Gina Birkmeier. Generations Deep. Out Loud Publishing, 2021.

Thirty years ago, if you had told me that today I would be a licensed therapist, writing this book, after graduating with a master’s degree from a seminary, working with all kinds of people to help find freedom and healing (in the name of Jesus, nonetheless!), most likely I would have laughed in your face and told you to pass me another shot of tequila. (236)

Generations Deep in some ways reminded this reviewer of That One Person, a book we recently reviewed. Both are autobiographies of women brought up in a dysfunctional family with drugs, alcohol, and emotional indifference. However, this one is more effective. It has a purpose.

In that previous review I noted that the Seventies was a time when such books sold well. I mentioned testimonies by Corrie ten Boom, Brother Andrew, and Chuck Colson as examples. Generations Deep is more like those because not only is there an intense story, but the reader can take away some useful and important lessons from these accounts.

Generations Deep has a long subtitle which does reveal its overall purpose: Unmasking Inherited Dysfunction and Trauma to Rewrite Our Stories Through Faith and Therapy. That is what Birkmeier does. Her story of her childhood is intense. She bounced around between various relatives, not even really knowing who her birth mother was until she was older—she had been told the woman was a cousin.

However, Generations Deep has a focus. The author notes that this family behavior was rooted in the past. She goes back, as best she can, three generations to describe her great-grandparents and how they began an unstable relationship and addictive behaviors that became magnified in each subsequent generation.

She notes near the beginning that the Bible tells us that God describes Himself as:

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7)

People often understand this to mean that God punishes people for sin to the third and fourth generations of their descendants. Other verses say something different than that, that God does not punish parents for the sins of their children or children for the sins of their parents (see, for example, Ezekiel 18:20). What this is really saying is that sins of one generation “visit” or arrive in the next generation unless there is some factor to stop them.

We cannot do anything about the things—both good and evil—that our ancestors did. Often we continue in their habits and behavioral patterns. Often that is all we know. As has been said, hurt people hurt people. And those personal family hurts can be the hardest to overcome or reconcile.

By the time things get to Birkmeier’s generation, the family situation is complicated. The story begins with two lines that suggest how this is so:

My mother gave me up for adoption.

Twice. (19)

But we are kept in suspense as she tells of her great grandparents’ awkward marriage, her grandparents’ difficulties in coping with life, and a complicated story about her own birth mother and various relatives who adopted her and took her in at various times. Just as some editions of long Russian novels have a list of characters with short descriptions to help the reader keep everyone straight, Generations Deep has an appendix with a chart of the names of some of the main figures with four columns: Name, Relationship, Adopted Relationship, and Step Relationship. Get the idea?

The author tells her story in an intimate and effective manner. Even if the reader has had very different experiences, it becomes easy enough to imagine how different people reacted and why they did what they did. For example, in describing her birth mother, she says:

Chaos can become a way of life, a place of familiarity and comfort. For Cathy [her birth mother], I think this was the case. In a bizarre way, I think the chaos of that wild life felt safe for Cathy. At the very least familiar, something she knew how to navigate. She had learned to find function in the dysfunction of her homelife as a child, so even if there had been stability with her dad and stepmom, it would have felt foreign and unsafe. After all, you only trust what you know, even if all you know is unhealthy.

…After a while, not fitting in becomes your identity. Everything you do is rooted in the belief that you are different in the most broken sense of the word. (50)

As I read this, I thought of a couple of families that I knew who took in foster children or who adopted older children. There were some serious struggles, no doubt partly because the kids they took in may not have known how to cope with an attentive, faithful, and stable family life.

If there is hope, part of it comes from the author’s own tenacity. She wants to learn who people really are. She is looking for some real relationships. She focuses on her upbringing and does not become lurid. Indeed, she passes over her late teens and early twenties other than to say in general terms, she experimented with sex, drugs, and alcohol—things that at this point had been going on in her family for most of the century. She says she does not want to “glamorize” these things.

There are two parts to this book, then. The first two thirds or so is her story of dysfunction and redemption. I am not a terribly emotional person, but at one point I confess I was getting misty as she described a discovery made in a medical laboratory. She said that other patients who did not know her were crying. Yes, most of us would.

Indeed, she notes how God did play an important part in her redemption. Some things that happened appear to most readers as more than just a mere coincidence. Such behaviors that cause children to rebel or hate or fear or escape “grieve the heart of God.” As she began to understand not only herself, but her mother, her ancestors, her various aunts and uncles and stepparents, she saw how she could rise above these behaviors and start over. She could even become a positive force in the life of her own children when she had been mostly a negative influence before.

The last third begins with a chapter titled “Turning Towards Healing.” But it is not just about her own healing. Generations Deep shares how the reader can become free in spite of parental abuse or other inherited poor behaviors. She emphasizes that it may take time. It requires forgiveness. She reminds us, for example, that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. We can forgive people, even those who do not apologize or who do not change themselves. She recognizes that this can be hard, a real battle.

I had to go through the battle inside of me that the choice to forgive created. And it was a battle. So, My Dear Friend, if you’re going through a struggle with forgiveness today, let me encourage you to lean in. The freedom it will bring you is worth the fight.

You may be thinking, “But Gina, you have no idea what I’ve suffered.” And you know what? You’re right. I absolutely do not. But, right here, right now, I want to tell you that I’m sorry you went through it. Whatever “it” was or is. It breaks my heart that you’ve not only suffered, but that you’ve continued to carry the weight of it. (224, italics in original)

While it is clear that the Lord had much to do with the author’s healing, she notes that certain therapeutic techniques work even if people have different beliefs. Above all, this book encourages the reader. Even someone who grew up in a stable environment can learn from this and perhaps make some changes. It certainly can help us understand the behavior of others.

The author herself has become a Licensed Professional Counselor. She, then, shares techniques and various counseling approaches that can help. There is not only a moving story, but a wealth of wisdom and knowledge in this book. This book will minister to many people, especially those raised in broken homes and dysfunctional families. It could be helpful to those who counsel them as well. This is the way autobiographies should be done.