This is a conversation about redeeming legacy. What happens when we get stuck in unhealthy patterns? How do we let Jesus into the broken places and step into spiritual and emotional wholeness? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Ali Ash about the things that get in the way of healthy relationship with God, ourselves and each other.
Ali Ash is a certified Life Purpose Coach. She is also certified in the Restoration Therapy Model, a TRR (The Relationship Resource) trainer and has been cultivating healthy leadership for the nonprofit world for over 10 years. She is passionate about coming alongside people where their mental and emotional health intersects with Spiritual Formation. Seeing people find a renewal of hope, joy and purpose through intentional holistic living is her sweet spot. She and her husband Ryan have been married for 20 years and live in San Diego, CA with their 3 boys.
Click below to listen starting at 28:03 to follow along.
Redeeming Genetics
Ali:
We try to reconcile this truth of what we read in God’s Word and what we know to be true with what we’re thinking and feeling and wrestling with in our day to day life. We start to bring light into just the way that our brains work and how they’ve been wired. Maybe you start to explore some of the stuff, people who are listening, maybe you’re in your twenties or your thirties or your seventies or eighties.
You’re just now going, “I want to understand why I do what I do. Why does my brain automatically go to wanting to withdraw and isolate when I’m feeling excluded or unwanted or inadequate?” A lot of us feel like, we’d never say this out loud, but we feel like we’ve failed. Why would we even try? We don’t have what it takes. So just don’t even get out of bed in the morning. It’s this hopelessness that we feel.
We don’t realize why we just automatically would go and isolate or we’re seeing so much more depression and even suicide. Unpacking that in a way where we can go, “What do I bring to the table? Genetically, what do I bring to the table with where I’ve come from?” You look at family trees and you start to see there’s mental illness and addiction on both sides of mom’s side and dad’s side. Then you look into your grandparents’ generation and you see they endured war. They endured famine. Maybe they’re immigrants. Maybe they were enslaved. Oppressed.
You look at all of these circumstances that our parents or grandparents or great grandparents endured, the way God created our brains is that we can constantly learn new things. They learned how to cope with that environment. Now they have these coping mechanisms that they needed at that time to survive. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about epigenetics.
Now it’s not that the DNA changes, the way that they express themselves does. Now they have these epigenetics coded to have a response to certain stressors or certain challenges that they’re proving now is passed through the placenta, into baby when grandma’s pregnant with mom. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Let’s say when your grandma was pregnant with your mom in that fifth month of pregnancy, mom has all the eggs she’ll ever have. Women don’t produce more eggs. We have all the eggs we’ll ever have when we’re in mom. Fifth month grandma’s pregnant with mom. Mom has all the eggs she’ll ever have. And now they’re saying that the emotions of grandma are being passed through, into the placenta, into mom.
And we are one of those eggs in mom. We’re actually receiving emotional hormones through grandmothers. You’ve got three generations that are basically in the same bio environment in the fetus. It would make sense why I’m a little more sensitive to some of these things that maybe grandma endured through being in a marriage that was abusive or through being in famine in war torn countries.
Now here we are in the 21st century and we don’t have that environment that we need those coping skills. We still have a stronger response to some of those stressors in our life and maybe were realizing that’s actually not helping us in our relationships to have this escape mentality or these coping things that isolate us from the people that we actually want to be more intimate with.
It’s this whole other level of understanding what epigenetics do to how we’re wired in our responses to situations that actually don’t need those stress responses. God created our bodies to heal from the inside. It’s that neuroplasticity and even just our immunity. We’re made to heal from the inside out and our brains can learn new things all the time.
That’s why I think it’s so powerful and important to understand where you’ve come from genetically, but then also to understand what God’s Word does in light of some of those circumstances that maybe we’ve endured or our parents have endured, or our grandparents have endured and how we can always make changes and step into a more free and joy-filled peaceful, abundant life. But not being scared of those things actually using them to have insight to understand so that we can make changes.
Gina:
It’s that reorienting. That is what redemption is. We’re always in process, that’s what this process of transformation is. I’m 53 and my mom died in 1998 and there was significant, hard, beautiful, messy redemption, healing, seeing God move on her behalf in the course of her death, which I need to share that story at some point. Experiencing this spiritual attack and oppression and really being delivered from that and recognizing some things.
But it’s not like it was like, “Phew all done.” It was a step in my transformation. It was a step in my sanctification. It was a step in my journey with Jesus to step into more healing. It’s like the onion, God only takes us as far as we can go now. Then after a bit, He’s like, “It’s time to do another layer. Let’s get a little deeper, let’s go a little further.” In my forties, I had a huge moment with the Lord where I recognized, I had processed and dealt with the trauma of my mom and my relationship with my mom and her brokenness and stuff.
I thought I had processed with my dad, but I really hadn’t processed the reality. My parents weren’t married. I was told that they were married and divorced. It wasn’t until I was 12 that I was told they actually weren’t married. In that moment I felt, “I’m a bastard. I was unwanted. I was a mistake.” Then I didn’t find out until after my mom died, that my mom got pregnant to try to get my dad to marry her.
She had told me a fabricated lie that they were in relationship, that they wanted to get married. She told me that my dad was told he couldn’t have kids, so she refused to marry him. Then she got pregnant and then he wanted to marry her and she said no. My mom fabricated this whole thing. She even changed her name legally to my dad’s last name. So much fear, so much all of that stuff.
Here I am a grown adult with kids gone through so much healing. I just feel like an idiot because I didn’t know the truth. I was talking to my dad one day and I’m like, “Yeah, you couldn’t have kids.” He’s like, “What are you talking about? That’s not true. No, I didn’t want to marry your mom. And she, one day, got pregnant and now “You have to marry me.” And I’m like, “no, I don’t.””
Here I am having to come to face to face again, with a whole another understanding of the unwanted, that lie at the core of me having to come to that reconciliation. My dad didn’t actually want me, although he loved me. Why can’t I just get over this and go on with my life? That’s the grace of Jesus bringing us a little closer, taking the healing a little deeper.
For some people it goes deep, fast, and there’s a lot of restoration and redemption really quickly. For some people it takes longer. There’s more of a journey and it’s okay. I love the fact that in the Bible, Jesus never heals the same twice.
Can we have grace, not just for ourselves, but others on their journey of transformation and healing on their journey of discovery with Jesus on their journey of restoration and understanding that we’re worthy of God’s love that He is pursuing us that He went to great lengths. Jesus went to great lengths, not just to get us into heaven, but to restore us, fully and completely, mind, soul, body, spirit, emotions, all of it. What would it look like to make space for that?
Ali:
I love what you’re sharing, because you get to this place where you go, “Look at where I’ve come from and how much of it is built on lies or built on this equation that I made as a young adult.” My story is similar, but different than yours. My parents were married and got divorced when I was 17. But within that, I remember feeling that my whole life feels like a fraud.
Everything I thought to be true is now fraudulent. Life’s a fraud, don’t trust people. That became this underlying equation. I then went into college and into my marriage, this was before I had a relationship with Jesus. Pausing and going “None of us chose who we were born as. You get what you get.” God knows and He’s at work in that.
Instead of dismissing or ignoring or being afraid of where we’ve come from or where we are currently, what if we actually turn towards it with the Holy Spirit and invite Him to take inventory and reveal the places to us that maybe have some really rotten roots that we don’t even know exist. But now that we’re willing to partner with the Holy Spirit in those places of darkness, we’re going to not only realize that those places can be healed, they can be surrendered.
Ali Ash is a leader, mentor and life-coach on staff at New Community Church in Vista, CA.
Check the rest of this conversation Leading Our Emotions & Reading Emotions & How To Renew Our Minds
Check out the Dwell Meditations
