This world is full of abuse, hatred, selfishness, manipulation, exploitation, violence, cruelty, etc. How do we maintain our sanity and protect our self from such treatment? Understanding the mindset fueling abuse, and God’s antidote for it, is key to avoiding it.
When one person focuses on manipulating another, they use tactics such as destabilizing their victim’s mental processes by denying or twisting the facts, undermining their feelings, disrupting their environment, etc. When the “rug gets pulled out from under us”, we fall hard.
Our trust in our self, our mental and emotional rationale, our basic identity, our decision-making ability, etc. diminish over time as their onslaught subtly or aggressively erodes our lifestyle, mindset and stability. We become indecisive, fearful, insecure, and we doubt our perspective on reality.
We make excuses for our abuser’s actions and attitudes, taking the blame on our self, and we start accusing our self as well. We believe that we are overly sensitive, confused, not good enough, unable to make decisions, constantly at fault, that we cannot measure up, etc.
We feel like we must depend on our abuser for everything, we lie in order to avoid censorship, apologize too often, question our attitudes and motives and feelings, doubt our abilities, etc. However, there is a way out of this dilemma, which does not require major changes in our life.
We can trust in the Lord, rather than in our self or others. He enables us to identify the truth from the lies and misconceptions. We can journal our interactions to refer back to them later. God teaches us that our opinions, concerns, and needs are valid and deserve recognition and resolution.
Walking in the Spirit moment by moment helps us to maintain our distance from abusers and to make our own choices according to the will of God for us. Manipulators will not stand for us taking control of our life, but we can remove our self from their abuse and continue to pray for their salvation.
Prayer:
Father God, help us to distance our self from the abuse we receive – either emotionally, mentally, or even physically if necessary. Remind us that constant confrontation or arguing is not any healthier than the abuse that we were receiving. Give us the courage to rally a support group around us that will give us honest feedback about our situation.
Teach us how to discern the triggers that cause our doubts, over-reactions, anger, depression and moods. Remind us that there may not be a right and wrong side to a situation, but just a difference of perspective and needs. Give us compassion for our self and others, teach us to nurture our self rather than to have expectations of others to do it for us. We do not want to live in codependence on another human being.
Thought for the Day:
We cannot change another person’s deep-seeded issues, personality, behavior, attitude and opinion of us, but we can change our response to them, our trust in them, our attitude toward them, and our tolerance of their behavior toward us; they are entitled to make their decisions, but then we are free to make our decisions according to God’s will for us, in order to protect our self as well.
