She was not a calming presence, and then it became an emotional thing where I can't have my mom projecting the same toxic things on my daughter that she did on me during my childhood.

That's Melanie Shankill, sharing ways that we can heal from generational trauma and protect the next generation.

Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller.

You know, John, any good parent wants to stop the unhealthy patterns that we saw our parents doing to us, right?

But that old adage that you don't fall far from the tree is so true.

There are things that I do behaviorally that I remember my dad doing, who was an alcoholic.

And it's not that.

It's just the attitude sometimes creeps in.

And you got to, especially as a Christian, you've got to arrest that thing and wrestle it down.

But it's hard because as children, we pick up habits, we pick up ways that we speak and, you know, those unhealthy things, the attitudes that we get from our parents, if we want to be healthy in Christ, we've got to capture those toxic things and make them healthy.

And we're going to cover that today.

You know, 1, 18, 19, and the producers pointed this out.

It says, we are ransom from the feudal ways of our forefathers.

Isn't that a brilliant scripture?

That kind of makes the entire point.

We don't have to live in the sin or the darkness of what they put on us as their children.

We can rise above it.

Yeah, Romans 8-1.

We're set free in Christ for freedom.

So our guest has written a book about her story.

It addresses generational issues as a daughter and a wife and a mom,

and we're very pleased to have Melanie Shankill with us. She's a mom, author. She is a co-host of the

...