The Process Of Recognizing Emotional Abuse

Some things only seem to make sense in retrospect.  Sometimes we just don't have the emotional tools to express what is happening to us or what is wrong.  Sometimes we are so enslaved by our own fears and self-doubts that reality is too painful and too distant to face.  Over time as we begin to see bits and pieces of the puzzle we begin to understand the nature of our problem.  The first superficial realization that something is wrong is somewhat like seeing the tip of an iceberg floating in the water, not realizing how much more lurks beneath the surface.  It is also like a thick morning fog that slowly lifts, revealing the light of a beautiful spring day.

For me it began as a subtle inner voice and culminated into the realization that I have spent the last 20 years miserable, trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship. 

Perhaps my childhood didn't prepare me with the skills and tools to immediately understand and cope with my situation.  I didn't have an abusive mother, nor an abusive father.  In fact nobody in my family was emotionally abusive so I simply had no experiences to draw from.

I was naive.  When someone told me they loved me, I believed it.  I thought love meant the same thing to everybody.  It turns out that my partner's idea of love was a prison.  She couldn’t see any value in me other than the value of my service to her.  She told me my hopes and dreams were selfish.  To keep me at a safe distance as her prisoner she avoided meaningful companionship with me.  Her verbal abuse and addiction to anger robed our home of its joy, and made life an unbearable chore.  She systematically trained me not to trust my inner voice, robbing me of my self-worth and self-confidence.  It caused me to doubt my every feeling, and my every choice. 

Somehow, despite this, I loved her.  This was the most confusing part.  How can you love someone that abuses you?  Those of us that have been abused know how this works.  We put too much trust in the loving emotions we feel, so we are quick to forgive and forget.  As the stakes become slowly higher it becomes harder to face reality, so we cling to any evidences that keeps us from having to face the painful reality, no matter how small that evidence is.  Without self-worth our own happiness is not a cause worth fighting for, and the abuser's crime becomes a grievence not worthy of conviction. 

The unfortunate thing about being in an abusive relationship is that over time these costs begin to add up until they finally exceeded our own mental capacity to ignore.  Then, since Prozac is ineffective at preventing a depression which has its basis in real problems yet to be solved, we are forced to deal with the issue.

When I swung from denial to confusion, I SWUNG!  This further eroded my own self-confidence, leaving me with an orphaned inner voice that cried so loudly that it drowned out any thoughts that could have saved me.  I was scared and alone inside an insurmountable inner wall of darkness.

This next part I am reluctant to share because I don't feel called to be a spiritual leader.  I do however feel I am called to share my testimony.  This presents a problem since my testimony is also a testimony to the power of my faith in a Loving God.  While I believe that God is ultimately the provider of all strength and healing, I also believe that not all people are called to Him in the same way or at the same time.  So regardless of where this strength comes from, this next part is the story of how I personally found strength.  Whether you find strength in the same way or in a different way, the key is to find the strength, regardless of how and where that strength comes from.  I will leave the high-pressure Christian sales tactics to those Christians that don't have faith in the ultimate redemptive power of God's Grace.

The walls of my inner prison began to crack in church on the Sunday before Good Friday, 2012.  I had turned to God so many times before that I had all but lost hope in a God that listens.  I thought perhaps God was not answering me because he was angry with me.  I thought I was waiting for God to forgive me, but it turns out that God was waiting for me to forgive Him. 

In Matthew 26:39, as Jesus was praying in the garden at Gethsemane He said, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."  In this moment I knew I had a God that not only hurt along with me, but was willing to carry my cross for me.  I thought about my situation as being like the stations of the cross.  If Jesus could get through it, and He was there to help me, then perhaps I could get through it.

As part of the sermon that day, the Priest said, "In the midst of the darkness, I will trust in my God, and I will not be afraid."  This became a mantra and rally-cry for me in the weeks ahead.  I visited God in church almost every day over the following two weeks.  I burried my head deep in heartfelt prayer.  Through prayer, God has taken a pickaxe to the walls of my prison.  For God nothing is impossible.  First I found God's voice, then I found my own voice.

This mantra, "In the midst of the darkness, I will trust in my God, and I will not be afraid", along with obedience, is what gave Moses the power to free the Jews.  In the past I had tried to reconcile the belief that the Holy Spirit is the ever-present voice of God within our soul with the reality that good Christian people sometimes stumble.  I now realize that it is unrealistic to think the Holy Spirit will provide our souls with spiritual daylight.  If It did, then our understanding of Truth and Love would not be our own, but rather one that we had simply borrowed from God.  It would be devoid of the moral conviction which can only be forged through the toils and tribulations of our hard-fought battles.


  

Adventures of the Hopeless Romantic

Recently I found myself on a commercial plane. I sat in my seat contemplating whether or not God was so romantic as to make one person to be truly meant for another person. An elderly man two seats away startled me out of my contemplation by snoring like a buzz-saw, which had started very abruptly. Instinctively I turned to look but was greeted by his smiling wife and her big inquisitive blue eyes which revealed their beauty in the sunset shining through my window, of whom had grown mostly deaf in her old age.