Abuse

Jealousy.

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I had a crazy last week guys, so I didn’t post.

Fun fact: My out of state friends tell me that you don’t refer to girls or mixed groups as “guys” in some states. Maybe that’s going out now that we share so much media, but apparently it marks me as a West Coast gal.

Now, you’re seriously going to wonder about it the next time you see someone use it, right?

Anyway, I have a myriad of weighty subjects I could write about, and probably will, but I’ve been considering for a while that I should write a post about Jealousy.

I’ve mentioned it before, that there’s good and bad jealousy, but I apparently ave never devoted a whole post to it. So here goes…

Guys: You need to get more jealous.

Yeah, I said it.

I’ll cut to the chase, according to the Bible, Jealousy is a godly quality.

“Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” (Exodus 34:14.)

I saw in some comment section somewhere that this person was talking God down for being described as jealous. God has been criticized for this declaration.

It certainly can be annoying, if you are trying to devote yourself to other things besides God, to have Him always interfering with it. A lot of trouble in life happens because we chase after false gods, and the Lord destroys them, much how H destroys their idols and altars in the Bible.

Jealousy is a consuming fire, as God describes Himself to be. But we should be grateful for that, because int he same way that fire destroys what we love and idolize, it also eats up the things we find ourselves in bondage to.

God will not have us enslaved to fear, doubt, and depression any more than to pleasures. He is just as jealous that the darkness will not have us as He is that false light will not.

There are some movies and shows and books that have beautifully portrayed this with human relationships. Often ones with a bit riskier of a plot. A character had a love interest that had a darkness or flaw that they can’t seem to shake, the character proceeds to love with a fierce kind of love, ready to go to any lengths to deliver them from their darkness.

The infamous Luke and Darth Vader example isn’t the most poignant for jealousy specifically, but it shows a little bit of it.

I really love that type of story.

Often we do not think of that as jealousy.

Jealousy is a fierce hatred for something that steals away your beloved. Anything that takes what you feel is rightfully yours from you.

It gets a bad rap because people are so flawed that they take jealousy to an extreme it shouldn’t be taken to. They want to own more than they should.

In an odd paradox, you really can have someone belong to you completely, yet belong to themselves at the same time. The more free they are, the more yours they are. Good jealousy exists to protect that freedom form outsiders who might try to steal it away be deceit or by force.

Jealousy, in romance, is a sign that the relationship is real, usually. There are petty people who will be jealous over nothing. It’s also not right to be jealous of someone who’s already committed to another person. even if you can’t help the feeling, you shouldn’t act on it.

Yet, I really can’t stand the thought of being with a guy who wouldn’t get at least a little upset if he caught me with another guy, or another guy was hitting on me in front of him.

I’ve liked someone for quite a while, and I got surprised by the amount of jealousy I felt over the thought of him dating someone else. (We’re not together, sadly, but the idea made me mad anyway.)

I am no stranger to jealousy of other types too. My emotionally abusive father liked to make me jealous on purpose. Plenty of parents do it by accident, he would deliberately provoke me.

Oh, yeah, people can be provoked to jealousy.

We all have heard a story about the girlfriend or wife who messes with her husband to get him to prove a point.

I actually don’t think that is always wrong. Don’t set someone up for failure, but to reasonably test their loyalty is sometimes appropriate.

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, As a seal upon your arm; For love is as strong as death, Jealousy as cruel as the grave; Its flames are flames of fire, A most vehement flame.” (Song of Solomon 8:6)

In this verse, a new bride is telling her husband to put her as a seal on his arm, and heart, warning him that love and jealousy are like death, relentless.

Love is relentless trying to do good to the beloved, and if the beloved wanders from that, ceases to receive it or to be around for it, Love will be painful like death. The loss and grief of love is a lot like losing someone to death, as you who have had very painful breakups can attest to.

On top of that, if the beloved goes to another source for what he or she should only get form you, jealousy will seek to remove that source by any means necessary.

And yet, the bride warning her groom is done in a pure and passionate tone that I find very compelling. It is not said in cruelty or bitterness or even in distrust. The Bride simple recognizes that her beloved is precious, and others besides her may want to steal him away.

There’s a desire in women, and I think men too (I’m not one) to protect someone by the sheer act of loving them. AS if all the love we pour into a person could be like a shield to them from evil.

The truth is, it can be. Love will not stop you from suffering, but if you’ve received it and let it sink deeply into your heart and soul, that love can protect you from suffering destroying who you are.

Love is joy even in the worst of circumstances. Peace in the face of trouble. Hope when there is nothing else to hope for.

If anyone can love us, then, there must be something worth living for and waiting for. Love itself proves the existence of better things. Nothing so wonderful could exist if the world was all bad.

And we should protect that with all the jealousy we can muster. It’s why toxic relationships have to be ended. Protect your ability to love and be loved above all else, people.

And if you meet someone who’s as fierce about that as you are, you stick with that one.

Well, that’s all I have to say for now, until next time–Natasha.

Heart recovering after abuse.

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It’s been a month since my dad moved out.

Things are slowly beginning to feel different.

Yet, it surprised me how little changed at the same time.

My dad has been so far removed from my life for so many years, that I lost no more substantial contact than the toxic words and an occasional family game night that went okay.

I wonder, if I knew anyone who’d go through this already, I’d ask them if they felt the same, or if the abuse was so involved in them that it was an immediate release.

Slowly, feelings of relief have begun to creep in, but only small ones so far. My mind still hasn’t really grasped it.

My friends have been great about it though.

I also, surprisingly, almost feel like I miss him.

I know it is not so unusual for people on the receiving ends of abuse to feel sympathy for the abuser. It’s not, I think, wholly bad. If you can still see how that person has real needs and feelings even if they are cruel, you are less likely to dehumanize them by being cruel in return.

Though, perhaps never standing up to someone is a form of dehumanizing them, because it keeps them on a pedestal of fear.

I tried to pity my dad so that I would not hate him. Hate would turn me into a person I do not want to be.

I’m not willing to pay the price of hatred, the loss of everything I can feel joy and gladness over, and every other relationship.

I find myself thinking a lot about new beginnings. I had begun to wonder if my dad would hold me back for many years yet, out of fear of me breaking free. My dad never, perhaps, knew he was doing this, but his insecurities did it for him.

I also still feel like he’ll get at me somehow to punish me for this, I think that is also common to people like me.

It’s not, however, completely unfounded, he’s the type of person to do it. I wonder if my success ever depends on him again, if he’ll try to sink me on purpose.

These anxieties keep bugging me, though I do not take them especially seriously.

It’s hard to move forward. I must rethink everything about my life, in a sense, and ask how much of it was affected by the toxicity.

That I still enjoy things at all, and am even able to open up to people, I credit God with.

God has ministered to me through people, often people are imperfect about it, they give up too easily, put their own spin on it, or push too hard when you most need them to ease up and let you breath, but even so, that there are some who try is encouraging to me, because I can hope that I will learn to trust them.

I have trust issues. My dad proved himself untrustworthy many, many times. Every time I needed him, pretty much, he failed me. Then, he blamed me for never relying on him.

I ended up with a very weird complex due to this. If I ever do open myself up to someone, I usually feel like they are just bearing it out of a sense of duty. I tend to withdraw, and then push forward in strange ways.

I tend to not put myself forward just when I most want to be noticed, and then to not set enough boundaries when I am asked for help.

In one way, it’s because my idea of giving is that it is limitless, even if as a human I must rest from it sometimes, but it’s also because I see my services as worth so little.

On top of that, I am confident most of the time, and then I have very poignant insecurities on certain things that surprise people.

Overall, I believe the Holy Spirit has healed me enough that my stronger side is the good things, and the insecurities, while they give me trouble, do not rule me. But they influence me more than I thought.

In the absence of my dad’s abuse, I almost seem to be trying to invent it, to recreate the same feeling, since it was my normal…at the same time, I’m fighting it.

I think, I want to defeat it once and for all, and I could not defeat it in him, so I want to pick a fight with someone I can defeat it with, and finally win.

I could prove I was worthy of more by being strong enough to stand up for myself, or I could plead until someone finally took pity on me like I wanted my dad to.

It’s strange to no longer be the victim. I wanted someone to hear my case for so long, and now it happened, it felt so short, and I am no longer a victim.

In a way, I stopped being one in my mind a long time ago, but the marks of it remain on my soul, where only healing can remove them.

I basically sent my dad the message: NO, you cannot do this to me anymore.

Now, all that remains is to receive the deliverance that came, and move on. Build a new life.

Someday, I hope my dad can come back into it, when he’s had a change of heart.

Can I move from fighting for my own survival to fighting for other people?

Thought I never let my heart die entirely over the years, by giving it to God, it could not help but take damage form this. Now I’ve been looking at it, wondering how it’s doing…

Hello my old heart, how have you been? Are you still there inside my chest? I’ve been so worried, you’ve been so still, barely beating at all…

Hello my old heart, it’s been so long, since I’ve given you away. Every day, I add another stone, to the walls I built around you to keep you safe…

Hello my old heart, how have you been? How is it being locked away? Don’t you worry, in there you’re safe, it’s true, you’ll never beat, but you’ll never break.…Cause nothing lasts forever, some things aren’t meant to be, but you’ll never find the answers, until you set your old heart free…

I began the process of taking down the stones around my heart years ago… by which I mean, God began to heal me. Yet, I had an active role in it too, we choose our path.

Still, I knew that there was more, my capacity to give and receive love is far from full. I seem to have shut down a good portion of it, sufficing on a little bit from time to time.

Like how my dad would occasionally be amiable, never really loving, but not hostile.

I went through a phase years ago of feeling I could be loved all the time, and loved deeply. I’m not sure what happened. I think as people failed me more and I got distracted by adulthood, I stopped tending to my needs as much.

It’s really hard to come out of that. My mind still thinks it’s true, but my heart has a much harder time committing to it.

So, I want my old heart to come back alive again.

Until next time–Natasha.

Getting out of an Abusive Situation.

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This is going to be difficult.  I wouldn’t write about it, except I think my experience might benefit other people.

If you’ve followed me for a while you might remember me mentioning having problems with my dad before.

Since I keep myself anonymous I feel I can share this without disgracing him to anyone who would recognize it.

The problems between my dad and I were not just misunderstandings, the situation was actually an abusive one.

I wasn’t physically abused more than once or twice, and not severely. I’ve been hit one time, flung out of chairs and rooms a  couple times, threatened  several times with violence; but I’ve never been beat on, thank goodness.

I was verbally abused more, but even that was not as often as I hear about in other cases. I wan’t yelled insults at very often.

The kind of abuse I was subjected to all the time was Emotional.

My dad is a very manipulative person, he uses guilt to control people. he is able to play the victim to perfection, and to lie, to feign being penitent in order to get you to ease up on him and let things go back to normal.

I don’t need to give a lot of specific examples and drag that out. But if you’ve been manipulated by love before you know the ways it works.

You know how you are always trying to please someone who is determined to be offended and the victim no matter what you do.

How the person will refuse to forgive you for mistakes that were minor, and then not apologize for things they did that were appalling.

The worst of it is the justifying. After threatening or doing something to me, my dad would say he was just so desperate, he had no other way to handle it, because I just made it so difficult for him.

A lot of horse hockey if you ask me. But I fell for it so many times, and so did the rest of my family.

I also got the blame heaped on me for everything that went wrong. I know now that my dad neglected my needs on top of abusing my emotional attachment to him.

Some might  be quick to say that people my age make themselves victims over anything now, and that we assign terms to every little thing.

I doubt anyone would say so to me, but because it does happen, I want to clarify that I am not about being the victim.

It took over 9 years of this pattern being open, + the previous 11 of it only being in the background, for me to recognize it was abuse. I thought it could never happen in my family.

Also, I call it abuse because of the impact. Had my dad’s sins only damaged him and made him look foolish, they would be ordinary selfishness and lack of self control. Bad, but not threats to anyone but him.

It was because this cycle sucked the life out of my family, destroyed a lot of my self worth for many years, and gave my siblings major guilt problems and my mom a miserable marriage that I call it abuse.

Abuse in the literal sense, misusing something in a terrible way. Love can be abused also. That is what The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces are about.

I’ve had my needs trampled on and my efforts spit in the face of many times.

I may go into it more some other time. But for now I want to focus on something different.

It’s over.

Not completely. There is plenty to work through. My dad is still a royal mess and he has not yet repented.

but things are never going back to the same cycle.

Because we did something about it.

My family came together, even my grandmother, and agreed my dad should move out.

A thing that is likely obvious to all of you reading this, but when you are in the cycle, that solution seems impossible.

My dad had all of us cowed for so long, and I was the least under his thumb, but because of that I got written off a lot. It was amazing to finally start to get my voice back as I and my siblings explained that we would move out of the house if our dad did not, but that he clearly should, because our mom needed to be free too.

And, after feeling it would never happen, it did.

The whole thing went down in under 2 weeks, actually. It’s now been a little more than a week since he got the last of the major stuff from the house.

Someday maybe I’ll be able to understand how to explain what changed, things happened so fast.

All I can think clearly about is that I knew that something had to break, that I could not stand years and years more of this. I knew that I did not want to see my family live like that.

I knew also that I was strong. Years of isolation made me draw close to God and become very independent. I am already more out of the cycle than the rest of my family is. I knew that even if I stayed trapped in this for more time, I wouldn’t be crushed.

But I knew no such thing of my mom and siblings.

And it made me mad how the lies that my dad told got swallowed by everyone.

Doing this meant burning some bridges. I may have permanently lost any chance of being liked by some of his friends and cut ties with my former church entirely.

Whether my dad will ever forgive me, I do not know. I did nothing wrong, but I do not think he will see it that way for quite a while.

I do not feel as upset about it as I did. There was a sense of guilt for the first few days.

I knew it was the right thing to do, but no one wants to have to do that to their own father. Plus the week he’d put me through was hellish.

I am also sad that it had to come to this. I know I had no choice, we had tried counseling, prayer, communication, and every other thing we could think of. Nothing worked.

What about God?

I wonder too, if you will wonder, how I as a Christian, feel about being abused and having to take action about it. God did not stop it. And God did not stop my dad, who claims to be a christian and hear from him.

That might be better explained in another post, but in brief: I know a lot about my dad’s walk with God, and I know that God did talk to him through people, and to him directly. I know I asked God for help. I know God tried to reach my dad. My dad is a sieve, he recognizes the hand of God briefly, but it passes through him and he forgets it and goes back to the same old ways.

Also he hates me, and never really wanted to change toward me, but wanted me to  suffer. And this goes back to problems that started before I was even born.

I have no doubt that God wanted to make this better. I spoke to God about this decision, and He was not silent, as people often say He is during trouble. (I don’t doubt that they are being truthful, it just did not happen to me this time.)

God made it clear to me that He had given it to us to change this. He did not say why, but that he wanted it to be through us. I’m sure He has His own reasons.

From my human perspective, I can see the value in us learning how to help ourselves, while still praying and relying on God’s guidance throughout the process. We used the gifts of Common Sense and discretion that he gave us. I never felt abandoned by God at any point during this whole ordeal.

I hope that answers the basic question.

Christians are not perfect. But I would never say that excuses abusers. That is not a problem you can just say you’ll work on, it must be cut out like a tumor. Gross, yes, but so is abuse.

Some Practical Advice about Ending Abuse:

Action needs to be taken.

Never, ever, expect an abuser to be the first to change. It may happen in rare cases, but if you are not seeing it now, do not wait for it. Do something.

Don’t act alone: We went to multiple people for help, I kept at least two people updated about what changed day by day in case something went wrong, and so I could have clear headed people confirming my decisions.

I set up meetings, asked questions, and planned my actions so that my dad could not stop them.

Be Informed: I made sure we were legally in the clear.

No two situations are exactly the same, so if you know of someone in this situation or you are in it, you’ll have to figure out the best plan. But I’m imploring you, do not do nothing.

Be Cautious: Also, I never confronted my dad personally about it, once it got really bad. My mom did, but she was safer from being physically lashed out at, though she got lots of verbal backlash for her efforts.

I recommend not confronting an abuser alone ever, or with anyone they can attack without serious consequences.

But, do something.

That’s what I’ve learned. Whatever you do, inaction is what kills you faster than any amount of mistakes along the way will.

I regret little of what I’ve done over the years, and more of what I could not do because of age or lack of understanding.

I’m happy God has led me into freedom, even if it took a long time, it was the perfect timing in the realm of what was possible.

I am learning not to complain about how deliverance comes, so long as it comes.

And that is all for now, though you can be sure I’ll be processing this and having more to say about it, until next time–Natasha.