“I would never do that to my kid.”

“How could she do that to me?”

“I will not be like him when I grow up.”

These are statements I often heard from teenagers when talking about their parents. At their age, they couldn’t possibly grasp the idea that he/she might end up more like their parents than they will ever care to admit.

Hearing these statements would sometimes humor me. I mean, I can remember myself saying things like that a time or two……….or 10……. or 20.

But occasionally, when hearing the pleading voice of a child, I would feel a twinge in my gut that didn’t feel content. At that moment I knew that the person before me, in all of their decade and a half of life, really would be better off if they didn’t end up just like their parents. They clearly knew this wasn’t the way to be, and

I wanted to help them make a change!

SO BEGAN MY RESEARCH……..

As a counselor, I often found myself intrigued by the patterns and cycles that take place in families. Whether it be attitudes, parenting, addictions, or any other choices made – it was obvious when exploring a family’s history that the issue at hand wasn’t the first time it had been faced in their family.

How did this happen?

Often children learn by modeling, such as the old saying, “monkey see, monkey do.” But research has shown that there is another way that humans learn. Their actions and behaviors are sometimes part of a path that was laid out for them, possibly even way before their time. It is the evolution of behavior.

Family System Theory

Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist from the 1940s, best described it like this: “people’s lives are enormously affected by the functioning of those in the generations preceding them. The generational transfer of information that so shapes people’s lives occurs on many interconnected levels.” We see this through physical traits, behavior, values, beliefs, communication styles, and relationship dynamics.

Bowen goes on to say that “Families transmit their behaviors almost as predictably as they transmit their genes.” That’s a scary thought when you are trying to be different than your parents.

It is astounding to realize that back in the 1940s, there was research and studies completed to PROVE AND IMPROVE the dynamics of the family and how we can either continue or break cycles. Yet so many families still struggled with repeating the patterns of their heritage.

I began to use this information in my sessions. Providing knowledge (we counselors call that psychoeducation) to clients was a key to their growth – while in counseling and for years to come.

The transformation was evident. Families would become more relaxed with an understanding of the dynamics at work. Youth became more accepting of their parents and more interested in being a part of the change. Couples recognized patterns in their parents and grandparents that they too were portraying in their relationship with each other. And the empathy within the family was through the roof! They now felt more connected to each other, were able to more easily see solutions, and were more willing to work together to make it happen.

I was ecstatic to see that the history I found was helping so many people!

Bowen’s Theory is Biblical

Many years later, while studying the Book of Genesis, I was reminded of the concepts in Family Systems Theory that I had learned. Like I said previously, Bowen had insights in the 1940’s that could change human behavior and relationships, yet unhealthy patterns still persisted.

MIND BLOWING!

But what was even more shocking was the fact that Moses had written about this nearly 3500 years ago!

Well that’s interesting! But…………

How will this help me overcome challenges?

The Bible set out to teach us how to answer life’s questions:

• Who we are
• Where we came from
• Why we act the way we do
• Why God created us
• Why we can’t hold a relationship
• Why you feel angry
• Where your personality came from
• Why you feel happy
• Why aren’t you motivated
• How do we change

And the list goes on and on……..

Since that time, as people struggle through the roller coaster of life, theorists come along to share their version of answers to all of the questions listed above. Some, like Bowen, come so close to what Moses taught us in the historical recollection of our heirs, that it is almost eerie.

However, what I am finding, is that the answers do not fall far from the tree. The tree of knowledge that is! (A little Bible humor) We have the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) to help us understand where we came from and how we can overcome that – and it all begins in Genesis.

Our ancestors in the Bible, multiple theorists, and now myself – all looking for the answers to the same questions over a period of thousands of years. Kind of reminds me of a stuck record player. Replaying the same message, over and over and over and over, with no one willing to take the needle off of the record.

Oh, wait a minute…… I forget my age sometimes and just realized that some people may not understand my record player analogy. Let me try a more direct approach.

3500 years ago we (humans) were given the secrets of overcoming! We can directly change and make life better for ourselves and those around us! Yet we don’t!

YIKES!

For this reason, I became completely enthralled by the book of Genesis. I wanted to learn everything I could about our history, these children’s history and the history of promoting and creating change.

Genesis not only captures our creation – which is what most people remember it for – but it spends an enormous amount of time covering the early history of humanity. It provides insight and understanding to what we often describe as our “broken world”.

It was the link I had been searching for. Oddly enough, it was right in front of me the whole time.

Does that happen to anyone else? Hmmmm……

Moving on…….

My quest began out of curiosity and a desire to help others change. I wanted to help youth feel better about their current situations and see a prospect for a future that is healthy. I wanted to help parents realize where their own behaviors came from and realize that no matter how old they are change can still happen. I wanted to challenge my clients with facts, not just theories.

Somewhere in the middle of all that: it was me that finally understood how to “feel” better about current life situations, it was me that began to create a healthier future, it was me that realized how my own behaviors developed, and it was me that was able to change.

The facts found in Genesis challenged me to the core.

With my newfound knowledge, I knew I wanted nothing more than to share this with the whole world. My pursuit to help my clients became my mission and purpose.

Although this is only the beginning of my Genesis series, it is a fundamental piece. It is the piece that provided me hope and will hopefully encourage you to take a stand against the flow of unhealthy families, cultural norms, and helpless feelings.

Face Any Challenge

Like I mentioned above, my original goal was to find concrete ways to help children and their families change, grow, and persevere through life. What I found was that there are definitely family patterns and cycles that happen throughout time. However, I also confirmed that people do not have to be stuck in them. There is historical proof that those destructive patterns can be overcome and extinguished.

Taking the steps below will set you on the right path. It is definitely not an exhaustive list of the ways you can overcome challenges. However, starting here will set you up for success – not just with your challenges, but with your life goals.

For the sake of time – and keeping your attention 🙂 – I will list a few that I think are the most important.

• Challenges are part of living, so embrace them. So far in my reading, the only people in the Bible that didn’t encounter a challenge, are the ones that were listed in the seriously long Geneology accounts (see the Table of Nations) with no other information. If you ask me, they weren’t living their life. They weren’t taking opportunities, creating change, or making a difference in other’s lives. They were just a name.
  • I don’t want to be just a name. I want to have a story. Those that have no challenge, have nothing to offer others, therefore are not beneficial to the story of life.
  • Think about it: What people do you remember in the Bible? Is it because of their story? Without the challenge in their life, there would have been no story to tell.
  • Realizing this simple fact changed my attitude from “I don’t know if I can handle this” to “bring it on”. I want my story to count.

• Challenges are like taking a class – learn as you go. If you sign up to take a class, your expectation is to learn something and hopefully be able to use it in the future. Well, if you think of each challenge you face as a class you are taking in that subject, you will be more likely to gain insight and learn from it. And, even better, you might be able to pass it on someday.
  • For many years I taught parenting classes. These classes met once a week for a month. Some parents were skeptical that they would ever be able to live a peaceful life trying to raise children with such difficult behaviors. However, each week they would come back and share their success with the class. It was amazing to see these results over and over. These parents had absorbed the knowledge and tested its validity. They overcame a challenge in their home and made life better for their children and themselves.
  • Consider Joseph – an important figurer in the Book of Genesis – his brothers despised him because he was his father’s favorite and he flaunted it. The brothers threw him in a pit and he was sold into slavery. That pit was a classroom for Joseph. Even though he was slowly climbing back up the ladder to success, he had learned to keep his head down and not flaunt his importance anymore. In other words, the pit taught him to be humble, and he was later called “the righteous one”. It was his “challenge” that set the stage for such a title.
  • There hasn’t been one thing that has happened in my life – whether it happened to me or I did it to myself – that I didn’t gain some sort of knowledge from. Each challenge you overcome gets you one step closer to the wisdom needed to overcome what comes next.

• Challenges need to be conquered. Don’t just expect things to change on their own or for issues to just go away. If you want your family to be nicer to you…be nicer to them. If you want to be respected….. show respect. If you want to be successful….. work diligently to reach your goal. In other words, you must take action in order to overcome whatever the challenge may be.
  • Joseph may have been sold into slavery, but he didn’t let that get him down. He didn’t hold a grudge and act as if the world had ended – as so many of us would in his circumstances. He worked hard and proved to be trustworthy and was given a high position in a prestigious house. You see, he knew the challenge, had already learned to be humble, and reaped the rewards of acting the part of an amazing servant. Many different times Joseph is up against similar situations and it is his actions that allow him to rise again.
  • When I began my search to help my clients reach their goals in their own families, it was tedious. What I mean is, I would stumble on something helpful….. share it with the family or youth….. pray for their success….. only to find that change had not happened. I had started with different theorists, talked to my peers, pondered, and prayed. Yet, occasionally I felt as if I had gotten nowhere. It wasn’t until my mind connected biblical principles to the change theories of today that I began to see real results. So, if I had not been persistently taking action in order to create change, I would have given up long before I did. I stayed the course, I actively read the books, talked to other counselors, and acted on the knowledge I was acquiring.

So, what’s the moral of the story on overcoming?

Embrace it! Learn from it! Conquer it!

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

James 1:2-4