Who or what is responsible for what I do and the way I am? This is a question that we all need to ask ourselves. It seems that we live in a society that loves to shift responsibility, to blame anyone but ourselves when something goes wrong. We make excuses for our own mistakes but judge harshly the mistakes and weaknesses of others. Whether we like it or not it seems that our generation and our churches have been influenced strongly by the field of psychology known as psychoanalysis. This philosophy is the somewhat ignominious school of thought coined by Sigmund Freud that traces all of human behavior to sexuality and its various dynamics. Many of Freud’s theories were quite bizarre in nature and in a large part have been discarded by more modern scholars of human behavior. The part of this philosophy that has stuck and become highly influential, however, is the part that blames behavior on the traumas of childhood. Even the birth process is pointed to as one of the events that cause us to have the insecurities and fears that we have. From there you can go all the way up through childhood to the early teen years pointing fingers at things like spankings, bullying, rejection, abandonment, and on and on as the root cause of why we are the way we are. Parents of course tend to get the brunt of the blame.
So just how much should we blame the people and events of our past for the way we are now? This is an excellent question. On one hand you have those who vehemently defend the actions of their parents and others who have hurt them basically denying that any wrong was done. In essence they are admitting that they deserved any hurts that were inflicted upon them. Many times these people have anger and bitterness that stays unresolved because they have not come to grips with the fact that they have been wronged. On the other hand you have those who can’t seem to stop talking about how badly they were treated when they were children. Again, this is normally directed at parents. They get stuck wallowing in the pain of their pasts. They also have unresolved bitterness because, although they acknowledge they have been wronged, they do not want to let go of those wrongs. So if neither denying nor embracing them are healthy solutions what should we do with the problems of our pasts?
Let me propose a scenario. Let’s say you go to a psychiatrist for help. He immediately takes you into your past with the intention of uncovering what might be causing you to have the problem you are having. You reveal to him that your father was always angry and distant, that he never validated you, never told you “great job”, never was interested in your problems or interests, never took time to build a relationship with you, and never said “I love you”. Any "good" psychiatrist would find plenty here to go on. He might encourage you to relive the hurts, unleash your anger by screaming and throwing things, and just generally give you permission to blame all of your problems on your father. He would probably take you swimming through all the pain leaving nothing untouched, bringing it all back up for you to experience all over again.
The problem is if you are going to open a wound you had better have a way to heal it. So many well-meaning psychologists and psychiatrists have taken people back into a world of hurt without offering a truly redemptive way of dealing with that hurt.
Let me continue the scenario in a way that is highly unlikely to occur. Let’s say the counselor tells you “Okay now that you’ve dealt with the hurts from your father I want you to think about something else. What about his father. How did your grandfather treat your dad?” So you go home to do some investigating. You come to find out your father was also treated badly by your grandfather. He was tied to the table and beaten with a belt. He was regularly abused both physically and verbally; he could never do a good enough job no matter how hard he tried. Now you turn your anger on your grandfather. Then suddenly the thought occurs to you – what about his past? Your continued investigation reveals that his father, your great grandfather, left home when your grandfather was very young to get a job during the depression. He met and married another woman while he was away and never came back. When your great grandfather asked his mom why daddy doesn’t come home she would scream in anger “Because he doesn’t love us anymore!”
I know this is a fictitious scenario that may not exactly apply to anyone in the world, but do you get the picture? If we’re going to go back then we must continue to go back. You can’t stop with your parents or their parents and you can’t stop even there. You must continue to go back generation after generation until you get to the common set of in-laws that we all have – Adam and Eve. Oh so we can blame it all on them. No not exactly. We have all sinned it’s just that Adam and Eve were the first ones to do it. We all have contributed to the fall of mankind. Sin was brought into the world by us, because we allowed the father of lies to convince us that God does not know best and that we need to take things into our own hands. Who influenced Adam and Eve to sin – Satan. Who wants to destroy your family – Satan. Who was delighted every time any of your ancestors hurt their children – Satan. Who hates you and your family and wants to destroy you, you guessed it – Satan. You see the problem is not your father or mother or grandparents. The problem is that we live in a world that is saturated by evil, that we were born with a natural tendency to follow after this evil, and that there is a powerful being out there who propagates this evil through lies, deceit, and manipulation.
So now we have found the answer of who we can blame right? The old saying “The devil made me do it” was right after all. Once again the answer is no. The one simple reason why we must take responsibility for our actions and why we will stand alone before the judgment seat of Christ is that God gave us the ability to choose. This does not negate the influence that our parents had on us, but it does stop the buck with us. We must choose to allow Christ to go to work in our lives. We must let Him do heart renovation. If we choose to follow Christ He then gives us the power to live above the world. Satan’s stranglehold on our hearts is broken. We can live victoriously. Not that we always do, but we can. As much as we are a product of our past and as important as it is for us to realize this, we must never allow this to become an excuse for bitterness.
I will attempt to sort out how to healthily handle the hurts of our past in part 2.
