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Melanie Shankle: She was not a calming presence, and then it became an emotional thing where I can't have my mom projecting the same toxic things on my daughter that she did on me during my childhood.

John Fuller: Well, that's Melanie Shankle sharing ways that we can heal from generational trauma and protect the next generation. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. This episode is one of our Best of 2025, and we're coming back to it because it really resonated with so many listeners. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller.

Jim Daly: John, any good parent wants to stop the unhealthy patterns that we saw our parents doing to us, right? But that old adage that you don't fall far from the tree is so true. There are things that I do behaviorally that I remember my dad doing, who was an alcoholic. It's not that, it's just the attitude sometimes creeps in. Especially as a Christian, you have to arrest that thing and wrestle it down.

It's hard because as children, we pick up habits, we pick up ways that we speak, and those unhealthy things, the attitudes that we get from our parents. If we want to be healthy in Christ, we've got to capture those toxic things and make them healthy. We're going to cover that today.

First Peter 1:18–19 says we are ransomed from the futile ways of our forefathers. Isn't that a brilliant scripture? That kind of makes the entire point. We don't have to live in the sin or the darkness of what they put on us as their children. We can rise above it.

John Fuller: Romans 8:1 says we're set free in Christ for freedom. Our guest has written a book about her story. It addresses generational issues as a daughter, a wife, and a mom. We're very pleased to have Melanie Shankle with us. She's a mom, author, and co-host of the Big Boo Cast, a great podcast.

Jim Daly: It's not about scaring people?

Melanie Shankle: It is not. I know it sounds like it, but it's not.

John Fuller: She's written a very personal, insightful, and hopeful book about her experiences. It's called *Here Be Dragons: Treading the Deep Waters of Motherhood, Mean Girls, and Generational Trauma*. You can find more about the book and about Melanie at our website. We've got the links at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Jim Daly: Melanie, welcome back. It's been many years, but it's so good to have you back at Focus on the Family. You're vibrant and doing well. That's a great part of this story, and I could just see it in your face, the healthiness in your life. Seriously, the smile.

Let's start with generational trauma. Many of us, if not all of us, experience some degree of that because parenting isn't perfect. We're not perfect; we're sinful people. We get that. Hopefully, as Christian parents, we've had that opportunity to say, "I'm so sorry I did that. Fill it in." Mine was, "I'm so sorry I responded with anger." I've never hit my kids or anything like that, but it's just the emotional response. I think I saw my dad in that, to be honest with you. What's your definition of generational trauma?

Melanie Shankle: I think generational trauma is truly because I think here's the thing: no parent is going to be perfect. We can try all we want. We're going to make mistakes. Our kids will be happy to tell us the mistakes that we've made if we ask. But to me, trauma is when something has been undone, when something in that parenting cycle has established an insecurity in you.

Whether it could be alcoholism, drug abuse, or mental illness, it takes a lot of forms, but it's something that actually causes trauma in the home that maybe keeps a child from developing in a normal way.

Jim Daly: Typically emotionally.

Melanie Shankle: Exactly. I think emotionally. There's physical trauma obviously as well, but I think there's so much emotional damage that can be done that a lot of times you don't even realize because something has to be really wrong in your childhood for you to say this isn't normal, because it's all you know and it's normal to you.

Jim Daly: You wrote this book, but you were going to write this book about your daughter, Caroline. Something derailed that. Describe that for the listeners.

Melanie Shankle: Originally, the book that I pitched when I was going to write this book, I had been on a podcast and I had talked about my daughter, Caroline, her sophomore year of high school. She just went through a really horrific mean girl experience where it was relentless. She faced it every day. As I talked about it because I speak at different events, every now and then I would bring it up and I would have all these women that would come forward. The story was, "My daughter's going through this too," or "My daughter went through this," or "I went through this."

I thought we have a mean girl epidemic. I'm going to write this book about mean girls and what that looks like and how we try to not raise mean girls. I didn't realize until I started to piece together the story that I was like, "Where does this go back from?" because I thought the thing is that mean mothers are going to raise mean daughters. That's when it dawned on me that my mom was my first mean girl.

Jim Daly: Melanie, when you think about that, it's hard for me to believe a mom that is a mean mom even knows she is. Why would you purposefully get up in the morning and say, "I'm going to do everything mean today to my daughter"? They're not thinking that way, but it's these little snipes and these little statements and other stuff. Give me a description of that, what that looks like.

Melanie Shankle: For me as a child growing up, I think she was always quick to point out all the ways that I did something wrong, the way that I didn't measure up. She would have such an overreaction to anything that I did or didn't do. My parents were divorced when I was eight. So there was a lot of, I would spend the weekends with my dad, and I learned quickly if I came home and she would say, "Did you have a good time?" and if I said yes, I knew that spun her around. It would end with her getting in bed and maybe not getting out for days.

Jim Daly: So even then you had to pretend, "No, it was a horrible time with Dad and he was terrible."

Melanie Shankle: That's it. I couldn't ever be myself. You learn to manage that. That's a lot for a nine, 10, 11-year-old girl to manage. Now, I will say for my mom, I agree with you; I don't think that there was this thing of "I'm going to be mean." I don't know that anybody really thinks I'm going to be mean. I just think it's a reaction out of your own. For my mom, there was mental illness, but I also think it's insecurities.

Jim Daly: That's what makes it so difficult. That's the auto wreck I'm talking about. That's what makes it so difficult as a child particularly to know if what I'm seeing is actually true and what I believe is actually true.

The book title, Here Be Dragons. Let me give my brogue to that: Here Be the Dragons. That's good. I'll take you on tour with me. I can do just that part. But what does it mean? I know, and I think the audience is really going to be intrigued by this because it's an interesting insight.

Melanie Shankle: Years ago, I read an article and it talked about how in ancient medieval times, when people would set sail across the ocean to explore new lands, they would make their ancient maps before we had Apple Maps that told us you have four stoplights to get to where you're going. They would chart these maps. What they would write, if there was a place where there had been danger, where maybe another ship had sunk or disappeared, if sailors had seen something that seemed scary, they would mark it in Latin: Here Be Dragons.

It was just their way of saying, "Be careful, there's danger up ahead, there's something unknown up ahead." When I read that, what really resonated with me is that isn't that our whole life? It's all this unexplored territory that we all have this map of our life, and we never know when the dragons may show up or where they're located.

Jim Daly: I think that is you have very creative book titles, by the way. Probably the most creative I've ever encountered. *Here Be Dragons* is right there with the rest of them. Tipping into that whole thing, you mentioned in the book these experiences with your mom, late-night Walmart runs and late-night restaurant runs and out-of-the-ordinary things that a lot of kids go, "Wow, this is awesome."

Melanie Shankle: That's what I thought. That's why even when my dad, I let him read the first draft of the book because I said, "I want you to read this, I want you to know what's in it, I want you to tell me."

Jim Daly: And your mom has passed away.

Melanie Shankle: My mom has passed away, but my dad's still alive. My mom passing away is what freed me up. I used to say the title of this book would be *Now That Everybody is Dead*, because I needed that. Once she passed away, I was like, "Now I'm free to tell this story."

I wanted my dad to read it, and he called me after. He said that was really powerful and he said there was a lot of that he didn't know. It was funny because as a kid, I didn't know that it wasn't normal. My mom sometimes would have these, and now I know it's bipolar, but this was the 80s and nobody was talking about bipolar. You didn't hear those conversations. She wasn't diagnosed.

She would wake us up and be like, "I want to paint the kitchen. Let's paint the kitchen." At 10 o'clock at night, we would paint. It was the 80s, so that meant we stenciled little geese wearing hats on the kitchen border. It was fun. Then she would be like, "Let's go get breakfast at Denny's at 2 o'clock in the morning," and we would go. It felt exciting. As a kid, you didn't know.

Then it would be followed up by days where she didn't get out of bed, where I would leave for school and she was in bed, and I would get home and she was still in bed, and the next day would be the same. I didn't know enough. I didn't ever say to my dad, "Mom's in bed all the time," because I just thought that's what moms do.

Jim Daly: Even that's kind of interesting. You're thinking there'd be a little bit of dialogue about that, especially with your dad trying to manage that. I think if I were the father in that situation, I'd be trying. But again, you're just this is coping. Everybody's coping and you're just going.

You don't even know what's going on again as a child, even as a teenager. You went off to college and met your friend Gully, and you became involved in college ministry. Describe that turning point for you spiritually. Now, emotionally you have all this stuff going on, you've lived through this weird, topsy-turvy, bipolar environment.

Melanie Shankle: It was such an awakening for me. A part of for me, there was so much of my mom because she did have us in church every Sunday. So it was this thing of you're living this weird life, but we go to church. I do believe that my mom was a believer. I just think she wrestled with mental illness; there was no doubt.

There was so much guilt and shame. Religion was something that she really used to make me feel like a failure and to make me feel like I couldn't measure up. I saw so much hypocrisy between what she professed to believe and the way she lived. It just created a lot of anger in me.

Jim Daly: Let me interject there because people listening and watching on YouTube need to hear your answer to this. The fact that you were able to overcome that and not use that as your sweeping dismissal of religion—"Oh yeah, forget that, my mom was a hypocrite"—how did you shake that off and say, "Okay, I can forgive that and embrace God and know that my mom did not always live like she should have" and be okay with that?

Melanie Shankle: There was so much guilt and shame that I laugh because I'm like, I used to walk down every center aisle to get saved at every possible camp or whatever. Billy Graham would have been like, "Girl, you are good. You're done. You've done it." But I was always searching because I wanted that.

For me, when I was at Texas A&M, I went to a Bible study called Breakaway, and the leader there at the time talked about the grace and mercy of God and that you can't ever outrun the grace and mercy and that no matter what you've done, you're never too far gone. That was what I needed to hear. That made sense to me. At that moment, I realized Jesus is the thing that always holds. People are going to let you down. The church is made up of imperfect people and the world is made up of imperfect people.

Jim Daly: What would you say to that person that clings to that excuse so they don't have to make a commitment to the Lord? "Christians have just let me down, so I'm not going to do it."

Melanie Shankle: I think it's a cop-out because people have let you down in a lot of areas of your life. People have cheated, Christians and non-Christians. It's a shame; as Christians, you hope that we're better, you hope that you're led by the spirit. But we're going to make mistakes.

So to not give Jesus a chance, who is the creator of the universe, who knows you, who created you, is a total cop-out. To not say, "I'm going to let you prove to me your love and your sustenance and the things you're going to bring me through." Because the whole story of my life is how over and over again, God has always brought beauty from the ashes of things that have burned down.

John Fuller: That is a powerful statement. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Our guest today is Melanie Shankle, and she has a beautiful, deep, personal book that is so hope-filled. It's called *Here Be Dragons: Treading the Deep Waters of Motherhood, Mean Girls, and Generational Trauma*. Get a copy from us here at Focus on the Family.

Along with coming to know Jesus during college, you met your husband, Perry, right? How did that happen and what was the impact on you?

Melanie Shankle: I met him at the very end of college. It was just in the nick of time, literally a month before graduation. I had started to get involved with Breakaway, the Bible study that I mentioned earlier, but there was a small prayer group and it met at a guy named Perry Shankle's house. My friend Jen said, "You need to come with me to this prayer group."

I met Perry there briefly. Looking back, I remember everything about that meeting. I remember what he had on. It wasn't love at first sight, but for whatever reason, he just made an impression on me. Mainly because he kept talking to me, and I was like, "Why are you talking to me?"

Then I ended up getting a job in San Antonio, and that's where Perry was from. We dated for two more years and got married, and we've been married for 28 years now.

Jim Daly: Now the moment is when you bring Perry to your house to meet your mom. I'm sure there was some time to meet your dad as well if Perry was on his game. But describe even his observations and then his comments that he had afterward for you.

Melanie Shankle: It was so interesting because when you bring a fresh set of eyes into a situation. Perry, we were serious enough where he met my dad came into town with his wife, my stepmom, for a business trip, and then about two weeks later Perry met my mom.

I had told him my back story and basically the picture my mom had painted for me, and I talk about this in the book, was that she tried to paint my dad as he had abandoned our family, he had left her for this other woman, that he really never cared about us. I knew in my head this doesn't reconcile with a man who sees you every weekend and who calls you every night of your life, but do you call your mom a liar? It's uncomfortable. So I just kind of let it be.

After Perry met both of them, I never will forget we went back to my apartment and we were sitting on the couch and Perry is so discerning and always sees clearly into situations. He said, "Hey, I don't think that what you've been told adds up." He said, "There's more to this story. This doesn't add up with the people I just met."

That quick. So he said, "I think you need to talk to your dad. I think you need to have an honest conversation with your dad." I asked my dad; he was going to be back in town in a couple of weeks and I said, "Can we go to lunch? I have some questions to ask you." At this point I was 23.

Ironically, my mom came in to see me the weekend before and I told her, "I'm going to have a conversation with Dad. I just have a lot of questions." At that point, my mom confessed essentially that everything she had told me had been a lie growing up. That she had been the one that had cheated first, that she had been the one that had walked out of their marriage, that she had lied about all these things.

It was so fascinating to me because all of a sudden this whole narrative I've been told my whole childhood she admitted wasn't correct. I guess she was afraid that at this point my dad was going to tell me the truth. I don't know if he would have or not.

But when I finally sat down with my dad at that lunch a couple of weeks later, I said, "So Mom told me all this stuff." And he said, "Yeah, that's right." And I said, "Why didn't you ever say anything?" And he said, "Because I never wanted to put you in that position. I just felt like at some point the truth was going to come out and you would see who I was."

It was such a lesson in me. My dad to me is such a model of what it looks like to walk the high road and to believe that eventually the light's going to shine on the dark places and that he didn't jump in and create more conflict by trying to defend himself or trying to explain himself. Because I think he had to know with a lot of my animosity that I had towards him at different times growing up, he had to know that I was being told things that weren't necessarily true of who he was.

Jim Daly: I'm struck by just "the truth will set you free." The Lord says that, but it's odd for us as Christians how much we cover that up, either through embarrassment or repercussion or we don't want to suffer the consequences, so it becomes hard for us to be honest.

Melanie Shankle: It does. I think that those places are the things in us that begin, and I think that's part of what was always going on with my mom is that darkness and those secrets fester. The lies and all of that just grow and create more conflict within you.

Jim Daly: This is during your dating time with Perry. You get married. Do you see the manifestation of your childhood in your own marriage now? Your own insecurities, the things that you weren't taught directly but that you absorbed?

Melanie Shankle: I think there was definitely for me the pattern of it was learning. I had learned so much to always keep the peace. If I ever advocated or said, "I don't like this," or "I don't want to do this," or "This isn't my favorite thing," I was made to feel so much guilt or shame or sometimes anger. So I just learned to keep it all down, because my mom would always greet me if I was like, "I don't want to do this," then it would be met with a sarcastic, "Oh, your life is so hard," or "Poor Melanie."

I just kind of learned nobody really cares how I feel about stuff. When we got married, what I would tend to do is I would just let stuff go and I would say, "I don't care, it's all fine, it's all fine." I'm the master of "it's all fine" until it wasn't. And then I would burst into tears and cry.

Perry said to me at some point in the first year of marriage, "Hey, I'm not a mind reader. I can't read your mind; you have to tell me how you feel." At that moment it dawned on me, I don't even know how to tell somebody how I feel. I don't even know how to express "this isn't what I want" or "this isn't my thing." Even something as simple as "I don't want Chinese food for dinner, I want Mexican food." I really didn't know how to do that because I just wanted everybody around me to be happy and I felt like if I stayed quiet, it would do it.

Jim Daly: This reminds me of the Yerkoviches' material, *How We Love*. They talk about different personality styles. One of the things in there was the "avoider." That is a classic avoider. You want to keep the peace, you don't want to disrupt anything, you don't want to disappoint your mom, so you come home from your time with your dad saying, "Oh, that was no fun." That's the avoider thing. Pretty powerful stuff and I think pretty right on.

Let's move through the end here pretty quickly just to cover today, and it'd be great if we can continue tomorrow and get the rest of the story. A few years after all of this, your daughter Caroline is born. How did having your daughter bring clarity to this relationship with your mom? This to me is a woman thing. Describe it because I'm not sure men really would get that, but how did having your daughter open up these wounds with your relationship with your mother?

Melanie Shankle: It just because nothing prepares you as a mother for how much you're going to love that child when they come into the world. The moment that I had Caroline—and I had known, we'd done the ultrasound, I knew I was having a daughter—I had prayed so many times, "Lord, help me to love her. I don't know how to be a mother to a daughter. I want to be a better mother."

When I held her, I was like, "This is the most holy moment of my whole life to have this innocent little fresh from heaven wrapped in a pink blanket gift." Wow, that thing. Wow. It's just that.

I remember there was a night they send you home from the hospital like you know what you're doing. It was harder for me to get a job at Soundcastle Records at 15 without a resume than for them to let me leave the hospital with this human to raise. I remember that first night rocking her in the nursery and just looking down at her and your heart is so full.

I really started to dread. I was like, "How am I ever going to send her to kindergarten? How am I ever going to let her go? How am I maybe Jesus will come back before I have to send her to college?" because there's no way I can do that. But just that overwhelming love. In that moment, I realized my mom never loved me like I love this baby.

It was such a powerful moment, but it was also a moment that felt like such clarity. I'd never had that amount of clarity before, and it felt like a puzzle piece had finally been put in place. It just opened my eyes to a lot of things that I hadn't seen before.

Jim Daly: That's so sad though. Seriously, that you realized a mother's love for the first time with the birth of your daughter and then to realize, "I did not have that."

Melanie Shankle: It is sad. It's part of the brokenness that I think there's so many of us. I will say since the book has come out, I've heard from so many women, and that has been so sad, that have said, "You put into words what I have felt and I didn't know how to articulate."

John Fuller: Melanie, this all kind of led to a boundary that you had to put in place, which sounds like it was really, really difficult but also freeing.

Melanie Shankle: It was very freeing. I think because with my mom, the thing was her behavior tended to escalate as the years had gone by. By this time, she had shown up at one of my baby showers and she was using a lot of prescription drugs. So she was not always coherent. It became a physical safety thing first of all, where I was like, "I can't have my mom holding my baby, I can't have her around." She was not a calming presence.

Then it became an emotional thing where I can't have my mom projecting the same toxic things on my daughter that she did on me during my childhood.

Jim Daly: Melanie, let's come back right at the end here because I want to amplify this as the right word. When you talked about Isaiah 61:3, which says He gives us beauty for ashes. Now that people have heard more of the story and people will hear more of this tomorrow, come back to that verse and the understanding you now have from that. I think it'd be an important place to end today.

Melanie Shankle: When I look at my childhood, what I say is it was like a house on fire that I didn't know that I needed to escape. So when I look at that, the ashes of my childhood and the brokenness that was there and the patterns that I could have repeated if not for the grace and mercy of God.

When I look at the beauty that He's given in my daughter, in my family, and the things that my heart longed for, it's like Isaiah 61 come to life where it's beauty for ashes, the oil of gladness. The thing about when I read that and I think the oil of gladness is it's like oil seeps into everything. It gets into every aspect of your life. Not that it's been perfect and not that it's been easy and not that there hasn't been a lot of pain in trying to heal and confront things and overcome, but to know that Jesus has been with me every step of the way and that He really does redeem all the things that have been broken.

Jim Daly: Perfect. What a good place to end for today. For the viewers, the listeners, if you're going, "Wow, this is my moment, this is the epiphany that maybe I too have suffered from dysfunction," I would say 90% probably have.

You're waking up to that right now listening to the conversation. Get in touch with us. We have caring Christian counselors who can help talk with you and walk that through, give you a top-line analysis of where things are at spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and then suggest steps that you can take, resources that we have here at Focus to help you. That's our mission and we want to be able to provide that for you. That's what we wake up and come in every day to do.

It starts with Melanie's great book, *Here Be Dragons*. What a great title. Know your life map and know where the dangerous territory is, and this will certainly be there in those things that we've learned as children and the pitfalls and the dark spots that our parents have given us. It's not a condemnation; it's a realization of knowing how to draw closer to the Lord so that you can deal with these things.

John Fuller: Get a copy of Melanie's terrific book, *Here Be Dragons*. We've got details at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast or call 1-800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. We'd also be happy to set up a time for one of those counselors to give you a call back. It's a free 25-minute or so phone consultation and you can learn more online or when you call 800-A-FAMILY.

When you get in touch, if you're able to, please make a generous contribution to Focus on the Family. Donors make it possible for us to offer counseling services and great resources like Melanie's book and so much more. Your gift of any amount today, either a monthly pledge or one-time gift, will make a lot of difference in the ministry impact that we can make together.

On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue the conversation with Melanie Shankle and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.