Good Baggage: How Your Difficult Childhood Prepared You for Healthy Relationships

Baggage has gotten a bad rap. We think it’s all bad. We think it makes us less likely to have good, healthy relationships today. But baggage isn’t just the bad stuff that happened to us in the past. It’s the lessons we’ve taken from the pain we carry. It’s how what we’ve been through has actually made us stronger and more capable than we imagine. And it’s how we’re going to make our current relationships work.

Far from minimizing past pain, pastor Ike Miller shows you how to go through the baggage you carry from a difficult childhood and pull out the good stuff. The intentionality you’ve developed. The empathy you’ve gained. The trust you value so highly. Miller shares from his own past in a dysfunctional family impacted by alcoholism and divorce, and his present as part of a healthy and loving family, to illustrate how to stop letting your past sabotage your present.

You’ll find no platitudes or pat answers here. Rather, you’ll discover untapped riches of experience and knowledge you already have that can make your relationships thrive and change the course of your life and legacy.

Ike Miller (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) leads Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina, a church he planted in 2018 along with his wife, Sharon Hodde Miller. He has written about the intersection of theology, mental health, and family of origin issues in outlets such as Christianity Today and Missio Alliance. After confronting the impact of his own childhood, including a family history of substance use disorders, Ike has developed a passion for helping others who grew up in difficult circumstances to better understand how those environments continue to impact them and their relationships now.