#142: How to Break the Cycle of Your Broken Family
Pending! Stay tuned.
Has your parents’ divorce or broken family brought pain into your life? Do you fear repeating the cycle of dysfunction or divorce?
You’re not alone—millions face these often unspoken struggles: hidden wounds, emotional problems, broken relationships, and destructive habits. Thankfully, you’re not destined to repeat your family’s dysfunction.
In this episode, you’ll hear a breakout talk from the SEEK25 conference where you’ll discover the two keys to breaking that cycle and learn actionable tips to build healthy relationships.
About the Speaker:
Endorsed by Jason Evert and Dr. Bob Schuchts, Joey Pontarelli has spoken across the U.S. and internationally.
He is the author of the book “It’s Not Your Fault” and hosts the podcast, “Restored: Helping Children of Divorce,” which has helped thousands of young people.
He has been a guest on EWTN’s TV and radio shows, Dr. Bob Schuchts’s “Restore the Glory” podcast, Jason Evert’s “Lust is Boring” podcast, and Relevant Radio’s “The Drew Mariani Show.”
Joey is married to Brigid, and they love life with their two kids, Lucy and John Paul.
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As a bonus, you'll receive the first chapters from our book, It's Not Your Fault: A Practical Guide to Navigating the Pain and Problems from Your Parents' Divorce.
TRANSCRIPT
Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!
Joey: [00:00:00] If you come from a divorced family, you're 103 percent more likely to get divorced than someone who comes from an intact family. But if you were to marry someone who also comes from a divorced family, that number goes up to 189%, almost 3x. And if you're like me, hearing all this can be a bit discouraging.
If you're like me, it can leave you feeling like the odds are against you. To the point where so many of us, we give up on love. We give up on marriage and we just settle for the counterfeit. Or if we do try to build love, we end up building unhealthy relationships, weak marriages, and broken families. And the cycle that we badly want to break gets repeated in our own lives.
And so what's the solution? I would propose to break the cycle of dysfunction and divorce, two things are needed. One, we need to heal our brokenness. And two, we need to build virtue. Sounds simple, not as easy to do,~ but if we do that, then as healthy, virtuous people, we can go on and build healthy relationships, strong marriages, and holy families.
~
Welcome to The Restored Podcast. I'm Joey Panerelli. If you come from a divorced or broken family, this show is for you. We help [00:01:00] you heal your brokenness, navigate the challenges, and build healthy relationships so you can break that cycle and build a better life. Question for you. Has your parents divorce or your broken family brought pain into your life?
Do you fear repeating that cycle of dysfunction and divorce? If so, you're not alone. There's millions of us who face these often unspoken struggles, hidden wounds, emotional problems, broken relationships, and destructive habits. Thankfully, you're not destined to repeat your family's dysfunction. In this episode, you'll hear a breakout talk that I gave at the SEEK25 conference, where you'll discover the two keys to breaking that cycle and learn actionable tips to build healthy relationships.
Now, if you're not familiar with the SEEK conference, it's a conference of 20, 000 people, mostly young people, mostly college students. And I had a Breakout session at that conference in a room of 2000. Now they actually had to cut off the line and not let more people into the room since so many people wanted to be there because of how relevant this topic is.
And we got a lot of solid feedback from the audience who with multiple people saying they took five pages of notes [00:02:00] that it was their favorite talk of the day or even the entire conference. And it was such an honor to build and deliver this talk for the college students at the conference. And so. If you're from a broken family, where things are just really dysfunctional, or maybe your parents are divorced or separated, this episode, this talk, is for you.
Now, I do mention God and faith a little bit in the talk, because the audience was primarily a Catholic Christian audience of college students. Now, if you don't believe in God, you're totally welcome here. Anyone listening to this podcast for a while knows that this is not a strictly religious podcast, so wherever you're at, I'm really glad you're here.
If you don't believe in God, my challenge to you is just this. Listen with an open mind. Even if you were to skip or take out the God part, you're still going to benefit a lot from this episode. With that, here's the talk.
So good to be with you guys. Let's start with the prayer in the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Dear Jesus, I ask you to be here with us. Lord, speak through me so that what I say may be helpful. Give us all the graces we need to become saints, brokenness and build virtue so we can build the [00:03:00] healthy, beautiful relationships that you want us to build in our lives.
And we ask all this through your mother as we pray, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, for through thy womb, Jesus, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and of our death, Amen. I send you humble and great, blessed pure Giorgio, and holy family, in the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
When my friend Mary was just a little girl, she would watch her parents fight all the time. Their marriage was a mess and they needed help, but they never got the help that they needed, and so the dysfunction just continued on for years. Fast forward to when Mary was in high school, her mom decided to divorce her dad.
And what honestly seemed like a solution to a really bad and messy situation just made things worse for Mary. It was just one trauma on top of another. Now up to that point, she didn't really act out. She just held her pain inside. But that all changed when she went to [00:04:00] college. She got into the party scene, she started drinking heavily.
That led to dating the wrong guy. She ended up marrying one of those guys who was a drug addict and alcoholic. And as you'd imagine, their marriage was a mess as well. That only led to more problems and more trauma. And eventually, she divorced her husband, repeating that cycle. And once the dust settled, she fell into a deep depression and started dealing with a lot of emotional problems.
Whenever I think of Mary, whenever I tell her story, I can't help but ask, could that have been avoided? Or was she somehow doomed to repeat? that cycle of dysfunction in her own life. Like Mary, I also come from a broken family. I'll never forget the day when my mom shared the news that dad would no longer be living with us.
In fact, they were getting divorced. As a 10 year old boy, I didn't know what to do with that news. I couldn't cope with it. And so I remember just hiding in the closet and crying. And sitting in the closet, I couldn't have put it in towards then, but it felt abandoned. I felt unwanted. I felt like I just wasn't good enough.
And in the months and years that followed, I dealt with all sorts of pain and problems, like emotional problems, anxiety, depression, loneliness, a lot of anger for me as a boy. [00:05:00] I dealt with bad habits. One of my buddies at the time introduced me to pornography, and so that became my drug of choice, my way of numbing the pain that I felt.
But the biggest area of my life in which I struggled was in my relationships. I remember after my parents split, swearing that I would never get married. Because if this is where love and marriage leads, why in the world would I want to go down that route? And so I was really afraid of love relationships.
And when it came my time to, you know, start dating and building love, I felt super lost. I felt really incompetent at it. But it wasn't really until high school when this whole fear of repeating the cycle. hit me in the face. I just started liking this great girl, like, good Catholic girl who I could see myself marrying one day.
But I was terrified that my relationship with this great girl would one day end the way that my parents marriage had. And so the question on my mind was, how do I avoid that? How do I not go down that path? But what I saw around me wasn't very encouraging. I knew well at least five families that were falling [00:06:00] apart going through a divorce.
Eventually, the studies I saw weren't much more helpful. One study found that if you come from a divorced family, you're 103 percent more likely to get divorced than someone who comes from an intact family. But if you were to marry someone who also comes from a divorced family, that number goes up to 189 percent according to this one study.
Almost 3x. And if you're like me, hearing all this can be a bit discouraging. If you're like me It can leave you feeling like the odds are against you. To the point where so many of us, we give up on love, we give up on marriage, and we just settle for the counterfeit. Or if we do try to build love, we end up building unhealthy relationships, weak marriages, and broken families.
And the cycle that we badly want to break gets repeated in our own lives. And so what's the solution? I would propose to break the cycle of dysfunction and divorce, two things are needed. One, we need to heal our brokenness. And two, we need to build virtue. It sounds simple, not as easy to do, but if we do that, [00:07:00] then as healthy, virtuous people.
We can go on and build healthy relationships, strong marriages, and holy families. And you guys, this is so doable. I've seen it. I've seen really beautiful couples where one or both of the spouses come from broken families, and they're working hard with God's grace to build really beautiful marriages and families.
And that's what I'm working on in my life as well. Thankfully what you heard of my story wasn't the end of it. I was able to, you know, just work through a lot of healing and building virtue to the point where I no longer struggle with bigger, constant emotional problems. I was able to get porn outta my life and start living a pure life with the help of Jason Everett.
And when it came to my relationships, it definitely didn't happen overnight, but I was able to work through a lot of the fears and struggles and insecurities to the point where I was able to pursue my wife. We were able to get married, start a family. I want to introduce you guys to my family. That's Bridget, my wife.
Uh, that's Lucy, our daughter. She's three. And that's John Paul, who's, uh, six months old. He's, he's here right now. Bridget and John Paul are actually here right now. So we've been married. Thank you. [00:08:00] Thank you. We've been married almost seven years now. And I'll be honest with you guys. Marish has been hard for me, but it's definitely been good for me and has made me a better man.
And I absolutely love being a dad. Like I freaking love being a dad. It's so good. I want to show you more pictures of the kids. So this is Lucy at a local farm nearby. They have this thing called farm school. So she literally goes to farm school. It's the cutest thing. This is a picture of her there.
That's Jean Paul. He's actually in training to become the next James Bond. Couldn't tell. But absolutely love. I love being a dad and I say all that not to brag, God deserves the credit, but just to show you guys like if someone like me can do it, like you guys can certainly do it. And so in this talk, you're not going to get a lecture from someone with a PhD or a psychologist.
That's not me. But just a few really practical tips that have been super helpful for me in my life. And so some of those practical tips are going to be just on how to heal. [00:09:00] We're also going to talk about how to build virtue, because once we've done that, that enables us to love better. And then we're going to talk about the three relationships I think that are most impacted by coming from a broken family, our relationship with our parents, we're going to talk about romantic relationships, and then we're also going to talk about our relationship with God.
And so we have a lot to cover. Um, but does that all sound helpful? Then let's dive in. Before I dive in, I just want to tell you guys, there's a lot of, uh, resources that I'll mention if you guys want to go deeper. Uh, at the end of the talk, there will be a way for us to just email you all those resources in case you don't want to spend the whole talk writing things down.
So I'll tell you at the end, uh, how to do that. When it comes to healing, where do we start? Just like in the medical world, I think we first need to start by diagnosing our emotional wounds. For so many of us, we're kind of a mystery to ourselves, right? We don't really understand why we think, feel, and act the way that we do.
But what controls so much of our behavior is our subconscious, right? Especially the untreated wounds within our [00:10:00] subconscious. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said it this way, he said, unless you make the subconscious It will rule your life, and you will call it fate. Unless you make the subconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.
That act of making the subconscious conscious is self knowledge. That's where healing begins. But it doesn't stop there. Self knowledge leads to self awareness in our relationships and everyday situations. Self awareness leads to self mastery in the way that we think and the way that we act. And self mastery is meant to lead to self gift.
So essentially we grow in self knowledge so we can increase our capacity to love. That's the goal of healing. The goal of healing is not some sort of perfection, it's not creating some sort of utopia in which you never suffer again, that's not realistic. The goal of healing is really becoming more virtuous, becoming like Jesus, and being freer to love.
And so we're going to talk about relationships later, like I said, but we have to start here with healing. And so to grow in self knowledge, it's really helpful to hear what researchers have found [00:11:00] about how divorce affects the children. So they found that children of divorce are more likely to struggle with things like social problems, behavioral problems, they're more likely to struggle in their relationship with their parents, in romantic relationships, they're less likely to get married, less likely to have children, more likely to get divorced, like we discussed, they're at higher risk for suicidal attempts.
More health problems, more emotional problems, and lower self esteem. Dr. Judith Wallerstein was one of the researchers who worked on this problem for many, many years. She studied children who were divorced for 25 years at UC Berkeley. Two main takeaways from her research. One, she said the full effects from your parents divorce actually aren't experienced until adulthood.
She called it the sleeper effect. It doesn't mean you're not affected beforehand, but she found in her research has the full effects, the most serious effects come out about college age and beyond. The second thing she said was the biggest area of your life that's impacted by your parents divorce is your romantic relationships, especially your future [00:12:00] marriage.
But perhaps you're thinking, Joey, my parents divorce was pretty civil, right? They weren't throwing cats and plates at each other. It was pretty civil. Dr. Paul Amato is a researcher at Penn State. He's a sociologist there who studied children of divorce for many, many years. He says that when marriages end in divorce, they typically fall into one of two categories, high conflict or low conflict.
He says high conflict means that the problems within the marriage are very overt and obvious to the children. It might include things like abuse, violence, a lot of bad conflict, and a lot of just visible dysfunction. He says less than 30 percent of divorces actually fit within this category. On the other hand, we have low conflict, which means the problems within the marriage are more covert.
They're more hidden from the children. And he says that more than 70 percent of divorces actually fit within this category. And so a model says that low conflict divorces are typically the most traumatic to the children. Seems kind of [00:13:00] counterintuitive. Why is that? In high conflict families, the situation itself is traumatic.
And while a divorce can certainly be even more traumatic, it can add to the trauma. Typically, the children do benefit from some sort of a separation as a protective measure. It's kind of the lesser of two really bad options, even though, as a church, we'd say, the goal is to heal the family and bring the marriage back together.
But in low conflict families, right, things seem to be fine to the children until they're not. And then the parents separate, and it brings a lot of confusion, a lot of pain, a lot of trauma into their life. But why are divorce and these high conflict families so traumatic? Here's why. Each child deserves their mother, their father, and stability that is built upon their love.
But so often what happens in these situations is that our parents love for each other usually vanishes. We're often physically and emotionally left without mom, without dad, or maybe without both. And as a result, instability reigns [00:14:00] within our families and even within ourselves. Divorce is especially traumatic because it's truly the death of a family.
We don't talk about that a lot in our culture, but it's truly the death of a family. And so if you've struggled, if you felt hurt because of what you've been through, to me it makes perfect sense. One girl told me, she's like, Joey, after my parents separated, like, it was super painful for me. Everyone at school knew my parents had separated, and everyone acted like it wasn't a big deal.
In fact, some people maybe just said, oh, it's for the best, everyone's happier. And she said, it was so confusing to me, because it was so painful for me, that it led me to think, maybe something's wrong with me for feeling this way. But the Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, had the perfect response to this.
He said, an abnormal response to an abnormal situation, Is a normal behavior. In other words, there's nothing wrong with her with you for feeling that way. Your pain, your struggles make sense given what you've been through. Now while that validation is helpful and even healing, what are some other things that we can do [00:15:00] in order to heal?
I want to share four tips that you can start immediately. That have helped me. One, engage your story. Each of us has a story as if it were a novel or a movie and to engage your story means to reflect on it in an active and constructive way, especially to reflect on the relationships that formed us and nothing forms us more than our relationship with our parents.
And neurobiologists have actually found that this act of reflecting on your story is healing on a neurobiological level. They say that one measure of brain health is neural connectivity. Think of your brain as a web of neurons. The more connection between the neurons, the healthier your brain is. This act of reflecting on your story increases neural connectivity, thereby making your brain healthier and making you healthier.
If you take that a step further And share your story with someone who can receive it with empathy, like a competent therapist, a good friend, maybe a mentor. That's also healing on a neurobiological level. Next, write about emotionally significant events in your life. Dr. James [00:16:00] Penbaker and his wife, early in their marriage, they were really doubting that they should have gotten married at all.
And he was, he was really struggling in particular. He was super depressed, lonely, and he would kind of lock himself alone at his house. And at one point he just decided to start writing about everything that he was experiencing. Just no filter. He did that for three days. After those three days, something amazing happened.
His depression just left him. And so he spent the rest of his career studying this link between writing and healing, writing and emotional processing. And what he'd do in his research is you take a group of people, he'd split them into two. He'd say, group number one. You guys just write about emotionally significant events in your life, things that have been painful and emotionally heavy to you.
Group number two, you guys just write about mundane, everyday things like your shoes, the weather, whatever. Just do it for four days, for 20 minutes each day, that's it. After doing tons of these studies, they found that the people who wrote about the emotionally significant events in their lives were healthier, happier, less depressed, less anxious, had higher quality relationships, [00:17:00] better memory, and more success at work, among other things.
And apparently there's been thousands of studies to confirm these findings. Now Dr. Penbaker, he actually has books to guide you through those writing exercises. It's not the same thing as like, mindless journaling, and those books have been super helpful for me. We can send you links to those in that email I mentioned.
Find someone to guide you. Dr. Gaber Mate, who speaks and writes a lot about trauma, said this, Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside of us in the absence of an empathetic witness. And so in order to heal, we need an empathetic witness. We need a guide. And so I'd encourage you guys find a competent therapist, find a trained spiritual director, find just wise mentors in your life who can guide you because healing happens in relationships, right?
Healing happens in relationships. Love. is the antidote to trauma. And I've personally benefited from like 15 years of spiritual direction, then seven years of counseling. And I, I'd have to say that the most healing that I've ever [00:18:00] experienced aside from my relationship with God has been in these mentor relationships.
So I definitely encourage you guys to do that. And it's especially helpful to, uh, if you're dealing with maybe heavy emotional problems like anxiety, depression, or maybe, you know, an addiction, something like that. And if you need help finding someone, we have some recommendations through my apostolate.
And finally, ask God to heal you. All these healing tactics that I'm talking about, these human healing tactics, they're good. They're helpful. But eventually we're going to hit a ceiling. God can heal us in ways that we can never heal ourselves. And so we need his grace, his life inside of us. But since, you know, here at Seek, you guys are getting so many good talks by people way smarter than me on spiritual growth, spiritual formation.
I'm not going to go too deep into it, but just one tip that's been helpful for me, adoration. Adoration has been so helpful in healing for me. When you're there, I just encourage you guys to say this simple prayer, Lord, I want to be well. Lord, I want to be well. And then let Jesus as the divine physician do his slow work of healing.
All right. So in summary, we need to heal so we don't repeat that cycle of dysfunction and divorce, but that's only half of the equation, [00:19:00] right? We need to very intentionally build virtue as well. But how do we build virtue? In essence, like virtue means building good habits and breaking the bad ones, right?
We all know that. But a few tips that have been really helpful for me, one, develop emotional agility. So often when we feel pain, when we feel difficult emotions in our lives, we turn to sin as a quick fix. Just like I turned to porn, right, to numb my pain, even though it was damaging my soul, and it was destroying my ability to love.
That's why we need to learn how to properly navigate our emotions, which isn't an easy thing to do, but Dr. Susan David from the Harvard Medical School says to do that, we need to develop what's called emotional agility. Emotional agility is the ability to feel and face your emotions. We're not ignoring them, we're not stuffing them away, we're not denying them, we're feeling them and facing them.
And then choosing your response. In a way that aligns with your deepest held beliefs. We would essentially call that virtue. One tip she shares to do that is to create a space [00:20:00] between stimulus and response. Again, she quotes Viktor Frankl, who I quoted earlier. He said that between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response, lies our growth and our freedom. I'm going to say that again. Between stimulus, the thing that makes us feel something, and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Essentially what we need to do is we need to lengthen that space. We need to pause, we need to slow down, we need to take a deep breath and detach from the intensity of the emotions so we can choose our response with our minds. Next, fill your human needs. So often we fall into vice, we fall into sin because we're not filling our legitimate human needs.
I've seen this again and again in my own life, and it's kind of tempting, I think, to over spiritualize this stuff, but I think it's this simple. If we take care of our human needs, we're going to remove so much temptation. And so we need to take care of ourselves in four areas. Our bodies need good sleep.[00:21:00]
College kids aren't great at that, but our bodies need good sleep, right? We need seven to eight hours according to, to the expert. I wasn't good at that as a college student, I should say. So seven to eight hours, good quality sleep. We need good nutrition. We didn't unprocessed clean foods, right? And half a gallon to a gallon of water every single day.
And we need exercise. We need movement. Walking is a great place to start. There's a lot of good research behind that. But eventually there's more and more research coming out that says like weightlifting is so good for you, especially as you age, it helps you stay young. Our souls need God's grace, right?
God's life inside of us, which we primarily get through the sacraments, through a deep interior life and through good deeds. But we also need experiences of goodness, truth, and beauty. And it's not just limited to church, right? We need it with our friends in nature, through music, stories, the list goes on.
Our hearts need intimacy, right? We need relationships. We need people to love and people to love us. And our minds need challenges, essentially. We need to learn new things and have new experiences. And so my question to you guys would be like, what's just one area where maybe you're lacking a little bit?
Make a simple plan to just [00:22:00] start improving there. Next, practice the virtues. The Catechism says that to be virtuous We have to learn the virtues and then practice them very deliberately, just like we'd practice any sort of skill. When it comes to learning the virtues, I'd probably just recommend Father Mike Schmitz's Catechism in a Year, especially the parts on virtue, you'll learn a lot there, but for hacks on practicing the virtues, I highly recommend actually a secular book, which you guys have probably heard of, uh, called Atomic Habits.
Atomic Habits by James Clare, great book, and in it, he breaks down the four parts of a habit. And this is super helpful if you want to build virtue to know these things. First is the cue, then the craving, then the response, then the reward. I'll explain each. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior.
The craving is the desire that you have for the reward. The response is the actual habit, the behavior you perform. And the reward is, of course, the satisfaction you get from the habit. Now imagine that you maybe have the habit of grabbing your [00:23:00] phone every time it buzzes, right? Buzzes with maybe a notification for a text message, let's say.
The cue is your phone buzzing with the new text message. The craving is that you want to know what the text says. The response is you grabbing your phone and reading the text message. And the reward is that you feel satisfied now knowing what the text message says. But let's say you want to break that habit.
James Clear says that you need to do one or more of these things. He said, make the cue invisible. unattractive, make the response difficult, make the reward unsatisfying. So in our example of grabbing the phone, I think the easiest and simplest switch would be to make the cue invisible, turning off all of your text message notifications maybe, or just putting your phone on do not disturb during certain hours.
That's how to break a bad habit, right? To build a good habit, he says make the cue obvious, Make the craving attractive, make the response easy, and make the [00:24:00] reward satisfying. And we can talk about more of what that looks like during the Q& A if you guys want to. But one more tip from the book, the two minute rule.
The two minute rule is where you perform any habit that you're trying to build for just two minutes and then you stop. And do this for a period of time. In the book, he tells a story about one guy who would go to the gym. He really struggled exercising, so he'd go to the gym and perform a two minute workout, that was it, and then he'd leave.
He did that enough times to where he got in the habit of going to the gym and working out, then he started doing full length workouts. Within a year, it sounds kind of silly, right? But within a year or so, he lost a hundred pounds. Next, refuse to be a victim. One of the biggest barriers that I see to building virtue is victim mentality, right?
It's something that's really plaguing our society right now. Building virtue requires a ton of action, but victim mentality keeps us feeling stuck, feeling powerless, waiting for someone to rescue us and do the work for us. One guy who absolutely destroyed victim [00:25:00] mentality is a guy by the name of Ryan Jobe.
Ryan Jobe was a Navy SEAL. He fought in the Middle East and Iraq, and one day when they were clearing buildings, he got hit in the face with a sniper's bullet. He survived, but he would never again see. He was completely blind. Absolutely devastating. What Ryan could have done As he could have been totally debilitated by his wounds.
He could have just given up. He could have just remained a victim, because he truly was a victim in that situation. But he refused. He said, losing my vision will not stop me from living a good and meaningful life. And so as a blind man, he did some incredible things. He summited Mount Rainier. If you guys aren't familiar, Mount Rainier is a mountain out in Washington State.
It's 14, 000 feet high, not an easy climb. Every year on average, like one to two people die climbing Mount Rainier. He did it as a blind man. He trained for a triathlon, he earned his bachelor's degree and got a 4. 0, he successfully hunted an elk as a blind man, he married his girlfriend, and they had a baby together.
Two lessons I learned from him. One, his pain. Became a [00:26:00] catalyst for growth instead of a barrier to it. And I think the difference between Ryan and people who just give up is that he's simply standing on top of his pain and his problems instead of being crushed by them. Next, Ryan was so resilient. I think the reason he was so resilient is because he did hard things, right?
Obviously as a seal, he was like constantly doing hard things, but he suffered in those smaller ways so that he can handle that big suffering. And so we need to do the same. And so I actually challenge you guys this week at seek. Take the stairs. Take a cold shower. Like if that's kind of intimidating, one thing that I've done is do 30 seconds of like cold water at the beginning of your shower or 30 seconds at the end.
Give up social media for the week. You know, do a hard exercise. Don't kill yourself, but do a hard exercise. Just do hard things, get tough. But one of the biggest areas of bad habits for people like us is in unwanted sexual behavior. Dr. Patrick Carnes, an expert on sexual addiction, he found that 87 percent of people who struggle with a [00:27:00] sexual addiction come from a broken family.
Almost nine out of ten. I learned that from Jay Stringer. Jay Stringer is a Christian therapist who's studied almost 4, 000 men and women who struggle with sexual compulsion or addiction, whether it's porn, masturbation, cheating, buying sex, the list goes on. By the end of his research, they were able to predict the type of trauma that someone endured, especially in their families, based on the type of sexual fantasies and porn searches that they sought out.
In other words, it wasn't random. There was actually a pattern to it. Because of that, he says if you want to break free, you have to listen to your lust. Sounds kind of odd. What does he mean? He's of course not encouraging us to fall into lust, but rather to deeply understand it. Why? Because lust is just a symptom.
It's just a symptom of a deeper wound. It pinpoints where more healing is needed. And so I'd highly recommend checking out his book called Unwanted. We did a podcast episode with him as well, [00:28:00] but a few other resources at the conference. That will help you in this area. Matt Fradd and Jason Everett wrote a great book called forged.
It's a 33 day challenge for men to grow in purity. You can get that at the chastity project booth. If you're interested, the books didn't show up yet. There's a problem with the shipment that we had. Uh, so there'll be there tomorrow at some point. So you can get the forge book. If you want to Magdala ministries, perhaps you guys have heard of them.
They're a great ministry to help women who are struggling with sexual compulsion or addiction. They have a booth here as well. And so check that out. Rachel Kulaki, their leader, one of their leaders, she wrote a book called love and recovery about. her own struggles with sexual addiction, sexual compulsion.
So check that out. Um, Kelsey Skok is another one who, speaker, author, who wrote a book on her struggles with sexual compulsion. So you can get that one at the Chastity Project booth as well. And the Magdala Ministries is here as well. They have a booth not far from Chastity Project if you want to check that out.
And there's a lot of other resources we can send you guys in that email as well. But just to kind of summarize again, to break the cycle, again, we have to start with our own healing and building virtue. So we're freer to love. But how do we [00:29:00] practically build strong, healthy relationships? Again, I want to talk about three types of relationships.
Our relationship with our parents, romantic relationships, and our relationship with God. In college, I really struggled in my relationship with my dad. Like, he was in a really tough spot, and he was just acting out in a lot of ways that were harming people that I cared about. And so I felt convicted that if I were to continue my relationship with him, almost pretending like this stuff wasn't happening, I would kind of be tacitly approving that behavior.
And so again, I felt convicted to cut off communication with him, not an easy decision, but I didn't want to just ghost him. I wanted him to know why I was doing it. And so I wrote him a letter talking to him face to face at that time wouldn't have gone super well. So I wrote him this letter and I said, dad, I love you.
I want a good relationship with you. But as long as you act in this way, unfortunately that isn't possible. But as soon as I see your behavior start to change, I'll be more than happy to restart the relationship with you. We didn't talk for a year and a half. That was hard. But eventually his behavior did [00:30:00] change, and we were able to resume the relationship.
We're in a much better spot today. And so I'm not encouraging you guys to just, you know, cut off communication with your parents. That's an extreme. That takes a lot of discernment. But for any relationship to be healthy, boundaries are needed. And boundaries aren't just good for you, they're good for the relationship and the person on the other end as well.
But so often boundaries can kind of feel mean, especially if you're not used to, you know, using them in your life. Because it's true. It's true. Boundaries sometimes hurt. But there's a difference between hurt and harm. Hurt is pain that doesn't damage the person. It might even help them, like a life saving surgery.
Harm is pain that damages the person, like abuse. But to be a little bit more specific, so often boundaries are needed in a few areas, parents especially who are, you know, are going through a lot of pain through their own divorce or a lot of brokenness in the family kind of struggle in these areas we've learned.
One, bad mouthing. So often mom and dad just kind of speak badly about the other in our presence. Two, the middleman situation. So we're often expected as the children to maybe relay [00:31:00] information between mom and dad because they're not on speaking terms. And then spousification. Or mom or dad kind of rely on us as their emotional support and confidant.
And during Q and A, if you guys want to talk a little bit more about some tips on how to set boundaries in each of those situations, I'm happy to go into that. We also have a podcast episode on boundaries. If you guys are interested, we could send that to you. Next, if possible, deepen your relationship with mom and dad.
Now, if the relationship is abusive, or, you know, it's damaging to you, or maybe mom or dad don't want a relationship with you, which is super hard, obviously this isn't going to be realistic, but if you can, a good relationship with mom and dad is super important. Here's why. There was a study they did on high school students in Turkey.
And as you'd expect, they found that the students who came from divorced families were more likely to struggle with things like anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But if they had a good relationship with one or both parents, they were much less likely to struggle with anxiety, depression, and so it's definitely worth a shot to deepen your relationship with your parents.
Again, during Q& A if you want to, I [00:32:00] can throw out some ideas for how to better bond with your parents. Next, work toward forgiving your parents. Forgiveness isn't the first step of healing, it often comes later, but it's so freeing, like I've experienced that in my own life. Here's my definition of forgiveness though.
It's a continual decision to release someone of a debt they owe you for a past wrong they committed. And it involves a process. Two places to start, Father Mike Schmidt says that before we can forgive, we have to count the costs. We have to assess the damage, we have to tally it up before we can release them of the repayment that they owe us.
Father John Burns, he says too that the Latin word for mercy is misericordia, which literally means to be moved by the misery of another. Kind of a scary thing to do. But we need to ask the question, like, what was going on in their life that caused them to harm me in this way? That compassion is the start of forgiveness.
But a few final things, quick things about your relationship with your parents. If you're worried about your parents souls, remember that people can change, you [00:33:00] can't change them. People can change, you can't change them. Instead, just focus on living a holy life. Be an example to them and entrust them to God's mercy.
And remember that God desires to save them even more than you do. And one tactic that I've heard Jason Everett recommend is To ask all the religious sisters like here at Sikh to pray for your parents. You can write their name on a piece of paper, cut it up and hand it to them if you want to. And just, Hey, would you pray for this person?
You pray for my mom, my dad. But as much as we might struggle in our relationship with our parents, romantic relationships are really the hardest for people like us. Why do we struggle so much here? Our families are meant to be the school of love, right? And in broken families, essentially we get really poor training and how to love and how to build a relationship.
And so when it's our turn to be love. We often feel lost. We feel incompetent at it. We fear that our relationship will one day end the way that our parents did, like I experienced. And healthy relationships might even feel foreign and boring because we're so used to drama and dysfunction. But to build love that lasts, [00:34:00] the starting point is what we've been talking about, right?
Healing your brokenness, building virtue. Because if you want a great marriage, it starts with you. It has nothing to do with your relationship. Why is that? It's simple. You, and eventually your spouse, are the lid on your marriage. Your marriage will only be as healthy, happy, and holy as each of you are individually.
And what I've seen in the great marriages I've been blessed to know is this truth. The more virtuous the spouses, the happier the marriage. The more virtuous the spouses, the happier the marriage always. But beyond healing and building virtue, a few quick tips. Find a virtuous spouse. One guy said that marriage is the type of game where you win or lose the championship in the draft.
So we need to find virtuous spouses. But what sort of virtues should you look for? Obviously you want someone who has all the virtues, but I'd highlight a few. Find someone who's humble. Humility is the foundation of all the virtues. And within marriage, it's so helpful because it gives you the ability to apologize and to forgive your spouse.
And that [00:35:00] happens a lot. You can ask my wife. She's a pro at forgiveness. Find someone who's selfless, someone who has a heart for others. The best way you can tell if they have this heart for others, how do they spend their time and their money? Are they doing that selfishly or are they doing that to serve others?
That's one of the things that actually attracted me to my wife. Like, she's a nurse and she was always involved in ministry and just clearly had a heart for other people. Find someone who's living the virtue of chastity. We hear a lot about chastity. Why is it so important? A big part of it is because at the core of chastity is self mastery.
And self mastery is just an essential skill within a marriage because it gives you the ability to die to yourself and do what's best for your spouse and your children. Find someone who has empathy. Empathy is so helpful because within marriage, conflict is going to happen, and the goal is just to make that conflict healthy.
And empathy is so helpful because it gives you the ability to step into someone else's shoes, to see things through their eyes. Find someone who has a growth mindset. A growth mindset is basically just the belief that you can change, you can grow, you can get better. A fixed mindset is the opposite. It's the belief that you just can't change, can't grow, you're kind [00:36:00] of stuck the way that you are.
Why is this so important? Because you don't just marry the person that they are today, you marry the person that they will become. And one of the greatest indications of who they will become is their action and attitude toward growth, and so pay attention to that. Find someone who you could be friends with, someone who gets you, because marriage is so much more than romance and sex.
In fact, it probably could be said that the quality of a marriage is best measured by the quality of the friendship between the spouses. Not their sex life, not the romance, not the feelings that they have for each other. As good as and important as all of those things are, it's not the ultimate measure.
Find someone you want your children to be like. Just ask yourself this question when you're dating someone, do I want my children to be like this person? Find someone who's on the same page with you in these areas. God, money, parenting, in laws, and intimacy. So God, someone who ideally shares your faith.
Money, someone who has a similar vision of how you want to manage and spend your money. Parenting, someone who obviously wants to have kids and has a similar vision for how to form them and raise them. [00:37:00] And then in laws, someone who can, you know, good boundaries and have a healthy relationship with their families.
In intimacy, someone who can set healthy boundaries, you know, around sexual intimacy, especially, you know, outside of marriage, but then even boundaries within marriage and obviously some effort towards keeping, you know, intimacy, emotional, sexual intimacy in your marriage is super important. If you're on the same page in these areas, researchers say that the likelihood of you having a successful marriage just like shoots up.
And when marriages fall apart, if you notice, like it's usually because one or more of these things aren't aligned. But when discerning all this, we have to be careful. John Paul II said that as a rule, we exaggerate the goodness, the virtue of the person that we love. He says as a rule, we all do this. And so we need to ask the question, is this person actually virtuous?
And we shouldn't discern alone, right? Because love is blinding. We all know this. And so involve your family if you can, involve your friends, and actively ask for feedback. Okay, do you guys see any red flags? Like, what do you think about this relationship? Don't wait for people to bring feedback to you because they might not.
And it might be scary. You might not like the [00:38:00] answers that you get, but it will save you a lot of heartache. I really wish I'd done this sooner in some of my relationships. I remember after one of my relationships ended, uh, one of my best friends was like, Oh yeah, I saw this happening like six months ago.
I'm like, bro, like would have been helpful to know that. But to be fair, to be fair, I probably wouldn't have listened to him. But most of all, place all of this in God's hands. Like trust him. Like, he'll provide for you to the degree that you rely on him. I know the dating world right now is kind of a hot mess, like, it's really tricky out there for you guys.
I do not envy you, and so make sure to just trust God above all else. And take to heart the words of Curtis Martin, who said so well, he said, don't pursue your soulmate, pursue God, and after a while of running after him, turn to see who's keeping up with you. Next, set healthy expectations for marriage.
Perhaps you've heard of the Paris syndrome. The Paris syndrome is a psychological condition where when tourists go to Paris, France, they suffer extreme shock, disappointment, and other symptoms. This isn't a [00:39:00] joke. It's been documented by medical journalists. Like, they get so disrupted that they have to either go home or get medical attention.
What's going on here? Basically, the messy reality of Paris did not live up to the romantic expectations they had, and as a result, they were greatly disappointed. Similarly, if our expectations for marriage are unhealthy, if they're off, it's going to cause a lot of problems. And one popular unhealthy expectation that so many of us have, even in the Catholic world, is believing that the purpose of marriage is happiness.
The purpose of marriage is not happiness. The purpose of marriage is holiness, and of course having children and forming them. But nowhere in the wedding vows is happiness promised. I know, super romantic, but this is important. This is important because underneath almost every divorce is this belief.
Consciously or not, we expect our spouse to make us perfectly happy. And when they don't, we tend to think, hmm, maybe I married the wrong person. Maybe I picked the wrong location, I mean, I might even be tempted to leave. And so, your marriage will suffer to [00:40:00] the extent that you expect your spouse to make you perfectly happy.
Only God can do that. But does that mean there's no place for happiness within marriage? No, of course, of course there is. It's a good thing to make your spouse happy, to just enjoy all the happiness that comes with marriage. But don't be fooled. Marriage is hard work. It doesn't come to your door in a prime box.
We've been so conditioned in our culture that if we want something, we click a button and it shows up in a few days. Not so with marriage. Marriage is more like farming. It takes time to see the fruit of your labor, but we all know this. We don't know that the best things in life take hard work. Ask any Olympian how they won a gold medal.
They're not going to say they did it by sitting on the couch and watching Netflix. They put in the work every single day, especially when they didn't feel like it. If we want great marriages, why should we expect any less? And so one of the most helpful tactics that has worked for me and a lot of other people to set healthy expectations for marriage is just spending time with good couples, with good families.
Like, just soak in the presence of like their healthy, functional family. It will be so healing and helpful for you as well. And we can talk [00:41:00] about more how to build those relationships during Q& A if you guys want to. And again, I've like benefited from those two families in particular that were just super helpful and healing for me.
Next, prepare for the temptation to quit. This is probably the most unpopular thing I'll say in this talk, but be prepared for this. Expect things within your marriages to get difficult. Expect times where you just don't want to be married, where you'd rather quit and walk away. It might be days. It might be seasons.
For some of you, it'll maybe happen right away. For others, years down the road. And if you're shocked, if this is kind of scandalizing to you, think about it. Why do we make the vow? Why do we make the vow? If we were never tempted to quit, the vow really wouldn't be necessary. Desire alone would hold the marriage together.
And so when you or maybe your friends struggle within your marriage, just remember that you shouldn't believe the lie, that there's only two options. To stay married and be miserable, or get divorced and be happy. There is a third option. You can heal your marriage. You can make it strong. And there's a lot of great resources out there.
Again, during Q& A, if you guys want to, we could talk about [00:42:00] that. There's obviously so much more to say about relationships, but we can email you guys an entire talk we've done on this topic. There's a guide we have on it to building healthy relationships. And I also recommend Jason Everett's book, how to find your soulmate without losing your soul.
Such a good one for women. And then for men, he has the dating blueprint book, which is super great, super practical. And you can again, get those. But the final relationship in which so many of us struggle is in our relationship with God. Why is that? As children, the most powerful creature that we know are our parents.
And so we tend to think, well, if they're like this, then God must be like that too. We project their image onto him. But in broken families, this presents a problem. We often walk away with this extra distorted image of God, which is a huge barrier to intimacy with him. And I would propose that like, if you feel far from God right now.
This might be one of the reasons. And so an exercise a lot of people have found helpful to kind of untangle that distorted image of God, is just making two lists. One list is all the things you've felt God is [00:43:00] like. You can say these are the lies, right? The next is a list of the truth that you've learned about God, right?
From scripture, from the saints, from the sacraments, from the church. But as helpful as that may be, the biggest struggle I think we often face in our relationship with God is just feeling abandoned by him, which often leads to anger. There was one guy who told me, he's like, Joey, I don't believe in God. He said, honestly, it's probably because of being mad at whatever divine being is out there because of all the mess of things that happened within my family.
And so if you're angry at God, I get it. I've been there. Just make sure to bring your anger to him. He already knows about it. And he can handle it, I promise you. And don't let it drive a wedge between you. That so often happens in our world. And I'm speaking from experience here. Like, I've had to deal with this myself.
I've had to ask the question, like, God, why did you let this happen? Why'd you let my family fall apart? And more importantly, like, where were you? Where were you? Honestly, it felt like he was just sitting on the sidelines watching as I got my teeth kicked in. So I had to ask God, where were you? And the answer didn't come quick.
It took years, a lot of adoration, [00:44:00] a lot of prayer, a lot of spiritual direction. But in time, I become so convicted that God was not just watching from the sidelines. He was actually right there with me in the midst of the pain. He was right there with that 10 year old Joey, sitting in the closet, crying too, saying, this breaks my heart.
I don't want this to happen. It's not supposed to be this way. And what I've learned is that sometimes God's only response to our pain is his presence. Father Mike Schmidt said that. Sometimes God's only response to our pain is his presence. And the best proof, of course, that we have that God is in the midst of our suffering is Jesus on the cross.
We can never say that we have a God who doesn't know what it's like to suffer. And so instead of pushing him away when you suffer in life, just try holding on to him. Try holding on to him in the midst of that suffering. But even with all of that, it can still be hard to accept why God allows suffering.
And that's when we're challenged to just trust him. To trust that he can bring good out of it, to trust that he knows what he's doing, that he knows what he's about. St. John Newman said it so beautifully, he said, [00:45:00] Therefore, I will trust him. Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I'm in sickness, my sickness may serve him.
In perplexity, my perplexity may serve him. If I'm in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about. And so in closing, there's a real danger, guys, that if we don't heal, if we don't Build virtue, we're going to end up repeating that cycle. We'll pass our brokenness onto the people that we love the most, but that doesn't have to be our story.
If we heal our brokenness, if we build virtue, we can go on and build healthy relationships, strong marriages and holy families. And this is how we transform our culture. John Paul II said that as the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live. And so if we do all of that, I really believe that we can transform our broken culture into a Catholic culture where the human person flourishes and souls are saved and there's nothing More important, but maybe after hearing all of this, you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed.
So just remember you don't heal overnight. Transformation takes time. It won't be easy. It might even be harder for [00:46:00] you than someone who has had an easier life, but so be it. You're going to be okay, guys. If you make those like 1 percent improvements every single day, and trust in God's grace more than your own strength, you're gonna look up a year from now at the next seek, and be like, wow, I've grown a lot.
You'll be a better, stronger, more virtuous person with a greater capacity to love. And remember, you're not alone. Like, I'm right there with you guys, I'm trying to live this out in my own life as imperfectly as I might do that at times. And I'd say make sure to not just do this for yourself, don't just heal and build virtue for yourself.
Do it for the people that you love in your life. For me, my family is my motivation. I bring their picture back up. I want to spare them the pain and the trauma that I endured. I don't want to pass my brokenness onto them. I want to give them the family that they deserve. With God's help, you guys can do the same.
Not only can you do the same, but if God's calling you to marriage, this is your mission. And so my challenge to you guys is this. What's just one thing that really resonated with you in this talk, just one, [00:47:00] just take action on that one thing this week. That's it. Kind of my prayers for you guys. I have over a thousand sisters praying for you and, uh, just so honored to be here with you guys.
God bless you guys. If you want the resources mentioned in the talk, just go to restored ministry. com slash talk. or click on the link in the show notes, we'll be happy to send those to you. After the talk, I had the privilege of chatting with the college students, with the young adults, uh, one on one answering their questions, listening to their stories.
And the line was actually over two and a half hours long. And to me, it just shows how badly this message is needed. And so if you feel the same and you'd like your school, your university, church conference, youth group, young adult group to hear this message or any of the other talks that we offer, we'd love to work with you.
If my schedule allowed, and you can feel free to fill out the speaking form at restored ministry. com slash speaking, or by clicking the link in the show notes. So, I'm going to go ahead and start with the show notes. Now, by doing that, you're not committing to anything. Of course, you're just gathering more info.
There's actually an option to schedule a time to discuss your potential event with my team if you prefer that. And also, I can deliver a secular [00:48:00] version of my talk that doesn't mention God or faith if you have a secular audience. Again, that's restoredministry. com slash speaking or by clicking the link in the show notes.
Again, my availability is limited due to a bunch of recent requests for speaking engagements, but we'd be happy to work with you if my schedule allows. That wraps up this episode. In closing, always remember you are not doomed to repeat your family's dysfunction. You can break that cycle and build a better life.
And we're here to help. And keep in mind the words of C. S. Lewis, who said you can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
