How Your Relationship Affects Everyone Around You!
Psalm 3:2-6
Many are saying of me, "God will not deliver him."
"Selah" But you are a shield around me, O
LORD; you bestow glory on me and lift up my head. To the
LORD, I cry aloud, and he answers me from his holy
hill. "Selah," I lie down and sleep; I wake again
because the LORD sustains me. I will not fear the tens of
thousands drawn up against me on every side.
"Many of us who have been in abusive
relationships had no idea how our relationship
deeply affected everyone around us. We had all
kinds of excuses for our abuser, and we had all
kinds of reasons why we stayed, but we did not
realize the damage or have an excuse for what it
was doing to our loved ones and our children."
During the 15 years, I spent in an abusive marriage
I had no idea that what I was going through my
struggle in my marriage that my mother was staying
up nights praying for my safety or that she was
having nightmares of someone finding me dead. I
lived across the country, and she had no way
of checking up on me, so all she could do was pray
and trust that God was taking care of me. I was so
surprised after I was up on my feet and living life
again how much people saw from the outside.
I thought I was so clever at hiding the pain and
angry words. I thought I was hiding the abusiveness
with my very well thought out excuses, but you can't
hide the obvious. It can be easy to hide
because no patterns have been set, but slowly it
gets harder to cover it up. My
relationship even reached out to my brothers in a
way that I had never thought. I am the youngest
girl and child number 7 out of eight children.
So I had no idea that they wanted to
protect me as the baby girl and couldn't.
They felt powerless as men
to help their baby sister. They also knew the
struggle that our mother was going through at the
time, and it bothered them that they could not help
her by helping me. A few of them had even
considered coming to rescue me by force but thank
God, my mother's prayers kept that from happening.
I was so caught up in my own little world that I didn't
realize I was causing them to struggle. It was as if
they were caught up in the abuse themselves. I also
realized that it was affecting the few friends I had
left. They were so uncomfortable with how I was being
treated and spoken to that they finally stopped
coming around. The most important people that my
relationship affected were my children. I worked
hard making the home an environment where they
felt safe and loved, but by not seeking help, I was
fostering a secretive hostile environment.
They knew they were loved most of the time, but they still
heard the arguments and witnessed their father call
me stupid and other derogatory names. They never
saw much in the way of affection between us, just
hostility. Because of prayer, my children are not
dysfunctional, but I believe their ideas on love and
marriage have been skewed by what they saw.
If you are in an abusive relationship, please