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The Relationships We Normalize : What We Pass Down Without Ever Realizing It · The Voice: Breaking, Believing, Becoming

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Welcome to The Voice, where breaking, believing, and becoming finally have somewhere to be heard.
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I'm Kim Munoz, and I'm so happy that you're here.
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So today, I want to ask you a question. What if the greatest lessons we ever
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teach our children are the ones we actually never said?
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We spend so much time, I think, trying to find the right words when we're teaching
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values, correcting behavior, giving advice, when we're having those,
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you know, quote-unquote important conversations.
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But children begin learning about relationships way before we ever sit down to talk about them.
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They watch us, right, every single day.
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They watch how we love, how we disagree.
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They watch how we apologize, or maybe when we don't apologize.
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How we forgive people. How do
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we handle disappointment. How we treat the people that are closest to us.
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But little by little, they begin deciding what love is supposed to look like,
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not because we told them, but because we showed them.
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I've come to believe that every family normalizes something.
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Some normalize affection and laughter and honesty, faith, hard work, generosity.
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But some families also normalize silence, walking on eggshells, emotional distance,
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keeping secrets or disrespect, or pretending everything is okay when everyone
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in the house knows it's not.
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So the difficult part is, when you're raised inside something,
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you rarely recognize it as unusual.
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It's just life, and we always say, it's just my family, it's how we are, it's just normal.
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Until one day you step outside of it, and you realize, maybe it wasn't.
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One thing I've reflected on over the years is that the two men I was married
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to had very different childhoods.
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One experienced the absence of his mother during some of his most formative
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teenage years, and the other one grew up without a deaf father,
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and he was told his father didn't want him.
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Very different stories and different circumstances, but they shared one thing in common.
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They both entered adulthood carrying wounds that began long before I ever met them. And don't we all?
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Every one of us walks into our adult relationships carrying a history,
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a blueprint, an understanding of love that was shaped somewhere.
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Sometimes it was in healthy homes, and sometimes it was in deeply broken ones.
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The truth is, we don't get to choose what happened to us as children.
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But as adults, we become responsible for what we do with what happened.
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I've learned to have compassion for the child someone once was While still holding
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the adult accountable for the choices they make today Those two things aren't really in conflict,
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Understanding someone's pain doesn't require excusing their behavior Healthy
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relationships require both compassion and accountability.
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One of the hardest decisions I faced during both of my divorces was deciding
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what to tell my children, and perhaps even harder, what not to tell them.
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What made it even more complicated was that my children were at very different
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stages of life during each divorce.
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In my first divorce, it was only my older son, and he was six years old.
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But in my second, my other two sons were 20, and my oldest was 31.
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They were completely different seasons of parenting, because age changes everything
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about what children can understand and what they should carry.
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When my son was six, I chose to help him process what he was feeling in ways that matched his world.
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We used divorce coloring books, we drew pictures of emotions,
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we talked about feelings in simple, safe ways that allowed him to express what
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he didn't yet have the words for.
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My goal was to protect his innocence while still giving him space to feel.
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During my second divorce, there was no protecting in the same way. My sons were adults.
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They had lived long enough to form their own perceptions of what they believed our marriage was.
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They had seen what they thought was a functioning relationship behind the scenes.
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And then suddenly they were confronted with the full truth all at once.
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There was no gradual understanding, no soft introduction, just the reality of what had been hidden.
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And that was incredibly difficult for them, because in many ways they felt betrayed on multiple levels.
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By their father for the choices he made against our family, and by me for not
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revealing sooner what had really been going on.
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That was a different kind of pain than what a young child experiences.
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It wasn't confusion, it was disillusionment, and navigating that required a
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completely different kind of care.
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I never wanted my boys to become the keepers of adult information.
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I didn't want them to become my confidants, my defenders, or even the people
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responsible for understanding my pain.
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They're my children. It's not their job to carry the emotional weight of my marriages.
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But I also didn't want to protect them so completely from the truth that I accidentally
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taught them unhealthy behavior was normal.
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Because there's a difference between protecting children and pretending.
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There's a difference between refusing to speak badly about their father and
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asking them to deny what they could clearly see.
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And there's a difference between allowing children to love a parent and teaching
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them that love means accepting every behavior.
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That was the balance I was always trying to find.
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One thing I did very intentionally, but not always perfectly,
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was separate the role of their father from the role of the man I had married.
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When I spoke about their relationship with him, I tried to use words like dad
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or your father, and when I spoke about what happened inside the marriage,
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I tried to use his first name.
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That distinction mattered to me, because their father was someone they loved,
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and I loved the part of him that belonged to them too.
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My issue was never with their love for their dad, my issue was with the choices
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made by the man I was married to, and the way those choices affected the marriage and our family.
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Those were very two different relationships. I wanted my children to understand
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that they did not have to reject their father in order to love me,
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and they didn't have to choose sides.
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They didn't have to carry my disappointment.
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But I also wanted them to understand that harmful decisions have consequences.
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Dishonesty should not be excused simply because someone is family.
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Disrespect does not become acceptable because it comes from someone we love.
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And that preserving a relationship should never require abandoning your own
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judgment, your boundaries, or your sense of what is right.
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For a long time, I believed that encouraging my children to preserve their relationship
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with their father was automatically the healthiest thing I could do.
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But in many ways, I still believe children deserve the freedom to love both of their parents.
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And over time, I had to ask myself a harder question. Was I encouraging a relationship
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or was I unintentionally teaching them to tolerate some of the same behaviors
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I had spent years learning to tolerate?
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Children are not only listening to what we say, they're learning from what we normalize.
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If we continually explain away manipulation, inconsistency, disrespect,
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or even a refusal to take responsibility, we may believe we're keeping the peace.
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But our children may be learning something entirely different.
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They may be learning to ignore their instincts, to excuse behavior that hurts
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them, to hold on to relationships at any cost, and to believe boundaries are
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disloyal, to accept confusion as love.
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I didn't want that for my children. I didn't want that for my sons.
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I didn't want them to carry those lessons into their own friendships, marriages, or.
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The goal was never to convince my boys who someone else was.
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The goal was just to teach them who they should become.
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Men of honesty, integrity, men who understand that love and accountability belong
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in the same relationship, men who can recognize unhealthy behavior without becoming cruel,
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men who extend grace without abandoning wisdom, and men who know that loving
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someone does not require pretending their choices are harmless.
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Because I wasn't only raising children through divorce, I was raising future
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husbands, fathers, friends, and men who would one day decide how the women in
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their lives deserve to be treated.
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That responsibility stayed with me. Their fathers are present in their lives,
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and for that, I will always be grateful.
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But my sons also witnessed marriages, marked by infidelity and lack of respect for their mother.
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As a mom and a woman, that frightened me, not because I believed they were destined
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to repeat what they had witnessed, but because I knew how powerful modeling can be.
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During my first divorce and the custody battle that followed,
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we were introduced to an incredible woman who helped me understand just how
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much boys learn from the men around them.
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She recommended a book called The Wonder of Boys. The biggest lesson I took
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away from this book wasn't simply that boys develop differently than girls.
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It was that boys become men by watching other men.
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Long before they understand lectures about respect, integrity,
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or character, they're absorbing what manhood looks like.
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They're watching how men handle disappointment, how they treat women,
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how they apologize, resolve conflict, how they speak, how they lead,
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and perhaps most importantly, how they love.
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That realization changed the way I looked at raising my boys because I realized
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I wasn't just trying to help them become successful men.
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I was trying to help them become good men.
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For anyone raising sons, I consider it an essential reading.
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That book didn't only teach me more about the boys I was raising.
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Looking back, it also helped me understand some of the men I had known and loved.
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Boys don't learn how to trip only from what we tell them.
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They learn by watching. Watching how conflict is handled, how respect is given
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or withheld, how love is expressed or neglected.
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They watch what men apologize for, what they take responsibility for,
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and also what they dismiss, and what the women around them are expected to endure.
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I remember praying over my boys more times than I could ever count.
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In fact, I kept a separate prayer journal for each one of them,
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page after page filled with prayers, not for who they were as little boys,
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but for the men they would someday become.
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If you're someone who prays, I can't recommend this enough.
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There's something incredibly comforting about placing your children in God's hands.
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It doesn't take away the responsibility of parenting, but it reminds you that
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you're not carrying it alone.
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One prayer found its way onto those pages more than once, and it was,
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Lord, don't let what they've witnessed become what they believe marriage has to be.
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Give them the wisdom to recognize healthy love. Give them the courage to become men of integrity.
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Teach them to honor the women in their lives. Let them learn from what they've
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seen without feeling bound to repeat it.
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Because every parent hopes their children inherit the very best of them,
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but I also hoped my boys would have the discernment to leave behind anything
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that wasn't worthy of carrying into their own homes.
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I wanted them to recognize healthy love when they encountered it,
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not because I had convinced them who was right and who was wrong,
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but because they had learned what honesty looks like,
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what respect and accountability look like, what love feels like when it's safe, mutual, and true.
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That was the responsibility I carried while raising my boys,
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not to give them every detail of my marriages or make them responsible for my
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healing, but to make sure the silence surrounding those marriages never became,
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permission to repeat the same patterns.
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I don't regret protecting my children from adult conversations.
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I still believe that was the right decision.
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I also don't regret helping them understand that unhealthy behaviors should never become normal.
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They're very different things. You can protect a child's heart without teaching
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them to tolerate what hurts it.
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I believe every generation is given an opportunity not to create a perfect family,
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but to write a healthier chapter.
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Maybe your family taught you beautiful things. Maybe it also handed you patterns
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that needed to be questioned.
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The goal isn't to blame the generations before us, because they were carrying stories of their own.
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The goal is to become aware enough
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and courageous enough to choose what deserves to be carried forward.
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And before we go, I want to leave you with this. None of us gets to choose the family we're born into.
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None of us gets to rewrite the first chapters of our story.
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But every one of us gets to decide what we do with the chapters we're writing now.
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Maybe you grew up surrounded by kindness. Maybe you grew up surrounded by chaos.
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Maybe you were taught what healthy love looked like, or maybe you've spent your
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entire adult life trying to figure it out for yourself.
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Wherever your story began, it doesn't have to end there.
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Awareness changes things. Healing changes things.
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One healthy decision changes things, and one honest conversation can change things.
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A one parent choosing to model something different can change generations.
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I've learned that we don't leave our greatest legacy through the things we own or the words we say.
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We leave it in the relationships we build, the respect we show,
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forgiveness we extend, the boundaries we keep, the love we model.
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Long after we're gone, those are the things people will remember.
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Those are the things our children will carry with them.
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So maybe today, don't ask yourself whether your family was perfect.
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Ask yourself this, what will the people I love learn by watching me?
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Because someone is always watching.
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And whether we realize it or not, we're always teaching.
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Thank you for spending this time with me. And until next time,
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keep believing and keep becoming the kind of person whose life teaches the lessons your words never could.