Pornography also gave me the illusion of control. I couldn't get my parents back together. I couldn't end the chaos. But with pornography I could dictate the outcomes. In my eyes the fantasy around pornographic depictions could turn powerlessness and futility into efficacy.

"Work is for man, not man for work. Everyone should be able to draw from work the means of providing for his life and that of his family, and of serving the human community” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2428)

Continuing with the themes from Part Two of this series, let us look at boundaries with God in light of the extremes of avoidant independence and enmeshed dependence.

In my previous post “Believe His Voice,” I told in detail about my struggle with the different voices in my head, all vying for power and control. Once I came to realize and recognize the voices I was hearing, so many things became clearer in my life. Simply knowing what was going on in my mind and heart was (and is) empowering.

If your parents are divorced or have split up, you’re not alone. While family breakdown can impact a child’s life in several noticeable ways - such as being more likely to grow up in poverty, more likely to drop out of school, and more likely to experience emotional or behavioral problems - it’s harder to see the invisible wounds that can last into adulthood. But these wounds are no less real...

Forgiveness is hard. I can attest to that. I was born angry (by the looks of my baby picture!) and my parents’ divorce cemented that anger even more. I was the queen of holding grudges; I literally held them for years. But that was before I reverted to Catholicism, and I heard about forgiveness on a daily basis through the Lord’s Prayer and the teachings of Jesus.

After therapy, I had a break-through and began to reconcile with myself for the emotional and physical harm I had put on myself in the wake of the abuse. I realized that I had to work to repair the rupture I had in my relationship with myself, just as I would with a loved one who had been hurt by me.

I share this tale because I know many of us long to hear apologies from one or both of our parents for their own roles in the divorce. I just encourage you to pray for apologies and a sense of remorse not for your own sake but for theirs. If we forgive them in our hearts, we can find healing without their apologies.

Let us keep in mind as we examine these things that the intention of Christ is always health, always unity, always love, and always truth. When we name our dysfunction for what it is and speak the truth in love, we honor the self that God gave us and in turn, the Creator of our self is delighted.

Sometimes I feel like I walk around in life on the verge of insanity. If someone could see into my mind, they might consider me a tad unstable. There seem to be so many voices in my head! I wonder, especially in times of crisis, how I am to move forward with all the noise. Of course, I want to believe His voice alone, but in moments of pain and agony, that seems like a near impossible task.

I learned to forgive my father over time. It started with a question, “How can I forgive him?” and developed from there. I realized that he had done what he thought was right, and that he never meant to harm me. Even though I felt rejected and abandoned by him, I knew that he never stopped loving me, and realized how much I had stopped trying to love him.

This poem came out of a recent time of prayer. When I was two years old, my father left my mother, my sister (3 months old), and myself. We saw him every other weekend for a few years, and then he remarried and moved around the country from job to job for most of my childhood. This poem expresses my struggle to call God “Abba” and to trust in His loving, faithful presence.

The inner critic is a very demanding, uninvited voice in your head that chastises you for being inept, bad, or deficient. It undermines your self-confidence and increases your self-doubt. ... So what can we do about our internal critic?

For adult children of divorce or separation, we often struggle with the extremes of boundaries: when our person becomes overly entangled with other persons in our family, this is unhealthy; it can be equally unhealthy to completely cut everyone out of our lives because we think this is the only way of preserving ourselves.

I’m fifty-fife years old, and up until recently I spent most of my life after my parents’ divorce in pain and not knowing why. I also spent my life running from that pain— into the arms of men, towards the bottle, and literally running for exercise, all of which gave me a brief reprieve from my problems.

When my father left the family during my late teens, I fell right back into infancy: I was unable to call my father “dad” because “dad” was no longer present. And that translated to my relationship with God: I did not call God “Father” because it seemed that God left me, too.

But listening to Fr. Mike’s podcast over the past year, my perspective on what it means to come from a ‘good’ family has been completely changed. I have been immersed in a story about a family that is immensely broken and immensely beautiful: the family of God. 

Keep in mind that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation (which takes two people), but sometimes must be offered unilaterally. It is a difficult process, but it is also freeing. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, condoning, or approving the harm done, and it goes hand and hand with setting healthy boundaries. Seeking out therapy and empathizing with the other person’s own struggles helps.

When the home is shattered by the brokenness of divorce, one must boldly turn to the Church. And so, for those leaders in the Church who come into contact with adult children of divorce, here are five ways that you can help bring them Christ’s healing truth.

Know that you are not alone, and that this is not the end, though it may feel like it. Know that even if I don't know you, that I am with you in this journey, that I care about you and so do many others who are like us. Know that you deserved a family who would stick together and that you deserve to grieve that you lost that forever.