It’s time to get over it. Yours is not the only dysfunctional family of origin. In fact, the fully functional family of origin is a fiction of TV land. Is there any post pubescent member of the Brady Bunch who wasn’t fucking either Florence Henderson, Greg Brady, and/or Alice the Housekeeper? Well, okay, maybe Robert Reed, but that’s easy to explain.

You see, understanding the pathology of our family of origin is helpful in understanding the bad choices we made as young adults, but the responsibility of those bad choices still lies squarely with us. Nobody made me get married because I lacked the balls to leave home for a “lesser” reason, and in retrospect it’s absolutely predictable that my first wife and I found each other and that our relationship fell apart after less than seven years given that we were both sexually abused, but nobody held a gun at our heads and made us say, “I do.”

We can choose to sit around forever, blaming our families of origin for not being perfect. The result will be that we go nowhere. Or, we can decide that they tried their best, that they weren’t perfect, and neither are we. We can learn the lessons that can be learned and choose to make the best life for ourselves we can. It is completely up to each one of us. In the end, we will have nobody to blame but ourselves. And, if we feel the need to continue the blame game, it might be a good idea to pray that our own children turn out to be more gracious than we are.