Navigating the Pain of Fatherless Childhoods: How Kirk Franklin's Journey of Healing & Reconciliation inspires us all.

Hey y'all, welcome to Triumph Over Trauma, the podcast. Listen y'all. I created this podcast because, like so many other people, I've had a traumatic past. I didn't always realize how those things affected me negatively and how I even carried them into my adult life, and so I wanted to create a space where other people could come and we could have candid conversations on how you identify trauma, how you navigate it and how you recover from traumatic experiences. If this resonates with youth, then join me. I am your host and trauma survivor, ms Eve McNair. Let's get into it. What's up guys? Welcome back to Triumph Over Trauma. The last episode we recorded was the self-betrayal episode. It was called you Betrayed you, and we took a look at how self-betrayal forms, how it originates. Rather, I should say I express my own experiences with not only betrayal from others, but also how I had a tendency to betray myself as a result of some of the early childhood trauma that I experienced, and so that was a very, very insightful episode for me because it caused me to look at some of my own behaviors. So we need a second to check that episode out. So let's talk about this documentary Kurt Freaklin's Father's Day documentary. The documentary brought forth so many different types of feelings and emotions, experiences, both negative and positive, that I resonated with, so I want to talk about that today. Listen, as a child of an absent father, there were so many things about the documentary that I first of all resonated with, felt some things, brought up some unresolved trauma, and so I'm going to talk about it. Okay, and I do want to say this, if you have not seen it yet, you might want to pause this, watch it and then come back to re-listen, but for those of you who have seen it, it won't be a spoiler alert. So I'm watching this video and obviously I don't know Kurt Freaklin personally, but it, for me, was enlightening and I have the utmost respect for him as an artist, as a child of God and as a man. But when I watched his documentary, I felt like I understood him on a greater level. And not only did I understand him on a greater level, I understood some things about myself on a greater level, having come from a traumatic childhood myself, having not grown up with my father, having not known him at all, not known his name, not known anything about him besides the memories that other people have shared with me. I related to Kurt in so many different ways. Just that emptiness that you feel with, you know, with lacking that father's validation and affirmation. All of that played a part in a lot of the decisions and choices I made in my life, and so in watching Kurt's documentary, I was like wow, and I had so much more compassion for Kurt as a person, as an individual, as a father, as a man of God. You know, we almost always judge what we don't understand, and it's so easy for us to judge, it's so easy for us to misinterpret someone's struggle right, like what you know you're supposed to be this and you're supposed to be that and you struggle with this. Or you know you're supposed to know better and you're supposed to be able to easily and readily and rapidly recover from some of the things you've experienced. But when you take a look at history and the depth of the compound trauma that he experienced, with, first of all, never even having grown up with knowing his biological parents in close relationship, right, when you take a look at that in his own words, the fact that he felt like he never healed because he would see his mother but not really be able to go home with her, and that, you know, affected him as well, and I was like, wow, there's so much about History that I resonated with, because I too Would see there were times in my life where I would see my mother and Not understand why she wasn't taking me with her. There were big times where she and I were right across the street from each other, where we lived across the street from each other and I will be in a foster home and I would see her across the street from me, walking up the street Don't walk down the street and going about, seemingly going about her life and her business, and I'm like hello, I'm still here, don't want to know me, don't want to come and get me where it's when it's up to me, and so there is so much compound trauma in that and it's almost as if the wound of abandonment, the wound of rejection is, it's like a, it's like a revolving door of, because there's always this hope that they're gonna come for you. There's always this hope that they're gonna want to be with you and want to know you and Just to spend the life with you. And you grow up kind of waiting for them. And no matter how old you get you could be Kurt Franklin's age, I think he said he was 53, 44, and I can honestly say that there's still a bit of that father wound Left in me, that God is still healing me now, thanks, of course, to my heavenly father, thanks to him, that I am able, and him starting to heal from some of those things. But that wound is so deep, it's so serious and I feel like there's so many people in this earth who who have these same struggles, issues, challenges, emotions, and we're not talking about it. We're not really dealing with it. I applaud Kirk for his transparency. I applaud Kirk for his honesty, and what I thought was so phenomenal was he did not stop at trying to achieve his own healing, like when you think about generational traumas, generational curses. What I loved about the documentary is that he did not stop with trying to achieve his own healing. He said within itself how can I Try to reconcile with my own father when, as a father, I have not yet reconciled with my son? And so to see his son walk through those doors and to hear that dialogue With he was his son, and to see the pain, the anger, the raw emotion between the two of them, I thought it was the most beautiful thing. I thought it was the most real thing or is that word Is that a word? The most realist? I thought it was a what we need to see more of in society in general. Right, and my prayer is that there will be an ongoing healing between the father, the son and the grandfather. Right, and I thought that that was just so phenomenal. I also appreciated the fact that Kirk's father seemed to be Kind, he seemed to be patient, he seemed to be understanding. It seems as if he was touched with compassion, touch with sorrow, touch with the grease of, with the grief of Having had a son out there, not and not having had a relationship with him. I thought that was phenomenal, to see that he was touched, to see that it wasn't like, oh okay, well, I mean, you know, I didn't know you, I didn't know you existed in this, you know? Oh well, it's. You know. He opened his door, his home, his life, his heart to Kirk into the possibility of having a relationship with him, and I longed for that. I longed for that. I don't know who my father is. I don't even know his name. We've tried so many different things, so many different avenues to try to locate him, to Discover him. I'm on ancestrycom. I rebuilt to or down and rebuilt my family tree and I'm sure that there are relatives on my ancestry calm that are up or from my father's side. But because I don't know his name, I don't even know where to start. And so in seeing his story kind of gave me hope for my story. I don't know if I'll ever be able to see or meet my father, or I don't know if he's living. I don't know his name, I don't know anything about him, I don't know if I have his eyes or his smile or his mannerism, but when I watched Kurt Franklin and I, you know, looked at his dad and you could see him and his father and you could see his father and him and it was just, it was so phenomenal to watch and I was like, wow, you know, because I can honestly say I felt so lost as a child. I did grow up in a home where there were a mother and a father figure, so to speak, but it's nothing like knowing who you come from and knowing who birthed you is nothing like it. And so I resonate with Kurt's story because I grew up feeling like so lost and I felt like I didn't belong to anybody. I felt like nobody truly understood me. I felt like nobody truly knew me. On top of the fact, not only was I displaced from, not only was I displaced from my mother, my father, my siblings, but the homes, a lot of the homes in which I grew up in I didn't have unconditional love. They didn't have acceptance and affection, affirmation and validation. So there was always in the back of my mind, like well, maybe if my mother or father, maybe if I lived with them, they wouldn't love me as I am. Right, because I'm like, surely only your father and mother can love you unconditionally, right? Like, surely these people care for me, right? The people that I lived with, whether they were foster parents or relatives or whatever, have you? And all the homes that I frequented, all the homes that I lived. And I thought, like, okay, these people have a level of care for me, they have a level of concern for me, they have my well-being and my welfare in mind. But surely my own mother and father loved me so unconditionally that it doesn't matter what I say or what I do or how I act, they love me so much. And surely I have missed out on that unconditional love, obviously before coming to know Jesus. Right, and they're still at 44 years old. They're still a little girl in me. You know what they say in every little girl I mean in every woman there's a little girl. In every little girl there's a woman. Surely there's still a little girl in me who longs for her father's love, her father's embrace, her father's touch, her father's affirmation and validation. I remember seeing watching Bishop Jake's confer the mantle or the responsibility of a woman that I would lose, or how it basically transformed or went from woman that I would lose to woman involved. I remember seeing him or watching him transfer that mantle on her and how he affirmed her, how he validated her, how he entrusted her, and I was like wow, I was so blown away by that and I was like God. I wonder if I'll ever be able to experience that. And don't get me wrong, there have been people in my life who most certainly have been father figures to me, but I don't personally think that there's anything that can compare to the love that you feel is, though, you need and are missing from your earthly natural father. I don't feel like there's anything that compares to that, and maybe I feel like that because I never experienced it. Maybe I feel like that because I never knew my father and I'm still hoping in a way, still hoping that one day I will be able to have that. I'm still hoping that. I'm still feeling like there's something that I missed, that I missed out on right, but it's been so introspective for me, it's been so reflective for me. I think I'm actually gonna watch it again because for so many of us who have struggled with anger, depression, anxiety, abandonment, rejection, addiction, so many people who have had so many different vices in their life and they don't understand why, I think a lot of it stems from some sort of trauma, but specifically that father wound because of the way that we were designed, because of the way we were created. We were not built, we were not designed to live life, especially during those four-month of years, without the father and mother figures that we need right. We were just not designed to live like this. I honestly do also feel like we can't talk about the absent father, the missing father, the incarcerated father, the abusive father. I think we can't talk about that father who struggles with addiction, or I feel like we cannot talk about the broken father without acknowledging the fact that for certain groups, especially those of African descent, I felt like there's no way that we can talk about them without acknowledging the fact that we were broken, that we were stripped away from our fathers, from our families. And again, this is not to play what they were considered the race car, because it's not necessarily a game. This is the reality of life. It's not something that you use in order to divert from responsibility, but it is worthwhile acknowledging the fact or the impact that that slavery, that separation, affected us Like. We need to be able to understand that. And I say that. I say that with the full way of responsibility that comes with not only acknowledging where you've been, but also acknowledging where you must go. So we have been in pain, we have been in trauma, but we must go to triumph, we must go to healing. We must go or come to reconciliation. We must first come to confrontation, we must first come to transparency in order to move forward. You know what they say you can't know where you're going until you know where you've been. And we have all been somewhere. We've all been in places where we can resonate with some or all of his story and, if we're all honest, his story is our story, our story is his story. So I'm just grateful for the fact that he was transparent. I pray God's healing. I pray the furtherance of healing for him and furtherance of reconciliation for him and his entire family. I pray that he would not only be able to go from healed but to whole, right. Y'all know that scripture. We talked about it before on this podcast and it talks about the man at the pole of Bethesda and Jesus comes to him and acts him hey, listen will now be made whole. To me, the difference between being healed and whole is that, well, you can be healed without a significant transformation, like you just healed, right. But I feel like when you were made whole, there is a transformation from the inside out. It's like that scripture that says be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. I feel like when you're made whole, you're made new, you're renewed, you're different, you're changed, right. If you're healed from something, then the pain is no longer present in the heart or the spirit, right, or even in the body. But if you've been made whole, not only is the pain absent, the pain absent, but its effect is absent even from the mind, right. So, for instance, one of the diagnoses I received was post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of years of trauma and abuse. Right, and although I have been healed, I've been healed in some capacity from the pain that I did carry in my spirit, right In my heart, even in my body. You know, trauma can be stored in your body, but I am in the process of being made whole mentally so that when those memories come up, when those thoughts arise especially Like the thoughts that came up when I watched Kurt Frankler's documentary when those thoughts come up, there's no longer pain, anger, regret, shame, depression, anxiety associated with it, because my mind, it's being transformed, because my mind is being transformed. You know, there's a description in the Bible that says you know being transformed by the renewing of your mind, and it's like wow, like you can literally become a different person if your mind is renewed. Right, and to me that's what wholeness is. It's a changing of a mind, so much so that when triggers will arise because they will arise when triggers come up when you're reminded of what you've gone through, how it made you feel, and you know what you experienced, that that change that is taking place in the mind will keep you from reacting the way you once did right. It will keep you from anger, from depression, from shame and guilt right, or at least build or resolve in you so that you will be able to fight against it. The Bible says that when the enemy comes in like a flood, the Lord will raise up a standard against it. I feel like that wholeness is the standard against the pain, the trauma, the abuse, all of the things that you've experienced or associated with what you experienced. That wholeness is the standard, or that transformation of the mind is the standard that God raises up against it, so that you will be able to overcome it right and instead of it overtaking you, instead of anxiety ruling your day, instead of depression keeping you from your purpose, you will be able to confront it and overcome it. Jeremiah 33 and 6 says this but now I will heal them, I will make them whole and bless them with an abundance of peace and security. So that lets me know that that not only Should we be praying to be healed, but we should be praying to be made whole. So that's my prayer for you today, is that God would heal you, that he would make you whole, that he would bless you with an abundance of peace and security. In Jesus' name, amen, thanks for doing that. I'll see you guys next time. One more thing Don't forget to check out the show notes. So, regardless of what platform you're listening to me on if it's Apple Podcast, amazon, google, spotify, iheartradio there is show notes at the bottom of each episode. If you click in the show note area, you'll see tips and resources, information regarding therapy, some of the books that we're reading. There's an abundance of information there. Also, if you'd like to be a guest on the show to share your story, ask questions, whatever you'd like to contribute in any capacity by allowing us to hear your voice, then please look for the contact banner. There should be an email address that's linked to the email for the podcast. Also, if you follow me on any of the socials there is Facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube you could find the links for those socials as well in the show notes and you could feel free to DM me or send me a message if you want to get in contact with me that way as well. But I'd love to have you as a guest on the show. I'd love to hear your voice and hear your story and just share some of the experiences. We've all gone through something and sometimes we just need community, we just need a safe space to talk and to walk through it and to get past some of the things we've experienced. So again, feel free to check out the information in the show notes. There's a bunch of resources there Also, my contact information is below as well. Thanks again for all your support, your contributions, for listening. I'll see you again next time. Bye.