Letters to an Abused Soul: When Love is “No”

I’m helping someone I love work through the realities of what has been going on in her marriage.  It is hard complex stuff.  It is not fun.  But as she laid her marriage dreams in the grave and stops denying the truth of her situation, she is beginning to find peace.  I was musing tonight over some of the serious issues she has dealt with, and how difficult it is to accept the painful truth of WHAT IS, vs. what she wants or what the books promised she could have if only she’d do __[insert book's promise here].  I thought I’d ramble it out here tonight, these thoughts I am slowly formulating on abuse, on some of the ways we are destroyed without a fist ever being thrown, and, most importantly, on how love responds to abuse.    

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What do you do when a husband (or a church leader or a friend) says he is sorry, even repeatedly, never actually explaining what it is he’s sorry for, but expecting his general apology to result in your general all-encompassing forgiveness?  What if you grow to hate their apologies, knowing that all they do is provide them with one more way to control you, to tell you what you can and can’t feel. 

He says he is sorry while still engaging in destructive behavior towards you and defending his right to do so?  How does that make sense?  But you are too confused to understand what is going on.  All you know is that his apologies take away your rights, not give them back. 

What do you do if, after hurting you for the umpteenth time (not some little slight but actual violations of your personhood), they remind you that, hey, they’ve apologized, remember?  To them, that nullifies your right to be in pain—and gives them the right to rebuke you for not being forgiving! 

What do you do when he says you don’t have a right to be angry, that you don’t have a right to be hurt?  What do you do when your abusive friend says that because her experience wasn’t painful, it must mean that your experience wasn’t either.  (After all, it didn’t hurt her, right?). 

If you say that it hurt you, the abusive person feels you are threatening his experience, his truth, so he works to defend his version at all costs.  Because in his mind, only his experience if valid, and yours is competition.  Oh, if you think you were hurting before, wait till he get through with you now—if you were expecting him to actually hear you, that is, if you were actually expecting him to love you more than he loves himself.  

What do you do when the abusive person (the abusive church or parent or friend or spouse), changes the story, when he takes out what he did, forgets those violations of trust or refuses to acknowlege them, and rewrites your history together into a 50/50 problem, “just a difficulty in getting along, that’s all,” and nods approvingly when others start repeating that line.  You might even be tempted not to mind so much, since it’s a vast improvement on the prior years when he was convinced that it was all your fault.

What do you do when he (or your church leader or your family member) despises you, hates you, because you finally got up the guts to make it stop—you’re sick 0f it and you’re not playing the twisted little games anymore—and at the very same time, talks about you as if he’s lived to please you, lived to make you happy, which, in a sense, he truly believes.  (And is partly true.  It’s not that it was 100% bad.  It never was 100% bad).  In fact, if you sit down over coffee with him and listen to his tale, your heart will probably brim over with pity for that poor dear soul who works so hard to try and make his wife (or congregant, or child) happy.  How could anyone not appreciate such a tender gentle person, you’ll think? 

Do tender gentle people tell their loved ones that they have to do humiliating things in order to prove their love?  Do tender gentle people demand perfection from their loved ones, letting them know that they are never going to be satisfied with their efforts because their efforts will never be enough? 

Do tender gentle people look with scorn on the rest of humanity, believing that no one is as wise as they are, and make it a point to let you know that you are lucky that you got them, that it’s a good thing you did or you’d have probably never made it?  Do tender gentle people react with rage toward their loved one when their loved one expresses pain at the way they’ve been treated? 

Do tender gentle people manipulate their loved ones into believing lies? 

What do you do when they openly admit that they’ve lied to you—not just a little lie, but doing things like regularly lying to you and/or reinforcing previous lies?  What if they lied to you about what “God” was telling them to do (meaning, if you didn’t do what they wanted you to do, you were disobeying God, because they lied to you and told you, repeatedly, that God was telling them such-n-such in order to guarantee that you would do what they wanted and stop asking pesky questions). 

You were such a trusting little thing, weren’t you?  You believed him/them.  They kept telling you to trust him, admonishing you for your “rebellious” lack of trust.  So finally you did.  You wanted to be good, you wanted to love God, and you never thought, never in your wildest dreams, that this “godly man/church” would tell you anything other than the truth. 

In fact, what do you do when you realize you’ve been conned, regularly, repeatedly, by someone who is literally a mastermind at manipulating?  When years of your life were spent being lied to, being twisted, being played?  When you thought you were giving your all to something that was living and good, and really your energies and your love and your spirit were being sucked down into a black hole that would never be satisfied, that could never get enough, that would always want more until it finally sucked out the last bit of life you had. 

And when, because of your own warped view of what it means to be loving and gracious—perhaps even a view that would be perfectly healthy if you were dealing with a healthy spouse or a healthy church or a healthy friend—you knew that something was wrong, something didn’t feel right, yet, because you thought that love never stopped giving, you let it happen again, and then again, and then again, until it became so normal that you forgot it wasn’t.        

I think you get away from that spouse or that church or that friend.  

I think it doesn’t matter how nice they were that day.    They might think that because they were nice today, because they were kind to you yesterday, because they were sweet three days ago, that you are wrong for getting far away from them.  “You shouldn’t leave your church, you know.  You shouldn’t leave your spouse.  You shouldn’t reject your friend.  Good people don’t do things like that.”   

They might even be so nice, so charming, to all your friends and/or family, that they might put on a convincing act that makes you look like the bad guy for getting away, who knows?  They are good at that kind of thing.  And, to make it even more confusing and complex, some of the kindness is probably completely real.  There is a very nice person or group in there.   Very rarely are destructive people actually made of pure evil.  This letter is not saying that the person or the group is all bad, that everything was 100% horrible.  It’s just the parts that are damaging are so very very damaging. 

They might get mad, then, that you still stay away.  But the fact that they’re mad proves that nothing has really changed at all.   

Zacchaeus repented, upon recieving the grace of a Messianic embrace, and promptly gave back four times what he had stolen.  I think that loving a Zacchaeus is good.  Jesus loved him before he repented, didn’t He?  So we have it on record that a person who robs you blind is okay to love—but not to give your bank account password to.  That would be stupid.   

In like manner, a person who has abused you is okay to love.  But not to give your heart to.   Not to be in close proximity to, either.  Which goes against the “good Christian” code.  But, hey, you’ve already broken that code (the first time you put your foot down and said no), so what have you got to lose? 

He or she is probably safe to be around when he’s repented.  And that’s not that little “generic sorry” stuff they’ve been pulling since you’ve known them.  Repented means actually repented: acknowleged what they’ve done, and brought you four times what they took from you.   Repentance costs them, not you.  And, if it’s the real thing, they’re even not going to mind if you flinch everytime they come near your heart for a while.  Truly repentant people are like that.  They get it. 

So that’s kind of depressing, because how often do you think real repentance happens?  Rarely.  It takes guts.  It takes a real and genuine person to do that kind of thing, because it feels like death.  It feels like the worst thing in the world.  It feels like it will kill them.  The sad thing is, it’s the thing that will set them free.  But that’s not what it feels like at first, and that’s exactly why it’s so rarely done.  But, hey, some might.  Maybe even your spouse.  Maybe even your church leader.  Maybe even your friend.  Short stumpy Zacchaeus did it.  So don’t lose hope altogether.   

In the meantime, I don’t think you should have to listen to any more rebukes about your lack of grace or your lack of forgiveness or your lack of love.  You are dealing with a person or a group who doesn’t understand those concepts in the first place, so of course they will think that you are wrong, of course they will think that you shouldn’t dare have boundaries, that you have no right to say that you’ve been deeply wounded. 

 Actually, I’ve changed my mind.  Listen to their demands on that one thing, on love.  Do work on being more loving.  Please.  But work on the real kind of loving, love that actually works for the good of it’s object.  And that might mean the kind of love that delivers a deaf ear.  And puts up, “No Trespassing” signs, shuts doors and locks them.  The kind of love that draws clear boundaries and isn’t afraid of an abuser’s raging, lying, crying, or warped spiritual judgements. 

What the object of your love needs is the kind of love that says no.  Because, in this case, a love that says yes isn’t love.  “Yes,” just hands over more bombs for the madman to launch, and, honey, there is nothing redemptive about being slowly destroyed.