Scapegoating and a smear campaign, all because I had the audacity to make life choices (even as a still-practicing Christian) that my parents hated because it wasn’t reflecting how they would do things.
My parents were also embarrassed by my inability to keep up the public performance and perfect family image, due to me being a late-diagnosed introverted autistic with co-occurring disabilities and similarly neurodivergent kids.
But of course in their eyes I’m the problem and always will be. That’s why cutting contact with them felt like setting myself free, even though they then ruined my reputation and relationships with extended family through a distorted and confabulated narrative, after their attempts to bully me back into submission fell flat.
Parents like mine can never see their adult children as equal, independent adults, whose life decisions have validity in reflecting their own God-given individuality as image bearers.
And women raised in church settings especially are trained for compliance, submission and self-abandonment, which gives us no scope to push back against mistreatment without it being framed by others as either sinful rebellion or a mental health crisis.
Your phrase ‘whatever parental intentions’ is significant. What invariably follows, after the litany of spiritual, emotional and/or physical abuses a child had to suffer through, is the well-worn ‘…but I’m sure the parents were just doing what they thought best.’
That is patently false, and it’s a tired excuse at this point. I far too easily convinced myself—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—of the same when I was exercising ‘godly discipline’ with my children. More is the pity.
thank you so much for writing this, marissa, for taking the time to understand and articulate what this feels like for both the parents and the grown children.
the biggest thing i desire from my parents is respect. i don’t even ask or hope for agreement or understanding about leaving their church and choosing a different christian tradition, or rejecting the courtship model, voting democrat etc. but i would truly love to be able to talk about my new church without them drawing back in fear and judgement. i would love to be more open with them about my life without their suspicion and disapproval hanging over me. i have worked hard in therapy to learn that i need to release myself from the need for their approval, but it’s much easier said than done when i was taught early on that the stakes of compliance and conformity were eternal.
which brings me to wonder how my relationship with God would be different—freer, more secure, more authentic—if i had learned attachment in a healthier way.
this post witnesses these struggles with profound clarity and gentleness and i thank you again for speaking to them!
You are most welcome, though I'm deeply sorry it resonates with your experience. There is so much grief work and loss wrapped up in this, and, yes, threads of loss with connection to God as well. ❤️🩹
Excellent piece, Marissa. We need to talk more about the connection between estrangement or detached parent-adult child relationships as a result of these fundamentalist teachings. Joshua Coleman doesn’t explore this at all, but this is who our readers are.
Estrangement is a fruit of high-control parenting and I’m grateful for this piece. I’ve lived on both sides of estrangement at various times, and I wrote a chapter on it for I Belong to Me, but it’s on the tension of estrangement, the pain it causes, and the impact it has on recovery. I have nothing but compassion for anyone who’s felt driven to it, and I yearn for understanding and new ways forward. The truth is tho, there aren’t enough fundamentalist parents willing to look at what they did that resulted in severance, and how that disconnection happened much earlier in childhood than they realized. I really hope your book helps.
Whew, yes. The disconnection happened much earlier...the estrangement/low contact is simply revealing the truth of that ruptured relationship. I think on both sides, too, fundamentalist thinking leaves people with all or nothing reflexes, and this contributes—living within a tension or tolerating the discomfort of uncertainty are maybe also pieces. So many layers.
People procreate regardless of not being sufficiently knowledgeable of child development science to parent in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. They seem to perceive thus treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture their children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
As liberal democracies we cannot or will not prevent anyone from bearing children, even those who selfishly recklessly procreate with disastrous outcomes. We can, however, educate young people for this most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless, through mandatory high-school child-development science curriculum.
(I’ve talked to parents of dysfunctional/unhappy grown children who assert they’d have reared their cerebrally developing kids much more knowledgeably about child development science.)
And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, which many parents would understandably oppose, such curriculum should be about understanding child-development, and not just information memorization. There indeed is a difference.
It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society. … If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?
Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123).
And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).
As a moral rule, a mentally as well as a physically sound future should be every child’s foremost fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. Yet, many people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving children largely as obedient property.
.
"I remember leaving the hospital thinking, ‘Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don’t know beans about babies! I don’t have a license to do this. We’re just amateurs’.” —Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons
This is an essential conversation for where we find ourselves. "The kind of humility that can admit error", and the ideas taught to parents that cause them to see their children as extensions of themselves are two sentences that stood out.
"While these frameworks focused on training up children, they also unconsciously trained parents up to see children as extensions of themselves and their God-endorsed dreams."
I found conviction in this. Whose image am I really offering to my sons? I wonder about this daily. Should you be interested in a therapist's perspective on some of these issues, read this piece by Rachel Haack.
I hope to read your book someday soon. But your article captures my lived experience on both sides. One of your IG posts captures so profoundly the tension I live with today. The one where we feel the child’s anxiety over “discipline” and then the last slide shows the grandfather thinking how he didn’t do to his kids what his dad did to him. Wow! My life in an IG slideshow!
What I have discovered is that saying I am sorry isn’t enough. At least for some of my kids. I don’t expect instant healing but the rejection still hurts.
I have compassion for that young mom I was, trying so hard, living with domestic violence, poverty, and no where to turn for help. Trying to heal from the trauma of my own childhood with therapy and reading everything I could get my hands on and trying to provide a childhood for my kids I wished I’d had for myself. The reading wasn’t as helpful as it should have been. The therapy saved my life.
Maybe your book has ideas for a way forward. I wonder if it would be healing to hear “I am so sorry” from my parents? I probably will never know but I have given that gift to my children in various ways over and over as they have brought things to me. But it wasn’t enough. I am estranged from two of them, in a tense relationship with two, and close to two. None of the “promises“ of “biblical parenting” proved at all true. For that matter “biblical womanhood” is also a complete and utter farce!
I have come to peace knowing I actually really did give my very best to love my kids. I didn’t do to them what was done to me. I also know I failed at the thing I poured my entire identity into. And any part I did get right was stolen by an abusive husband.
I live daily in the tension of grief and loss and guilt with the deep peace and knowledge of God’s love for me. I miss my kids, miss knowing a grandson. I am not that parent who insists I did it “right”. I did a lot wrong. I can see where I resisted and tried to do differently than I was being pressured into doing with discipline and “shaping” my kids. I remember the moments of intentionally choosing not to follow the script. But I didn’t resist enough and I acknowledge that and will live with that forever.
I can’t attend church anymore. I can’t even read the Bible I have studied since early childhood and spent years teaching. But my relationship with Jesus is the most peaceful and secure it has ever been.
I will continue to walk this tension out. Hope for reconciliation and live joyfully in the now. And trust that Jesus will bring healing to each one of my kids in their own way and their own timing, whether it includes a relationship with me or not.
Thank you for shining a light on the WHOLE picture and opening conversations about what the real enemy is. Pointing the finger at “bad parents” or “ungrateful adult kids” doesn’t help heal the divide. I continue to hope for generational healing that I tried so hard to start… to be the one who changed the patterns. The first one to graduate college. The first one to name the abuses and separate myself and my kids from the abusers. And in many ways I did do better. But it wasn’t enough for my kids childhoods. Perhaps it will be enough for my grandchildren’s childhoods.
Thank you so much for reaching out and for sharing some of your story Kenda. It powerfully illustrates the generational trauma involved and the complicated way that—in many cases—parents were both victims and victimizers. It is a lot to untangle, and the grief and broken relationships are such a profound betrayal after all the promises for guaranteed success.
I'm in multiple MK (missionary kid) groups and definitely am seeing the rise of this estrangement. Children's behavior was and is part of the sort of mythic image of missionaries, this elite group of Christians who lead these sacrificial and exemplary lives. The trauma that the kids endure through displacement, neglect, reintegration into their passport countries often alone, Nevermind the performative stresses of being part of the family's fundraising campaign while on "furloughs" cannot be questioned without impugning the sort of hierarchy of mission work. In fact John Piper has gone on record to say that the well being of MKs is subordinate to the spread of the Gospel. Of course, this all ties back to these rigid structures of obedience and control and their untethering once all of us MKs get out on our own, again often with very little support, and forge our own lives. The physical estrangement was often already there but sanctified by "the calling," but when many of us attempt to work through these issues with our parents (I actually successful navigated this), it often results in further isolation, even where the child is seen to the flourishing of their mission or mission work.
These kind of parents don't stop at their own children. They inflict this "obedience" on grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc and end up alienating their extended family because no one can comply to such authoritarianism.
The retaliation is the worst thing.
Scapegoating and a smear campaign, all because I had the audacity to make life choices (even as a still-practicing Christian) that my parents hated because it wasn’t reflecting how they would do things.
My parents were also embarrassed by my inability to keep up the public performance and perfect family image, due to me being a late-diagnosed introverted autistic with co-occurring disabilities and similarly neurodivergent kids.
But of course in their eyes I’m the problem and always will be. That’s why cutting contact with them felt like setting myself free, even though they then ruined my reputation and relationships with extended family through a distorted and confabulated narrative, after their attempts to bully me back into submission fell flat.
Parents like mine can never see their adult children as equal, independent adults, whose life decisions have validity in reflecting their own God-given individuality as image bearers.
And women raised in church settings especially are trained for compliance, submission and self-abandonment, which gives us no scope to push back against mistreatment without it being framed by others as either sinful rebellion or a mental health crisis.
This names so much. I'm so very sorry.
It’s tragic how similar the pattern is. For what it’s worth coming from a stranger on the internet, I’m so sorry for your experience.
My wife and I both know it well, and we wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
💔
Relate to this nearly completely. Thank you for sharing and articulating this pattern so well. 💔
You are very welcome. I’m so very sorry this touches on your own experience.
Your phrase ‘whatever parental intentions’ is significant. What invariably follows, after the litany of spiritual, emotional and/or physical abuses a child had to suffer through, is the well-worn ‘…but I’m sure the parents were just doing what they thought best.’
That is patently false, and it’s a tired excuse at this point. I far too easily convinced myself—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—of the same when I was exercising ‘godly discipline’ with my children. More is the pity.
Very true and thank you for saying this. Intent doesn't mitigate impact, and the way forward begins with parents courageous enough to hear the truth.
thank you so much for writing this, marissa, for taking the time to understand and articulate what this feels like for both the parents and the grown children.
the biggest thing i desire from my parents is respect. i don’t even ask or hope for agreement or understanding about leaving their church and choosing a different christian tradition, or rejecting the courtship model, voting democrat etc. but i would truly love to be able to talk about my new church without them drawing back in fear and judgement. i would love to be more open with them about my life without their suspicion and disapproval hanging over me. i have worked hard in therapy to learn that i need to release myself from the need for their approval, but it’s much easier said than done when i was taught early on that the stakes of compliance and conformity were eternal.
which brings me to wonder how my relationship with God would be different—freer, more secure, more authentic—if i had learned attachment in a healthier way.
this post witnesses these struggles with profound clarity and gentleness and i thank you again for speaking to them!
You are most welcome, though I'm deeply sorry it resonates with your experience. There is so much grief work and loss wrapped up in this, and, yes, threads of loss with connection to God as well. ❤️🩹
Excellent piece, Marissa. We need to talk more about the connection between estrangement or detached parent-adult child relationships as a result of these fundamentalist teachings. Joshua Coleman doesn’t explore this at all, but this is who our readers are.
Thank you for reading and YES! I think this is much more common than we talk about in Christian communities.
Estrangement is a fruit of high-control parenting and I’m grateful for this piece. I’ve lived on both sides of estrangement at various times, and I wrote a chapter on it for I Belong to Me, but it’s on the tension of estrangement, the pain it causes, and the impact it has on recovery. I have nothing but compassion for anyone who’s felt driven to it, and I yearn for understanding and new ways forward. The truth is tho, there aren’t enough fundamentalist parents willing to look at what they did that resulted in severance, and how that disconnection happened much earlier in childhood than they realized. I really hope your book helps.
Whew, yes. The disconnection happened much earlier...the estrangement/low contact is simply revealing the truth of that ruptured relationship. I think on both sides, too, fundamentalist thinking leaves people with all or nothing reflexes, and this contributes—living within a tension or tolerating the discomfort of uncertainty are maybe also pieces. So many layers.
Very eager to read I Belong to Me.
People procreate regardless of not being sufficiently knowledgeable of child development science to parent in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. They seem to perceive thus treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture their children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).
As liberal democracies we cannot or will not prevent anyone from bearing children, even those who selfishly recklessly procreate with disastrous outcomes. We can, however, educate young people for this most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless, through mandatory high-school child-development science curriculum.
(I’ve talked to parents of dysfunctional/unhappy grown children who assert they’d have reared their cerebrally developing kids much more knowledgeably about child development science.)
And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, which many parents would understandably oppose, such curriculum should be about understanding child-development, and not just information memorization. There indeed is a difference.
It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society. … If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?
Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123).
And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm. When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).
As a moral rule, a mentally as well as a physically sound future should be every child’s foremost fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. Yet, many people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving children largely as obedient property.
.
"I remember leaving the hospital thinking, ‘Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don’t know beans about babies! I don’t have a license to do this. We’re just amateurs’.” —Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons
Thank you for sharing this. Yes! I think basic understanding of child development would be well worth more than any parenting book or sermon.
This is an essential conversation for where we find ourselves. "The kind of humility that can admit error", and the ideas taught to parents that cause them to see their children as extensions of themselves are two sentences that stood out.
Thank you for reading. I think so many Christian families are navigating these painful dynamics.
"While these frameworks focused on training up children, they also unconsciously trained parents up to see children as extensions of themselves and their God-endorsed dreams."
I found conviction in this. Whose image am I really offering to my sons? I wonder about this daily. Should you be interested in a therapist's perspective on some of these issues, read this piece by Rachel Haack.
https://rachelhaack.substack.com/p/why-everyones-cutting-everyone-off
Thank you for this reflection and the link! I will read with interest.
I hope to read your book someday soon. But your article captures my lived experience on both sides. One of your IG posts captures so profoundly the tension I live with today. The one where we feel the child’s anxiety over “discipline” and then the last slide shows the grandfather thinking how he didn’t do to his kids what his dad did to him. Wow! My life in an IG slideshow!
What I have discovered is that saying I am sorry isn’t enough. At least for some of my kids. I don’t expect instant healing but the rejection still hurts.
I have compassion for that young mom I was, trying so hard, living with domestic violence, poverty, and no where to turn for help. Trying to heal from the trauma of my own childhood with therapy and reading everything I could get my hands on and trying to provide a childhood for my kids I wished I’d had for myself. The reading wasn’t as helpful as it should have been. The therapy saved my life.
Maybe your book has ideas for a way forward. I wonder if it would be healing to hear “I am so sorry” from my parents? I probably will never know but I have given that gift to my children in various ways over and over as they have brought things to me. But it wasn’t enough. I am estranged from two of them, in a tense relationship with two, and close to two. None of the “promises“ of “biblical parenting” proved at all true. For that matter “biblical womanhood” is also a complete and utter farce!
I have come to peace knowing I actually really did give my very best to love my kids. I didn’t do to them what was done to me. I also know I failed at the thing I poured my entire identity into. And any part I did get right was stolen by an abusive husband.
I live daily in the tension of grief and loss and guilt with the deep peace and knowledge of God’s love for me. I miss my kids, miss knowing a grandson. I am not that parent who insists I did it “right”. I did a lot wrong. I can see where I resisted and tried to do differently than I was being pressured into doing with discipline and “shaping” my kids. I remember the moments of intentionally choosing not to follow the script. But I didn’t resist enough and I acknowledge that and will live with that forever.
I can’t attend church anymore. I can’t even read the Bible I have studied since early childhood and spent years teaching. But my relationship with Jesus is the most peaceful and secure it has ever been.
I will continue to walk this tension out. Hope for reconciliation and live joyfully in the now. And trust that Jesus will bring healing to each one of my kids in their own way and their own timing, whether it includes a relationship with me or not.
Thank you for shining a light on the WHOLE picture and opening conversations about what the real enemy is. Pointing the finger at “bad parents” or “ungrateful adult kids” doesn’t help heal the divide. I continue to hope for generational healing that I tried so hard to start… to be the one who changed the patterns. The first one to graduate college. The first one to name the abuses and separate myself and my kids from the abusers. And in many ways I did do better. But it wasn’t enough for my kids childhoods. Perhaps it will be enough for my grandchildren’s childhoods.
Thank you so much for reaching out and for sharing some of your story Kenda. It powerfully illustrates the generational trauma involved and the complicated way that—in many cases—parents were both victims and victimizers. It is a lot to untangle, and the grief and broken relationships are such a profound betrayal after all the promises for guaranteed success.
Marissa, you are such a prophetic and nurturing voice in the world.
Thank you for these kind words. May it be so!
I'm in multiple MK (missionary kid) groups and definitely am seeing the rise of this estrangement. Children's behavior was and is part of the sort of mythic image of missionaries, this elite group of Christians who lead these sacrificial and exemplary lives. The trauma that the kids endure through displacement, neglect, reintegration into their passport countries often alone, Nevermind the performative stresses of being part of the family's fundraising campaign while on "furloughs" cannot be questioned without impugning the sort of hierarchy of mission work. In fact John Piper has gone on record to say that the well being of MKs is subordinate to the spread of the Gospel. Of course, this all ties back to these rigid structures of obedience and control and their untethering once all of us MKs get out on our own, again often with very little support, and forge our own lives. The physical estrangement was often already there but sanctified by "the calling," but when many of us attempt to work through these issues with our parents (I actually successful navigated this), it often results in further isolation, even where the child is seen to the flourishing of their mission or mission work.
Thank you for sharing. This is an important perspective to consider!❤️
Do you follow Rachel Haack at all? She writes on estrangement a lot. I know she grew up Mormon and left. Not sure if she is in a different church now.
I mentioned you in the comments of her latest article on estrangement here: https://substack.com/@rachelhaacktherapist?utm_source=global-search
These kind of parents don't stop at their own children. They inflict this "obedience" on grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc and end up alienating their extended family because no one can comply to such authoritarianism.