-29, it says, For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.
For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.
See, the amazing thing about being a Christian, being a Christ follower means that we have a heavenly family.
We've been adopted into God's family, and He is our heavenly Father.
So even though our earthly families may not have behaved the way we wanted them to, maybe they passed on these generational patterns or cycles of dysfunction or lies or behavior towards us, that has been harmful.
We have a heavenly Father, a heavenly family to look forward to.
And so setting boundaries with our earthly family means that we get to lean into our heavenly family.
Maybe you've got a church family who could help you set some healthy boundaries with your earthly family.
Maybe you've got a Christian counselor who could help you set some of those boundaries or a mentor.
We know that boundaries are a healthy thing.
Hurting people sometimes hurt other people.
And so we just want to give that as a step 4.2.
If that is something that resonates.
Elizabeth, you want to do a quick recap for us?
Yeah, so making sure that you get out of a pit and making sure that someone that you love, you might be able to help them out of a pit, is to first identify the pattern in your family that could have been from multiple generations ago.
You're going to identify the agreements or the lies that you've believed.
Those are sometimes called soundtracks.
You're going to be intentional to fix all of the problems while you're down in the dirt, figuring out what those patterns are.
And then you're going to replace those soundtracks and lies with the truth.
And we would encourage you to go to scripture to find those truths.
The Bible can cover any of our preconceived notions about ourselves, our family and God.
And then the last one is to set boundaries.
Some of us are going to still be in relationship with the people that have hurt us or the people that we're identifying, oh, they have passed along anxiety or they've passed on something else to me.
Don't just cut them off unless you really need to, but set some boundaries first to protect yourself and to protect them.
We hope this has been helpful for all of you as we consider what a renovation in our own personal lives looks like, climbing out of that pit.
And we are so thankful that you joined us today.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, we hope that you will rate it or share it with other people.
If this has been helpful to you, that just helps us spread the word about Life Renovation Podcast.
We're so glad for those of you that have continued to join us week after week.
We're gonna return next week to continue talking about faith, family and sexuality.
See you then.
See you, bye.
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