#121 - Generational Curses {Reflections}

The phrase “generational curses” can feel like a verdict you didn’t choose. We take that fear head-on, unpacking what those Old Testament passages actually communicate and why Ezekiel’s voice reframes the conversation around personal responsibility, practical hope, and real change. Rather than a mystical hex, we explore how family systems, trauma, and learned behaviors create momentum that can be redirected with clarity, support, and grace.

We share lived stories of anger, addiction, money missteps, and relational rupture to show how patterns repeat when no one models an alternative—and how they shift when someone does. Along the way, we connect Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy’s warnings about multigenerational consequences with Ezekiel’s insistence that the child does not carry the parent’s guilt. That tension becomes an invitation: acknowledge what you inherited, refuse fatalism, and choose practices that write a different line for the future.

You’ll hear simple, grounded ways to interrupt the cycle: naming what you absorbed, seeking therapy or wise counsel, building new skills around communication and finances, setting boundaries without bitterness, and letting grace do what effort alone cannot. The heart of our conversation is empowerment and mercy—seeing your past clearly while believing that your next step can be different from your last one. If you’ve ever wondered whether your family history defines you, this is a compassionate, practical roadmap toward freedom.

If this resonated, share it with a friend who might need courage today, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. Leave a review with one pattern you’re choosing to end—what new story will you pass on?

Join us! Facebook | Instagram | www.clcelkriver.org

Chapters

• 0:16 Welcome And Topic Setup
• 0:42 What Are Generational Curses
• 1:53 Fear, Scripture, And Misreadings
• 3:01 A Psychological Lens On Patterns
• 4:01 Personal Story Of Learned Behaviors
• 5:15 How Patterns Repeat Without Models
• 6:09 Ezekiel’s Clarification On Guilt
• 7:40 Choice, Responsibility, And Hope
• 8:45 Questions For Breaking The Cycle
• 9:52 Farewell And Community Invite

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

What is up everybody? Hey, welcome to our Reflections podcast. My name is Ryan, and I'm in studio here with Olivia. What up, Olivia? You know, when I grew up in the church, and one of the one of the phrases that we would often say or hear, and I didn't really quite understand it, but it was sort of like induced this level of fear in me that was always I could almost feel it. Maybe you heard this phrase, or if you didn't grow up in the church, maybe you didn't, then fine. But it was a phrase of generational curses. And the idea was that we we thought that like you know, these curses were kind of passed down from one generation to another. And so, like, if you were the grandson of a grandfather who had like engaged in these sinful activities or addictions or whatever, like like a curse would be passed down. And so we called these generational curses. It's like some of the most fear-producing language in Christianity, if you ask me. Now, the Bible does talk about things like this. I want to, but I want to, here's what I want to say about I want to, I want to just sort of unpack it a bit and maybe offer a different angle on what it might mean when when people say or when the Bible talks about what you might call generational curses. And here's a different way to think about it. So um, because the question I think is raised, like, am I the victim of like my grandfather or great-grandfather's actions? And like, is that how it works, or is there something else going on there? But the Bible does talk about in a number of places, and mostly in the in the Hebrew scriptures in the in the Old Testament, like Exodus, Deuteronomy, there's a couple places in those books where it says something like God will punish the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generations. You can Google it, but there's all these verses in in uh in Exodus and the book of Deuteronomy, it's the law that that it seems like it says God will punish the the uh the sins of the or punish the children for the sins of the father. So yeah, verses like Exodus 20, verse 5, or Exodus 34, verse 7, or Numbers 14, verse 18, and Deuteronomy, as I mentioned, uh 5, verse 9. And so it's this idea that God seemingly is punishing the children for the sin of the parents, up to the third and fourth generations. Now, if you ask me, like, this sounds like is God punishing the kids for their parents' sins? Am I am I culpable or responsible for my parents or their parents' sins? Like, is that what generational curses means? Uh, that the following generations are cursed and doomed because of the sins of their grandparents. Is it like some kind of a magical curse passed down like a spell, or something like genetic, maybe even? Or is it something maybe, I don't know, more ordinary, uh, which is maybe even more dangerous? So, you know, um in the modern world, we we have this understanding of like patterns of like psychological patterns and systems of behavior and learned behaviors and and trauma and addiction and and um here's what I mean. So I grew up the the son of uh of divorced parents. They got divorced when I was about six years old. And my father, my birth father, had anger issues, addiction problems. My mom came from, you know, this was her second abusive husband that she married, and um had dated lots of other abusive people before this. And and um and if you look back in their lives and their sort of family tree, you see their ancestors or like their parents or uncles that have these same kinds of problems. And like for me too, like when I grew up, I struggled immensely with anger and and some addictive kinds of behaviors and things like my father. And you're like, wow, what is this is this is weird? Is it is it that like I'm cursed with some magical spell? Or is it maybe that like I was raised by a person who didn't know any better? And he sort of passed along those behaviors, and I learned them because of what I sort of the water I swam in for a number of my formative years, and because of my own trauma and and sort of the the the you know failure to recognize the elephants in the room in our lives, and not until I got into therapy when I was in my teens that I really realized, oh, this is like not properly how one should live. And um, I have a good friend of mine who I met him when he was in middle school, and his mom was raising him. His dad had left him when he was a little boy, he never knew his dad. And his mom um had all kinds of bizarre, deviant sorts of behaviors and was terrible with money and uh just generally irresponsible. And we loved the young man, he would come to a lot of our youth programming. We loved him. And uh, but he was growing up and he also began to take on these same kinds of traits. He began to kind of engage in sort of these out-of-bounds behaviors in terms of relationships with girls, and he was doing things with money that he didn't, you know, he just was really inappropriate, irresponsible with it. And I was like, oh yeah, because nobody has shown him or taught him any differently. I was with a couple, I was counseling them, and they're an older couple, and uh they're kind of facing the end of their days here. They're like they both know that they're at the end of their life, and they've got all kinds of wounds with their children that they've passed on, and they have like a rupture in the relationship. So like the father, especially, is uh has had a falling out with every one of his kids, and all of his kids have told him, we don't want to even talk to you any longer. And he's gonna die very soon, and so is she. And like broke my heart. And then I asked him, I'm like, what's going on there? And he told me, I'm just so angry at my mom. I was like, You're angry at your mom for how you were raised, and so now you're being this certain way with your kids, a way that actually makes them not want to talk to you any longer. And it's like I'm shocked, and I'm like, yeah, it's sort of this like, no wonder they're like this. No wonder there's this rupture because you guys were taught the very same things that your parents were taught, that their parents were taught. And so I don't know if it's like a generational curse being like a magical spell passed down, as much as it is like these, like these patterns of behavior that we learned from our parents, who learned it from their parents, uh, who learned from their parents. And and the more I do this, the more I'm convinced that like children just deal what they're shown a lot of times. Um, and maybe it's just more about that learned behavior. Like, I'm not surprised to learn that you don't know how to manage money because your parents never showed you. You know what I mean? I'm not surprised that you have angry or anger issues, that you're an angry abuser, probably because you were a victim of an angry abuser, you know? I'm not surprised to hear that, you know, you to hear you use like racist slurs or racial slurs when I hear your parents use them and their grand and their parents use them. It's like the things that are parents said and their parents often are things that we end up doing. So I don't know, maybe the text in these verses in Exodus and in Numbers and Deuteronomy is not sort of describing a spell passed down, but like a trajectory that repeats itself over and over again from one generation to the next, unless unless it's interrupted. Now, Ezekiel comes along. Ezekiel is written after these two books of the law, or three, you know, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And Ezekiel the prophet says this. And by the way, he's not correcting, or he's not, he's not, um, he's not uh overriding what those verses say. I think he's actually bringing kind of a correction or clarification. So he says this hey, the one who sins is the one who will die. Now, maybe it's a physical death, but maybe it's more of like just uh all kinds of like death. I mean, sin equals death is sort of this common theme in the scripture. Sin breeds death in every way. But he says, so the one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. So Ezekiel comes along, he's he says something wildly different. He kind of corrects the thoughts of the earlier uh Israelites. You know, Israel is sort of saying, Hey, we're stuck because of our parents and these generational things passed on. We have no other way of being. And in Ezekiel, God seems to say, No, no, no, you're responsible for your own life. Yes, you were raised in these certain ways, and yes, it sometimes puts you behind the a-ball. And yes, maybe you're starting at negative one or a half a mile behind the starting line, yeah, for sure. But like, there is a way forward. The Bible refuses, I think, to let us blame our ancestors forever. And so when the people say that they're cursed because of their parents, um, or when we say that and use that language, like we're not really promoting or producing healing. Uh, we're sort of producing fatalism or even or even shame. So, yeah, here's what I would say. I think this idea of generational curses is less about some kind of magical spell and more like, hey, we are all learning life from those around us in our community, our parents and their parents. And these things do get passed down. It is like learned behavior and systems of uh, you know, behavior patterns and and these kinds of things that are hard sometimes to recognize when you're in them, but they're not impossible to overcome. We're not simply uh, you know, the uh the victims of the fates that will sort of have laid a course for us that we just follow. But it is important to ask, and here's what I want to ask you in in closing here what patterns have you inherited, you know, as a young adult, as an older adult, what are the what are the things that you're how are you living that were similar to how your parents were living and their parents? Maybe patterns of dysfunction or abuse or I don't know, silence, or qu uh whatever the things are that are that are unhealthy. And um and then I want to ask you this which ones will end with you? Yeah, which ones will you break? Which ones will you kind of where will you decide at the fork in the road? Like, I'm gonna go this way instead. I'm gonna be the first one in my family to not do that. I'm gonna be the first one in this generation to not go that road because it's destructive and leads to death. I'm gonna go a different direction. And uh yeah, where might grace be more powerful uh than your past? So, my prayer for you today is that you will recognize the systems that you've inherited, the ways of behavior, that you will see them for what they are, and that you will go a different route today. Alright, love you guys. Peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8 30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering. Or you can check us out online at clcelkriver.org. Peace.