A love denial fantasy is created to avoid facing truths that may bring feelings of abandonment, rejection, or ending the relationship in divorce. A love denial fantasy can be stronger if the victim believes God will be disappointed or mad at them if they don’t submit to their abusive spouse or get divorced. These spiritual lies come from misquoted and misused verses, often by the abuser, to keep the victim in their control through fear.
If you grew up hearing and believing that you will “never amount to anything” or other negative lies, and you adopted these beliefs, you may struggle with low self-worth. You may doubt that you could ever be good enough or that you deserve to be respected or loved. These struggles torture you and keep you in pain and blind to seeking the truth of God.
The devil deceives you into believing that the negative lies people have said about you are your worth. If you equate their lies to be your worth, the enemy keeps your mind and emotions in pain. In your pain, you focus on fixing or changing yourself to prove you are valuable.
One fact of our human condition is our longing and need to have loving contact with other people. When we don’t experience healthy love in our childhood, our drive to feel loved makes us self-focused. Our self-focus affects how we see ourselves, others, and our relationship with Jesus.
Feeling love-starved for most of my life influenced what I believed about love. The pain in my past taught me that any attention, good or bad, was to be considered “love.” With this understanding and definition of love, I excused any unhealthy and abusive words and actions as long as there was “love.”
We are one-half of our marriage. If we only commit halfway to our marriage, how can we expect a deep, rich, healthy, happy marriage? Likewise, if we are using an imperfect love design with unhealthy aspects, how can we expect our marriage to be healthy?
The only person you can change is yourself with the help of Christ. Our marriage is like a series of dance steps. When one partner changes a step, the other one will notice even if they don’t say anything at first. When you choose to love your spouse in Christ’s design, the new step is done in his love. Your spouse will choose to react or to respond.
Here’s the big secret you have been waiting to find, and it comes from two verses Jesus tells us.
A performance-based identity warps the value we place on ourselves and others. When we’re wrapped up in how our performance makes us look or what we gain, we are living in the self-focused sin of pride. We can start to believe that who we are is based on how good or how bad we are doing something, which is not true in our Christ identity.
The best place to start asking questions is with yourself. You must know what you believe, why you believe it, and what God’s truth says about your faith and love. When you know your truth, you can have a conversation with your spouse without feeling like you need to defend yourself or change their mind.
Remember, questions in Christ’s love allows your spouse to answer from their perspective, understanding, opinions, and beliefs. It’s your time to listen and see where they come from and what is in their heart. It’s not your job to change their mind or try to fix them. When they ask what you think, share your truths, and create a safe place, you can discuss how you see things differently and why.
The top type of abuse that is rarely acknowledged or addressed in marriages is verbal abuse. Verbal abuse speaks in disrespectful, degrading, dishonoring manners to manipulate, control, and overpower their spouse psychologically. No one is immune to this learned form of toxic, abusive communication, not even “Christians.”
Many Cristian marriages struggle with fighting, sarcasm, and painful words. They want their marriage to be happy. However, they’re not taught to recognize the verbal cycle of abuse or stop it with Jesus. Let’s look at the husband’s words and the wife’s words to see how the cycle of destruction and abuse happens.
If you’re a disciple of Christ, and you sense that you’re stuck in an unhealthy or abusive cycle of communication or behaviors in your marriage, listen to the leading of the Holy Spirit. As you learn from this blog post, there are various factors that many Christians are never made aware of or taught. However, now you know that you have an option to learn how to operate in Christ’s love design instead of using your broken love design.
You can stop struggling to fix your marriage and learn about Christ’s love design. As you work with him and uncover the lies you have believed, he will transform your definition and design of love into his. When you’re using Christ’s love design, you take the tug of wills between your broken love design and your spouse’s out of your relationship.
The enemy wants us to believe our broken love is automatically transformed into God’s and Christ’s love when we receive Salvation. We never stop to evaluate our definition and understanding of love. Most Christians are not taught to look at their love design and learn about Christ’s to see the differences. We don’t know what we don’t know, and nothing will change until we learn and live in God’s truth.