Christian Parenting Advice
After serving for over 10 years as a pastor I have to say that there is just as many dysfunctions and masks that we wear in the church as people do outside the church. I think we just learn to hide them better on Sunday Morning.
But what happens when we wear those masks and don’t deal with the issues at hand, is that we find ourselves actually becoming and living as co-dependents to our teenagers. We find ourselves hiding and masking the dysfunction, hurts, pain, and embarrassment that comes with our teens wrong thinking and behaving.
I am not sure if you know this or not but co-dependency is actually a learned behavior. You can actually pass it down from one generation to another, constantly teaching those that you raise how to function and live in a co-dependent relationship.
When a parent lives in a co-dependent relationship with their teenager who is abusing drugs it not only affects both parents, but siblings as well. It has a destructive pattern that plays out throughout the entire house. It shows and allows those who are harming the family to live any way they want while pressing in on those who are not abusing drugs, over compensating on parenting so that they themselves do not go down the same path.
Some examples of dysfunctional families with teenagers who are using drugs might not acknowledge that problems exist. The family will not talk about them or confront them. As a result, family members learn to repress emotions and disregard their own needs. They become “survivors.”
What happens in parents and siblings who live with a teenager who abuses drugs is that they develop behaviors that help them deny, ignore, or avoid difficult emotions. The family detach themselves. They don’t talk. They don’t touch. They don’t confront. They don’t feel. They don’t trust.
This places the family in a situation where they are no longer able to live the way God designed them but carry the masks they wear in public, into their private life. In other words we never can take off the masks even in our home, because we live as co-dependents among our children.
