When My Mother and Father Forsake Me...

Dan Hitz is the Executive Director of Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, a member ministry of the Restored Hope Network dedicated to bringing freedom to men, women, and adolescents struggling with sexual and relationship issues.  For more information contact Reconciliation Ministries at 586.739.5114, or visit us on the web at www.recmin.org.

For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.

Psalm 139:13-14

Those verses were intended to give us comfort as we realize the great attention to detail that Lord used to lovingly put us together in our mother’s womb. For those of us who grew up in a dysfunctional family, those verses may bring up different emotions altogether. We may wonder why the Lord “chose to put us in that specific womb”. Far from feeling good about ourselves as the Lord’s creation, our negative upbringing can make us feel like damaged goods.

Erik Erikson is a developmental psychologist famous for identifying the stages of psychosocial development. His theory basically describes God’s intent for the role that parents and other significant people play in our emotional and social development. Unfortunately in this fallen world, not all of us have grown up with a healthy mother and father. Not all of us have gone through childhood and adolescence with a healthy connection to our peers. If that is the case in your life, the Lord can heal the emotional wounds inflicted through the things you have experienced. He can also heal the wounds you’ve endured because the nurturing and care that you were supposed to receive didn’t happen. Psalm 27:10 reads, “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” God can heal the hurts in your heart and fill the emotional voids.

A brief exploration of God’s intended role for our parents and peers will help you understand where you need the Holy Spirit to touch your heart. Our relationship with our mother is the most important relationship that we have when we are born. Mothers are intended by God to give us a sense of being – a sense that it’s okay to be alive and that we have value. Mom’s nurture us. When we are hungry they feed us. When we mess our diapers, they change us. We learn from them that our lives are celebrated and that we will be well cared for.

After we learn to crawl and walk, we look beyond mother to our father. Fathers are intended by God to help us learn to explore the world and take the initiative to try new things. They are also designed by God to encourage us to grow into the identity and purpose that He created us to have. Dads empower us to become established in this world and succeed. Little girls learn what it means to be female through their mothers, while little boys learn what it means to be male from their fathers.

As we enter school, the next important relationships we have are with our same-gender peers. At this stage boys usually think girls have “cooties” and girls may think boys are a bit nasty. This is a normal stage of development. Little boys learn how to relate to other little boys as they interact and play together. It works the same for girls. We learn that we are a good and acceptable little boy or girl as we fit in well with other little boys or girls.

As we gain confidence in our own gender peer group, we then begin to reach out to the other gender and learn how to relate to them. Boys notice that the girls lose their cooties and are becoming attractive. Girls notice that the boys aren’t so nasty after all. Confidence in who we are as a person continues to grow as we establish healthy relationships with the opposite sex.

God intends our emotional and relational development to continue throughout our lives as we enter into committed relationships, begin our families, and relate to others in our community. Many of us have not had the ideal development and growth described in this article. A problem at any stage of development will create challenges in the future stages. Fortunately, the Lord has taken that into account and has made provision for our emotional healing on the cross. We can take comfort in the verse that was referenced earlier in this article which reads, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” When Jesus began His ministry, He read out of the book of Isaiah where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted…” (Luke 4:18-19). In the original language, the phrase “brokenhearted” refers to shards of glass like when you break a mirror. Jesus was saying that He was sent by the Father to heal the “shards of glass” – the fragments of our heart – from emotional trauma and neglect. We find in Jesus a loving Savior who is willing to hear our prayers, heal our emotional wounds, and fill the voids in our hearts with His presence.

If you’ve grown up without the kind of nurturing that God designed you to have, spend time in prayer and share your hurts with Him. Recognizing our areas of deep need is a first step in overcoming our mother and father wounds. Be honest about your pain. Ask Him to teach you to recognize His healing presence and to heal your heart. As you work through the various areas of need in your heart, you may recognize pockets of hidden anger. It is important for your own personal growth to learn to forgive those who have wounded you. Forgiveness is more for your sake, than for the sake of those who have offended you. Your offender may be totally unaware that he or she has wounded you, or he or she may actually be glad that you were wounded. We live in a very fallen world. Harboring anger and resentment will only serve to hinder you, keep you bound to your wounds, and give your offender the victory. Forgiveness sets you free. Ask the Lord to help you release your anger and resentment to Him and allow Him to deal with those who have hurt you. Your offender and your wounds will lose their power as you experience the healing power of Christ.

Sometimes when we are sinned against, we respond with sinful reactions. Ask the Lord to show you the areas in your own life where you have responded to your pain in sinful ways. When He does, repent and seek to make amends where appropriate. In walking away from our sin we find a deeper capacity to receive God’s love and walk in deeper relationships with others in the Body of Christ. In addition to friends, we all need others who are more mature than us and have journeyed successfully through some of life’s difficult pathways. Ask the Lord to send you a safe, Christian mentor to walk with you and help you in your journey. Your pastor, a recovery group, or the pastoral care department at your church may be a good place to start. No pastor or mentor can become the long-lost mother of father that you never had, but he or she can share his or her experience with you as you both walk towards Jesus together.

As you follow these steps in your journey, you will begin to experience the fulfillment of the verse, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” You will grow into a beautiful relationship with God the Father where He truly will fill the voids in your heart. He longs to become the safe, loving, nurturing parent that you have always wanted.

© Reconciliation Ministries 2014. This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as credit is given and no fee is charged.

God Meant it for Good: A Lesson from Joseph

Craig is a licensed Minister of the Gospel in the International Fellowship of Christian Assemblies. He joined the ministry team of Reconciliation Ministries in 2023 as a ministerial caregiver and prayer minister. Craig’s passion for recovery ministry comes from his own process of healing from childhood neglect, emotional and sexual abuse, and relational challenges. He has experienced the Lord’s transforming power in his life and has a passion to help others grow in Christ and experience the healing that the Lord provides.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.” – Genesis 50:20 NLT

As the youngest of 3 boys in an extremely dysfunctional and abusive home, I have always been the caretaker and the strong one. I started counseling people when I was in junior high and have taken care of hurting/needy people all of my life. It was easier to take care of others than to face my own life because when you are helping others, no one asks about you.

I had always been different growing up and my dad never accepted me. Anyone not like him was wrong.  He was an accountant and very logical and I was creative, sensitive and not the normal rough and tumble boy like my two older brothers. My dad was in his own world which consisted of work and having a “Better Homes & Garden” yard. This fit with the image that he wanted to have of us being the “perfect” family to all on the outside. My brothers and I were on our own to figure out life and how to not get dad angry. My oldest brother made the mistake of trying to get close to my dad, and we watched in horror as my dad emotionally destroyed him. Needless to say, being close with my dad was not an option for me. My mother was very stressed out with 3 boys very close in age and having no family support in raising us. When I was very young my mother had a nervous breakdown from the pressure of raising three boys and trying to be perfect enough to please my perfectionistic, workaholic, raging father. I learned at a very early age not to be a burden to anyone and not to need. My mom became completely depleted emotionally and started to turn in greater ways to me as the youngest and more sensitive child for her emotional needs, intimacy, and support. We had been enmeshed since I was born, but it became even more so now to the point where I had no identity of my own. In this I learned that I was not allowed to live, need, feel, or exist because I was there to meet her needs. Basically, I was a non-person. If I felt smothered or had any preferences to not be so close to her, I was wrong. I felt like a fly in the web of a spider who was trapped by the web and having my blood sucked out of me a little at a time. Some of the time the spider was kind and other times I could tell that it was killing me. I learned to suppress my hatred of my mom because how can you hate your mom especially when she is “Mother Teresa” to the rest of the world. She really was a great lady it was just that she was also very broken, and I was the one who bore the brunt of her brokenness. I was beginning to view “love” as something destructive because as I was to learn later, abusive people tend to tell their victims often that they love or care for them.

At age 10 a male member of the family started to molest me and this went on for 3½ to 4 years; this just about destroyed me. I didn’t know how to deal with the shame, confusion, and devastation, so I learned to shut down and become numb in order to cope. As I look back, I can see why the longer the abusive relationship lasts the more damage it causes. The reason being is that over time you become more and more dysfunctional as you try to cope with the on-going horribleness of it all. You start out in a shock and trauma phase and gradually adjust. I even got to the place of lying to myself that this was some kind of special relationship where he really cared about me. Needless to say, the damage was quite severe. I walked into junior high school while this was still going on and was immediately labeled as gay, because I was so confused, and treated as a leper. Most of my friends split and I was left to survive on my own. In an effort to try and make sense of everything that was happening to me, I turned to the world of make believe: the theatre. I could pretend to be someone else and that people liked me. I reached out for a male image to become and ended up with the male model image popularized at the time by “GQ” magazine. I grabbed onto this with all of my might and transformed myself into this image. I also lost myself in the theatre and the hope of being a star someday. The GQ image brought with it a lot of problems as men and some women started responding to the alluring person I had become. Being propositioned and made passes at become a normal thing, but it was very confusing for me. While I was still being abused by the male family member, I had become a Christian in 7th grade, but never allowed the Lord to do much in my heart because I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t even discover the Bible until I started to go to a youth group in high school. I didn’t know what to do with all of the confusion in my life, so I buried it. My brother had introduced me to hardcore porn during the years of my molestation, so I went to the local bookstore and found a whole world of porn that I immersed myself into trying to deal with my pain and confusion. 

In college the propositions became more frequent and I immersed myself into helping others even more than before. During that time, I did grow a lot in my walk with the Lord, but I still did not know what to do with all the struggles I was having or my confusing life. After college, I started out in ministry and swore off dating since I always ended up in abusive/destructive relationships; this became one more step to lose myself in ministry and forget even having a life or needs of my own. The unfortunate consequence of these decisions was my own near total nervous breakdown at age 30, when the Lord clearly ordered me to get out of ministry. It took almost ten years to recover from this as I worked hard to carve out a new career in the secular work force. With the Lord’s help I was able to work more than ten years in the human resource field; furthermore, after many years of working through forgiving my father, I even became an accountant myself and could embrace the talents that I had inherited from him.

Over the years, I tried everything I could think of to get some help: counselors, pastors, and books. While I learned many facts and information about my struggles, I really didn’t receive any healing. A friend of mine told me about Living Waters and I will admit that I didn’t have much hope that the program would do anything for me. I cried my way through my first Living Waters program in 2002. For the first time someone was speaking right to me and the Lord was giving me some hope for change. During Living Waters, bondages were broken, walls started to come down and many years of pain were beginning to be removed. After my initial session, I continued in Living Waters as a leader in training and then as a leader. The Lord has done a great work in my life through my years of involvement in the Living Waters program and through inner healing prayer. The Lord has healed my fractionalized identity and helped me accept who I was created to be. He also healed my broken heart and taught me how to forgive.

Previously, living as a victim who was not allowed to need, feel, or exist, I would draw people to me that wanted one-sided relationships: I being the giver and they being the taker. I also seemed to have a sign over my head that drew abusers. As I have come to life through the Lord’s healing, I now can feel, have preferences, and desire two-way relationships. Where I once was content to just listen to endless monologues, I now want to have two-way discussion; this is not to say that there isn’t a time and place where friends need to dump or get something off of their chest, but this should not be the normal mode in a friendship. I also can see the abusers a mile away and can run because I no longer feel worthless and deserving of bad treatment.

I used to hide from my pain and background by filling my life with other people’s needs. This was safer for me because my emotional energy was channeled outward and I could ignore my inner struggles. I became addicted to the feelings that came from helping others and it was like a drug that made me feel good about myself. The more I helped people, the better I felt, so it became quite a cycle until I crashed. Now I no longer need to help others to feel good about myself or to ignore the things in my life because the Lord has healed me and helps me address the things going on in my life. Today, I am developing disciples, doing some prayer ministry and ministerial care for Reconciliation Ministries, and making my way back into full-time ministry as a planter of house churches. As I move back into ministry this time, the Lord has taught me a great deal about having a balanced life. It is okay for me to have a life and be alive and enjoy having friends. I am no longer hiding from my background and pain through helping others. He has healed me and I am ready to give again using my God given gifts as they were intended to be used. It is not God’s desire to use me as my abusers did and chew me up and spit me out when He is done. The Lord desires to work through my life to help others, and He also desires to have relationship with me.

Craig is licensed as a Minister of the Gospel. He provides ministerial care and prayer ministry. If you would like to schedule an appointment with him, call 586.739.5114.

Photos used under license with www.shutterstock.com.

© 2023 Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, Inc. This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as no fee is charged and credit is given.