Breaking Bonds, page 4
If you do go to her website or read her book, which I think are helpful resources, please know that I do not agree with Roberts’ opinion that you do not ever have to forgive your abuser. For the sake of your happiness, personal growth, and peace of mind, I think that it is very necessary—once the divorce is behind you and he can no longer abuse you—for you to forgive him. You will need to release him to release yourself. Keeping anger in your heart for years will block your happiness and make you a bitter person, vulnerable to disease. You will remain tied to him energetically if you don’t forgive and release him and yourself at the appropriate time.
The whole point of going through the divorce is to be happy and at peace with yourself. Right now, you need to use your healthy anger in productive ways to help you get through this. Staying angry after the anger has served its purpose is not good for you at all. You forgive to set yourself free. Forgiveness does not mean tolerating abuse or forgetting that it happened to you.
It was too difficult for me to do alone, so I had to give my inability to forgive in prayer repeatedly over a long period to Archangel Michael for transformation into love. I finally admitted to myself, after much soul searching, that my ex-husband was an unbalanced individual who was doing what he thought he needed to do from a place of fear, and that it was tragic that he was unwilling to get help to deal with his problems. It eventually made me feel a lot of sadness and compassion for him. Although he is much too dangerous to for me to communicate with or be around, I felt lighter and at peace after forgiving him. I have concluded that what he feels or thinks about the divorce, or me, is none of my business. Today I want nothing in my heart except love.
ALREADY JUSTIFIED
Throughout this book, I am going to offer you tools to help you get started down the path of recovering or building healthy self-esteem. For me, improving my self-regard has been and will remain a lifelong project. I have had to work through a lot of damage that occurred over five decades. I am still a work in progress. We all are.
Please do not blame yourself for what has happened. It is not your fault. Many women feel ashamed or responsible for the abuse that their husbands have perpetrated on them, partly because of having been brainwashed by their abusers. Do not buy into negative messages any longer. One thing you need to look at is why you tolerate it—not to judge yourself, but to understand it so that you can change the quality of your current and future relationships. Make the decision not to tolerate abusiveness any longer.
If you have engaged in the dynamic of verbal abuse with your husband, you may have become defensive, justifying yourself and your needs at every turn. I sometimes used to engage in arguments with my abuser to defend myself and became emotional in the way that I reacted. On occasions, I said things that I regretted later, even if they were in fact true. It doesn’t matter. It was degrading to both of us to engage in attacking each other. It is hard to treat someone with respect who is degrading and condemning you.
Do not try to justify yourself any longer; you do not owe that to anybody. In God’s eyes, we all have equal value. In your marriage, you gave your power to a cruel Wizard of Oz, a man hiding the truth that he is mentally and emotionally disturbed behind a curtain. He is not God. He has no right to judge you or anyone else. You must take your power back from him if you are going to have a happy and meaningful life.
Your future happiness is up to you and no one else.
Going through a divorce is hard enough, but divorcing an abuser is incredibly difficult. The process is going to change you as a person, and this is something that you need to embrace. You must change if you are going to avoid repeating this pattern of submission to unacceptable behavior, the negation of your needs, people pleasing, an inability to say no or to protect your boundaries, and so on.
Start saying no to requests for help when you don’t have the time or desire to participate. Do not give an explanation or an excuse. Just say “I can’t help you, sorry” or “I am not able to help, but thank you for thinking of me.”
When somebody asks you for help with a project, try to remember that they usually want to dump something on you that they don’t want to do themselves. Don’t let anyone “volunteer” you without your consent, which people will try to do if they know you have been an easy mark in the past. Just say no. If someone presses you for a reason, do not explain, just say “I can’t, but thank you.”
Practice makes perfect. You will be going through a divorce for many months, and you need to marshal your resources for yourself and your children, instead of squandering them on other people’s needs. The divorce is a wake-up call letting you know that you need to make some changes in yourself if you are going to be happy.
You must let yourself feel your feelings to heal. Have a good cry. Forgive yourself for any mistakes that you have made, and recognize that God loves you. Finding a few peaceful moments to meditate and pray every day may seem difficult, but it is essential that you try to do so every day to become calm and centered. It will give you strength.
THE WALLS WHISPER
“It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.”
―ANN LANDERS
Even if you think that your children are too young to know, it is likely that they are aware of most of what is going on at home, which is not a safe place for them to be. Even if they are not abused personally, they are adversely affected when they witness or hear abuse or disrespect of their mother. If you continue to be abused as they get older, they will be at increased risk for emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression, as well as behavioral and academic problems. Although it is true that some children from abusive homes show no apparent symptoms of psychological distress, abuse affects how they view the world, their boundaries with themselves and others, and what is acceptable behavior with loved ones.
The good news is that children are resilient, and that love combined with direction and therapy can heal their wounds. Most children can overcome the effects of being in an abusive home through professional counseling, a loving family, and community support. The best gift that you can give them as their mother is to set boundaries as to what is acceptable behavior and model for them how people who love each other should treat one another.
Remember, you are sending them a message every day that you stay in an abusive marriage that it is OK for your husband to treat you the way he does. Do you want your son to grow up to be just like Dad? Or for your daughter to marry a man just like her father?
Other than one incident with my son, where my ex-husband banged his head on the floor, I didn’t find out until long after the divorce that my husband had used physical violence against both my son and my daughter when I wasn’t home to protect them. He yanked my daughter by her hair and dragged her, and he hit both of my children with his belt. My daughter finally told me about these incidents when she was in her mid-twenties. I was shocked. She told me that she felt angry that I hadn’t protected her and her brother from the physical abuse.
My ex-husband was careful to make sure that I wasn’t around when he abused the kids. If I had known, I believe that I would have left him a lot sooner than I did. Of course, I should have left after he hurt our son the first time, but I didn’t want to break up the family, and I hadn’t seen him physically abuse either of our children before or after, so I let it slide. I did not ask my children if he had been physical with them when I wasn’t around, a grievous failure on my part. I think that I was too caught up in my pain to notice theirs, and it brought me a lot of sorrow and grief to find that out later.
If you are abused, it is quite possible that your husband is also abusing your children when you are not around to see it, and they are too afraid to tell you.
MOTHER KNOWS BEST
“Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
―SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI
I thought for a long time that I needed to sacrifice my happiness for my children. But what I modeled was a poor example to my daughter of what to look for in a husband and to my son of how to be a good one.
I tell my daughter now that happiness is a choice and it is her responsibility to make sure that she has a fulfilling and happy life. That responsibility belongs to nobody else but her. My son also knows how I feel about this issue, and I feel it is important that I show him by example.
I had hoped that my being a good wife and mother would make me happy. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted a relationship based on mutual respect and love, where man and wife loved and took care of each other. I wanted to be able to state my needs and safely to disagree if I needed to. None of my needs was being met, and I was treated with contempt. I was very sad and hurt, turning my feelings inward, where they turned into depression and overeating. I came to believe that my needs and I meant nothing. This belief is common among domestically abused women. I was suffering from the martyr syndrome, and it was about time that I got down from the cross.
When you do not face the reality of your situation and do something to change it, you will continue to suffer. I stayed in denial of what was happening for way too long and so my suffering continued unnecessarily for years. It was up to me to end the suffering. Nobody else was going to do it for me.
Please don’t stick your head in the sand and hope for things to get better in your own home. If you have already tried therapy and your husband is not willing to go with you, you must accept that he is not going to change. He may try to intimidate you by telling you how much money you are wasting unnecessarily, insisting that everything is fine, or claiming that you are crazy and defective. You need to face the reality of what you are dealing with and make the decision to stay or to leave.
One technique you may find helpful to make this decision is to get out a piece of paper and a pen, and write the following in two columns: A) the benefits of staying, and B) the benefits of leaving. If your husband is abusing you, there will never be a situation where the benefits of staying outweigh the benefits of leaving, even if you must struggle for a few years after you leave. Writing it down on paper will help you see this for yourself.
SCRIPTURE STIGMA
“You are not what others think you are. You are what God knows you are.”
―SHANNON L. ALDER
I thought God wanted me to sacrifice my life and stay married to a man who didn’t deserve me out of a perverted sense of loyalty, as well as my Catholic sensibility. But this is not at all what God wants. As Neale Donald Walsch states so beautifully in his book What God Wants, God wants nothing because God already has and is everything that God ever could want. He is everything, and in everything, including you, so he doesn’t need you to suffer. God wants us to be happy. God’s will for you is your will for you. He asserts: “God cares for you by giving you the power to care for yourself. Each human being can create his or her own reality.”2
I believe that the Bible was divinely inspired. However, I do not take its meaning literally. Whether you do or don’t, if you are a religious Christian you may feel you need a spiritual justification for leaving your husband because you took vows in church when you got married.
My feelings of guilt when I was contemplating divorce were partly due to my upbringing and the strong emphasis on tradition in the Catholic Church. Like other people, I believe that a married couple who are not getting along have an obligation to try counseling to save their marriage, especially if there are children involved. But I also believe that a woman subjected to domestic abuse has the right—and the obligation—to leave her marriage as soon as she can. Your pastor or priest has a moral obligation to support you when you are the victim of domestic abuse. If your pastor tries to “stay neutral,” the pastor is condoning the abuse you have endured by not holding your husband and abuser accountable—and you may need to point this out.
Nobody has walked in your shoes or suffered what you have had to endure. Some well-meaning people in your spiritual community may simplistically quote passages from the Bible or canon law to try to convince you that you are in the wrong for deciding to get a divorce from your abusive husband. Out of ignorance, they may say that even after your divorce you will remain married in the sight of God and that divorce is an unpardonable sin. Or someone might tell you that divorce is only allowed in the case of adultery. Those kinds of remarks can be very painful to hear and may leave you feeling isolated.
Many Christians believe that marriage has four purposes: to satisfy social needs for companionship, to satisfy sexual desire, to rear children, and to facilitate the divine plan for human redemption. It is important for you to recognize and grasp deep down that if you are in an abusive relationship, you do not have a true marriage. Continuing to tolerate abuse prevents your spouse from suffering the consequences of his actions and from “seeing the light.” In fact, if the dynamic of abuse continues, it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for either of you to be filled with Spirit and at peace. This is not God’s plan for either of you.
In a real marriage, both spouses share equal responsibility within the family, and it is up to the couple to decide who is responsible for which tasks or duties in the home, based on competency and preference. Decisions should be made mutually and cooperatively rather than on the basis of what is traditionally men’s work or women’s work. In Ephesians 5:33, the Apostle Paul calls on husbands and wives to be subject to each other out of reverence for Christ. And in Galatians 3:28, he says “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Your husband has violated your marriage by demeaning you and dishonoring you. With his abuse, he is treating you as having less worth than he does or none. You do not have a real marriage in God’s eyes. My belief is that God hates violence more than he hates divorce.
Now, after years of counseling, I am aware that my low self-esteem, established firmly in childhood, allowed me to be vulnerable to accepting marital abuse in the first place because it was a familiar pattern to me. I also believed some flawed messages about what and who God is from my religious upbringing as a Roman Catholic, although it did give me a strong moral compass. The closer I feel to God, the more I can discern how much He loves me. God made us all in His image and did not make mistakes.
In 1 John 4:7–8, it is written: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” I believe that if any woman stays in an abusive marriage, it is an abandonment of herself and a perversion of what God wants for her. I know this to be true in my heart of hearts.
While you are going through your divorce, it will be important for you to establish a personal connection with God yourself through reading, contemplation, prayer, and meditation. One of the gifts of divorce is the opportunity you are given to question everything, including your most closely held and cherished beliefs. Please do not fear this process. It is necessary for your personal spiritual growth. You can trust your discernment, for in Romans 12:2, it is written: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
God is calling you to himself directly. How wonderful. No intermediaries are necessary for this to occur. It does not necessarily mean that you will change or sever your connection with your church. Questioning your beliefs may deepen your faith. The most important thing of all is that you have a more profound personal relationship with God.
The support system at your church can be a lifesaver for you, and some churches have divorce recovery support groups. Please check the website www.divorcecare.org to find a support group in your area. Personally, I had stopped going to church for a long time, but I now attend Mass again on occasion and get a lot more out of it.
My intention here is to encourage you to think for yourself, which is what God wants you to do. You may disagree with me on some of my points, and that is fine with me. I am glad that you are thinking about them. Do not live your life as others would have you do. They have no right to hold you under bondage. Live your life according to your convictions. Other people are not God and have no right to judge you. Talk to God directly and remember that God wants you to be at peace, not to remain in hell to please some judgmental, interfering person who doesn’t have to live in hell with you. Stop being a people pleaser.
TAKE THE WHEEL
“The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”
―J.K. ROWLING
For years I mistakenly thought that God had abandoned me because my husband made me feel worthless. In fact, I had abandoned myself. Doing nothing and staying in a bad marriage is a passive choice, but a choice nonetheless. It has nothing to do with God’s will.
Fear creates obstacles that we need to overcome. You may have a fear of violence, fear of recriminations, fear of ostracism or judgment by others, fear of being alone, or fear of having to stand on your own two feet. You will need to be brave and trust in yourself and in God to give you the tools you need to overcome your fears and reclaim your life.
When you are in a traumatic situation or feel depleted or scared, the most important thing that you can do is to take one day at a time. Sometimes I took things minute by minute to get through the day during my divorce. You may feel completely overwhelmed if you try to do more than that.
Take at least one positive action on your behalf every day, and do not underestimate your abilities. Who you are right now is good enough to sustain you through this crisis. You can do anything with God’s help. God is more powerful than the abusive man you married. And you are, too. You just may not see this yet.
You likely have been deeply wounded by the abuse in your home. Now you need to gear up for battle in the legal system. You need to renew your energy, focus, plan, and heal to prepare for it. In Part Two, I will introduce you to strategies that can help you build your strength physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, so you can do everything you need to do to be successful in navigating through the divorce and having a happy and productive life.
