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Before I say anything, I want to first acknowledge the weight of the word enslavement. It carries such historical significant for the Black experience and even in my own mind surfaces images of Cynthia Erivo’s movie poster for Harriet (2019) and the photo of slaves picking cotton in Lecrae’s bold twitter post on July 4, 2016 that cost him favor with white evangelicals.

My heart in using the word enslavement when talking about covert childhood sexual abuse within families is NOT to decenter the important images paramount in American history, but to widen the lens to include any instance a child’s body is dehumanized through compulsory physical labor and bodily control. Our failure to widen the lens of childhood sexual abuse to include what can happen in any family, regardless of race, is partially responsible for many Americans feeling outside the reach of social justice movements.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of enslavement broadly refers to forcing someone into bondage, completely depriving them of liberty, and subjecting them to the absolute authority and will of another person. Unfortunately, this intense word accurately describes the childhood of many adults who grew up with abusive caregivers.

This post is the last in a three-part series on covert childhood sexual abuse. In this article, I build on the definition of childhood sexual abuse and the ways in which it exists in two covert forms.

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Covert childhood sexual abuse can occur through enmeshment when a parent takes emotional and psychological pleasure from a form of intimacy with their child that is not centered on the child’s needs. Enslavement occurs when a parent uses his/her authority to control a child’s body (beyond the need for safety and wellness) and require a child to serve in the home in an adult capacity.

• Enmeshment: parental domination of a child’s emotional and relational energy

• Enslavement: parental domination of a child’s body

What qualifies as enslavement?

If enmeshment can be summarized as a parent requiring a child to do “inward jobs” that meet a parent’s psychological needs, enslavement can be summarized as a parent requiring a child to do “outward jobs” that fulfill a parent’s roles.

Before I dive into specific examples, it’s important to clarify that the defining element that contributes to covert childhood sexual abuse is not the event but the energy behind it.

In her book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023), Judith Herman discusses tyranny in a way that goes beyond international political realities and can be applied to authoritarian parenting that dominates a home’s emotional climate.

Tyranny is cruel and unfair treatment by people who exercise power over others through dominance and subordination (p 25).

Herman highlights three tactics that coerce submission:

1. Control of bodily functions (hair, clothing, food, sleep, toilet)

2. Capricious enforcement of petty rules

3. Random intermittent rewards (more effective than regular punishment)

All of these tyrannical elements flourish in culturally Christian parenting models that rely on controlling children’s behavior, hierarchical power and ownership of children’s bodies.

Keeping in mind that a spirit of tyranny underneath these elements creates a sense of violation, I now turn to four arenas of covert sexual abuse: an ownership mentality, exploitative labor, invasive body care and physical punishment. This list more deeply connects the experiences of children in abusive homes to the concept of enslavement.

Ownership of Children’s Bodies:

Emotionally immature parents feel overwhelmed by normal child behavior and seek regulation or image management through control. This can include the following:

• Sleeping or eating schedules for kids

• Controlling or criticizing the food intake, body weight or body size of a child.

• Dictating or criticizing hair length and hair styles or clothing preferences to adhere to image or morality standards for a parent

• Commenting on the private parts of their children whether developed or not (breast size, penis size, shape of a butt or figure, etc.)

• Oversharing private information about their child to other adults (periods, dating relationships, sexual activity, etc.)

• Financial control such as a refusing to pay for education or help with their needs if the child is not living according to a parent’s values or morals

The Role of Servant:

The role of servant for a child can include tasks such as cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, gardening, extended/all day sibling care, responsibility for educating siblings (often for eldest daughters) and protecting siblings from parental violence.

Again, it’s a normal reality for a growing child to be responsible for their part of a home or family space by being asked to clean their room, do their laundry or conduct chores as part of a family system. But I have many clients with memories of cleaning for several hours a day when they were off school, being in charge at a very young age of a newborn all day or having to cook or grocery shop in order to have enough food for themselves and younger siblings. This is beyond helping or contributing to a household. This is children being responsible for their own survival needs.

Invasive Body Care:

Emotionally immature parents often have intrusive and violating grooming standards for a child’s skin, hair or teeth that go beyond the value of wellness. When I interned for the Wings Foundation, learning this category of harm was considered childhood sexual abuse was disruptive for me personally.

I have vivid memories when I was in elementary school, of having my mom obsessively clean out my ears in an extremely painful way. On Sunday evenings, as part of a “getting ready for the week” routine, she’d call me into her bathroom and ask me to sit on the toilet cover with the bright bathroom heat lamp shining down on me. She’d command me to tilt my head to the side and she would use the end of a bobby pin to push out any blackheads she found visible on the inside of my outer ear. Sometimes she’d rake the bobby pin over the skin and tell me to lean against it because the oil wouldn’t come out from a pore with just the force of her hand. When she was satisfied I’d tilt my head to the other side and she’d continue until the job was complete. What was strange was that everyday I went to school smelling like cigarette smoke, our house was perpetually dirty and I had been doing my own laundry since I was six years old. Cleanliness wasn’t a value for my mother. I’m not actually sure what was satisfying for her about this ritual, but it was not essential for my safety nor my wellness.

My supervisor, Sarah Eisenbud, Clinical Manager for Group Services at the time, helped me understand how this story for me was understood through an encompassing definition of childhood sexual abuse:

“Forced hygiene habits can take place during a grooming process as an abuser begins to exert control over the body of a child. They can also be the sole form of abuse that is enacted. This is a common characteristic of many survivors’ abuse experiences. I think what is important to think about here is that any time that an adult exerts power over the body of a child there is potential for abuse. It can be challenging for us to discern where this line is as we have all been socialized in a culture that objectifies children and assumes that adults have dominion over the bodies of children. There is also a necessary amount of power that adults need to exert over children’s bodies to help keep them safe (i.e. forcing children to bathe frequently enough to keep them healthy and hygienic enough to attend school, brushing teeth, exerting force to keep them out of danger). There are also different cultural concepts of what is necessary hygiene for health. I think the key is determining the impact that having an adult force, coerce, observe, or interact with hygiene had on the individual and how it may be tied to patterns of abuse in their families or lives.” (2024)

Physical Punishment through Spanking:

The most gut-punching term in Burt & McGinnis’ book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families is liturgized spanking. This term does not refer to pain used to situationally teach a child safety, but highlights when physical discipline for children becomes a ritual that carries supreme weight, is quasi-sacred, considered “God’s method” and based off the Puritanical concept that pain wards off depravity (p. 133).

“Experts told parents that pain was an indicator of love; in turn, parents repeated this to their kids…Even still, the sentiment remains: There is something good and necessary about hurting and causing bodily harm in order to control and produce a desired outcome.” (Myth, p. 141)

“When parents have complete, unchecked authority, when they are told not only that they should rely on corporal punishment but also that God requires them to administer it, when they are empowered by manuals that matter-of-factly recommend implements to secure penitent cries and weed out sin, it is a recipe for child abuse. Please do not skim past that. Popular Christian parenting teaching has enabled and exacerbated child abuse.” (Myth, p. 142)

Not only do Burt & McGinnis qualify ritual spanking as child abuse, but they boldly go further to expose how this can cross over into confusing sexual territory for children:

The system of liturgized spanking is “a recipe that communicates to children that it’s okay for adults to hurt their bodies in privates places, because God says so…This trains children and grooms them for sexual and other kinds of abuse in direct ways, and the same problematic messaging occurs with other retributive punishment methods rooted in the idea that God requires parents to inflict pain and shame. When children learn that love is painful or that it’s okay for someone to hurt them or speak authoritatively about their internal motives, they are susceptible to intimate partner violence in the future.” (p. 165)

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This is part two in a three-part series on covert childhood sexual abuse. In this article, I build on last week’s post that covered the definitions of childhood sexual abuse and the ways in which it exists in covert forms.

Covert childhood sexual abuse occurs when a parent takes emotional and psychological pleasure from a form of intimacy with their child that is not centered on the child’s needs. Many examples of this type of abuse can be categorized as either enmeshment or enslavement. In this post I’m diving into the concept of enmeshment and next week we’ll look at forms of enslavement.

Enmeshment: parental domination of a child’s emotional and relational energy

Enslavement: parental domination of a child’s body

This series culminates with a substack live event on Friday July 24th at 11am MST with author Marissa Burt, coauthor of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families. We’ll discuss how the use of spanking intersects the terrain of childhood sexual abuse.

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What is enmeshment?

Therapist Salvador Minuchin, a pioneer of family systems theory, coined the term enmeshment to describe families where personal boundaries are so permeable that individuals lose a clear sense of self. Enmeshment is a psychological dynamic where separateness is blurred or non-existent. It creates a fused emotional state where individual identity is lost, and a person struggles to separate their own feelings, needs, and autonomy from the other person.

Parental enmeshment refers to a dysfunctional family dynamic in which the parent-child boundaries are blurred, roles are mixed up, and a child’s autonomy is stifled. Enmeshed parenting goes beyond normal intimacy and creates an environment where a child serves the parent’s needs and emotions at the cost of developing their own identity and independence. When a caregiver is enmeshed with a child, the adult, in some way, compels the child to do their “inward work” (like emotional regulation)for them.

The important work of authors like Kenneth Adams and Kelly McDaniel clarify this link between childhood sexual abuse and enmeshed parent-child dynamics.

In his book Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners, author Kenneth Adams states, “There is nothing loving or caring about a close parent-child relationship when it services the needs and feelings of the parent rather than the child.” (p. 6)

He goes on to write:

“Covert incest occurs when a child becomes the object of a parent’s affection, love, passion, and preoccupation. The parent motivated by the loneliness and emptiness created by a chronically trouble marriage or relationship, makes the child a surrogate partner (p. 15). The relationship becomes sexually energized and violating, even without the presence of sexual innuendos, sexual touch, or conscious sexual feelings on the part of the parent. The chronic lack of attachment in the marriage is enough to create an atmosphere of sexualized energy that spills over to the child (p. 16). The seduction inherent in these psychological marriages is subtle and insidious (p. 18). One [parent] is getting some needs met through the child and the other is relieved at not having to deal with the reality of the unsatisfied partner.” (p. 20)

Though a child may feel idealized and privileged in their family system being put in the role of caretaker is parentification of a child. (p. 17)

In her book Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance, author Kelly McDaniel writes:

“Enmeshment happens when a mother’s need for companionship and affirmation overwhelms her child’s capacity for autonomy and care. (p. 38) When a mother’s care is too intense, an enmeshed daughter caters to her mother’s moods, needs, and desires while losing the chance to know her own. (p. 123) This is an insidious form of neglect. (p. 39)”

Like Adams, McDaniel calls it a psychological marriage between a parent and child that involves being chosen as a favorite and singled out. “Not all sexual abuse physically hurts. Mothers who misuse their daughters for affection and touch they need are at risk for [sexual] abuse.” (p. 149)

As a therapist, I realize how disruptive this truth can be for so many of us. The reality of covert childhood sexual abuse, like enmeshment itself, does not have clear lines. As an overt childhood sexual abuse survivor I have always had stories that were clearly inappropriate in a way that could be told or seen. With a deep respect for their courage, I have listened to many client struggle through giving voice to the “ick” they have felt with a parent who idolized them, needed to much from them, or with whom they felt an instinctual compulsion to take care of whenever they feel a negative emotion. They did not had the “privilege” I have of clear evidence.

Naming covert childhood sexual abuse in your story will rarely be something someone outside of you helps you see but rather it will be a brave path you take yourself down of validating your body’s response to the closeness you had with an emotionally unwell parent. My hope is this series helps you feel more sane in the insanity of what was real but rarely visible.

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In the six months I’ve been writing on substack, this is the topic I feel the most called to speak about and the one I have most dreaded diving into. Everything I have written about childhood trauma is the scaffolding for this topic. I’d hoped it would feel more natural and gentle by now, but it doesn’t. I don’t expect discussing how large the umbrella of childhood sexual abuse really is will feel rewarding but I know it is important. This three part series is not for everyone, but there are more of us for whom this is relevant than we want to admit.

All of us have at least a beginning concept of what qualifies as childhood sexual abuse.

Dr. Dan Allender defines it as any contact or interaction—whether visual, verbal, or psychological—in which a vulnerable person (such as a child or adolescent) is used for the sexual stimulation or gratification of an older, stronger, or more influential person. This includes any touching, rubbing, or exposure to pornography meant for the offender's pleasure and is possible because of a fundamental betrayal of trust and misuse of authority to groom or coerce a victim.

This is what I refer to as OVERT sexual abuse. It’s something you could capture on camera. It involves physical contact and is clearly violating even if the beginning stages of grooming are hazy. The heartbreaking reality is that this is only part of what qualifies as childhood sexual abuse. There are many other categories of COVERT childhood sexual abuse that leave survivors battling the same emotions and symptoms but without the clarity of why.

This is what I’ll cover in this three part series on covert childhood sexual abuse, culminating with a substack live event on Friday July 24th with author Marissa Burt, coauthor of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

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Let’s start with Webster’s definition of covert:

Hidden, secret, or disguised; describing actions or things that are intentionally kept out of sight or done without attracting observation.

In the simplest terms childhood sexual abuse is any act involving a child for the sexual gratification of someone else. The important link to forms of covert childhood sexual abuse is the term “sexual gratification.”

Sexual gratification is the physical, emotional, and psychological pleasure or satisfaction a person obtains from sexual thoughts, acts, or experiences. It encompasses a broad range of human experiences, from the immediate release of physical tension through orgasm to the deeper emotional fulfillment and intimacy derived from a healthy relationship.

This is what broadens the umbrella of childhood sexual abuse: emotional and psychological pleasure from intimacy with a child that is not centered on the child’s needs. For emotionally immature parents or psychologically unwell caregivers, there are so many unsettling things that can be gratifying and these are at the root of what can develop into covert forms of childhood sexual abuse:

• dominating a child’s will and behavior

• seeing their child’s mistakes or imperfections exposed (humiliation)

• seeing their child struggle or be harmed in the way they were

• seeing their child abandoned or rejected as they were

• seeing their child share their emotions of shame, fear and distress

• feeling in control of their child’s expression of personhood

• seeing goodness (they don’t feel they posess or have access to) spoiled

• shaping their child into their image

• hating the affirmation and value their child receives from others

Taylor Swift in her song Actually Romantic writes brilliantly of how the energy of negative emotions takes on a sexual intensity.

I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got your brain
High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me
Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face
Some people might be offended…

But it’s actually sweet
All the time you’ve spent on me
It’s honestly wild
All the effort you’ve put in
It’s actually romantic
I really gotta hand it to you, ooh
No man has ever loved me like you do

When emotionally immature parenting overpowers, competes and gravitationally dominates their child’s life all of these dark dynamics are possible. Bethany Webster in her book Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power names this instability as an intermittent reinforcer.

“A mother is sometimes empathetic and loving, but when triggered becoming controlling, hostile or cutting. This constantly shifting dynamic keeps the child on a never-ending roller coaster of emotions and fosters a sense of instability within her” (p. 44)

Other forms of “charge” that can leave a lasting emotional impact on children’s nervous systems also include:

• Inconsistency

• Unpredictability

• Incongruence

• “Should” sentences

• Deprivation

Neville Symington in his book Narcissism: A New Theory writes of object relations theorist Ronald Fairbairn, “He said that the emotionally unavailable mother is at the same time erotically exciting. A lack of emotional sustenance, as it were, makes the [child] ecstatic. He explains cases of incest on this basis, incest often occurring to fill a vacuum where there is a lack of emotional satisfaction.” (p. 99)

Erratic is erotic.

In the upcoming two weeks we’ll dive into two forms covert childhood sexual abuse:

• Enmeshment: parental domination of a child’s emotional and relational energy

• Enslavement: parental domination of a child’s body

Thank you so much for reading through such a weighty and sobering post. What I have discerned through my work as a therapist has not been easy to see but my hope in sharing what I have witnessed is to help many more adult survivors of covert childhood abuse feel sane in their symptoms and connected to a community that knows they are not imagining their suffering.

For an opportunity to learn more join my colleague, Coburn Childs, and I for an 8 week journey using film to learn about about the dynamics of sexual abuse.

THIS WEEK: Kelsey Kramer McGinnis returns for a substack live event with me on

Friday June 26th @ 11am MST!

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In astronomy, gravitational dominant means a celestial body is massive enough to control or clear out all other objects in its orbital path through collisions, captures, or ejections. Traditional Christian parenting models, like the ones Burt and McGinnis research in their book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, posture parents as God-like figures in the lives of their children exerting incredible force in the family system.

This post wraps up a three-part series exploring how the parenting style of emotionally immature parents compromises the differentiation process for children. Lindsay C. Gibson’s book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents list traits of EIPs (emotionally immature parents) that fall into three main categories. We’ve looked at how EIPs are immovable and competitive. This week we take a look at their gravitational dominance.

The most tragic thing about being a child of an EIP is that what they need undermines what you need. Often their own experiences of abuse and/or neglect, where they were not cared for as a needy child in their own family of origin, means they need now to be cared for in their relationship with their own child. Burt and McGinnis shed light on how even well-intending parents over power their own children’s personhood through this need.

Spiritual enmeshment:

“When parents are tasked with taking on the role of the HOly Spirit—uncovering sinful desires and labeling a child’s motives—rather than allowing the child’s inner life ot remain their own, private and know by God alone. (Myth, p. 90-91)

Indoctrination:

Indoctrination is a goal with “the ultimate end being to impose a belief system or worldview on someone, usually by restricting access to information. It is unethical because it strips children of autonomy.” (Myth p. 96)

In her book The Wish for Power and the Fear of Having It describes Althea Horner writes, “Intrinsic power is the power to think, to feel, to know—to experience the creative workings of the mind.” (p. 14) Indoctrination through spiritual enmeshment compromises the power children are created to have over their own personhood.

Doubting Their Bodies:

An impoverished view of children that sees them as unable to discriminate between good and evil or asses the world around them (Myth, p.97) dismisses the power of their created bodies. We all have interoceptive abilities—a sensory system that allows us to feel and interpret our internal bodily signals like hunger, emotions, and the tension we feel in the presence of danger. When this system is daily overridden by spiritual enshment and indoctrination children are left doubting the truth of their own body signals. This truth is what feels comfortable and safe for them is needed to navigate relationships, ethics, morality and safety their whole lives.

These dark dynamics are natural outcomes when an emotionally immature parents beliefs, needs, preferences and opinions are the center of the home.

Emotionally immature parents…

• Seek enmeshment, not emotional intimacy. (Gibson, p. 61)

• Demand mirroring. (p. 57)

• Like to be the center of attention.

• Are self-referential, not self-reflective.

• Are subjective, not objective.

• Are self-preoccupied and self-involved.

Instead of taking on a parenting style that is immovable, turns the parent-child relationship in a competitive power struggle, and requires kids to orbit around adults, caregivers can support their children’s differentiation process by…

• Scaffolding: Providing just enough support for a child to master tasks independently, gradually fading support as their skills grow.

• Encouraging Choice: Allowing children to make age-appropriate decisions to build self-trust and personal preferences.

• Validating Emotions: Accepting a child’s feelings (even negative ones) helps them build self-awareness and self-concept.

• Allowing Safe Failures: Giving children the space to make mistakes and solve problems on their own.

Author Lindsay C. Gibson designed a wonderful resource to help adults reflect on their experience with their own parents in hopes of validating what may have felt difficult in the relationship.

ACEIP Assessments

SAVE THE DATE: Kelsey Kramer McGinnis will return for a substack live event with me on Friday June 26th @ 11am MST!

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This post continues a three-part series exploring how the differentiation process for children clashes with the parenting style of emotionally immature parents. We are looking at three key categories from Lindsay C. Gibson’s book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. Last week we looked at how EIPs (emotionally immature parents) are immovable. This week we take a look at their competitiveness.

The most tragic thing about being raised by an EIP is that what they need compromises what you need. Their underdeveloped relationship with personal power plagues their parenting style and thus undermines the development of their children’s agency. Burt and McGinnis in their book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families shed light on how well-intending parents become entwined in power struggles with their children.

“In Dare to Discipline, Dobson tells story after story of parent-child conflict in which a parent struggles to get the upper hand, to “win,” and the language of parents “winning” is a staple in countless other resources. If a child “wins” a perceived power struggle, this is extrapolated as an indicator of future rebellion and selfishness.” (Myth, p 105)

Christian cultural parenting (not Biblical parenting) is quick to label children as “strong-willed,” dismissing the reality that “there is something valid and distinct about their particular response to the world” (p. 99).

In his work on attachment theory, John Bowlby identified four stages of relational loss that children move through when feeling disconnected from a caregiver.

An important part of yearning and searching is protest. The protest phase is characterized by loud crying, searching, and screaming. It is an instinctual, biological survival strategy designed to ensure the caregiver’s return and thus restoring emotional safety for the child.

Crying, searching and screaming are how kids tell us “I need you!” They are designed to stand against any disconnection between them and their loved ones and they do it with their voice and body language. It’s their job to oppose us when we are separate from them in a way that compromises their needs.

This is not disobedience. This is creation.

But that’s not how EIPs view their children. Gibson identifies emotionally immature parents through the following characteristics that contribute to this power struggle for dominance:

• They see roles as sacred (role entitlement and role coercion pg. 59-61)

• They promote role reversal (the child takes care of the parent)

• They have low empathy and are emotionally insensitive

• They are egocentric (need to prove themselves to be good)

• Their self-esteem rides on your compliance

These traits set up emotionally immature people, robbed of their own agency as children, to compensate as parents through overpowering their child’s will.

Reflection Question:

In what ways were you “rebellious” growing up?

How did you stand against and oppose your parents?

What did you protest or boycott in how your family operated?

What were you trying to communicate?

How were you seen as a result?

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This post kicks off a three-part series exploring how the differentiation process for children clashes with the parenting style of emotionally immature parents. We’ll see three key categories emerge from combining Lindsay C. Gibson’s book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents and Burt and McGinnis’s The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families. My hope is to shed light on how well-intending parents become immersed in oppressive parenting philosophies when they are immaturely immovable, competitive and gravitationally dominant.

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The most tragic thing about being raised by an EIP (emotionally immature parent) is that what they need compromises what you need. Their underdeveloped relationship with personal power plagues their parenting style and thus undermines the development of their children’s agency.

Published in 1989, Althea Horner book The Wish for Power and the Fear of Having It says intrinsic power can be best described in terms of I am, I can, and I will.

• “I am” means I have an identity.

• “I can” refers to a sense of mastery.

• “I will” signals intentionality.

For children to have these three things (identity, mastery and intentionality) they must go through a growth process the therapeutic world calls differentiation. Differentiation refers to how a child develops a distinct, separate identity from their caregivers (Myth, p. 168). It is a lifelong journey of self-discovery spanning key developmental milestones across different age groups.

Four key stages of the differentiation process include…

• Infancy (0–24 months): Involves building object permanence and recognizing that caregivers are independent entities. The peak of this stage is experiencing separation anxiety, signaling the child realizes they are separate.

• Early Childhood / Toddlerhood (2–4 years): The “no” phase. Children assert physical and emotional independence by testing boundaries and exploring their environment.

• Middle Childhood (5–12 years): Shifts toward social and cognitive differentiation. The child compares themselves to peers, develops personal hobbies, and discovers their unique learning styles.

• Adolescence (13+ years): The ultimate quest for personal autonomy, where youth evaluate their own values, morals, and identity apart from their family.

This bulleted list can feel simple for many parents, but for adults who weren’t allowed, as children themselves, the luxury of moving through these developmental milestones with a caregiver’s delight in who they were becoming, parenting their child well through these missed stages feels arduous on the best days and impossible on the worst.

In chapter five of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, Burt & McGinnis tackle the key question—Are children human? As they explore the rights, autonomy and vulnerability children possess, they identify many ways that traditional evangelical parenting philosophies are dehumanizing. The unhealthy dynamics they identify—underestimating the discernment of children, the language of winning, spiritual enmeshment and indoctrination—poignantly encompass many of Gibson’s traits of emotionally immature parents.

In her chapter “Recognizing the Emotionally Immature Parent” Gibson identifies over a dozen traits of EIPs (p. 29-42). These traits can be distilled into three key categories that create a vulnerability to an oppressive parenting style relying on the toxic domination of a power-over position to control children’s behavior.

Emotionally immature parents are immovable—unable to shift or change their approaches and decisions. Their opinions are unyielding and their attitudes steadfast no matter the circumstances. They are legalistically rule-oriented. They manage their emotional dysregulation through black and white thinking in order to feel steady when not in control.

In Gibson’s words….

• They are rigid and single-minded.

• They have little respect for differences.

• They develop strong defenses that take the place of the self.

• They have low stress tolerance.

• They do what feels best.

• They are often inconsistent and contradictory.

This is tragically unfortunate for kids who are always in new territory as they develop and learn. This requires attuned caregivers to be agile, fluid and flexible in handling their ever evolving needs, desires and abilities.

In the words of Burt and McGinnis:

“To deal ethically with children is to be willing to be moved by their desires, needs and preferences.” (Myth, p. 92)

Reflection Question:

How movable or immovable were your caregivers as you developed into adolescence? Do any of the traits of an EIP feel true of your parent?

What makes it hard for you as a caregiver to reconsider your approach, change a rule or be flexible with a consequence?

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I’m thrilled to announce that this week, as I wrap up this four part series on why parents can struggle to teach their kids to exercise personal power rather than train their children’s behavior, authors Marissa Burt and Kelsey McGinnis will join me live this Friday for a conversation on their important book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

Join our live stream here: Friday May 29th @ 11am MST!

Their work is a crucial because a focus on training “godly” behavior results in children who lack a sense of their own identity and gifts, wrestle with a warped relationship to power, are vulnerable to indoctrination and often focus on performance over connection. In order for healthy parenting frameworks to flourish in faith communities, much needs to be named and understood—for the children AND those who raised them. Over this past month I have looked at four key reasons parents find themselves parenting in ways incongruent with their intentions:

1. They lack their own sense of power

2. Their child’s dependency needs feeling overwhelming for them

3. They focus on image to manage their chronic shame

4. They themselves were unparented as a child

Children Parenting Parents

One of the most common sources of emotional unwellness in adults is a dynamic from their family of origin that is being recreated in their lives even decades later. Many adult childhood trauma survivors struggle with depression and anxiety due to over function in their relationships and roles. For most the root causes was being a parentified child in their home growing up.

Psychology Today explains parentification this way:

Parentification is a role reversal in families in which the child acts as the parent in the family system. For instance, emotional parentification can take the form of a child mediating between family members, acting as a parent’s therapist, or being privy to their parents’ adult problems, such as a single parent’s dating struggles or financial woes. Emotional parentification does not refer to moments when a child sees their parent upset and gives them a loving hug. Emotional parentification is a chronic role reversal based on the parent’s inability to manage their own emotions and sufficiently care for their child.

In her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller explained how a mother who was ummothered as a child can create a sense of her own protection from emotional chaos as an adult by raising a “well behaved “ child who will meet her needs.

What happens if a mother not only is unable to recognize and fulfill her child’s needs, but is herself in need of assurance? Quite unconsciously, the mother then tries to assuage her own needs through her child. This does not rule out strong affection; the mother often loves the child passionately, but not in the ways he needs to be loved. The reliability, continuity, and constancy that are so important for the child are therefore missing from this exploitative relationship. What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly save his life (by securing the mother’s or father’s “love”) at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself. In such cases the natural needs appropriate to the child’s age cannot be integrated, so they are repressed or split off.

What the mother had once failed to find in her own mother she was able to find in her child: someone at her disposal who could be used as an echo and could be controlled, who was completely centered on her, would never desert her, and offered her full attention and admiration. If the child’s demands became too great (as those of her own mother once did), she was no longer defenseless: she could refuse to allow herself to be tyrannized; she could bring the child up in such a way that he neither cried nor disturbed her. At last, she could make sure that she received consideration, care, and respect.” (pg. 30-31)

Though this concept is only briefly mentioned in Burt and McGinnis’ book, it is a valuable link demonstrating the reality that adult parents who were unparented themselves can look for structure in programs that help contain their own insecure emotions about being a parent as well as provide the internal guidance they lack.

Unfortunately, in evangelical Christian culture, the parenting programs that are promoted as “Biblical” promote a rigid level of control over children’s bodies, mind and emotions that is detrimental to their development and stifles their freedom to differentiate as uniquely created humans.

To hear more about the process of healing as a parent join our live stream this Friday May 29th @ 11am MST!

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Today, we continue our four part series on why some parents struggle to teach their kids to exercise personal power rather than train their children’s behavior to conform to a standard. This theme started in April as we looked at four concerning premises underneath cultural Christian parenting from the book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

When it comes to training behavior instead of teaching how to use power, the results can be devastating. A focus on training “godly” behavior results in children who..

• lack a sense of their own identity and gifts

• wrestle with a warped relationship to power

• are vulnerable to indoctrination and

• often focus on performance over connection

Despite clear evidence that these dynamics are unhealthy for children, how do well-intending parents who want to give their children a more emotionally nurturing home than they had, end up perpetuating harm? In order for healthy parenting frameworks to flourish in faith communities, much needs to be named and understood—for the children AND those who raised them. We are looking at four key reasons parents find themselves parenting in ways incongruent with their intentions:

1. They lack their own sense of power

2. Their child’s dependency needs feeling overwhelming for them

3. They focus on image to manage their chronic shame

4. They themselves were unparented as a child

Today we turn towards the tendency to focus on image (rather than growth) to manage chronic shame.

I grew up the eldest daughter of a mother who suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder, so I have an intimate knowledge of the way shame and image are perched on opposing sides of a seesaw, always trying to counterbalance one another. My whole life my mother had a push pull with the ways I would shine—sometimes as a uniquely insightful child and often because, like all children, I was beautifully inquisitive, spiritually attuned, playfully creative, and generous with my affection. One minute she was proud of me, admiring the strong person I was, and the next she was disdainfully ridiculing my faults out of jealousy.

One of the hardest parts of having a parent with a personality disorder is learning to stay within what I call “the narrow bandwidth of existing.” You need to perform at a level high enough that it reflects well on them as a parent, but low enough that you don’t outshine them. They must stay the focus which means maintaining the gaze of others through their status, reputation and accomplishments. Like everything in their life, their child must contribute to the glow, but not to the degree that they distract others from their place on center stage. A borderline mother wants to feel like a good parent because she doesn’t feel good inside as a person. She wants to appear like a good mother, without actually having to mother.

When I became a mom at age 30, I felt this same pull from the residue of attachment to my mom’s unwellness. My whole life I have battled chronic shame.

For me chronic shame means that I measure my own value according to how others respond to me. That other may be a teacher, spouse, supervisor, client, friend at my gym or my kid’s coaches. I am unsure if I am good but I think others are, so I work hard to elicit a positive emotional response from them (admiration, respect, acceptance, desire, connection) so I can feel good about myself.

My heart, mind and body center other people as the foundation for my own existence.

In her book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame, Patricia DeYoung describes it this way:

“This is what happens: as an infant, when I am in a state of distress, or as a child, when I am feeling a rush of emotion, the other’s response fails to help me manage what I’m feeling. Instead of feeling connected to someone strong and calm, I feel alone. Instead of feeling contained, I feel out of control. Instead of feeling energetically focused, I feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling that I’ll be okay, I feel like I’m falling apart. This kind of experience is the core experience of shame.

All of it has something to do with needing something intensely from somebody important, and something going wrong with the interaction between us. I feel, “I can’t make happen what I need from you.” Moments that can coalesce into lasting damage and chronic shame are disintegrating moments that remain unrepaired, with the child left struggling alone to recover a sense of who he is with the other.”

I experienced thousands of these moments growing up and my chronic shame runds deep. In contrast, becoming a mom felt like a fresh start as a woman. I had been given an innocent, beautiful, awe-inspiring creature to put on the center stage of my identity instead of my selfish, erratic, jealous and cruel mom who had been the main character for so long. She was still on stage but she was usurped.

I read many of the books that Burt & McGinnis cover in their research hoping to be a good mom and raise godly children. The problem with that mentality is that I already had the DNA to be a good mom and my child was already made in God’s image. So instead of understanding that we needed support, blessing and freedom to be our indestructible selves, I thought my daughter and I needed needed to change. I believed we needed our sinful natures to die, but what I really needed was to heal my woundedness through the journey of being her mother and she needed to grow into her full personhood through the journey of being my daughter.

In their book, Burt & McGinnis call this trying to be the “right kind of parent.”

“They [parents] may not be explicitly taught that children—their behavior, health, or salvation—directly reflect [their] own spiritual goodness, but some come to believe it. Fear and the fervent desire to be the right kind of parents makes people desperate for answers, promises, and a guarantee that their kids will be okay.” (Myth, p. 114)

It is the quest for these guarantees, to counterbalance their chronic shame, that parents can buy into any type of parenting philosophy that promises goodness. They go on to explain that American evangelical family-life teaching cultivated a generation of narcissistic parenting.

“When children are viewed as extensions of godlike parents, individuation and differentiation—developmental stages in which young adults separate in distinct ways from their family of origin and establish their own sense of self—may be delayed well into adulthood. (Myth, p. 168)

Another way to think about this is a quest for goodness rather than the belief we already have it. When our parenting places our children on center stage of our life, their every move becomes an evaluation of who we are. This keeps up from seeing their personhood because we are still searching for our own.

Reflection Questions:

Do you experience chronic shame? If so, how would you describe what it is like for you in your mind, heart and body?

As a child, was your parents’ approach to change you into a godly creature or help you grow into a mature human? What did that look like in your childhood?

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Today, I’m continuing my four part series on why some parents struggle to teach their kids to exercise personal power rather than train their children’s behavior to conform to a standard. This theme started in April as we looked at four concerning premises underneath cultural Christian parenting from Burt & McGinnis’ sobering book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

When it comes to training behavior instead of teaching how to use power, the results can be devastating. Instead of young adults who are in touch with what they need, want, think and feel and can go out into the world to love and live freely, a focus on training “godly” behavior results in children who lack a sense of identity and gifts, wrestle with a warped relationship to power, suffer from indoctrination and often focus on performance over connection.

Despite clear evidence that these dynamics are unhealthy for children and their families, many parents in faith communities continue to perpetuate an oppressive parental framework. The most perplexing question is why? How do well-intending parents who want to give their children a more emotionally nurturing home than they had, end up perpetuating harm?

In order for truly healthy parenting frameworks to flourish in faith communities, much needs to be named and understood—for the children AND those who raised them. We are looking at four key reasons parents find themselves parenting in ways incongruent with their intentions:

1. They lack their own sense of power

2. Their child’s dependency needs feeling overwhelming for them

3. They focus on image to manage their chronic shame

4. They themselves were unparented as a child

In last week’s post we looked at what happens when parents lack their own sense of personal power. Today we turn towards the negative cycle that develops when a child’s dependency overwhelms an ill-equipped parent who suffered their own childhood trauma.

At birth a newborn is…

• Completely Dependent

• Completely Helpless

For a parent who feels inadequate as a person the role of parent can feel very overwhelming. They can easily feel powerlessness to be a “good” parent which feels like being in an eternal state of deficit. If this same parent came from a traumatized home and struggles with chronic shame, then even small parenting tasks (like caring for a wound or teaching a child to read) can surface that shame. The complete dependency of an infant and all that is needed on a daily basis can feel consuming of their energy and motivation. When a parent feels constantly overwhelmed by the role of parent and like their child is consuming their life, it is easy for them to then feel violated by their child. This domino effect of overwhelmed, consumed and then violated (by the dependency and helplessness of their child) leads parents to look for rigid rules and schedules to help feel “protected.”

Once a parent crosses into the emotional territory of believing “my child is doing this to me,” the child is experienced as an antagoniser rather than a creature to love, nurture, protect and enjoy.

In their book, Burt & McGinnis ask this piercing question:

Once a child is seen as “sinful” (rather than dependent and helpless) the goal of training their behavior becomes a top priority for Christian parents who need their fragile sense of self to feel protected and their own chronic shame to be quieted. Unhealthy parenting frameworks schedule children’s dependency needs which helps a parent who feels invaded by their child to experience some breathing space. It begins with limiting feedings and lengthening sleeping to help an adult feel like their life isn’t lost in the role of parent but can end with abusive elements in a home as a child’s will, personality and power develops.

The cycle can go like this:

A parent feels helpless or inadequate to meet their child’s needs.

• Who I am isn’t enough for what you need.

A parent needs a “container” for those feelings.

• I can’t function feeling like this.

A parent projects these feelings onto their child

• I’m good, so you must be making me feel bad.

A parent needs help controlling the pervasiveness of their child’s needs.

• This book sees you how I feel with you (like you are the problem) and has ideas of how to help you behave better.

A parent utilizes an unhealthy framework that trains behavior (which is really scheduling the child’s dependency needs) in a way that helps this parent feel less overwhelmed.

• I feel like I can exist when you don’t need something from me every minute of the day and I know when I can be expected to take care of you.

A parent then feels powerful and competent from implementing a parenting framework that limits the scope of their child’s needs.

• This is much better. I can take care of me first and then take care of you.

Some of this cycle can sound like healthy desires and needs because they are. Parents need to feel sane. They need to continue to care for themselves even in a demanding role. Parents have needs too. Parents can bring a feeling of empowerment to the new role of parents as they learn to structure their life differently.

The two key questions are:

• What is the problem?

• What needs to change?

When a parent recognizes their own lack of emotional regulation with dependency and helplessness, they can identify that adjusting to parenting is the challenge, not their child. When they realize they need to be better resourced, they can look to their partners, families, friends and communities to help rather than expect their child to have less needs so they can better care for themselves.

Reflection Questions:

As an adult child, when do you remember your parent feeling overwhelmed by you? What were you needing or doing? How do you relate to those parts of you now?

As a parent, what about your child’s personality, needs and desires as overwhelming for you? Do you see any connection between those and what parts of who you were overwhelmed your caregivers when you were young?

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For the past two weeks we’ve examined four concerning traits of cultural Christian parenting as articulated by Burt & McGinnis in their book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

• Hierarchical structures

• Kids belonging to parents (rather than to themselves)

• Spiritual enmeshment

• Training children’s bodies to obey instead of teaching children to exercise their intrinsic power over their behavior

Despite clear evidence that these dynamics are unhealthy for children and their families, many parents in faith communities continue to perpetuate these oppressive frameworks. The most perplexing question is why?

In the coming four weeks we’ll look at four factors that lead well-intending parents to utilize principles that compromise the emotional development of their children: lacking their own sense of power, their child’s dependency feeling overwhelming, focusing on image to cover shame, and the ways they were unparented when they were a child.

The first of these is a lack of connection to their own intrinsic power.

In March, I dove into Athena Horner’s work on intrinsic power in this post but here are a few key points as a quick review. Intrinsic power refers to a sense of being effective, of having an impact, of mattering. It is the power to think, to feel, and to know and can be summarized by three “I am” statements. (Horner, p. 14)

• “I am” means I have an identity.

• “I can” refers to a sense of mastery or competence.

• “I will” signals intentionality and agency.

There are also two other important types of power: formal and shared.

Formal Power

Formal power refers to entities (government, police, teachers, employers) that are designated to be the holders of power by virtue of title or position. The goal of formal power is to enable a social system to operate with coordination towards the achievement of shared purposes. (Horner, p. 22)

Parents hold formal power in many ways in their children’s lives, but when they don’t also feel intrinsically powerful as a person, formal power is what parents will lean on to compensate when they feel overwhelmed.

Formal power lends itself easily to the competitive language of “winning” against a child’s will. As Burt & McGinnis explain, “This idea of ‘winning’ shows up in many of the spanking manuals and relies on a parent accurately diagnosing a child’s motives as rooted in defiance.” (Myth, p. 138) “If a child ‘wins’ a perceived power struggle, this is extrapolated as an indicator of future rebellion and selfishness. Children have never had the upper hand over their parents, no matter how harried the parents may feel.” (Myth, p. 105)

The extent to which a parent becomes dysregulated by a child’s behavior reflects how much power the parent perceives the child to have over them.

In her book The Verbally Abusive Relationship, Patricia Evans distinguishes between what she calls personal power and power over.

Personal Power vs. Power-Over

Equality vs. Inequality

Partnership vs. Competition

Mutuality vs. Manipulation

Good Will vs. Hostility

Intimacy vs. Control

Validation vs. Negation

Not all formal power is abusive but when it’s exercised without character, integrity, empathy and compassion it easily becomes power-over. When dysregulated parents don’t feel personally powerful, they will lean on power-over ways of relating as the foundation of training kids’ bodies to behave rather than teaching their hearts, minds and bodies to steward their own power.

Horner offers this warning when parents take a power-over shortcut to fulfill their role:

“The power differential characterizing the relationship between a parent and a small child is the first and most formative experience with this inescapable dimension of life and of all subsequent interpersonal relationships. Our attitude toward that early experience will determine how we use our own later power (or how we refuse to use it) and how we react to the power of others—whether we seek it and cling to it, whether we hate and envy it, or whether we rebel against it, overly or covertly.” (p. 7)

When children are not given access to their own intrinsic power, they will seek compensatory power over themselves and others in various ways. This can include bullying, manipulative relational behavior, restricting or binging food, cutting and other forms of self-harm. They may also refuse to hold power in their lives through under achieving in school or activities, people pleasing (or fawning) with their peers and engaging in escapist activities such as video games.

Burt & McGinnis call for a “reframing…of children around the awe-inspiring, miraculous nature of children as human beings” that can help parents let go of deeply held beliefs that children are theirs to mold or “adversaries to conquer.” (Myth, p. 183) The remedy for a power-over dynamic, that provides the reframing Burt & McGinnis encourage, is the concept of shared power.

Shared Power

Shared power comes from the experience of oneness in which the power of the self and that of the other are in sync rather than in opposition. (Horner, p. 33) In a healthy relationship, power is shared in an agreed upon manner that does not imply defeat or humiliation for the one who may willingly cede power to the other based on genuine respect or confidence.” (p. 29)

When it comes to a parent-child relationship, the child’s first sense of his or her own power comes largely from sharing the power of the primary caretaker to whom it is emotionally bonded. Shared power allows children, at developmentally important times and in safe ways, to “try on” and articulate their own various identities, choose which activities and endeavors they want to pursue achievement, and self-determine the actions and values they will seek to stand by.

When a parent was given these freedoms in their childhood, they will find it natural to allow their children the same. If, however, a parent is at war with their own power (or lack of it) still feeling unsure of who they are, floundering in their own achievements and struggling to make choices according to their own needs, feelings and desires then they will need a lot of support in their own personal journey towards freedom to not revert to a power-over framework where they feel false power through subverting their child’s intrinsic power.

Reflection Question:

In what ways could you exercise power in your family? In what ways was it discouraged?

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One of the most important tasks I do, day in and day out, as a therapist is help survivors of childhood trauma hold and exercise their personal power. We call this agency and it the fuel for how we show up in and shape the world.

This has EVERYTHING to do with why I consider Burt & McGinnis’ book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families so valuable for those from a traditional faith background. Their work contains a deep exploration of what I’m calling the fourth concerning trait of traditional Christian parenting: training instead of teaching children.

When Burt & McGinnis discuss their concerns about evangelical communities’ focus on “training” young children, the conversation prioritizes children’s behavior (instead of learning) and, like tent stakes that anchor a flimsy shelter to the earth, is held down by words like obedience, compliance and respect. When these become the primary parental values, the disturbing outcome is indoctrination rather than differentiation.

Before I was a therapist I couldn’t have told you what the word differienation meant so let me give you a definition that’s useful for every relationship, not just parenting.

Differentiation is the process of developing a distinct sense of self, separate from others in our social environment. It involves forming our own identity, values, and beliefs while balancing our autonomy and emotional connections with others. Differentiation is important for psychological maturity and involves being able to maintain our sense of self even when influenced by external pressures.

In their book, Burt & McGinnis write…

• “Evangelical frameworks generally don’t address the process of children separating from their parents, something known as differentiation or individuation.” (Myth, p. 67)

One such example is the work of James Dobson who elevates the value of respect but to a problematic degree. Dobson believed that “developing respect for the parents is the critical factor in child management…Respect for parents must be maintained” (Myth, p. 90). When the developmental tasks of differentiation is interpreted disrepect to a parent, a child’s ability to grow is compromised.

Instead of being disrespectful, kids, when they are in the process of differentiation, are asking two key questions:

• Can I be like you and still have my own world?

• Can I be different than you and still be accepted by our family?

What Dobson called “willful defiance” I call ordained defiance.

Aletha Horner, in her work on power, says it this way:

“The push away from the mother requires not only the will or intention to do it, but the freedom to use a certain amount of aggression in the service of that individuation.” (p. 76)

Instead of being a “rebellion [that] can plant the seeds of personal disaster” (Myth, p. 75) defiance is how we grow into brave souls. When children are labeled strong willed it “dismisses the possibility that there is something valid and distinct about their particular response to the world” (Myth, P 98-99). But if behavior is a form of communication then when kids oppose their caregivers they are telling them information about what they are learning about themselves and who they want to be in the world.

When we are making involuntary choices rather than conscious decisions, we are in the terrain of indoctrination.

Burt & McGinnis go on to write:

“When it comes to education, emphasizing training and downplaying the effectiveness of teaching reveal a very anti-humanist view of learning and….flirts with the definition of indoctrination. The ultimate end of indoctrination is to impose a belief system or worldview on someone, usually by restricting access to information, so only that which reinforces the desired belief system is available. Indoctrination is unethical because it strips children of autonomy.” (Myth, p. 96)

Instead of training, Burt & McGinnis offer this wise insight into the original Hebrew text of Proverbs 22:6. The word for “train up” more accurately translates into the verb to dedicate.

“Parents committing their children to God’s ways are doing so from a posture of walking alongside them rather than maintaining control over them. They may dedicate, but they cannot determine.” (Myth, p. 174)

This is an important distinction that helps explain why well “trained” children can often ricochet to extreme, opposite moral behavior in their search to have any personal power in their hierarchical family structure.

Horner warns us that children, in their search for good, personal power, will over separate themselves from caregivers if they aren’t allowed to be close but different:

• “The development of a child’s will may go off course with parents who make extreme demands for performance or achievement, and with those who take away the child’s opportunity to make the kinds of decisions that are an expression of will. In these instances, all that is left to enable a child to experience its own power is the statement “I will not.” (Horner, p. 80)

• “Saying no becomes important not only to define one’s self as separate, and to have a sense of “I am”; saying no becomes important to preserve an illusion of will, and with it, intrinsic power.” (p. 80)

• “When there have been earlier power struggles, with parents unable to gradually relinquish control and enable the child to take on more and more responsibility for choices and actions, the boy or girl may have come to feel the necessity to completely overthrow parental authority. This may lead to a kind of oppositionalism, a refusal to identify with parental values and standards…It is more important for such a child to NOT be like the mother or NOT be like the father. A negative identity is no identity at all.” (p. 86-87)

It is tragic that the good intent of most Christian parents backfires when control is a higher goal than connection. How do parents who want to love, nurture and encourage their children end up stunting their development, promoting indoctrination instead of wisdom and teaching them to go along with something they don’t want? Next week we’ll dive into a four part series exploring why some parents struggle to teach rather than train (control) their child.

Reflection Question:

In what ways were you permissioned to be different than or separate from your family and in what ways was that not allowed?

Finally, after a few weeks delay, I am starting our dive in the concerning DNA of cultural Christian parenting. Releasing this material has been slower than I anticipated for one straightforward reason: It was sobering, slow work to get through Burt & McGinnis’ sobering book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

Before we look at three of the four most concerning traits (we’ll examine the fourth in next week) I want to highlight an important distinction between what is Christian and what is Biblical. I am intentionally using the word Christian, as Burt and McGinnis do, to signify what has become normative in American evangelical culture, not what is commanded in the Bible. The two are easily conflated and it is crucial to distinguish them.

“It’s easy to slip the label ‘Christian’ onto any number of things—denominational affiliations, doctrinal frameworks, well-behaved families, moralism. But in its most basic sense, what makes something Christian is whether it reflects the life and teaching of Jesus.” (p. 187)

In so many ways, traditional Christian parenting literature made popular in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, by such names as James Dobson, Bill Gothard, Tedd Tripp and Gary & Anne Marie Ezzo, does not reflect the life and teachings of Jesus.

1. Hierarchical structures

The family life teaching promoted by evangelical church leaders rests on two key elements: hierarchy and promised security if the hierarchy is maintained (p. 48). Bill Gothard called it “umbrellas of authority” while Tedd Tripp referred to “circles of safety.”

These models “place children at the bottom of a hierarchy defined by obedience, submission, and relationship to a parent.” (p. 49)

Two important things to clarify in this critique.

First, many of the Bible’s authors and audiences were writing in a context where hierarchy’s (like the Roman Empire) were prevalent, dominating, and exploitive. And yet these weren’t systems to replicate but rather power structures where Jesus painted a vision of liberation from oppression.

Second, I’m often counseling adults who were raised by psychologically unwell caregivers and yet are trying to parent in a different way. Our conversations often refer to their children being “entrusted to them” and what it means to use their God-ordained power as a parent for their child’s good. The difference is what if a position “over” someone for.

In the coming weeks we’ll talk about how problematic (even sometimes dangerous) it becomes when the mindset is that parents have power OVER their children rather than shared power WITH their children. Burt and McGinnis say it this way:

“To deal ethically with children is to be willing to be moved by their desires, needs and preferences…The ethical treatment of children means leaving behind a framework of rules based solely on hierarchy.” (p. 92)

2. Kids Belonging to Parents

This is a concept we’ll return to in the coming weeks but an important connection to make as we set the stage for the damage done to kids and in families is that the concept of kids belonging to parents breeds a sense of ownership of children (their bodies, their behavior, their personalities) that always ends in sense of violation to some degree. Of course, authors, such as Tripp and Dobson, don’t use the term ownership, but that is what is becomes when parental authority is used to produce obedience and submission in families.

“No matter how strongly parents feel the pressure to raise ‘good kids’ who reflect well on their family, a child’s behavior and feelings belong to the child.” (p. 105)

Instead of belonging to parents, I believe children belong to themselves and healthy parenting centers around helping children learn to use their intrinsic power for their good and the good of others.

“Children don’t belong to parents in the sense of ownership. Parents cannot control the choice of future generations. Parents are not godlike agents of authority. Parents are simply human beings, people entrusted with the care of vulnerable children for a short time.” (p. 171)

3. Spiritual Enmeshment:

In the counseling community we often use the term enmeshment to refer to a dysfunctional relationship dynamic, often within families, that is characterized by weak boundaries, lack of individual autonomy, and intense emotional over-involvement. It was fascinating to read how Burt and McGinnis combine this with the word spiritual to indicate what happens in parenting when children are seen as morally corrupt and in need of having their sin nature reigned in.

Spiritual enmeshment happens when…

“Parents are tasked with taking on the role of the Holy Spirit—uncovering sinful desires and labeling a child’s motives—rather than allowing the child’s inner life to remain their own, private and know by God alone.” (p. 91)

They go on to explain how evangelical teachers on sin dishonor God’s creative design and diminish the glory of the incarnation when they 1) equate sin nature with personal moral failure and culpability, 2) ascribe adult motives to infants, who have no sense of self or parental other, and 3) interpret anything short of perfection as sin (p. 111).

This concept is pivotal in understanding how prevalent spiritual abuse can be in evangelical communities focused on hierarchical power. We often envision spiritual abuse as strange cult ceremonies, emotionally forceful leadership from an eccentric personality, or unsettling sacrificial blood rituals. Unfortunately, what qualifies as spiritual abuse is much more.

In a Allender Center podcast on spiritual abuse, Allender and Clinton offer this beginning definition:

“Spiritual abuse…is a misuse and abuse of power that is connected to spiritual authority…where someone is claiming to have knowledge, insight, expertise, some kind of authority to lead spiritually, to speak on behalf of God, to have power and authority to bring forth theological ideas, power and authority to have the right doctrine, the right interpretation of scripture. [Spiritual abuse happens] when those realities of what God thinks, feels, believes, how God relates, are being dictated through a human being in a way that is misusing power, using power to control, to manipulate, to keep in line.”

When spiritual enmeshment is present because struggling, emotionally or psychologically unwell caregivers have authority over knowing a child’s mind and heart, spiritual abuse always follows.

Next week we’ll begin a two weeks dive into the last concerning DNA strand of cultural Christian parenting: training children’s behavior instead of teaching them how to use their innate personal power.

Reflection Question:

What are 1-2 ways you saw each of these three dynamics present in the framework of your home growing up?

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It feels important to share, as a break from the regularly scheduled program addressing childhood trauma that I do here on substack, a deep breath of hope before diving into the myths of good Christian parenting.

Over the past few weeks, I have heard the word despair mentioned in several places and The beautiful thing is all of them have had the spirit of turning away from it—that we can no longer give it power. These gorgeous lines have stuck with me and surfaced together in moments when I am tempted to think goodness in hard places is impossible.

From Jan Richardson’s blessing entitled “And The Table Will Be Wide” found in her newest book How The Stars Get In Your Bones:

And we will open our hands

to the feast

without shame.

And we will turn

toward each other

without fear.

And we will give up

our appetite

for despair.

And we will taste

and know

of delight.

Then, last Sunday at Highlands Church here in Denver, co-pastor Rachael McClair opened the service with this short Rumi poem:

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

It doesn’t matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.

Come, yet again, come, come.

Finally, Anand Giridharadas’ interview with Rebecca Solnit this past week discusses her book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. In his intro to the interview (from his substack newsletter called The Ink!) he writes:

My favorite quote from her book that Anand reads at the beginning of the interview reminds me that setback isn’t the same as defeat.

May we all, this coming Holy Week, turn away from the despair we are accustomed to, refuse to ride in its caravan and not concede power to darkness even when we struggle to see truth in the backlash!

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Every infant is born both 1) helpless to meet their own needs and 2) beautifully disruptive to the life his or her parents had before their arrival. How parents view the life-altering presence of their child sets the trajectory for how they will interact with their child’s power over the course of a lifetime. Will they foster the development of their child’s power or feel threatened by it? Will they embrace the emotional and physical chaos as a catalyst for their own growth or use control to limit its impact?

In her book The Wish for Power and the Fear of Having It, Althea Horner writes:

The power differential characterizing the relationship between a parent and a small child is the first and most formative experience with this inescapable dimension of life and of all subsequent interpersonal relationships. Our attitude toward that early experience will determine how we use our own later power (or how we refuse to use it) and how we react to the power of others—whether we seek it and cling to it, whether we hate and envy it, or whether we rebel against it, overtly or covertly. (p. 7)

A parent’s attitude towards this power imbalance is the link between the intrinsic power of every family member (that we examined last week) and the health of the family system (that we’ll dive into next week). One of the first indicators of how parents experience their child’s power is their inner experience when their child cries.

Horner writes:

The power of the infant is largely illusionary and comes from the parent’s response to the baby’s cries, a response that allows a sense of effectiveness to develop in the child. This sense of effectiveness, of having an impact, of being able to evoke a helpful response, is one of the seeds of intrinsic power that develops over the early years of life (p. 31).

Horner goes on to say that healthy parents do not have a need for their child either to stay dependent and helpless, or to be completely self-reliant (p. 43). Instead, they can share power—a concept we embrace in the face of race and gender inequity but rarely consider in the power differential between caregivers and their children.

Sharing power requires an attitude of trust and safety. Sharing power never comes with a sense of humiliation or defeat, especially when we need to relinquish it out of wisdom or have to bear not having it in the face of suffering. A child’s first sense of his or her own power comes largely from sharing the power of the primary caretaker to whom it is emotionally bonded (p. 30, 33-34).

Next week we’ll look at 3 key elements in traditional Evangelical (not Biblical) parent teaching:

• the posture towards children’s power

• how crying is handled for infants

• beliefs about the power differential between parents and children

Reflection Question:

What do you remember about how crying was handled in your family? What response and emotion did it illicit? What family rules or norms were there between parents who provided and children who were dependent?

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Honestly, it’s a bit overwhelming to know where to start with an article on personal power. So many of my own connections flood my mind…

• My ministry leadership telling me when I first became a mother in 2004, I could keep doing ministry but only if it didn’t compromise my (then) husband’s role and duties rather than holding my spouse accountable to his own productivity.

• Wrestling deeply, in 2016, with my job at a secular, nonprofit residential program serving female teen survivors of sex trafficking and our position on reproductive health.

• My fascination with the movie The King’s Speech (2010) and the pressure created for others when we abdicate our power for our own comfort.

• The clients I’ve had in my office over the past six years processing the harm of not having had agency as children over their hairstyle, clothing and with whom they were affectionate.

• In January, wrestling with my response to my son’s unapologetic choice to change roommates for his sophomore year based on what feels easy for him relationally.

• And finally, last month feeling strangely unsettled on coffee dates by the idea of not see someone again simply because I didn’t have a good time. Instead, I deeply analyzed their personality, nervous I was being “unfair” to them while failing to validate my own experience in an interaction.

One of the most helpful places I’ve read about personal, individual power came from a book published in 1989 by Althea Horner entitled The Wish for Power and the Fear of Having It. She covers so many amazing concepts and several quotes from this book will pop up later this month, but the most powerful is her clear articulation of personal power. She calls it intrinsic power and understanding what it is offers a clear baseline for measuring unhealthy parenting frameworks and their effects on kids.

In Horner’s work intrinsic power refers to the power of the self. Here is how she describes it.

“Intrinsic power refers to…a sense of mastery, competency and potency in one’s dealings with the world of things and with the world of people. There is a sense of being effective, of having an impact, of mattering. It is the power to think, to feel, to know—to experience the creative workings of the mind.” (p. 14)

She goes on to explain that intrinsic power can be best described in terms of I am, I can, and I will.

• “I am” means I have an identity.

• “I can” refers to a sense of mastery.

• “I will” signals intentionality.

If, as children, our intrinsic, God-ordained power is honored then we come to know who we are through the things we learn to do and the desires we have. Kids grow into their intrinsic power in a thousand every day ways. Between the ages of two and six, it looks like saying no to a million different things and seeing what happens next. It’s developing preferences for food, play, people and our appearance. It’s discovering their favorite books, shows and music through wide exposure. It’s finding out what makes their body feel good in terms of touch with people and objects, how they receive comfort and what helps them relax. It’s learning how they delight the people they love and the ways they impact their connection with them. All of this happens through their bodies!

And when kids don’t have power over themselves, over their own bodies, they will look for other forms of power in order to cope. Horner says it this way:

“The willingness of parents to allow and promote the child’s own intrinsic power in terms of adequacy, autonomy, and feelings of mastery, will make it unnecessary for that child to develop illusions of power, compensatory power, or power over others in order to feel good about himself or herself.” (p. 48)

Next week we’ll begin looking at what American Christian culture falsely teaches parents to do with children’s intrinsic power and what the consequences are when children are dehumanized, not even their personhood belonging to themselves.

Reflection:

If intrinsic power is the power to think, feel and know, what was allowed and disallowed in your home growing up in these three categories? Challenge yourself to fill in this chart with 3-5 items for each box!

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Welcome to our third overview of 2026! All content in this series will continue to be free so please share with anyone you believe would benefit.

Throughout March & April, we’re going to dive into the DNA underneath the “traditional” family model. When caregivers have unhealed trauma, this most often means authoritarian parenting fails to provide the freedom for kids to learn and young adults to grow into their intrinsic personal power. We’ll examine cultural (not Biblical) faith-based parenting that creates family dysfunction and results in fractured relationships when, decades later, adult children exercise their delayed agency to address the lack of respect from their own parents. In extreme cases—caregivers with extreme trauma who develop a personality disorder—we see how patriarchy shapes this family model into a home where abuse and neglect run rampant.

The intent of this series is not to cast blame, though one of my favorite quotes by Anne Lamott comes to mind whenever I think about the discomfort for so many when examining their family system:

Instead this series is about naming our childhood experiences as a path towards more deeply loving—ourselves and them. Love for parents doesn’t have to include affection, connection and safety, but it does require truth. When we choose to see ourselves as “bad kids” and thus fail to name the harm we suffered from our caregivers, we continue to idealize them instead of humanize them. We cannot relate to, love or really know people we put on a pedestal. Seeing ourselves as the “problems” in our families also ignores the reality that kids are meant to be a doorway parents walk through towards greater healing. When we refuse to name the ways we weren’t parented, our parents lose a chance to look in the mirror for their own sake. Even far into midlife, parents can be lost in their own historic shame, and us naming our experiences of needing them and wanting them in ways they weren’t available can offer an exit strategy if they’ll take it.

A willingness to name harm requires longing—what David Whyte calls “right kind of peril” that reveals we have always wanted more from them and with them. It means we dance with the uncertainty of ache and grief if they aren’t desiring or capable of it. This can be crushing, but our lives are more grounded and genuine when we live in reality, even heartbreaking ones. Reality allows us to relate to them from an “awake” posture and releases us to seek out other relationships that can nourish us.

As you engage the content in these upcoming months, keep in mind that our experiences aren’t black and white. One of my favorite clinical tools (the DES-2) invites clients to answers questions about discocoation on a scale from 0-100%. These types of answers are so helpful because they invite specific and nuanced explanations of our inner world. We never want to inflate the presence of pain (Lord knows there’s already enough to deal with) AND we don’t want to dismiss even the mild or moderate presence of unhealthy dynamics. No one thing makes a family dysfunctional; it’s often an accumulation of several things that are “off,” even in moderate ways. So as you consider the frame that holds up the house of the traditional family model and where it hurt you growing up, think in shades of gray and seek to validate the weight of wherever your experiences falling on the spectrum.

Week 1 (Monday March 9th): Intrinsic Power & Personhood

Week 2 (Monday March 16th): The Myth of Good Christian Parenting (Part 1)

Week 3 (Monday March 23rd): The Myth of Good Christian Parenting (Part 2)

Week 4 (Monday March 30th): Role Reversals: When Kids Take Care of Parents

Week 5 (Monday April 6th): Emotionally Immature Parents (Part 1)

Week 6 (Monday April 13th): Emotionally Immature Parents (Part 2)

Week 7 (Monday April 20th): How Parenting Becomes Tyranny

Week 8 (Monday April 27th): How We Develop Depression & Grandiosity

Resources I’ll cite this coming month in case you want to do a deeper dive:

• The Wish for Power and the Fear of Having It by Althea Horner

• The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

• The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller

• Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice by Judith Herman

Enchanted by Our Own Bravery:

Another beautiful passage from a chapter (entitled Cold Water) in Katherine May’s book Wintering.

Her experience of cold sea swims is a poignant analogy for how we step into the connection that can often feel overwhelming for the disorganized parts of our souls.

I was in (the first time) for perhaps forty-five seconds, although it feels as though time was warped by the experience, so it could easily have been shorter….I feel safe now, having been in and out again; I have survived. It is obvious, in retrospect, that staying in a little longer would only have been a matter of nerve.

My skin tingles with the memory of the cold. ‘I think I have the measure of it now,’ I say. ‘I came out because I didn’t think it was possible to stay in. But as soon as I was out, I could see that it was fine. I want to go back in.’

‘Tomorrow?’ says Margo.

‘Tomorrow,” I say.

The second day, I set the timer on my phone, and find that I can stay in for nearly five minutes if I put aside the fear that I will suddenly die from hypothermia. I’ve done my research, and know that it’s a slower process than that, which is oddly reassuring. I know that I am to get straight out if I start shivering in the water, but also if I start feeling warm again. For as long as I’m feeling the cold, I’m relatively safe…

On the fourth day…I am surprised to find that I feel fine. By now, I’ve learned to breathe through the initial thirty seconds when my chest feels tight, and to simply acknowledge the cold.

On the fifth day, I stay in for ten minutes straight, astonished at how quickly I’ve adapted. ‘This is wonderful!’ we say. ‘This is amazing!’ We are completely enchanted by our own bravery, by the way that we’ve stepped out of the everyday world and into this alternative space.

(pages 213-216)

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In our final week of this four-part February series on how children survive trauma with caregivers, we look at the continued loss of self and the pattern of thinking that keeps the whole structure in place—a mistrust of self.

Gabor Maté writes,

“If the choice is between ‘hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need’ and ‘being myself and going without, I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus, our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.”

And from Dani Shapiro’s podcast Family Secrets:

“Because growing up in a family in which a secret is being kept from you, is like growing up in a family which has its own poltergeist. Maybe you can’t see it, but know you can feel it, you know you can hear it rattling things in the attic, you know something is wrong but the truth of it is hidden from you. And when there is a difference between what you are sensing and what you’re told, it erodes your trust in yourself and in others in a way nothing else can. Many of us who grew up in families with secrets we sensed while everyone around us was saying nothing’s wrong, came to the conclusion that something must be wrong with us.”

At the heart of a “mistrust of self” is a deep mistrust of our bodies. It’s our body and its nervous system that registers the danger around us. We feel sick to our stomach, our chest is tight, our throat closes, our heart beats fast, our breathing quickens, we get tense and still with caution, and our temperature fluctuates from freezing to burning up depending on how intense the moment is. Our internal alarm bells go off, physical indicators that all is not well.

But what happens when those alarm bells never shut off? If you’ve ever been stuck in a large building while a fire alarm is misfiring, you know what you must do to stay sane. To drown out the repetitive, loud sounds you have to put on noise cancelling headphones so you can go on with life.

The double tragedy of this transaction is that as we grow into young adults our alarm bells are so quiet we are vulnerable to compounded harm in multiple forms. We know how to get through bullying on the playground when there has been verbal abuse at home, teasing about our body in a locker room when lines are crossed at home, or humiliation in friend groups when mockery is a common communication style with siblings. We may even be more susceptible, later in life, to date rape or intimate partner violence. There may be a quiet voice inside that whispers to us, “This is not ok,” but when things feel different than what is seen by bystanders or said by a perpetrator, we doubt ourselves rather than the clear evidence of harm.

The content we have taken a deep dive into this month has been heavy. I’m going to leave you with two hopeful thoughts before I close, but first I want to say thank you for wading through all of this.

I believe it matters that we understand how we have survived trauma because it normalizes the difficulty of outgrowing its patterns. This collection of quotes and diagramming their collectively truth began because there is a reasonable reason we feel so much guilt, why we don’t know ourselves sometimes, why figuring out what’s real can be hard work, and why when we heal, the path of reality can stir up ancient despair and terror. Once we understand these things we can navigate the tricky terrain of trusting ourselves and being our true selves out in the world from a more grounded internal place.

Two pieces of good news.

First, we don’t have to stay on the attachment path our whole lives. When we are mysteriously ready, we start the journey down the other path—naming what was unwell in our families, facing the young terror that goes along with that reality, entering periods of young despair when we aren’t sure how to integrate reality into our relationships but also discovering our whole selves and that we can trust again.

Second, we can learn to listen to our bodies again. Alarm bells that are so quiet we aren’t sure they even work anymore can be recovered. It’s hard as hell and takes a long time, but it is possible. We can have access to ourselves again so we can establish places of safety in our worlds and in the world.

These things are possible when, in the words of Stephen Cope—as quoted in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk—we agree to exile nothing.

“The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness. . . . The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.