Don’t Confuse Generational Curses with Poor Generational Choices

The real curse is believing we are powerless to break these familial patterns

Photo: Nick David/Getty Images

In Exodus 34:7, we hear about the God of the Bible “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” From this passage has derived the notion of generational curses; the concept of pathological dysfunction as spiritual punishment. Modern adaptations of this idea speak to the cyclical nature of unhealthy family pathologies, citing things like poor health, illiteracy, sexual violence, and poverty as examples of these transmissible misfortunes.

But how much of our personal dysfunction is compounded by our decisions, as opposed to shaped by our ancestry? How many of us hide behind the guise of inherited issues to dodge the responsibility of having to resolve them? Probably quite a few of us. When we take this Bible passage as proof positive that our propensity for problematic behavior is everyone’s fault but our own, we render ourselves helpless to defend against it and embrace a level of victimhood that keeps us trapped in its cycle. So when does our participation in unhealthy familial patterns stop being the result of our “generational curses” and start being the consequence of our own generational…