Being abused and living with a Lie controlling your every thought and action makes you very self centred. I was very self centred. I could not love my husband. I loved my children to the best of my ability, but I know I did not love them as they needed to be loved. There are many things I could say to stick up for myself and the reason I was not able to love. How do you love a husband who is severely emotionally abusive to you and who rapes you violently when he is drunk. No I did not try to stop him from this physical act. I did not fight back. I did not say no. I just let it happen. This does not mean it was not rape. I was so terrified of him and so lacking in any kind of belief in the fact that maybe I did not deserve such treatment, that I let it happen. That does not mean it was not rape. He did not have to ever hit me because I did not ever answer back or try to stop him. I lay with tears rolling down my cheeks though the whole act, but he never once saw the tears or cared. How do you keep loving when you are treated unlovingly? You can’t.
But this Jesus was showing me a new way to live. He was asking me to become a different person. He was asking me to only look at what I was doing wrong in the marriage, even though I was perfectly justified in not being able to love my husband. If I would do this, I would change and so the marriage could change.
I was a person who lived inside a deeply buried Lie that said ” there must be something radically wrong with you but you are too stupid to know it. Even your own mother cannot love you. Therefore you are unlovable. No one will ever be able to love you.
I can never stress enough how powerful these Lies are. They have gone into us as children when we are unable to know that they may be incorrect. I was unable to think that maybe my mother was wrong in not loving me. Maybe she had a problem that prevented her from being able to love me. I just believed that all mothers love their children. That is who mothers are. Therefore the problem was that there had to be something very wrong with me but I was too stupid to know it.
A person who has such a deep Lie inside controlling them is self centred. They cannot be any other way. So that was the first thing I had to look at. What was it like for my husband living with someone who was self centred. Everyday I was sick or in pain. I was physically and emotionally weak, always dwelling on what was wrong with me and how horrible my life was. I was not pleasant to be around. True, he did not help at all. He was also living under a deeply controlling Lie. But did that mean we were going to live like this forever? Yes, unless one of us changed. And I had to be the one to change. And I did. More next month.