The old English proverb “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is similar to the statement “God cannot heal you without your permission.” A man can go to church every Sunday and not to be touched by the healing hand of God only because we do not talk about or share our own broken lives.

To allow God to heal us requires that we compare our father’s parenting to God’s fathering of his children. Depending on your experience with your father, the transition can either be a cake walk or a giant leap of faith. My experience is a giant leap of faith.

In order to give God permission and submit to healing, we need to know where and why we are broken. When I look at my own life, I see two obstacles to healing and becoming a son of God. The first obstacle is easily removed by God. The other requires the need for me to understand what kind of person God is working with.

The first obstacle: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. This obstacle is cleared away by Jesus himself. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17. Also in Romans 12:1 it says: “..but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This also comes from God because it does not say that we need to renew our mind; it tells us to be transformed by the renewal that has taken place from his Holy Spirit.

The second obstacle to becoming a son of God is me. We can all admit and are reminded on a weekly basis in church that we are broken by sin and that we are sinners. But rarely do we look at the extent to which we are broken. The word of God tells me I am broken. What it does not tell me is how badly I am broken. A broken bone is a broken bone but there is a difference between a simple fracture and a compound fracture.

In my reading of self help books, I discovered Dr. Edward Khantzian’s (a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School) research that led to him to focus on men’s brokenness by describing four cardinal areas of dysregulation.

· Difficulty in maintaining self esteem;

· Difficulty in regulating one’s feelings;

· Difficulty in exercising self-care;

· Difficulty in sustaining connection with others.

You can also find four corresponding cardinal areas of discipline in the word of God.

· “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Romans 12:3

· “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Galatians 5:22-23

· “In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself”. Ephesians 5:28

· “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Ephesians 2: 19-22

Our own personal story, the experience with our family of origin and their belief system, impacts how we view both the area of our dysregulation and the biblical discipline found in the Bible. For each and everyone of us our story is different but the path to healing is always found in our relationship with the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.

I share my story starting with the letter written by my wife to the doctor when I decided to commit to the healing process.

November 18, 2003

Dear Doctor,

I am writing this letter concerning my husband, Glen Aus, because I love him dearly and so much want for him to be accurately diagnosed and treated. After listening on many occasions to Glen share with me about the events of his childhood and after several discussions with his mother concerning the same, I believe it is accurate to say that Glen experienced a very difficult childhood. He was the one "targeted" out of four children by his father, receiving almost constant emotional and psychological abuse. His father used anger, intimidation and demeaning words and actions towards Glen. He was often unpredictable and he withheld approval and acceptance of Glen as his son. He also blamed Glen and others for things.

Glen's father in his later years, was diagnosed with a "severe personality disorder" and due to severe depression, anger, and psychotic thinking, was on anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications. It wasn't until about three years before his death in 1997 that he became almost pleasant to live with. His brother apparently had similar struggles. They were sons of an alcoholic father.

Throughout our almost eighteen years of marriage I have seen Glen go through "cycles" of depression, times when he felt low and discouraged and felt angry and negative toward himself and other people. He has put out so much energy trying to be a good husband and father, working toward an ideal that was not modeled for him by his father. I believe that Glen's relationship with God, our strong encouraging relationship with each other, and his own goals for himself have helped him become the wonderful man that he is. But he is too tired now.

He and I both believe he needs help. He has been depressed, angry and negative, and his moods have been quite unpredictable for quite some time now. Expending so much energy battling his background, his negative thought processes, his anger, his depression, and trying to be what he desires to be has "aged" him. He often doesn't have enough energy left to enjoy life or invest much in his children.

In comparison to his father's diagnosis, I believe Glen does have depression and anger and he often mentally and verbally "replays" the harmful treatment in his childhood, his envy of his siblings and his current struggles, especially those involving individuals who portray characteristics that remind him of his struggle with his father or people who "feel sorry" for themselves.

As far as I know, Glen has only had one panic attack and that occurred several years ago. When Glen is depressed, he sometimes has misperceptions about himself and others but does not seem to have the psychotic thought processes that his father had (i.e. "someone was 'bugging' his bedroom" and that "everyone was out to get him").

I have wondered how much Glen's anger and thought processes (especially those against others) were learned from his father's example and how much is his own internal struggle. I hope that this information will aid you in your efforts to help Glen come out from under the "cloud" that weighs heavily on him.

Thank you,

Respectfully,

Lee Anne

My mother’s response to her husband’s abuse is one of the reasons why I am a Christian. In spite of creating additional conflict, my mother still took us to church faithfully. The actions of her faith were non-negotiable.

My father and I came by our abuse honestly. This is not a rant against my father because I am commanded to forgive others. But I want to understand why I am broken in order to be healed by a faithful God.

The seeds for abuse from my father were laid long before I was born. The history from my father’s side of the family involved embezzlement, alcoholism, mental illness, anger and lack of food during World War II. A professor of history explained it this way. When the Nazi U-boats started sinking supply ships, food that needed to be imported was no longer readily available.

To understand his personal experience, I dug up some family history and discovered that my father’s experience was against him. He was born in Norway in 1930, joining his 2 brothers and his two sisters. He lived through the occupation of Norway by the Nazis between the ages of 10 and 15. During the war, when the Nazi invasion of Russia went bad for the Nazis, the Nazis started requisitioning material from the Norwegians.

My grandfather developed a serious alcohol problem after he lost his job as director of the telegraph station in Honningsvag because some money had gone missing. This forced the family to move south to Oslo. To make matters worse, without consulting his wife, grandfather went to grandmother’s older half-brothers for a loan against her inheritance to cover the deficit. Grandmother could not forgive her in-laws and severed all contacts with them. My uncle, the oldest boy, had to fetch his drunken father and carry him home on more than one occasion.

Also, my grandfather would come home and beat his wife on a regular basis. That is until my two uncles took their turn and beat their dad up. During the war, granddad would come home and feed his lunch scraps to the dog in front of my father who was hungry.

My Grandmother and her sister maintained a stormy relationship throughout their lives, not being on speaking terms for long periods at a time only to become friends again. Grandmother also had this kind of relationship with her oldest daughter and did not attend her oldest daughter’s wedding because they were not on speaking terms at the time.

I have come to the personal conclusion that the following scripture is true.

“The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” Numbers 14:18

I am the fourth generation and I neither asked for or wanted this curse.

In spite of or because of my experience (I can’t figure out which) I am learning to enjoy and can look forward to having a relationship with God the Father. The possibilities are endless because God gives us confidence, includes us in his life and gives us what we need for a relationship with him.

Here are some examples.

As any good father would do, God inspires confidence in us when he says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" in Hebrews 13:5.

God the Father and Jesus, his Son work together by including us in their home when Jesus says in John 14, “In my Father’s house are many rooms…..I am going there to prepare a place for you.” And he says “I will come back and take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am.”

God is a giving Father because, “He did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline,” as stated in 2 Timothy 1:7.

God is doing everything and more than a good father would be able to say and do. And our brothers in Christ remind us of our purpose in becoming sons of God.

Our brother, Paul in 1st Corinthians the 14th chapter encourages us to, “stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

Peter, another brother in Christ, reminds us to grow up by saying, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good,” in 1st Peter chapter two.

And the ultimate encouragement is found in Philippians 2 and Ephesians 2. “Therefore, my dear friends,…..continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” because “….it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

For those whose fathers were like God, the Father, I would ask that you be considerate of those of us who do not find it easy to become sons of God. For those of us that were wounded by our fathers to the extent that we are afraid or unwilling to approach God the Father, let us take our eyes off ourselves and start walking toward God. He will greet us with open arms.