As I said before, most people just “do” parenting. So, the individual who was raised without a father, and who did not seek out a man to help him establish a strong set of principles to guide him, now proceeds into a relationship with a child of his own. As he gives very little – if any – thought to the future of this child, he portrays a certain behavioral template to the child. Most children see their father as their hero, so this child wants to become “just like Daddy.”
But in this case, one of the absent principles is that of moderation – the child doesn't know how far is too far, because the woman who raised Daddy won't stop an action until she is satisfied, and Daddy knows no different. So the child sees what Daddy does, and because he doesn't know moderation he amplifies before he imitates. So hypothetically, if Daddy has a scotch with dinner, Kiddo has a scotch with every meal. If Daddy gets frustrated and angry with a cantankerous child, Kiddo explodes at the drop of a hat. If Daddy strikes the child in anger for breaking a rule, Kiddo strikes his child twice for speaking a forbidden word in a forbidden tone. Without moderation, the child only imitates thoughtlessly, escalating along the way.

So, how does this play out? Well, consider the pattern and add to it a magnifying glass. This is how each generation would experience the family environment. As such, they escalate and imitate until eventually you come to a child who can't take any more and either becomes suicidal, or indiscriminately abusive. I have witnessed the indiscriminate abuse in my own generation, and the suicide in the one prior.

But how far can this go? That's just the problem. No one knows. In some of my own generation of the Wood family, there has been made the oath of never having a child. Well, this could be somewhat useful, but at what cost? Is this vow being made actually beneficial, or is it a form of personal revenge? It is possible that those who have made such a vow might actually want children, but are so afraid of perpetuating the “same old family bullshit” that they run from the confrontation of the creature, denying their desires along the way. This does not solve the problem, and in the end the person taking such a vow leaves this world unfulfilled and lonely.

In the movie Fallen (1998), Denzel Washington plays a cop who is hunting an unusual criminal – a fallen angel by the name of Azazel. At the end of the movie, Denzel lures Azazel out to a secluded cabin in the woods, far away from civilization. Working with information he had received earlier in the movie which claimed that Azazel cannot live outside a host but for a short time before overtaking a new one, Denzel believes that he has the upper hand by bringing this parasitic demon and his current host out to the middle of nowhere. While there, he critically wounds the host, taunts the demon, and then takes poison before killing the host. The plan was to die with the parasitic demon inside him, leaving the demon to suffocate without a host. But in the end, after Denzel's character died, the demon still found a new host and continued to do his bidding.

Mind you, this portrayal of demonic possession is categorically incorrect, but that is for another discussion entirely.

As I said, running from the family demon might be useful in the short term, but it is by no means the end of the family pathology. The demon will still find a way to perpetuate its reign. The individual who made the vow still married a woman who already had kids. Though there was an existing pathology within that family at the time of the marriage, he still had to interact with those kids in the only way he knew how – by acting out the same old family bullshit. Now what? Now those kids – one of whom was still of the age of influence – take not only the pathology of their mom, but also of this man. One of those kids committed suicide as a result of the compound pathology of abuse.

Not only did the individual vowing never to have children perpetuate through negligence by refusing to confront the creature, but he also perpetuates by way of the principle of avoidance – giving life to and holding close the very infection he hopes not to spread, by focusing on it in hopes of avoiding it. Ultimately a lost war with every battle.

With all of this in mind, where is the hope? Tune in next week.