PCR and Marriage

I have done my share of  premarital and marital counseling.

And I’ve seen how relationships slowly progress over the years towards profound depth and richness, or towards alienation and divorce.

I find a pattern:    where one or both partners is a devotee of personal control religion (PCR), the chances of that marriage ending are high.

This fact can be seen by some familiar scenarios:

1) I need  you!

Some gain control over their world by having a significant other in their life.   They overly depend on, find their sole identity in, and try to suck security out of their partner.

“I need you” is their constant message.    “And I need you to need me” is their agenda.

Abandonment is what they fear most.   So they try to be indispensable, and end up being clingy and possessive.

Sadly, the drained partner begins to resent this insatiable demand and begins to fantasize about escaping it.

They feel trapped.  That’s why lot of affairs are really jail-breaks.

And that’s why a lot of “personal control through being needed” kind of people marry abusers.   Personal control through total domination meshes well with personal control through total dependency.

Dependency-oriented control feels suffocating.

That’s because the relationship is addiction-like–one partner is the user and the other is the used up drug.   And, again, the unspoken quest is to obtain personal control by always having a significant other in one’s life.

We see this in gals who always have to have a guy in their life to be OK.   And in guys who always need to have a gal hanging on his arm.

They need to be needed.  And if they aren’t needed then they are nothing and lose control.  But it’s never enough.   And if the pattern isn’t broken before marriage, the very sick marriages outlined above can easily result.

2) I use you!

Another and far more common scenario is the “I love what you do for me” kind of relationship.

This person seeks personal control through self-fulfillment.

They meet a partner, and the unspoken agenda is, “You must always fulfill me”.    One or both partners is seeking personal control through personal fulfillment.

But it can’t last.

The narcissistic couple consumes each other until one or both lose their ability to please.

Then they start to say things like,  “You’re not as romantic as you used to be.   You’ve gained weight.   You no longer any fun. ”

The responsibilities, works hours, children, and other mundane life duties block a lot of self-fulfillment.    In real life, we’re just too tired to live on fantasy island.

So the fulfillment worshiper begins to look around and see lots of fun, thinner, romantic people of the opposite sex and begin to compare.

They feel cheated.  They feel entitled to a better deal.   So they quit the marriage and trade in the old model for a new and improved one.

Then they start the pattern again.

This is the sad story of so many modern American marriages.

Marriages that could be saved if the personal control through self-fulfillment agenda was abandoned.

But instead of the institution of marriage being at fault, the problem lies squarely with the religion of personal control that feeds the selfish using and using up of people in marriage.

One human being simply isn’t enough for another human being.

Never has been.  Never will be.   And, happily, never needs to be.

More about this other way to be married the next time around.

Our Real National Religion

What do Americans really worship?

There’s a famous story in the Bible where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai, stays there 40 days to receive the Law of God, but has to run down the mountain because… the people who had just sworn allegiance to Yahweh God were dancing around a bovine idol.

Which raises the question:   Is there a modern-day golden calf in the USA?  

Is there an idolatry infecting both political parties, most of our families, and many of our churches?

Is there something right in front of us, something spiritually toxic, that we can’t seem to see?

I believe there is.  

And I stumbled upon this discovery in a funny way.

Back-track 20 years, where my wife’s OB/GYN was discussing with her the option of an epidural block during delivery.

We asked him why so many more women were having one.    And he said this, “A lot of suburban women these days don’t want to lose control.   An epidural block allows them to maintain their aura of control.”

Fast forward to the 2007, where I was reading books on addiction and the treatment of addiction as part of doctoral studies.

In one of the best works, Stephanie Brown of Stanford University, mentioned how the key for treating addiction was for the therapist to help the addict lose control and begin the Twelve-Steps.

She went on the say that many therapists had an unspoken philosophy of personal control, and an agenda of helping their clients regain personal control.

Her conclusion:  therapists with this “control agenda” were a positive menace to an addict’s recovery.

I believe that most people in the United States, whatever box they may check on their religious preference form, subscribe to the religion of personal control.

The bottom line of this belief system is to gain control at all costs, and maintain control at all costs.

It can manifest itself as religious, irreligious, and indifferent towards religion.   It can be found at the heights of power and in the gutter, in self-help success seminars and in Twelve-Step clubs, in all regions, rural, suburban, or urban.

But it’s unalterable, inviolable creed is this:  One must never lose control.

What happens when two people marry who worship this idol?   A battle for control.

What happens when they have kids?   A battle for control.

What happens devotees of personal control are elected to office?  A battle for control.

What happens when they attend church?   A battle for control.

What happens when they indulge repeatedly and lose control to a substance, activity, or relationship?    They try even harder to control but end up losing control so they indulge more and more to regain control and therefore spiral downwards in a vicious circle.

It is fatal.

Personal control is thus the master addiction behind all other addictions.  

It is the chief idol in the American pantheon.    It is as American as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Why are our politics so nasty?   Why are so many of our marriages so nasty?   And so many of our families?   And so many of our businesses?    And so many of our neighborhoods?  And so many of our churches? And so many of our souls?

Because we have danced around the idol of personal control so long we cannot stop–even when it’s killing us and destroying so much we cherish and hold dear.

The very frenzy of our ravings, the very fevered pitch on the Left, Middle and Right, tells us that a national breaking point is near.

Personal control will either be forcibly stripped from us in a devastating way, or we can voluntarily surrender it, hit bottom, and find redemption on the other side of it.

But we will surely lose it either way.

I hope, over the next few entries, to examine how the religion of personal control impacts marriages, politics, churches, and other areas of life.

And I hope to share a way out.

Recovery’s Hardest Test

My recovery has been a long and rich journey full of surprises.

But not all of those surprises were pleasant!

Nine years ago I entered into another layer of recovery.

It began when I became responsible for a children’s ministry, and when I saw parents making choices that hurt their kids.

I began to have sharp exchanges and close spirits–all in the name of protecting children from violation.

But what I was actually doing was protecting myself from seeing children be hurt, which was protecting myself from hurt.

And this reaction, in turn, provoked other people to react to me.

Which made me nervous and react to their reactions.

So things escalated.

The culmination came when I want on a sabbatical and a fellow leader rose up against me with an arm full of accusations and an agenda to get rid of me.

The more I tried to patch it up, the more I tried to explain, the more it fueled his anger.

I was at my wit’s end.   So I asked the Lord, “What do I do?”

He told me to submit myself to my fellow elders and do anything and everything they told me to do.

He required me to not defend myself, and opened my eyes to my reactivity.

Reading through the book of Proverbs at this time, I saw that fools react and talk too much, and fail to rule their spirits.

The time had come to discipline (not eliminate or suppress) my emotions and my mouth.

I got quieter and said less and listened more.    I slowed down my responses and became very slow to escalate problems.

If I felt like telling someone off, I learned to bite my tongue and pray for them.

At the same time, I learned the power and joy of submission

Since I wasn’t resisting anything and was willingly and cheerfully doing everything I was asked to help the situation, I stopped adding fresh grievances and my reactions stopped clouding the issue.

The unhappy fellow leader, however, got more and more frustrated.

He began losing control and reacting more, and became more and more unreasonable with less and less credibility.

When I gave up defending myself and trusted God enough to submit to a hard road, I was free!

I no longer needed the other man to stop being threatening.

He lost his emotional hold over me based on my fear.    And working on the Proverbs way of disciplining my emotional reactions and words gave my fewer words more power and deeper impact.

Recovery’s final exam is learning now to submit to Christ in the midst of unjust, unavoidable suffering

It happens when suffering becomes painfully too close to home, too similar to past situations, too much like what happened before.

We are brought back to the one place we never, ever wanted to return to–the re-enactment of our past abuse in the present.

But now we are adults, now we have an Abba in heaven, so we choose to trust Him and step forward into it.  And find new mercy.

This breaks it’s emotional power like nothing else.

And, on the other side of it, we learn we do not need to cower before the human agents who inflict it, but bow to the God who holds all the power and who does His agenda– with or without their cooperation.

It is where we finally learn that we really are in the palm of His hand, not theirs.

It is where we have serenity in spite of the chaos.

It is where we stop reacting, and begin really living in freedom and hope in spite of the pain.

It is the Christian life.

Facing Down the Why of It

Of all the vexing questions that haunt the traumatized and the abused, the question “Why did this happen to me?” is perhaps the hardest one.

But not all whys are the same

I am not talking about the defiant, God-owes-me-an-answer kind of why.

I am not talking about an impersonal, detached, scientific investigation kind of why.

I am talking about a reverent, genuine exchange between a searching child of God and his or her God.

My own search took me to places like the book of Job and the book of Lamentations–potent exchanges between God and a suffering son.

It took me to the Garden and the Cross–the most potent exchange of all between the Father and His suffering Son.

But it really happened in response to a dream.

It was about 13 years ago and I had a very vivid dream where I saw my attacker/pedophile on his bicycle.   It wasn’t a long dream.  And it was right before I woke up.

But it caused an upwelling of grief and it provoked a deep question, “Why, Lord?  Why?”

His answer arrested me

It was something to the effect, “My son, there was no other way.”

There was no other, less painful way, for me to be saved.   There was no other, less painful way, for me to gain a pastor’s heart.   There was no other, less painful way, to be fruitful in ministry.

If there had been another, less painful way for all this good to come about, then my Father in heaven would have provided it.

My mind instantly went to the Garden where Christ begged and begged His father to remove the cup of suffering from Him, but choose God’s will instead of His own.

The implied answer in this exchange was there was no other way to save humanity, and that this was the least painful and only way to do it.

It wasn’t random.  It wasn’t flippant.   It was terribly necessary and thus unavoidable and inescapable.

For me, too, there was no other way

Much like chemotherapy almost kills a patient to save him or her from the certain death of cancer, and can only be justified in the face of certain death, so, for me, part of my answer why is the fact that there simply was no other way to save me.

Looking backwards, I could not deny that there was a direct line of events that began with the rape and ended with where I’m at today.

Horrific, shocking means were used to interrupt and redirect my life in this best of directions.

So I take God at His word on this point.

Not everyone will be able to piggyback so easily on my answer to the question why.

It only took me 25 years to be ready to hear it.

But I’m glad I did hear His answer…and accept it.

Bitter Root Judgments and Inner Vows

I’ve picked up many gems of wisdom and mercy along the way.

One of them was among pastoral friends 15 years ago–a friend was going to a seminar on helping people deal with past wounds to their souls.

He came back and spoke to the rest of us about inner vows and bitter root judgments.

I instantly saw the application to my own life.

After my rape event, I constructed a whole world around never allowing it to happen to me again.

I avoided places, situations, or people who reminded me of that day.

I became hyper-vigilant and very aware of what is going on in the physical environment all around me.

I avoided any situation where I might feel detained or confined–boxed in by trucks on the freeway, people crowding me, etc.

Behind all this feverish effort were a collection of  inner vows:

“I will never let anyone do that kind of thing to me again!”  

“I will never be hurt that way again!”

“I will never allow myself to be humiliated again!”

“I will never be violated again!”

“I will never be confined again!”  

“I will not trust anyone or anything else again!”  

“I will not lose control again!”

These vows were, ultimately, directed towards God.    I could tack on, “–not even God!”, to each of those statements.

There was a defiant, fist-shaking quality about them.

And they were all about me trust me to protect me–in defiance of any and all challengers.

Animating all of it was bitterness–I was hurt and angry and wanted someone to blame and grasp something to control–so I swore unspoken oaths to do so.

If God or my parents can’t and won’t protect me, I will!  So there!

But there was also a strong element of unreality to these vows

They were vows I could not keep as a vulnerable little human being.

Inevitably, my bubble of control would be punctured and I would feel the very thing I vowed never to feel again.

Then the other part kicked in, the unspoken vow to punish myself if I ever failed to keep the vows.

Much self-destructive behaviors, and much my self-inflicted shame and self-condemnation, was about hating myself for failing myself whenever I was hurt, humiliated, or unable to protect myself.

Renouncing the Vows

For my recovery to progress, there came a point where it was time to renounce these inner vows as unkeepable, ungodly, and unnecessary.

There came a point where it was time to address the bitter cry of a violated 12 year old and escort that boy to Jesus Christ.

I had to abandon myself to Him, and let go of the mandate to never be violated again.

Next to salvation, it was the great turning point of my life

And it’s a decision I have to repeat over and over and over again.   It is a life of sheer vulnerability to His love, and therefore sheer freedom as His beloved.

Have you made any promises to yourself to never be hurt again?  

Any bitter-root judgments and attempts to erect a self-protective life?  

Tired of running away?   Tired of carrying all that around?

Stay tuned for the next installment!

Surfing the Waves of Recovery

Recovery can be compared to the ocean waves of an incoming tide.

A wave advances onto the sand and sets a high point and then retreats…but not as far as the last wave retreated.

Then another wave gathers momentum, spills over the retreating previous wave, and advances the tide a little higher.

There seem to be alternating waves–waves of pain, then waves of grace, then waves of pain, then waves of grace–and grace always wins.

Under the tender ministry of the Holy Spirit, I’ve seen Him deal with my soul this way

After uncorking the bottle during my 2nd year in seminary, I found that the “strong leader” persona I had developed in college was shattered.

All of the buried emotions–fears, angers, humiliations, sorrows–came to the surface and I found myself insecure, uncertain, and weak.

Although progress was made in that next year, I graduated with deep insecurities into full time ministry.

My first response to this inner shattering and this up-welling of fear was to compensate for inferiority through ministry success.

The only problem was the church I served at was entering a long season of division and acrimony I could not stop and could not escape.

I simply could not succeed.   And that bucket full of shame, that thing desperate to avoid failure at all costs, could not avoid fresh failure.

It was another breaking of the wave, another season of pressing hard into the all-compassionate Christ and unavoidable suffering.

When that first ministry ended in a church split, it left me bitter.

My shame monster was snarling and out in the open where even I could see it.

It was a season of darkness and feeling victimized all over again.    It was a season of crying out and absolute vulnerability.

God was breaking the hold of my compensating, selfish ambition.

He was surfacing deep humiliation and violating my self-protective mandates.

His intention was to unwarp the warping of my heart and soul

So he used new pain to touch upon deeper pain.   He used fresh injustices to expose ancient anger over old ones.

He stripped me of control to shine His light upon my unspoken determination to trust no one and remain in absolute control.

Then He loved me in those violated places and I emerged a little more free.

I asked those honest questions, “What’s going on here?  Why am I overreacting to this minor offense?   Why do I hunger for control and safety and protection from violation?”

The Holy Spirit was quick to expose the secret agendas and answer these questions.

He connected the dots.

I find that progress in recovery can be monitored by my reactions.

Early in recovery, I just unconsciously reacted to all kinds of things and didn’t even see it.

Later, I began to see my over-reactions and ask why.

Still later, I saw whole patterns of reactivity to certain triggers and I began to see just how much of my reactions stemmed from this rape event.

All I could do was to beg the Lord to release me from the power of these triggers, to comfort the pain behind them, and replace them with Himself.

He Slows and Lowers the Reactions

The exciting thing is my reactions moved from automatic, hair-trigger things and became much slower, much more of a conscious choice kind of thing.

I could now choose to not react, which is to say, to not to let this wound define me.

And, best of all, I could choose to respond differently to God and others.

I could choose life and freedom.   I could choose to receive love and mercy, and choose to pass them along.   Intimacy became more and more possible.

So there’s hope.  There’s progress.

There’s a master soul Surgeon and He specialized in traumatized, victimized souls in need of compassion and healing

He cuts through many self-protective layers and gives us a heart of flesh again.   He’s so wonderfully good and totally trustworthy.  You can trust Him.

After all, He, too, was victimized and violated on the cross.

The key to all recovery is this:   taking myself out of my own hands, and entrusting myself into the care of Another over and over and over again.

This applies to all addictions, traumas, and our recovery from our sinful self in general.

It is a movement from suspicion to trust, from protest to surrender, from angry accusing to weeping within the strong arms of a Savior.

First Steps of Recovery From Abuse

It’s been 37 years since that horrible summer day of abduction and molestation.

While few of the subsequent years were easy years, all of them have been fruitful, purposeful years–often in spite of myself.

They were and are years of recovery

My own post-rape journey began with emotional shut-down and hiding–like trying to be a robot in a closet.

I disassociated myself from anything that would even remotely remind me of the trauma.

To regain a sense of violated control, I sought control through rituals, escapes, and creating a secret world of fantasy.

In other words, I buried the events, adopted a tight, rigid persona, and worked on stabilizing and surviving.

Stage one of recovery is emerging from shock

It takes awhile–especially if you have nobody safe you can confide in and nobody wise who can guide you.

I was my own guide and my own protector and my own compensator.

At first, I directed my energies into helping to prosecute the pedophile in court.  That was helpful.

But that task soon ends… and what then?

For me, it took 5 years to come out of emotional hiding and to begin to want to live again.

The key insight was realizing I had become my own abuser

By risk-taking and drug-taking and occultism, I found not the control and relief I sought but only more grief and torment.

I asked two questions near the bottom, “Why am I destroying myself?   And is there anything in life that lasts and can’t be taken away?”

Those questions were pure gold.

Reasoning my way backwards, I realized that if there was a personal evil there must also be a personal Good.  If Satan was real, then God is, too.

So I began to seek Him and opened my Bible and, finally, opened my soul to Christ and trusted Him with me.

Here at last was mercy and compassion and unlimited love–a good far bigger than the Grand Canyon of grief and shame inside of me.

And one of the first things I told Him was, “I want to know the truth even if it hurts–please don’t let me deceive myself.”

Little did I know how literally God would take those words, and how doggedly He would insist on holding me to them.

The second stage of recovery is discovery.

My discovery of just how affected and warped I was happened 8 years after salvation.

I was in a counseling class and was assigned to read a book called “Betrayal of Innocence”– a book dealing with child sexual abuse.

As I read the book there came a page where the actual word on the page said “molester.”   But what my eyes saw was the word “monster”.

My conscious mind knew that couldn’t possibly be right.  So I stared hard until the word unscrambled itself.

“I guess I have a problem” was my conclusion.

Weeping hard for the first time was the reward–my bottle was uncorked and the foam all came out.

What a relief!

Over the next few years I learned all I could.

I moved out of denial into acknowledgement, out of self-ignorance into self-honesty.

I asked the Holy Spirit, the “Wonderful Counselor”, to connect the dots, unlock the locked rooms, and unwarp my soul.

I asked Him to make me emotionally alive again and move me out of being an emotionally flat person.

And He did it!

I began to speak openly of my issue with a few safe people.

I moved out of hiding and really, really entered into community.   Each of these decisions was preceded by a mini-crisis, an uncovering of another layer of the onion.  Each of these choices were real choices.

I opted for truth.   I opted for the path leading to life.    I opted to bring these issues into the light of day.

In my next entry, I will speak about the next stages of my recovery

Even though I would never, ever want to go through the horror of what happened 37 years ago, I wouldn’t want to give back my recovery either.

It was the making of me.

It made a Christian out of me.   And it’s made a husband and father and pastor out of me, too.

All that to say, “There is hope!”

Finding Redemption From Abuse

Any victim of abuse will need to do two things to regain health and find healing.

But these tasks require giving up of control, and allowing oneself to be vulnerable to soul surgery.    So they are easily put off.

But unprocessed, unredeemed abuse is the very scenario that sets us up to become abusers ourselves.

For that reason I write to encourage my fellow sufferers to press onward.

The twin tasks I refer to above are recovery and redemption.

Recovery is about being gradually healed of the trauma and painstakingly unbent deep within, so the trauma of abuse ceases to govern the subterranean regions of our souls.

I will speak more about this task at another time.

Redemption is about allowing God to turn our abuse into a force for positive good.

It is where we learn deep lessons, receive compassion and care from Christ, and then bless others with these unexpected, undeserved riches of grace.

It is where we emerge from our abuser’s shadow, and choose to not follow the script he or she handed to us.

Instead of being destroyed by abuse, we are saved from out of the midst of it and then lend a hand to others.

So when I talk about what happened to me, a great joy comes from how my story gives permission for others to tell their story.

A great joy happens when skillful prayers and works spoken with Christ’s energy release someone else from their inner jail.

Though expressions of sympathy and pity are nice, I must say that I don’t feel sorry for myself most of the time.    The effects of abuse can still be inconvenient and troublesome at times.   But I have been redeemed, am being redeemed, and will be fully redeemed in spite of what happened.

When a thought that freed me frees another, there is nothing better.

When I pass along the comfort and see torment disappear on a face and serene understanding take it’s place, it’s such a privilege.

It is sweeter than any revenge.   It is nothing less than being enabled by evil events to be more effectively good than had that evil never happened.

Which means evil is defeated

By not doing to others the same abuse that was done to me, and by being goaded to a far greater level of compassion and grace, I am triumphant and free.

The goal is nothing less than to milk out of this horrible experience every bit of insight and truth, every bit of healing and grace, every bit of resiliency and strength, and then pass it along and see it multiply and spiral out of my control.

So many stuff it inside like I did at first, and then take it out on themselves or others.

We become the very evil we deplore.   It is the agenda of revenge and power over others.

But the other agenda, to bring as much good out of evil and do as much damage to evil as possible, is far more satisfying.

It’s something we can do.   It is something God will do in us and through us.

Has it been all roses and fun and games?  Absolutely not!

Has it been worth it?  Absolutely yes!

My part is not to run the universe and try to create a self-made heaven on earth where such things never happen.

My small part in God’s grand and glorious script is to take the evil that comes my way and let it first drive me and press me into Christ.  And then let Him bring all the unanticipated, unlimited good out of it that He wants in holy partnership with me.

So it’s back into the trenches, back into the battle for people’s souls.

It’s redemption time!

All Abuse is Personal

I’ve decided to get more personal about this issue of abuse.

Now that I’ve pointed out that we are all God-abusers and, as sinners, all of us have hurt and abused our fellow human beings, it’s time to turn the tables.

We live in a fallen world full of sinners, and sinners hurt other sinners 

All of us have been victimized and abused to one degree or another.

Mostly in petty, selfish little ways.

Often with neglect and the withholding of love.  Often in the withdrawal of love in the presence of failure.

Many times in the active harm we receive at the hands of someone more powerful when we are vulnerable.

We’ve all been hurt and rejected.   And we’ve all abused ourselves, and hurt ourselves and been our own worst enemy.

My Descent into Hell

The worst thing that ever happened to me, by far, was being kidnapped by a predatory pedophile in late July 1976.

I was twelve and very naive and totally off my guard.   Riding my bike around town, growing up quite sheltered in suburbia, it was the last thing I expected to happen.

The match was unequal.

I was small for age 12, and my rapist was man-sized large as an older teen.

I was riding a three speed, he was riding a ten speed.

He gave me the creeps and I tried to turn around and pedal away from him.  But try as I might, I couldn’t escape.  And when his hand went over my handle bar and he took control of my bike, it was like a horror film come true.

Only this was real.   There would be no waking up and finding it was all a bad dream.

He threatened to kill me if I did not obey his instructions to the letter.

People who’ve never been raped don’t understand the effect of sheer terror, how it paralyzes the body and freezes the brain.

But I do.

My one overriding thought was survival.

So I cooperated and blamed myself for being so gullible.   I was like a lamb led to slaughter, meekly submitting to the infliction of evil and unable to escape.

He required me to do gross things, and have gross things be done to me.

He violated my body and stole my innocence.

But it was not about sex, I realized long afterwards.  It was about power and shame.

He was seeking to pour his shame into me, and transfer his own filth onto me.

A couple of times he gave me options, between this disgusting thing or this other disgusting thing.  And every time I chose, he would do the option I didn’t choose.

So it was about his feeling powerful, enjoying himself at the expense of someone weaker.

I was his plaything, He was a monster

It left me feeling dirty, used, and deeply ashamed.

I hated myself for being a part of it.   I blamed myself for falling into it.

Turning the screws down inside my soul, I resolved to never think about it or feel it again.

And this reaction made me robotic, controlled, and emotionless–like an automaton.     All on the verge of Junior High, where my sensitivity to the impressions of others was intensified.

It was terrible and horrible.

The next few blogs I will unpack more this journey of abuse and recovery.

It will be raw and real.   It will not be for the faint of  heart or those prone to nightmares.

But it will be good for my soul and yours.