Supportive Resources

Ok, so in this post, I am adding the things that were helpful in my journey towards leaving my abusive husband and after having left him, also losing the support of my church family.

1. The biggest help was Theophostic Ministy.  I am trained in this, and my counselor was trained in it also.  I dealt with a lot of hurt and pain from my past that kept me in fear and bondage to the ways my husband was relating to me.  Once I was able to allow Jesus to help me look at the stuff from my past that was hindering me, and allowing people to treat me poorly, it was easier to deal more appropriately with the more current stuff that was happening with me and my husband.  This website will direct you to a list of people who can help you in this way.  It really helped me.  

2. A Social Worker.  You can ask your family doctor about where to find a social worker to talk to.  They are trained to help families, and can give good counsel, as well as provide options for you, as well as supportive resources in your area.  Because of the gal who helped me, I am now training to become a social worker.  :)

3.  Put a local crisis number in your cell phone for easy access.  Depending on how controlling your hubby is, you may need to put it under another name.

4.  Have a place or two where you know you can go if you need to be safe.  I had some friends who offered to be those places for me.  At the time, I also had a key to my church, and this one night when my husband flew into a rage, I left the house, and locked myself in the church after midnight for a couple of hours and called a crisis line and just talked to someone for a while.

5.  Divorce Care.  This really helped me a LOT.  It's a Christian based program to help individuals understand and cope with the fallout of separation and divorce.  If you're only getting separated, don't be afraid to utilize this helpful program!  It still applies!  :)   They also have a really great devotional book that takes you through a whole year!  You can get it in paperback, or online HERE.


6.  Got kids?  Here are some supports for them!
     
 I took my daughter to the DC4K classes while I attended the adult Divorce Care classes, and man, that really helped alot, for both of us.  :)  It comes with a booklet, and they have snacks and games, but also sharing and stuff.  Admittedly, the vids they use are quite corney, so the kids may do some eye rolling, but, it does educate them about divorce, and reassures them about God loving them, and their parents love them, and it's not their fault and all that.  DC4K

7.  Books, I love books!  Education has been such a helpful thing in my journey through divorce.  Here are a few that have helped me understand how I can be divorced AND a Christian at the same time.  LOL  (Really, it can be done!)

While this book mainly focuses on abuse that happened in childhood, there was definitely a lot that applied to the current situation with my husband in understanding what abuse is, and what the perpetrators of abuse are like, and why, and how it affects a person and why, and how to set boundaries with that.

  This book was really helpful because I found the "biblical" evidence I needed to feel like leaving my husband was ok.  Up till then, it was hard to reconcile the idea of it in my mind...

  I haven't read the whole book, but what I did read really revolutionized some of my thinking.  When I first learned about it in bible college, in a counseling class there, I burst out crying because it was biblical stuff that I NEEDED to know 8 years previously!  Had I learned these things from the pulpit, perhaps I would have left the marriage sooner, rather than trying to carry my cross, martyring myself over and over in a bad situation!

Here is the book review:
IF CHRIST HAD PRACTICED THE KIND OF LOVE WE ADVOCATE NOWADAYS, HE WOULD HAVE LIVED TO A RIPE OLD AGE. We've come to view love as being nice. Forgiving and forgetting. Yielding to the desires of others. Yet the kind of love modeled by Jesus Christ has nothing to do with manners or unconditional acceptance. Rather, it is shrewd. Disruptive. Courageous. And, as a result, socially unacceptable. In Bold Love, Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Tremper Longman III draw out the aggressive, unrelenting, passionate power of genuine love. Far from helping you "get along" with others, Bold Love introduces the outlandish possibility of making a significant, life-changing impact on family, friends, coworkers-even your enemies. "Bold love is anything by passive," writes Dr. Allender. "It is unpredictable, cunning, and creative. It is a violation of the natural order of things. In many cases it will unnerve, offend, disturb, or even hurt those who are being loved. But in the end it will also compel them to deal with the internal disease that is robbing them (and others) of true beauty." So if it feels like you've turned the other cheek so many times your head is spinning, it's probably time to take a second look at your practice of love. Because there's nothing redemptive about a love that just accepts people for who they are.


Now that's what I'm talking about!!!  :D  


So, it's really ok to allow someone, like, say, your husband, to experience and endure the consequences of being a shitty individual to you.  Really it's ok.  Remember he CHOSE to be shitty.  :)


  I did a book report on this book for the "Marriage and Family" class I took in Bible college.  I was the only divorced person in the class, as you can imagine.  LOL  It was very good.  This author is one of the top 5 biblical scholar authors that were recommended to us when doing a research assignment at Bible college.  It was quite enlightening.  :)

  This helps you understand WHY you might be addicted to trying to make that marriage work.  We can all get addicted to things, and I certainly was addicted in that way, and this book helped me to see it.  :)

There are so many good books out there.  But this will get you started with something.  It's not easy to be a Christian and then try to get yourself out of a bad marriage.  It's really hard, I know.  But there are lots of us out there!  And if you have any questions about anything, please feel free to ask.  I have a BA in counseling from a bible college, and I am also studying to be a social worker.  I am 42, I have 2 teenagers, and I'm no longer a doormat, because I am no longer afraid.  If I don't know the answer, I know where to find it.  Ok.

Hang in there!  And I leave you with one last book... which I feel is kinda poignant...

   Bitch:  In Praise of Difficult Women.  Cuz, it's really ok to be labelled as "difficult".  (See Dan Allender's "Bold Love" book.  LOL)

Life Collage

One form of "Art Therapy" is to make a collage. I have a friend who, when she was staying in a psych ward for a time, had made several different-themed collages to represent the different things about herself. There were dark parts, and happy parts. Contemplative parts. Wishes for the future parts.

At that time, oh, about 2002-ish? I was a new Christian, I had started going to counseling, and I had started studying Theophostic Ministry (http://www.theophostic.com/). After a conference I went to with other friends who were studying it, I felt very inspired. I had so much going on in my life, troubled marriage, son being bullied at school, unpacking memories of being abused as a kid, my own parent's divorce and how that had also impacted me. I was so unhappy, yet I was also very happy because I had found Jesus, and I knew that even though everything else seemed to be going to shit, at least I knew HE loved me. I had many dreams and aspirations that I just couldn't seem to attain. I was spinning my wheels, yet I still had much hope. I needed a tangible way to express it all.

So I bought a 4ft by 8ft piece of plywood. And I made a collage on it. LOL

I started telling my story with pictures and words cut out of magazines, and "Our Daily Bread". I began on the left, where there was anger, denial, pain, sorrow. I had a bridge from the word "pain" to the word "hope" which moved into finding God, and getting counseling, and making new friends. I had an area about being married "Will my marriage last?" was one of the quotes. That all moved into finding answers from God to many of my painful memories that I worked through in counseling. These answers set me free inside, brought me inner peace, even though my home life was less than peaceful, and didn't feel very safe. On the far right, this was for ideas of where I wanted to go in life. I had the words "freedom" and "peace" and "love" sprinkled among pictures of happy couples, and women singing, and moms cuddling with their children. I had lots of scriptures that spoke into all of these various thoughts. The one that stands out for me the most is: Joel 2:25 - "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten." It did kinda feel like bit by bit, parts of my life, my self, had been eaten away. But here was a promise from God, that He would see to it that I was restored.

I didn't know how he would restore me. I often prayed for a "new husband". I didn't know if God would do a new thing in my current husband, or send a completely new person into my life. He gave me that answer after my ex moved out. Isaiah 43:18: "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." It certainly did feel like my life was one big wasteland. And it was hard to imagine how it would be restored.

So anyways, I'm back into Hulk Hogan's book "My Life Outside the Ring". There is much that he experienced in his marriage that I can resonate with. But around the time when he was at his lowest point, someone gave him the book "The Secret". Which is kinda funny, cuz I have given books away like that too. He writes about how he learned from that book, and a few other books after that, how your own thinking is what propels you in a certain direction. If you're wallowing around asking why is this happening to me... well, you're just gonna keep on going in that negative direction and keep on feeling sorry for yourself, and never move forward. He wrote about the laws of attraction, "If all you think about is how grateful you are to live this amazing life filled with wealth and happiness of every kind? Well, that life of wealth and happiness can be yours. It might take a long time to get there, but it's coming."

That's when it clicked for me, that the collage I made all those years ago, that was me. "It may take some time to get there, but it's coming." "See I'm doing a new thing, making a way in the wilderness" "Restoring what the locusts have eaten." It's like, today, I see that collage as having a huge impact on breaking the power of the negativity I was living in. Like a declaration of independence, a declaration of my life's direction, in spite of the locusts chewing away, the demons of the past and present, pulling me down, those unseen forces that hold onto you, the unseen walls that keep you trapped. If you imagine Hulk Hogan, punching a hole in a brick wall, that's what this collage kinda did, it punched a hole in the wall, and sent the scavengers scattering.

There were other things that punched holes in the walls, and a lot of them have tumbled down. But that quote from Hulk about the laws of attraction from "The Secret", that just opened up a whole bunch of thoughts and realizations about my life and the things that had an impact on it, even though I didn't know the magnitude of the impact at the time.

And now, I'm off to cuddle with my daughter and watch another Princess movie. She is sick, and we've already watched 4 movies in the last couple of days. It's a princess marathon, and she is my princess. My life is taking the form of the images I had glued onto the plywood of my future. I envisioned it, I prayed for it, it took a while, but it's here. :)