Christian Women Don’t Need Permission to be the Leader in Their Own Life
Do you sometimes feel like a bird in a gilded cage? Christian women are often taught they need an authority figure to protect them. Is that true?
Do you sometimes feel like a bird in a gilded cage? Christian women are often taught they need an authority figure to protect them. Is that true?
Imagine two terminally ill children. Both are given three months to live. For one, there’s nothing doctors can do—death is certain. The disease is incurable and untreatable.
For the second, there’s a life-saving treatment available. If it isn’t taken, the next three months will be a slow, excruciating crawl toward the end. If the treatment is started as soon as possible, the child will live and—what’s more—thrive.
Family, friends, and church leaders of the second child gather around and declare that the life-saving treatment shouldn’t be accepted. Since the first child’s death is certain, it would be best for the second child to accept death as well. The second child should die. In fact, not only is it right to condemn the second child to death, but their suffering and pain will bring glory to God.
One more thing. The second child is YOUR child.
Thoughts?
I have some. So listen in.
You’re not a toaster.
No matter what you’ve been taught by religious leaders, you’re not a thing to be used.
No matter what you’ve been told by your husband, you’re not an appliance to be owned.
No matter what you’ve come to believe about yourself, you’re not property — at the mercy of a spouse who wants toast on demand.
If you’ve found yourself tormented over how you’re treated in your marriage, especially when it comes to sex, and you waver between disgust and despairing “submission,” I have a new bottom line for you.
It’s four little letters, and it never justifies your mistreatment.
If you break abuse down to the nitty-gritty, at its heart is something called “emotional childhood.” Abusers think everybody should make their life work. Everyone should cater to their whims. Everybody is responsible for their emotions. For fixing them, moment by moment. They shouldn’t have to do anything. Like a stunted emotional child.
If you’re a wife in this situation, you come to believe that you are supposed to fix your husband. You think you’re the only one who can (and that “fixing” him is even possible).
Any movement to protect yourself, to detach, to assign responsibility to him for HIS OWN LIFE and CHOICES, feels like betrayal and selfishness and just plain gross. Your husband and many religious people would agree.
Which leads us right back to: Am I responsible for fixing my husband? Is detaching from him to protect myself wrong?
I’ve been asked these questions hundreds—if not thousands—of times, so I’ve fleshed out an answer that addresses them AND all those icky rabbit trails in your mind.
And unlike what you’ve been told in church, online, or by your husband, this answer doesn’t require you to throw yourself in a pool to save a person who wants to drown…and drag you under too.
We want to believe we live in an advanced civilization—one that has risen above the base prejudice of our unenlightened ancestors. Human beings have a bent to marginalize other people. We want to be the best Sneetches on the beaches, after all.
When you react to your husband’s abuse, it can feel like you’re the abuser.
When he tells you how hard his childhood was, you may feel sorry for him.
When you read about personality disorders, some of the symptoms fit you.
When you read about mental illness, the symptoms also fit him.
Which makes you wonder…
If your husband was abused, is it really fair to hold his harmful behavior against him?
If he has unresolved trauma or a personality disorder, is it wrong to expect him to treat you better?
And even more confusing…
What if your C-PTSD sometimes mimics a personality disorder?
What if your traumatic responses seem abusive?
Get the first chapter of my book, Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage, recommended by therapists. That chapter will help you figure out what’s going on in your marriage.