Encouragement

This is going to take time. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy road to walk and even expected a few set-backs, as there always are when you’re in the healing process. What I didn’t expect was how quickly it happened. Before I knew it, my mind returned to the place is was comfortable for so many years. One random conversation and I was back in that place of agreement; that place of acquiescence; that place of submission to whatever was said to protect myself from confrontation. It scared me. I don’t want to go back there. But my mind did. Automatically. As if someone had flipped a switch. The transition was flawless. Right back to the same old pattern; right back to the same old response. It was then I realized I have more healing ahead and probably more heart wrenching realizations as well. When I was in elementary school, grammar and punctuation were integral parts of learning the English language. While I have retained the know-how of using both of these without issue, reciting the exact rules that govern each one have long since left the building. (I’m thankful to have a daughter who just so happens to be an English major and helps me whenever I forget the finer points of the only language I know how to speak.) One part of punctuation that has always intrigued me are the parentheses. Two side-ways smiles that encompass an added thought, word, or phrase. Perhaps the word or phrase isn’t a huge part of the overall storyline but the author felt it important enough to include to give the reader another detail or even just a side-note of interest. The Almighty Author of my life story has added a parentheses to this chapter of the manuscript. It may not be a huge part of my overall storyline but it’s important to include so I don’t get caught up in another cycle of abuse. If you have followed this ministry for any length of time, you are well versed on my story. Up until five years ago, I was in a marital relationship that was filled with abuse, deception, and manipulation. It wasn’t pretty. It was a desperate way to live and my mind has suffered greatly due to the influence of those things. However, while in the midst of it, I didn’t see it as abuse. I thought everyone’s marriage was as mine was. I couldn’t have been more deceived. I was raised with the belief that the man was the head of the home, the Spiritual leader and, as any good Christian wife, I was to submit and allow him to lead and help me grow in my relationship with Jesus, as well as with him. I not only believed it, I wanted it. I actually welcomed it. I wanted a godly man, strong in his faith, to study the bible and pray with. I wanted him to be the leader of our home and our family. I knew if I married such a man, the submission part would come naturally because I’d be secure in his leadership and trust he was being Spirit led through personal bible study and prayer. I thought I had done that. However, I didn’t marry such a man. I married a man who only pretended to be all of those things and he kept me fooled for quite a long time. Since Jesus rescued me from that existence, I have learned many things about the reality I lived in for so long. I didn’t realize I had been married to a narcissist until many months after the divorce. I’d never even heard the word before, much less knew what it was. Behavior doesn’t lie. One can deceive you with smooth and perfectly practiced words about who and what they are, but when it comes to their actions, it gives away the intent of their heart every time! The behavior my ex exhibited those last few years of our marriage were textbook narcissism. (Knowing what I do now, I’m sure narcissism was always the “third person” in our relationship but not knowing it was an actual mental health issue, I was completely oblivious.) Over the course of many years, my mind was abused and manipulated one minute then “love-bombed” twenty minutes later and all of it coming from the very same person. It’s an exceptionally difficult thing to come to terms with. Even after all the time that has passed, my mind is still affected by the trauma. Back and forth. Ebb and flow. Right now, that’s my mind in a nutshell. Cognitive dissonance. After some online research of my own, I realized this is the culmination of what’s going on in my head. I live with two opposing views in my mind. I love him then I hate him. I miss him then I’m thankful he’s gone. There are times I know I’m over him and others I don’t think I’ll ever be. But, if there has been one thing deeply engrained into my heart during this journey with Jesus it’s that I know, beyond any doubt, God’s got me. If He allows something to touch my life, He has a purpose for it. I thought my days of counseling and therapy were behind me. I thought my days of being overwhelmed by grief and trauma had long since passed. However, since experiencing the results of the conversation mentioned above, it proved my mind is in need of more healing. My previous life was very compartmentalized. I used to think it was from all the years in the military but now I know it was from being married to a narcissist for over three decades. It’s how his brain worked and, over the years, it spilled over onto me. For almost 20 years, I marked time as, “when we PCS’d to Fort Irwin, CA, our first child was born and he was promoted to Captain” or “then we moved to Alaska

“I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of  Jacob, ‘Seek me in vain.’  I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right.” ~ Isaiah 45:19 Lately, I’ve been feeling listless, restless, uneasy, empty, aimless and out-of-sorts. I’ve felt this way at other times in life, usually in relation to fleeting or unfortunate circumstances; a temporary downturn. We all have them. But as I look more closely at this moody word list, it begins to resemble a quiver of arrows, all pointing toward one, encompassing, emotional theme: purposelessness. Or so it seems. I know I was not created without purpose, and neither were you, but honestly it is how I’ve been feeling for longer than I care to. Pondering this thought a little further, I sadly determine I’ve hit on something significant. I’ve battled depression most of my adult life, probably longer, with subtle signs evident as early as high school. I see this only now, looking back. I wish I’d known then what I know now (don’t we all), as I could have interpreted the world around me, and those in it, differently. I would have understood that my terrifying fear of abandonment was a perfectly expected reaction to the periodic silent treatment I endured in my youth, and the on again-off again absence of affirmation, conversation, and relationship that was utilized as a form of discipline. Silence effectively told me I’d been a disappointment, although I didn’t always know why. But emotional abandonment isn’t discipline. It is wrong, plain and simple. Routinely cutting the lines of communication in a valued relationship, especially with a young child, is traumatizing. In my case, it laid the groundwork for developing a mindset that emotional control over my life belonged to others, not me; toying with my emotions became permissible and ripe for the taking. Further, it set the stage for my people-pleasing propensity and this became my mission, because I would do almost anything to make the pain of silence and rejection end. Every human being comes into this world with a need for love, affection and acceptance, and being ignored by a significant other isn’t conducive to any of that. By school age the silent treatment was a well-established form of “communication” that grew more frequent as I entered my teen years. I learned early that communication can happen with a voice…or with no voice at all. (Something occurred to me just this very minute: I have loved the written word since my youth. I prefer it over verbal communication a thousand fold. I find that ironic; isn’t it amazing how, even late in life, the lightbulb can suddenly come on?) Anyway, growing up, there were other instances of implied abandonment, or the outright-stated-threat of leaving that I won’t go into at this time, but never-the-less they escalated my fears. As time marched into adulthood and I left home, this nearly-all-consuming fear of losing loved ones kept me chained to a controlling spouse, who did his homework and learned well how to keep me tethered. He studied the people-pleasing aspects of my personality and took full advantage. Ironically, it was the laying open of my heart and soul that taught him where I was vulnerable. He learned well the lessons that I unwittingly divulged as I shared stories of my youth. I thought in confiding in him that I was running to safety, a harbor in the storm. I naively believed my purpose was to take care of him and love all his demons away. If I could somehow make up for everything he lacked or lost in boyhood, then he would be happy, and by extension, I could be happy. But once he learned this about me, he began to expect that his happiness was my purpose. Just as in childhood, my job, my purpose, was to appease certain others, and in this case, him. I was to be present and accounted for, even if he wasn’t (and he often wasn’t).  If I failed to be pleasing in any way (perish the thought), then his sadness or anger or other myriad emotions became my fault. I shouldered the blame and the punishment: silence, shouting, shoving and leaving. And that, my friends, isn’t simply an unkind person; it is the essence of betrayal by a master manipulator impersonating a “husband”. It’s an insidious malignancy of torture that eats away a person’s soul until they feel so small and empty the only thing alive is a heart, faintly beating in the chest, and lungs that weakly breathe in and out. Consequently, I would often recite to him this old Mother Goose rhyme: Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, Had a wife and couldn’t keep her, Put her in a pumpkin shell, And there he kept her very well. It was a favorite nursery rhyme of mine as a child because I loved pumpkins, but in truth, I had no idea what it meant. Later I came to realize I was once again held captive under a heavy hand, this time by a controlling, alcoholic, narcissistic abuser who reeled in the catch of his life, gutted me and put my carcass on the mantle above the fire; the trophy wife he could display like a prized, hunted, and very dead animal. And from the outside no one could see that I, indeed, was hollow. Bottom-line, I’ve made some poor decisions in my life. Not all of them, but when I did, they were significant. For instance, why did I marry this man in the first place? The answer is important (and I hope this saves even one person from misery!)  The reason was to flee a perceived lack of control over my life as a young, single woman. The root that took hold so long ago from the punishing silence was now bearing fruit. I was living at home in my early twenty’s, and still under (perceived) authority even at that age.