Breaking the Generational Patterns That Keep Men Stuck

The cycle that was handed to you does not have to be handed down by you, but breaking it requires more than good intentions and willpower. In this episode of the True Man Podcast, Mike Van Pelt walks through seven living generations, the biblical pattern of generational sin and mercy, and what it actually takes for a man to stand up in his family tree and say: it stops here. #truemanpodcast 

Contact Mike Van Pelt: 

Mike@TrueManLifeCoaching.COM 

https://www.AmericanFamilyRenaissance.Org/ 

Order Mik’s New Book, True Man True Ways – A Roadmap of Discovery to the Masculine Heart 

https://www.AmericanFamilyRenaissance.ORG/TtrueManLifecoaching/Books/True-Man-True-Ways/ 

True Man Inner Circle Newsletter: 

https://www.AmericanFamilyRenaissance.ORG/#Subscribe 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the True Man Podcast. This is an invitation to radical reconstruction of a man's masculine heart and soul in a place of safe community where we dare to ask questions deep-seated inside a man and explore ways to help you become a better man, a better son, a better dad, and a better spouse. Well, thank you for joining me for podcast 251. I think we're on a roll now. I think we got something figured out here. So thank you for joining me again this week. And thank you for supporting us through 250 episodes of the True Man podcast. And uh especially after last week, a lot of big rollouts going on. And again, please help me join me. I need your help on this. Uh, go out and take a look at the True Man uh now the American Family Renaissance website. Of course, True Man is on there, but please head on out to American FamilyRenaissance.org. I will, of course, put those links in the show notes. But it's important that you go out there for a number of different reasons. One, you can share this podcast with anybody. If you're listening to this, the statistics tell me that uh you're probably listening to it on your mobile phone. So that makes it really easy for you to send the podcast on to a buddy to listen to. And I greatly appreciate when you do. That's really how I grow the show, just one man at a time. I shake a lot of hands and we talk about the podcast, and that's how I gain a lot of listeners. So um, I'm not some Hollywood mogul that has tens of thousands of dollars I've put into this to buy people to listen to my show and then provide you crap. No, this is a labor of love. This is very serious business we got going on here uh at True Man and the American Family Renaissance. Also, incredibly important is the upcoming uh Power of Asking for Help, American Family Renaissance Men's Summit. This is a recorded summit. We intentionally kept it short. We intentionally grabbed outstanding men to come in and talk. Average interview was about 23 minutes. You don't have to listen to all this at once. You can take it in bite-sized chunks. It is free. All you have to do is go out to my website, sign up, and then when we release this on September 24th, you'll be able to get your hands on the American Family Renaissance Summit. Now, I gotta say, my hope and dream is that someday we can take some of these men, if not all of these men and others, and go out and do this live and in person. Why? Why do something like that? Well, uh, number one, you know, this medium and doing things on Zoom is awesome. It is amazing. And I get to meet people from around the world. But there is nothing like being in person with people and shaking hands and eyeball to eyeball and and uh and the emotion and everything that comes with being in the same room. So I get excited about that. But uh also as part of the summit, we're gonna provide some options for you to jump into an upcoming class that I uh am going to be putting together, have put together. And so you'll have some options with that. You can take a self-paced uh study course and and go through the nine marks of a true man, or you can join me on a live 12-week training that I'm gonna take men through. And uh so just go out to the website, you can learn more about that. Now, speaking of men and generations, I heard myself use that term. So, podcast number 251, what are we gonna talk about today? Well, I think this is an incredibly important topic. We're gonna talk about breaking the generational patterns that keep men stuck. So let's dive in here. You know, there are some pretty amazing statistics out there. So I'm gonna throw some out at you so you can wrap your arms around the discussion here today on the True Man podcast. Believe it or not, and maybe you've heard this, maybe not. If you're hearing this for the first time, I think it's gonna blow you away. For the first time in human history, right now, today, there are seven distinct generations of people alive on this earth at the same time. Seven generations. Can you believe that? From the greatest generation, men and women that were born in the early 1900s, who survived the Great Depression, stormed the beaches of Normandy, built the post-war world with their hands all the way down to generational generation beta, children being born right now in 2025-2026, who will inherit whatever we build or whatever we break. Seven generations, one unbroken chain. Can you believe it? And here's the question that ought to sit on every man's chest like a stone. What's passing through you? Not just your genes, not just your last name, what is actually moving through you? From the men who come before came before you through you into the children coming after you. Because something is always passing through, isn't it? The question is never whether the chain continues. The question is, what are you adding to it? And what are you removing from it? So today we're going to be talking about generational patterns, the ones handed to you, the ones you're handing on, and most importantly, what it looks like when a man decides to be the turning point of the family line. Now, that is not a small decision, perhaps not even an easy one. It may be the most significant one that you ever make. So let's dive in here and see if we can dissect this a little bit. So let me put these seven generations in perspective for a moment, because I think when you see them laid out, something's gonna click with you here. So let's talk about the first generation, the greatest generation, born between the years of 1901 and 1927. These are the men and women who knew genuine hardship, poverty, war, the kind of difficulty they either uh broke a man or forged him. And many of them forged, many of them were forged. Many of them also came home from war with wounds nobody had a name for yet, and silently passed those wounds on to their sons. So what do you get? Well, now enter in the silent generation, born 1928 to 1945. They they were raised in the shadow of the depression in World War II, and they learned to endure, to keep their heads down, to provide without complaint. Strong men in many ways, emotionally unavailable in ways they didn't even recognize. Now, how about those baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964? The largest generation in American history until recently. So these folks worked, many of them built real things, and many of them were so consumed by building that they forgot what and who they were building for. All right, generation X. Okay, this is me, right smack dab in the middle of Generation X, born 1965 to 1980, the latchkey generation, home alone, parents divorcing at record rates. These men grew up learning to be self-sufficient out of necessity, and they carried that self-sufficiency and emotional dependency that I'll handle it myself, posture straight into their marriages and their fatherhood. Millennials, born 1981 to 1996, now the largest living adult demographic. They were raised in a world that told them they were special. And then they delivered an economy, a culture, and a relational landscape that made them feel completely lost. And many of them are fathers now, desperately trying to figure out how to lead families when nobody adequately adequately showed them how. All right, Generation Z. These are the folks born from 1997 to 2010. These are young adults navigating the most meat meta uh mediated, most surveilled, most anxiety-producing information environments in human history. Boy, can you feel it? More connected than any generation, but yet more isolated than most. All right, our two youngest generations here, Generation Alpha. They're born between 2010 and 2024. Children right now watching you and absorbing everything. And finally, the generation beta, born 2025 forward, the newest lives, the ones who will inherit. Guess what? If you're listening to this, they will inherit what we build. All right, seven generations and the thread running through all of them. Good and broken, faithful and fractured is men and fathers. The decisions they made or didn't make, the patterns they chose or refused to examine. So here's the question I want you to hold after hearing all that. Which generation are you? And what are the men from the generations above you, your father, your grandfather, still standing, still handling you right now, whether you realize it or not? Are they handling you right now? Are they controlling you right now? Well, I want to share a picture with you that I was reading an article um that I found from Pastor Ed Young. And he painted a picture here that um I think will help you better understand sometimes what gets passed down, passed on, or passed down. So he and his family uh came home from a vacation with bags strapped to the roof of their SUV. He was so glad to be home that he hit the garage door opener, pressed the gas to climb up the driveway, and flew straight in to the garage. I think you can probably see what's happened here. He completely forgot about the luggage on the roof of his car. Explosion, drywall everywhere, bags everywhere. I hope you've never had to experience that kind of mess. He forgot the luggage was up there. And forgetting it was up there is exactly what made it so destructive. You see, this is how generational dysfunction works, really. Every one of us is driving through life carrying luggage we picked up from our family of origin, patterns of anger, control, emotional unavailability, uh unavailability, addiction, anxiety, deception. Most of us have carried it so long that we've forgotten it's even there. We don't notice it until we hear the crash. Now, in our marriage, in our parenting, in the moment that we blow up, shut down, or self-destruct in exactly the same way our father did, and we look in the mirror afterward and feel a cold, sickening recognition, don't we? Have you heard ever had this happen to you? That was him. That was exactly what he did. And what is so painful about that moment is not just the behavior, it's the discovery that you became something you swore you never would. So here's the truth that most men need to hear, but rarely do. You cannot break what you haven't acknowledged is on the roof. The patterns running in your family line are not going to disappear because you're a good man or because you work hard or because you love your kids. They disappear when they are named, examined, surrendered, and replaced with something intentionally better. And here's what Pastor Ed Young observed. After four decades of working with people, whatever we grow up around, we either repeat it or repel it. So the man who grew up with an angry father either becomes the angry man or becomes the man who is so controlled, so conflict conflict avoidant, so buttoned down that he's emotionally unreachable. Both are broken versions of the same wound. So what are you? Repeating the pattern or reacting so hard against that that you've overcorrected into something that's also costing your family. Both need healing, and only one gets named. So here's what strikes me about all this. Let's turn to scripture here. God named the generational patterns thousands of years before psychology existed. See, if you turn to Exodus chapter 20, verse 5, it reads right in the middle of the Ten Commandments, by the way, God says He is a jealous God visiting the inequity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations. Three to four generations. That's not poetry, that is an observation. That is God who designed the family, by the way, telling us plainly that patterns in a man's life do not stay in his life, they travel through his children and in his grandchildren and in his great-grandchildren, unless something interrupts them. But here's what most people miss entirely the very next verse. But showing mercy to thousands to those who love me and keep my commandments. Wow. Three to four generations of inequity, thousands of generations of mercy. Thousands of generations of mercy. Can anybody do the math on that? Not my specialty. And then look at the stories, the actual men in scripture whose generational patterns played out for good and for bad in ways we can learn from today. Look at Abraham, a man of remarkable faith, the father of nations, the man God called friend, and yet he lied about his wife twice, telling two different kings that Sarah was the sister to protect himself. Isaac, his son, did the exact same thing with his own wife Rebecca, not once. Same lie, same cowardice, passed down like a family heirloom. The pattern traveled, didn't it? Look at David, a man after God's own heart, a warrior, a worshiper, and yet a man who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed in order to cover it. And then watch what happened in the next generation. His son uh Amnon raped his half-sister, his son Absalon murdered Amnon and led the rebellion against David himself. The pattern of sexual sin, of violence, of betrayal, it cascaded through David's household with devastating force. You see, the pattern traveled. But then look at a different story. Look at Timothy in the New Testament. Paul writes to him, the young man who's about to lead church, lead a church, and he says, I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother Eunice, and how I am sure dwells in you as well. Grandmother, mother, son. Three generations of sincere faith, not accident, not coincidence, but intentional investment passed from one generation to the next. A grandmother who chooses faith, a mother who chooses faith, and a son who was ready to lead a church because the women before him handed him something worth carrying. The pattern traveled there too. But it was a different pattern, a better one. Thank you to strong women of the Bible. And then there is the most stunning statement in the New Testament on the entire subject. Christ redeemed us from the curse in Galatians chapter three, verse 13. In other words, whatever ran downhill through your family line ran into a cross. You see, that cycle was handed to you, but it does not have to be handed down by you. So look at your family line honestly. Three generations back, if you can. What pattern do you see traveling? Anger, addiction, emotional unavailability, pride? And what pattern do you want the next three generations to trace back to you? So let me bring this out of scripture now and into the world that we are living in right now. So I think about the Generation X father raised by a boomer who boomer dad who provided financially but was never emotionally present. So his dad worked 60 hours a week and called it love. And his gen and this Gen X man swore he'd be different, more present, more connected. He coaches his kids' teams, shows up to the school events, does the things that his dad never did. And yet, because he never dealt with the emotional unavailability he absorbed, he's physically present and emotionally distant in a way he cannot see. His kids feel it, his wife feels it. He doesn't understand why the connection feels so doggone hard when he's trying so much harder than his father did. He broke part of the prop pattern, but not the root. Or the millennial father, raised in a home shattered by divorce, no model of covenant marriage, no example of a man who stayed. And now he's married with kids. And every time the marriage gets hard, every time the friction increases, something deep in him whispers maybe you chose wrong. Maybe you should leave. Not because he wants to, but because leaving is the only script his family handed him for when love gets difficult. He's not a bad man. He has an untreated wound trying to love a family. And then there is the man I've I've met him, I've set with him, who grew up in a genuinely broken home with a father who was absent or abusive, or both. And he decided consciously, deliberately, at great personal cost, he decided that the cycle would stop with him. He got help. He found brothers. He did the hard, unglamorous work of examining the luggage and putting it down. And his kids are growing up in a different home than the one he grew up in. That man is not a hero because his life is easy. He's a hero. Because he chose differently anyway. Now, what would it mean for your children and your children's children if you became that man? So let me give you the honest answer to the question every man in this episode is carrying. How do you actually break it? How do you actually break it if you got it, if you're carrying it around? Well, not with willpower. See, I've watched men try that for decades, heard the stories, don't do that. White knuckling, uh, a pattern, they haven't surrendered is just a different form of the same pride that it created. Here is how you actually break it. You name it. Name it. Generic prayers change nothing. Get specific about the actual pattern, the rage, the absence, the addiction, the deception, the passivity. You cannot throw off what you will not name. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1 says, throw off the baggage and fix your eyes on Jesus. But throwing requires identifying what you're holding first. Two, you surrender it not to willpower, to Christ. Whatever ran through your family line ran into the cross. The cross is the interruption. And that grace is the exchange. You your inherited pattern for his transforming power. So you also need to release the people upstream. Unforgiveness chains you to the very pattern that you're trying to escape. The man who will not forgive his father stays tethered to his father's wounds. Forgiveness is not excusing what was done. It is refusing to let what was done continue to define you. You do it in community. You do it in community. Patterns that formed in broken relationships only heal the healthy ones. A man trying to break a generational cycle in isolation is fighting one with one hand tied behind his back. So you need brothers who know your real story, who will hold you accountable, who will celebrate the win, and will tell you the truth when you're slipping back in. See, that is exactly why one of the many reasons, one of the many, many reasons that I designed the American Family Renaissance Summit and the course, the standard of the restored man. It's why they exist. Because no man, no man changes alone. And because the work of becoming the turning point for your family lines, it's just too important and it's too hard to attempt without brotherhood. So stay close, listen to my announcement. You've already heard me talk about heading out to the website, signing up for the summit. Um, if you do nothing else, just listen to the summit. I'd love it if you proceed and jump in with me. But if you don't, hey, listen to the wisdom of these men that are on this great summit. So as I close out today, seven generations alive right now. Do you believe it? Seven chances to look at the chain and decide what kind of link you're going to be. The greatest generation endured, the silent generation survived, the boomers built, Gen X adapted, millennials are searching, Gen Z is struggling, and Alpha and Beta, your kids, your grandkids, well, they're watching. They are watching you right now, my friend. Not the version of you that you post online, the real version, the version that shows up in the kitchen at 7 a.m. when you're tired and the margin is thin and nobody would blame you for checking out. That man, the one they see in the ordinary moments, well, that is the link in the chain. And you get to decide starting today what that link is made of. Not your father's material, yours. The material of a man who looked at what he was handed, acknowledged it honestly, surrendered it fully, and chose something better for the people coming after him. You see, that is the turning point, and that is the legacy. So here's your challenge this week: write down one pattern from your family of origin that you refuse to hand to the next generation. Name it. Call it out. Then write down the pattern you're choosing to replace it with. See, that's not just journaling, which I strongly recommend. That is a declaration. That is making a vow and oath to yourself that if it's a negative pattern, it stops today, and you push forward with a new habit, a new positive habit. That is my wish for you. Well, thank you again for listening to the true man podcast. I really do wish you can understand how much it means to me. And that's why I hope that you will pass this on to a friend. Really help us to grow this American family renaissance organization and true man podcast. There's so much work to be done. So much work to be done, but we can do it together. I certainly don't want to do it alone. And I would love the opportunity to come walk alongside you. Hey, if you're a part of a men's organization, uh a corporate community, a church, whatever it is, and you're looking for a speaker to come in and talk about some of these things and the power of asking for help, just reach out to me. Uh, you can send me an email at Mike at TrueManLifeCoaching.com. Get on my calendar, it's on my website. So head on out to American Family Renaissance.org. And if this podcast touched you, please leave me a great review on your favorite podcast channel. It really, really helps with the algorithms and everything that we're doing. Plus, I just flat out love to hear from you guys. Well, with that, again, hope you enjoyed uh today's true man podcast. Thank you so much for listening. God bless you, and go out and make this your very, very best day ever.