Breaking the Chain: When Only God Can Fix What Generations Couldn’t

There’s a reason they say there are just some problems only God can fix. I’ve lived long enough to see the truth in those words, traced back through generations of well-meaning people who simply didn’t have what they needed to break free.

The Weight of Inheritance

My great-great-grandparents didn’t have what they needed to be good parents. It’s not that they didn’t love their children or didn’t try. They simply didn’t have God, not the way I’m beginning to know Him. Their own parents were too consumed with survival, with putting food on the table during impossibly hard times, to be an emotional security blanket for their families. There was no space for processing feelings when you were fighting to make it through another winter.

So they did what most of us do when we don’t know better: they passed it on.

Generation after generation, the dysfunction traveled like an invisible inheritance. What my great-great-grandparents couldn’t heal, they handed to their children. What those children couldn’t process, they passed to theirs. The pain moved through the family tree like water through roots, nourishing nothing but more pain.

By the time it reached my grandparents, and then my parents, the weight of all that unhealed trauma was crushing.

When Brokenness Meets Brokenness

My mother came from a home where child abuse wasn’t just a problem, it was the air she breathed. She grew up afraid, separated from her mom and dad when she was small, raised instead by grandparents who were probably doing the best they could with their own broken hearts. Fear became her first language, the one she spoke most fluently.

My father’s story carried its own scars. His dad died when he was twelve, that tender age when a boy most needs a father’s steady presence. In the aftermath of that loss, during one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of his life, he was abused by someone they had to live with for a while. There were no carefree days playing outdoors for my twelve-year-old father. He was working in a sawmill. Hard work. Hard life. Life was just… hard.

Then these two broken people, my mother and father, found each other. They came together not in wholeness but in shared woundedness. They loved each other, I believe that. But they brought their brokenness into their union, and brokenness doesn’t heal itself just because two people say “I do.”

They passed along their dysfunctions to me. Not because they wanted to. Not because they didn’t love me. But because you can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t teach what you’ve never learned. You can’t model healthy emotional processing when you’ve spent your whole life just trying to survive.

The Cycle Continues

And then I did the same thing.

My children’s father came into our marriage with his own brokenness, his own set of inherited wounds that no one in his family had known how to heal. Two more broken people came together, and we passed along our dysfunctions to the next generation. The chain continued, link after painful link.

For a long time, I thought this was just how it was. I thought maybe some families were blessed with wholeness and others, families like mine, were simply cursed with brokenness. I thought the cycle was unbreakable, that the best I could hope for was to manage the dysfunction rather than heal from it.

I was wrong.

The Light That Changes Everything

The only light in all of this hardship, the only thing that has made the difference, has been that I have felt the presence of God. And that presence is new. It didn’t exist in the generations before me, at least not in the way I’m experiencing it. It’s the chain-breaker I never knew I needed. It isn’t found in church. It’s found in seeking God privately.

This isn’t about religion. This isn’t about following rules or performing rituals or pretending to have it all together. This is about a relationship with the Divine that offers what generations of my family never had, healing, wholeness, hope.

God is doing something in me that survival skills alone have never accomplish. Where my great-great-grandparents passed down dysfunction, God is planting something entirely different. Where previous generations handed down fear, He’s cultivating faith. Where brokenness once ruled, wholeness is beginning to grow.

Allowing the Growth

I will allow that to grow in me. Hope. Love. Courage. Faith.

Let it grow, I say.

This isn’t passive acceptance. This is active participation in my own healing and in breaking the generational curse that has plagued my family for longer than I can trace. Every day, I choose to water these new seeds rather than the old dysfunction. Every moment, I decide to nurture hope instead of feeding fear.

It’s not easy. Old patterns have deep roots. The instinct to respond from brokenness is strong because it’s familiar. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I catch myself passing along the very dysfunction I’m trying to break free from. But the difference now is that I recognize it. I name it. I refuse to let it be the final word.

The Chain-Breaking Generation

There’s something profoundly powerful about being the generation that says “enough.” About being the one who decides the chain stops here. Not because previous generations were bad people, they weren’t. They were people doing their best with what they had.

But I have something they didn’t have. I have access to healing through God’s presence that they couldn’t imagine. I have resources for processing trauma that weren’t available to them. I have a relationship with the Divine that offers not just survival, but transformation.

And I’m choosing to use it all.

I’m choosing to be the great-great-grandparent that future generations look back on and say, “That’s where it changed. That’s where someone finally broke the cycle. That’s where healing began.”

For Those Walking the Same Path

If you’re reading this and you recognize your own family story in mine, know this, you’re not alone. Generational dysfunction is more common than we admit. Most families carry patterns of brokenness that stretch back further than anyone can remember.

But you also need to know this: the chain can be broken. Not easily. Not quickly. Not without intention and often painful work. But it can be broken.

It requires:

• Acknowledging the dysfunction instead of pretending it doesn’t exist

• Seeking healing instead of just managing symptoms

• Allowing God to do what generations couldn’t

• Choosing daily to nurture hope, love, courage, and faith even when brokenness feels more familiar

• Giving yourself grace when you stumble, because breaking generational cycles isn’t a straight line, it’s a journey.

The Growing Things

What I’m discovering is that when we make space for hope, love, courage, and faith to grow, they don’t just benefit us. They change everything downstream. Every time I choose healing over repeating patterns, I’m not just changing my life, I’m changing the trajectory for generations to come.

My children and their children might not inherit the same brokenness I did. They’ll have their own struggles, certainly. Life guarantees that. But they may not have to fight the same ghosts, carry the same unhealed wounds, or be trapped in the same cycles.

They’ll know that dysfunction isn’t destiny. They’ll understand that brokenness doesn’t have to be passed down like an heirloom. They’ll have living proof that chains can be broken when we allow God to do what only God can do.

Let It Grow

So yes, let it grow. Let the hope grow in the places where fear once lived. Let the love grow where dysfunction took root. Let the courage grow where survival instincts used to rule. Let the faith grow where doubt and despair once seemed permanent.

There are just some problems only God can fix.

Generational dysfunction is one of them. Not because we’re powerless, but because the healing required is bigger than human willpower alone. It requires a power that transforms not just behavior, but hearts. Not just actions, but entire family systems.

And that power is available. That healing is possible. That chain can be broken.

I’m watching it happen in my own life, one day, one choice, one act of faith at a time. And if it can happen for me, if the weight of generations of dysfunction can finally begin to lift, then it can happen for anyone willing to do the work and trust the process.

The chain is breaking. Hope is growing. And generations yet to come will reap the harvest of seeds being planted today.

Let it grow, indeed.

Author Melissa Saulnier

BraveBeyondBreaking .com