My goal here is to describe the thoughts that go thru my mind when I struggle, to offer some insight into what abuse does to someone's mind. If you are a survivor and have similar thoughts I hope you find some comfort in that you are not alone, and maybe you can find some encouragement in the experiences I have had. If you have someone in your life that is a survivor maybe this can offer you some insight into why we act differently in certain situations.
This is definitely not a pity party, I don't want or deserve one. We all have crosses to bear and mine are no worse then any others. My wounds are deep, no doubt, but the person who caused them died 34 years ago and I have to take responsibility for not opening my eyes to the healing power of God's love until recently. I ignored Him for decades and I payed the price, only by exposing my wounds to the healing power of His love will I recover, better late then never but I took a long time to figure that one out.
This is also most definitely not particularly fun, there are parts of this story that are downright embarassing. But my wounds need to be exposed to God openly, and by sharing them and letting them free they will no longer control me. Only by hiding and isolating myself can the devil control me, those days are over. He will continue to try and use my past against me to slow me down, to take me off my path towards God, but I have a mighty warrior on my side and He will not fail me.
A quick summary of my issues is probably in order, for those who may not know. Starting when I was 4 or 5 years old my mother physically and mentally abused me, it lasted until I was 11 when she killed herself. She was no longer able to live with herself, she couldn't stop herself so in an attempt to protect me from further damage she took her life. Unfortunately the damage was done. The memories were so devastating that I blocked them for about a decade, during my teen years I had no recollection of what happened, but I knew I was broken, I just didn't know why. What I've realized over the years is that it was the mental abuse that did far more damage. It has molded how I feel about myself, it has left me with a degree of self doubt and self hatred that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
So what does "mental abuse" mean? In my case what it consisted of is my mother teaching me to hate myself, to think of myself as a complete failure and unworthy of love. How does one do that you might be asking....or maybe not.....doesn't really matter cause I'm going to tell you anyway :) These are the types of things she would tell me every day:
"No one will ever love you"
"You are pathetic, disgusting loser"
"If you tell anyone about what we do together they will know how disgusting and horrible you are"
"This is all your fault, its happening because even God hates you and refuses to protect you"
"I'm the only one that will ever love you"
"Everyone hates you, they put up with you because you are so pathetic. But if you ever do anything wrong they'll never talk to you again"
"You are a horrible, ugly, disgusting, fat loser and an embarassment to everyone that knows you"
"Everyone that knows you would be better off if you were never born"
"No one else will ever love you, you are too pathetic to be loved, I'm the only one that would ever put up with you enough to be with you"
"If you are ever with anyone else you will be cheating on me. Are you going to cheat on your own mother?"
Thats enough to give you the idea, I'm sure you notice a theme! Not exactly empowering and encouraging. What's worse is that she trained me to tell myself these same things. I can still remember sitting in my bedroom repeating these same words to myself day after day, hour after hour, over and over again until they were so embedded in my brain that they became subconscious. And once that kind of self hatred is subconscious it affects your whole life. An image I often use to understand how my mind works is that I see the world thru colored lenses, the tint decides how I internalize what happens in my life. A rose colored lens would have me seeing the world in a positive, encouraging way. A dark lens leaves me seeing everything in a negative way, glass half empty, that has been me most of my life.
When you are convinced that you are a horrible person its hard to be super confident, or even the slightest bit confident. The area of my life this has had the greatest impact is my personal life, which probably isn't surprising considering the source. You know that saying that no one will love you if you don't love yourself, ding ding ding they nailed that one! You'd think I was living my life trying to prove that correct. So long story short my personal life has been a complete disaster, and every rejection served to reinforce what my mother told me and convinced me she was correct.
Funny thing is that the answer was right in front of me all along, and I refused to see it. The answer is God, His love for me, His forgiveness, His ability to take my shame from me, His healing power. When I finally became a believer in God and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I was immediately struck with the understanding that God loves me and has deemed me worthy, that His love is so overwhelming that He gave up His Son for my salvation, that He has a plan for me and a purpose for my life, and that He will look out for me and guide my steps to fulfilling that purpose. It was a moment that changed my life, as it changed the color of the lens with which I look at the world. He has given me a new life, He has given me a purpose and a reason to live, and He has told me that my life has meaning and that I'm one of His creations...and that He doesn't make mistakes.
But that doesn't mean my past has disappeared, or that all my memories just vanished. We all have our struggles, those weaknesses that haunt us, and this is mine. I will always struggle with self doubt and hatred, my mothers voice will probably never leave my head, and the devil will always have this to attack me with. And one thing I've noticed since being baptized is that whenever I make a significant step in the right direction towards God I get tested by these old demons. Negative thoughts start creeping into my mind, self doubt takes over, the decisions I feel like God is calling me to make start looking like things I can't do, or I'll fail at. I have this terrible habit of imagining conversations with people, and all the devil has to do is plant the wrong conversations in my daydreaming mind and off I go to doubting myself. Here's how it usually happens, and yes the fact that its coming up on Valentine's Day doesn't help.
"So John what are you doing for Valentine's Day?"
"Nothing"
"What do you mean? Don't you have a Valentine?"
"Ha! Good one, thats funny. No, those types of things don't happen to me."
"Ok, so how's work?"
"Lousy, seems like no matter what I do and how hard I work its never good enough."
"Well that doesn't sound fair."
"My boss hates me, nothing I do changes that."
I really need a new hobby!
So you can see how easily I can slip into a negative state of mind where I would doubt myself and my ability to accomplish the dreams God has placed in my head. And this started happening to me a few weeks ago. I've been mulling over some major decisions, next steps I believe God is calling me to make. And here comes the negative talk in my head, the doubts, the questions. But I am slowly learning that my God won't let me be tested alone, and won't let me face problems without the solution being made available to me. Each time this has happened He has helped me thru the test, He was using the test to teach me something, there was a lesson I needed to learn thru this trial and He was going to let me see it as long as I stayed in his presence. No matter how I felt I stayed the course, I kept reading scripture, I kept praying and I kept asking Him for help. I prayed for the strength to get thru this latest test, and most importantly I thanked Him for this opportunity to grow and stretch my faith. That prayer made a big difference for me as it put me in the mindset to look for the lesson, to accept that He is in control and was using this rough patch for good. Slowly the lessons started coming, scripture started leaping out at me, positive thoughts started entering my mind and I started fighting back against the negative thoughts that had invaded my brain.
These are just some of the more memorable moments:
Driving to work one morning I was listening to Rend Collective and the song "Joy" which I love! I've listened to this song 50 times at least, but there's a line in there that I never noticed before, until this one morning. The song was playing and I heard a voice say "Listen", and this is the lyric I heard "The dark is just a canvas for your grace and brightness". This may not sound like much, but it meant the world to me that morning. What is meant to me is that the dark times in my life are not without purpose, they are forming me into the person God needs me to be. God shines brightest in those that are broken, His greatest glory comes from shining His light into the darkness and showing us the way out, and He has done that for me. Psalms 147:3 says "He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds". It is thru this healing that God shows his greatness, those of us are broken provide the opportunity for His light to shine. I was so overwhelmed by His presence that I cried the rest of the drive into work. This is just one of the lessons He showed me this week, I needed this particular reminder that we learn and grow when times are tough, and that I needed to keep praising Him in all things because He is using everything that happens in my life for good. He is leading me to where He needs me to be.
One of the daily devotionals I read is from Tony Dungy, called Uncommon Life. During this week two very important messages jump off the page. The first spoke directly to the decisions I've been mulling over, and said simply that if dreams enter your mind in the process of seeking God's will and purpose for your life you should follow them. He would not have placed them in your heart if they weren't important. The scripture he pointed to is Romans 12:2, which speaks of letting God transform us and change our minds so that we can see His will for us, which is good and pleasing and perfect. This is exactly what had been happening to me, He has placed dreams in my mind that were showing me His will for me. But the negative thoughts I started having were causing me to doubt whether I was capable of pulling it off. This simple passage was a reminder of who is in charge, and whom I've committed my life to serving. It gave me the confidence to realize that God had planted these dreams in my head, and that it was my job to make them a reality in order to serve Him. It also helped me put my life into a different perspective, that I have very deep wounds that need to heal. That God is the only one that can heal me, but it will take time. And while that process is taking place He will use this situation for good and move me in a direction that requires me to give Him my full attention.
The other passage from Uncommon Life that moved me was about how to define success. Dungy wrote of his first book and the temptation to worry about how many copies it sold. But he realized that success had to be measured in how he was living his life and whether he was fulfilling God's purpose for him. The scripture he pointed to was Isaiah 55:8-9 which speaks of His way being higher then our ways, and His thoughts being higher then our thoughts. It caused me to think about my life in a different way, I had been letting negativity get into my head by defining myself as a failure because of my difficulties in my personal life. Its easy to do in our culture, I realize that I'm an oddball in a world that assumes everyone should have been married a few times by my age. Its easy to define myself a failure based on my facebook status, but thats not God's definition. I have one standard to live up to, God's, and He doesn't really care about my facebook status. He cares about whether I'm seeing this world thru His eyes, and working to fulfill His purpose for me in this life, and whether I'm bringing scripture to life thru my actions and demonstrating to others what He has done for me by letting Him transform me into something greater. That is my only standard, and that is the only thing that will decide whether my life is a success or not.
Another message that jumped out at me along this week was that my body and mind is a gift from God, it is not mine to do whatever I want with. In order to stay on the right track and serve Him best I need to keep my mind moving in the right direction. These fights with negativity slow me down, cause me to doubt myself and pull my eyes away from God. In order to get the most out of the days He gives me I need to be mentally sharp and in a positive mindset. I need to put the rose colored lens on and keep it there. The next day I woke up with a vision of a war raging between good and evil, God and satan, in the form of my mind and who rules over it. I have declared war on my negative thoughts as they are the only thing that can keep me from seeing myself as God sees me, and the only thing that will stop me from fulfilling His purpose for me. The first battle started that morning, I decided to stop whatever i was doing when negative thoughts entered my mind and write them down. Then I would write down what God's words would be on that subject, immediately replacing the negative thought with God's view of me. You see I have realized that these negative thoughts are not from God, and whatever isn't from God can be ignored.
Here is an example:
Thoughts turning negative with all the stress of the list of items to complete at work, anxiety building as to my ability to finish and people getting mad at me. The old challenges of valuing myself if I'm not perfect, if I'm not perfect people will hate me so my tension level rises. God says I'm doing my best and He will take care of everything, I need not worry because He will provide all I need and He'll take care of everything and bring me all that is meant to be. He tells me not to worry, that everything will get done because He is with me and I need not stress.
If I am to fulfill the purpose He has for me I need to see myself as He does. I need to see myself with His loving eyes, and realize that He's planned out my steps because He knows I can succeed. If I see myself with my mother's eyes I'll never live up to what He needs me to be, and that would be a sin against His vision of me. He has a role for me to play in His great symphony, and in order to play my part I need to let Him be the master of my mind.
Even though I had a rough few weeks, I have learned some very important lessons. He has helped me fight against the negative thoughts to move forward with the plans for my next steps, with the confidence that He placed these dreams in my head to lead me in the direction He needs me to go. He has shown me how to measure myself, by His standards and not by worldly standards. He has shown me how to replace negative thoughts with His thoughts, to accept His vision of me as one of His children that He loves and has great plans for. It has been a difficult few weeks but well worth it, He has set my course and placed my next steps in front of me. Not a bad week!
