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I think most of us either have been in a home with divorce or we know people whose parents

divorced and we want to give you some hope about marriage today and how to deal with that pain.

I'm John Fuller joined by Dr. Danny Werta who leads our parenting and youth department here

at Focus on the Family and today Elizabeth Oates shares part of her story of coming from a broken home

experiencing a lot of pain and how God stepped in when things seemed hopeless.

Here now is Elizabeth with Jim Daly. I love these stories in part because I share that story. You do so many things you have interviewed so many women and you interviewed a lot of women for this book

All with some sort of dysfunction in their past typically I don't know that any human being doesn't have some kind of dysfunction in their

background but what kind of things did these women that you talk to deal with

to give our audience a general idea of those responses.

Sure, I like that you point that out, that many of us have some level of dysfunction.

It's hard to admit though.

Yeah, it is hard to admit.

We don't like to think of ourselves as dysfunctional or our families as dysfunctional, but that was one of the reasons I

wanted to include other women in this book was to show the range of dysfunction because it can be anything from maybe your parents were

overly critical or there was some sibling rivalry that never healed and so it can be

on that end of the spectrum all the way to you know what we think of dysfunction and more like addiction or

abuse or abandonment I mean I as I read your story divorce is so prevalent

speak to that description of your own family and why divorce was so constant in your family tree.

Yeah, I grew up thinking that divorce was normal,

that you would get married and you would have some kids

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