what repeats when nobody stops it

there is a kind of childhood that teaches you fear before it teaches you language. a father with severe mental illness. suicide attempts that turn the house into a waiting room for bad news. hospital wards that smell like disinfectant and endings. psychiatrists using careful words while everything around them feels anything but careful. his own childhood was wreckage. poverty. violence. parents who hurt him long before he ever learned how to hurt anyone else. he grew up inside damage. then carried it forward. at first there is sympathy. later there is pattern. years pass. he gets older. the pain stays. instead of learning how to live with it, he learns how to weaponize it. he turns into his father. troubled. brittle. angry at the world for what it never gave him. then religion enters the picture. not as refuge. as structure for control. harsh belief systems fit well with harsh people. they give language to domination. they wrap cruelty in righteousness. they turn personal chaos into moral authority. suddenly every decision becomes judgment. every boundary becomes rebellion. every woman who refuses to submit becomes a problem to be fixed. every child becomes something to manage through fear. Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee grew up watching this shift. the same man who once needed help later insisting he was the one who knew the truth. the same brokenness reappearing as certainty. bipolar swings turning into sermons. addiction turning into rules. pain turning into power plays. this is how cycles survive. nobody wakes up and chooses to become abusive. they wake up and choose to protect their wounds at any cost. then everyone around them pays. there is a moment when you realise you are living inside someone else’s unresolved childhood. their ghosts are running your present. their untreated damage is now your daily weather. what follows is not forgiveness. it is clarity. clarity about what cannot be fixed from the outside. clarity about what cannot be negotiated. clarity about the difference between illness and accountability. because pain explains behaviour. it does not excuse it. the hardest part is watching someone repeat the very tactics that once destroyed them. watching them reach for control because they never learned safety. watching them hide behind god because they never learned self. and the cost lands on the children. always the children. this kind of story does not end with closure. it ends with distance. with boundaries that look cruel to outsiders. with decisions that feel cold until you realise they are the first warm thing you have done for yourself. some families hand down land. some hand down money. some hand down names. some hand down trauma. and the only way it stops is when someone decides to carry less of it forward.