Essay

Breaking a Pattern You Were Raised In

You may believe deeply in God’s plan for families and still have painful questions about your own. If a parent, family member, or someone you trusted neglected, physically, emotionally, or sexually abused you, you may wonder what healing is supposed to look like. Can you really move forward? Can you learn to trust, love, marry, or create a healthy family when some of your earliest experiences taught you very different patterns?

The restored gospel gives hopeful answers to those questions. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that parents have a sacred responsibility to raise their children “in love and righteousness” and provide for their physical and spiritual needs. It describes family life built through faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If your family did not consistently reflect that pattern, the Lord can still teach it to you. Your childhood may have shaped you deeply, but it does not have to determine the relationships you build for the rest of your life. Through Jesus Christ, you can heal, learn healthier patterns, strengthen your capacity to love, and become a powerful transitional person in your family—the person through whom damaging patterns begin to change.

Can Jesus Christ Really Help Me Heal?

When Jesus said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28–30), He was speaking to people carrying burdens they could not simply remove themselves. Some burdens come through our own choices. Others come through mortality or through the choices of people around us.

Alma gives even more depth to that invitation. He taught that Jesus Christ would take upon Himself “pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind” so that He would know how to succor His people. In Alma 7:11–12, succor means far more than sympathizing from a distance. The Savior comes to our aid with perfect understanding of what suffering feels like and what healing requires.

That means He understands not only what happened to you but also the ways it may have affected you afterward—the difficulty trusting, complicated feelings about your body, anger, grief, fear, uncertainty about relationships, or anxiety about creating a family of your own. None of those experiences put you beyond His ability to help.

In “To Heal the Shattering Consequences of Abuse,” Elder Richard G. Scott acknowledged that deep wounds may require time, faith, supportive relationships, and skilled professional care. His teaching points toward something deeply hopeful: healing is possible, even when it is gradual.

Christ works with real people and real wounds. You can bring Him the parts of your story that are still unresolved and begin moving forward from where you actually are.

Gracie’s Story: Healing Can Change the Future

Gracie Leavitt shared her experience in the YA Weekly article “After Experiencing Trauma, How Could I Learn to See Sexuality as a Gift from God?” She was sexually abused as a child and carried the effects of that trauma into her young adult years:

When I was young, I was exposed to pornography and experienced sexual abuse. As I grew older, I continued to struggle with what had happened to me. The trauma affected the way I thought about sexuality, and at times I turned to unhealthy behaviors to cope with what I was feeling.

For a long time, it was difficult for me to believe that something connected with so much hurt could actually be a gift from God. Healing has not been simple, and it is still something I am working through.

One important change came when I began talking honestly with Heavenly Father about what I was experiencing. I had sometimes wondered whether He really cared about struggles involving sexuality, but I gradually learned that He wanted me to bring those questions and feelings to Him too. As I did, I came to understand the Savior’s Atonement and His healing power more personally.

I also learned that I did not have to work through everything alone. After my mission, I talked with my bishop about my trauma. I became more open with my parents, and trusted people in my life helped carry some of the burden with me.

Professional therapy also became an important part of my healing. Trained mental-health professionals helped me understand some of the effects sexual trauma had left behind and gave me tools for working through them.

My healing is not finished, but I am further down that road. Through Jesus Christ, supportive people, and professional help, some of the confusion and hurt I carried has gradually been replaced with greater peace and rest. I am learning that what happened to me does not have to determine how I see myself, my body, sexuality, or my future.

— Gracie Leavitt, “After Experiencing Trauma, How Could I Learn to See Sexuality as a Gift from God?”, YA Weekly, November 2025

What stands out in Gracie’s experience is movement. Her history did not suddenly disappear, but as she turned toward Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, trustworthy people, and good professional help, she began seeing herself and her future differently. Her full account describes a gradual process of learning again to understand her body and sexuality through God’s purposes.

That kind of healing matters because it reaches beyond relief from pain. Christ can help restore your ability to imagine goodness ahead of you. You can become increasingly capable of healthy intimacy, wise trust, peaceful relationships, and the kind of family life you may not have experienced growing up.

What Does Forgiveness Look Like as You Heal?

The Lord does command His disciples to forgive. In Doctrine and Covenants 64:10, He says, “Of you it is required to forgive all men.” In the context of healing, forgiveness is best understood as part of the Savior’s work of freeing your heart from the lasting spiritual weight of another person’s choices.

Forgiveness does not require forgetting what you learned from painful experiences. It also does not automatically restore a relationship to what it once was. Trust grows through honesty, repentance, changed behavior, respect, and time.

In “Beauty for Ashes: The Healing Path of Forgiveness,” Sister Kristin M. Yee taught that forgiveness is part of healing and that the Lord helps us accomplish what may initially feel beyond our capacity. She also taught that a person can be working toward forgiveness while following spiritual promptings about appropriate distance in a relationship.

That gives forgiveness a more hopeful purpose. As Christ helps you forgive, He is not asking you to surrender wisdom. He is helping you become increasingly free to choose your future without anger, resentment, or another person’s actions continually occupying the center of your life.

What If Forgiveness Takes Time?

Deep healing often happens gradually. Elder Richard G. Scott taught that when forgiveness itself feels overwhelming, a person can first concentrate on gaining greater experience with the Savior’s healing power.

That is an encouraging way to understand discipleship. You can begin with Jesus Christ. As your relationship with Him grows, He can enlarge your capacity to do things that may have once seemed impossible.

Sister Yee similarly taught that healing has an individual timetable. In her own family experience, forgiveness unfolded over years as Christ gradually changed her heart. What began as pain eventually became something she could place more fully into His hands.

Healing is not a race to prove spiritual maturity. It is a process of becoming free, whole, wise, and increasingly able to love as Christ teaches you to love.

Can Relationships Become Different Too?

They can. One of the hopeful truths of the gospel is that relationship patterns can be learned.

If you grew up around control, you can learn respect for agency. If communication in your home involved anger, withdrawal, secrecy, or manipulation, you can learn honesty, listening, patience, repentance, and healthy communication. If affection felt unpredictable, you can learn to become steady and trustworthy.

Jesus Christ is not only interested in helping you feel better about the past. He is teaching you how to become different in the present.

Sometimes that growth may include rebuilding a relationship when repentance, accountability, and genuine change make that possible. Other relationships may appropriately remain more limited. Either way, the Savior can help you move forward with greater wisdom rather than allowing old patterns to dictate every new relationship.

This is one way family chains begin to change. A pattern may have existed for generations and still stop with one person who decides, with Christ, to learn another way.

What Does Sexual Abuse Say About Your Divine Identity?

Sexual abuse can affect the way a person experiences the body, trust, intimacy, dating, marriage, or sexuality because the harm touches powers that God Himself calls sacred. Healing therefore may involve learning again what the body and sexual intimacy mean in God’s plan.

Your body remains part of your divine identity and eternal purpose. Another person’s misuse of agency cannot alter what Heavenly Father created you to be or diminish the eternal possibilities He has prepared for you.

Elder Patrick Kearon taught this beautifully in “He Is Risen with Healing in His Wings: We Can Be More Than Conquerors.” Speaking directly to people who have suffered abuse, he taught that what happened to them is not their defining identity. Your deepest identity remains what it has always been: you are a son or daughter of heavenly parents with divine worth, purpose, and eternal possibilities.

That doctrine gives healing a destination. Christ is helping you recover more than emotional peace. He is helping you see yourself, your body, your relationships, and your future more nearly as Heavenly Father sees them.

What Can Make Healing Harder?

Because healing opens the future, the adversary has reason to discourage it. One of his most effective distortions is persuading people that what happened earlier in life determines what will happen next.

Pain can make that idea seem convincing. If trust has been difficult, you may wonder whether relationships will always feel difficult. If your parents had an unhealthy marriage, you may fear that marriage itself will eventually become painful. If destructive patterns have appeared in several generations of your family, it can feel as though those patterns are simply “who your family is.”

The gospel gives you a larger view of agency and becoming. Through Jesus Christ, inherited patterns are influences, not prophecies. You can recognize what has been passed down, learn from it, repent of anything you have begun repeating yourself, and make different choices.

That is part of what makes the doctrine of Christ so powerful for families. His Atonement reaches backward enough to heal what you received and forward enough to change what you pass on.

Can I Really Build a Different Kind of Family?

Yes. Your family of origin influences you deeply, but it does not contain the full blueprint for the person you will become. You can become what might be called a transitional person in your family—the person who receives one set of patterns but, through Jesus Christ, passes something better to the next generation.

One useful piece of research comes from BYU professors Dean M. Busby and David C. Dollahite. Their study, “The Strengths and Challenges of Contemporary Marriages of Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” examined more than 16,000 people who were seriously dating, engaged, or married.

Among the groups they studied, highly religious Latter-day Saints reported lower levels of negative communication and strong levels of emotional connection, relationship satisfaction, and stability. The researchers suggested that Latter-day Saint beliefs and practices—including preparation for temple marriage and the commitments associated with temple covenants—may help shape how couples relate to each other in ordinary life.

You may have inherited some patterns worth keeping and others that need to end. With Christ, you can sort through them. You can carry forward faith, resilience, humor, family loyalty, or sacrifice while allowing anger, addiction, manipulation, abuse, secrecy, or unhealthy communication to stop gaining ground through you.

That is meaningful spiritual work. You are not merely recovering from a family story. You can help change one.

The Family Proclamation Can Become a Vision for Your Future

Sometimes reading about ideal family life can be painful when your own family looked very different. But the Proclamation can also become a hopeful description of what you are learning to build.

You may find yourself doing things differently from the family in which you were raised. You may communicate more openly, apologize sooner, show affection more freely, create more spiritual consistency, or build a marriage in which both husband and wife feel respected and secure. Those changes often begin quietly, long before you realize how much of a family pattern is being rewritten.

Through Jesus Christ, you can create something good that is genuinely your own while still being rooted in God’s eternal pattern for the family.

A Few Things to Think About

When I imagine my future, am I assuming that some painful pattern from my family has to repeat itself?

What healthy qualities from my family do I want to carry forward, and which patterns would I like to change with the Savior’s help?

How has my experience affected the way I think about trust, marriage, intimacy, or family life?

What does Gracie’s experience of gradual healing teach me about giving Christ time to work in my life?

If I became a transitional person in my family, what might be different for the people who come after me?

What Can You Begin Doing This Week?

Start by talking honestly with Heavenly Father about the future, not only the past. Tell Him what you hope your relationships, marriage, and family can become. Ask Him to help you recognize one pattern He wants to strengthen in you and one pattern He can help you leave behind.

Choose one relationship skill and practice it deliberately. You might listen without interrupting, apologize without defending yourself, express appreciation more freely, keep a commitment, communicate a concern calmly, or show greater respect for another person’s agency. Healthy family patterns are often built through small repeated choices.

Spend time in scripture looking not only for comfort but also for examples of how Jesus Christ treats people. Notice His honesty, compassion, courage, patience, respect for agency, willingness to forgive, and ability to speak truth without ceasing to love. Those qualities can become a pattern for your own relationships.

If you are endowed, let temple worship become part of this rebuilding. Temple covenants connect you to Jesus Christ and teach you what enduring, holy relationships require. You can leave the temple asking, What kind of disciple, spouse, parent, sibling, or friend is the Lord helping me become?

And give yourself permission to look forward with courage. Your family history is part of your story, but Jesus Christ is also part of your story—and He has far more power to shape your future than any painful pattern from your past.

You can become a transitional person in your family. With Jesus Christ, patterns can change, wounds can heal, and what is passed to the next generation can be different from what was passed to you. You can move forward with courage because you are not trying to build that future alone. The Savior is both healing you and teaching you how to become the kind of person through whom greater faith, love, righteousness, and peace can continue for generations.