A couple of years ago I started seeing a pattern in my life concerning relationships with others and I started questioning myself. Instead of placing the blame 100% on myself I started seeing the reality of the situation. Now this didn't immediately take away the overwhelming guilt and confusion i had often felt in dealing with relationships that went down hill, however I started piecing together this very weird and strange puzzle. This puzzle was exposing the truth about others but not only about others but about me as well.
I realized that I had become so conditioned within my own thinking that I felt that I was not cut out to live my own life, that I needed fixing, that I was evil and needed redemption, but not the redemption of salvation ... there was a difference in this type of redemption. Somehow in the fog of years and years of abuse I had grown to subconsciously believe that the redemption I needed was not from God but from others. Sounds sick and twisted I know however this is what happens to a person who is totally beat down, and has rendered themselves in thought to be less than any other person.
I often got into situations where there were controlling and manipulative individuals. This was nothing new in a lot of ways for me simply because I dealt with the same throughout my childhood. So as an adult I really couldn't see the reality of my own life. By the time I was 18 years old I was a very volatile person. I had a lot of anger and was determined to undermine anyone who posed a threat to me in any way. My mind was so mixed up and confused that I could not tell the difference between a person who was really trying to help me in honesty with no strings attached and a person who had a set agenda for me. Therefore I often rejected people who sincerely tried to help me. Sad thing is I had become the very thing that I had despised in other people.
It is odd how we humans are, for we can see the maltreatment done to others but often times we are blind to our own situations. I went through my teen years and young adult life trying to find acceptance. I viewed God in the same way I viewed people and often that view wasn't a pleasant one. I believed that I had to be someone else besides who I really am to meet God's approval. And I often felt defeated, powerless to my own situations and in my depravity of my mind and soul I would try to control my environment which also included people as well. However with every given attempt I often opened the door for manipulative and controlling people to control me.
I can't count how many times I opened that door and became a door mat. I deeply felt that I had to have the acceptance of others to make me a whole person and could not handle when someone rejected me .. once again my warped way of thinking played a lot to do with this because I had no clue to the true definition of rejection. So basically my whole belief system the very foundation of myself was really mixed up in a bad way.
In the process I had given so much of myself away that by the time I was 30 I had no idea who the heck I was. I had no definition for me, in other words I had lost my identity. When a person looses their identity it is like a gaping hole in the soul that goes on for eternity. It is like a person is starving to death but no matter how much food they eat it does not fill them up instead they continue to starve to death. In truth for me to not really know my own self my own identity it was like the bible describes people in hell with the gnashing of teeth, it is pure madness and anguish. Because when a person doesn't know their true identity it is like being a live yet being dead. Death in this sense is a deep painful void that no one can put their finger on and no amount of x-rays can identify what is causing the grief.
However God never gave up on me and He never will. In order for me to see the reality about myself and about other people I had to be taught the difference between real love and fake love. I had to be able not just to understand it intellectually, which intellectually I understood a lot of things however emotionally and in my heart I did not. In a lot of ways intellectually I have always been mature but emotionally I had a deficit. Actually most of my life I have felt as though it would have been better for me to be a robot because as long as I could handle life with only my intellectual thinking and logic then I was good to go but when it came to deeper things and deeper needs like emotional and heart wisdom I was still very much a child and often a wounded child.
How did God help me to see myself in truth and to see others in truth ... well each day is a on going process however I will point out two situations that come to mind (I am not sharing this to point out anyone else faults)..
in one situation the person sacrificed much time to be there for me, this individual did not expect anything from me, matter of fact this person didn't try to change me instead they were more concerned about my well being then about changing me. This individual spent many countless hours listening to me, praying for me and there was a time that I couldn't even cry especially for myself however this person would cry for me in her prayers over me.
The second situation was an individual who meant well however this individual had their own agenda. I don't think that they purposely set out to do harm instead much like myself they had been through some tough issues and to a certain extent had not fully recovered from them. In this situation it was well defined that i needed to change, that I was their project, and when I didn't change according to how they wanted me too I soon found out that I was of no good use to them, I was easily cast off. To be further honest they felt deeply that they were doing God's will for me.. However I am not one to judge that simply because I do believe God set the stage not to control me or manipulate me nor do I believe that He condone the actions that took place however to help me to open my eyes to see the truth. Otherwise I would not have been able to see the truth in the whole situation.
Now before I go on let me say this GOD does not manipulate nor control any of us, He is love true love and in true love there is no manipulation. However with people we can and do often try to control and manipulate each other from time to time. Some more so than others.
Now let me share some truth about me and what role I had in each situation. With the first situation the person who truly accepted me for me, who spent countless hours listening to me, praying for me etc. I personally did not know how to take this individual. Remember earlier I stated that I couldn't tell the difference when someone was truly helping me or not. So yes I pushed and tried very much so to prove this person. And often I manipulated the situation. Actually what I was looking for was for rejection. However what I found out was the rejection that I was waiting for was actually me rejecting myself before they could. Furthermore even though this individual treated me as an equal I felt sub-servant to them. These were my feelings not that they made me feel this way.
With the second situation with the person that tried to change me that had their own agenda for me, I did try to push away and I did try to test them however the difference in this situation and the situation with the other person is that it become very unhealthy simply because I had allowed myself to submit to the will of this person and this individuals opinion about me meant more to me then what anyone else including God had to say about me.
I was truly so starved within myself and looking for acceptance all in the wrong way that I was blinded to the truth. Acceptance is like change, in the fact that it must begin within ourselves. I did not accept me. Now I realize that it is ok to accept me and to love the person that I am.
After everything went sour with the second situation I have spent many days trying to figure out how I allowed myself to take that path and why I didn't stand up to that person from the start. Part of it had to do with a very fragile wounded child like heart and the other part of it was the fact that I was truly void of myself in many ways. This person fulfilled a need in my life, however in fulfilling that need I also allowed myself to submit to their will, not my own will and not God's will.
Later on I did stand up to this person. And though I hated to yet at the same time I realized I had a right too because I didn't just stand up to them I stood up to my own self and took ownership of my own life and the responsibility of my own actions in the situation.
Now in no means am I trying to paint anyone in a bad way and neither am I pointing fingers because just as the second person had their own agenda so did I have mine and that was to have a very deep felt need met.
I even believed that when things did go sour I had to comply in other words that I had to fix the situation, that it was all my fault. Yet I now know that in any relationship there are two that are responsible. I can only answer for my own actions and not the actions of another person. At the heart of it all I did and still love this person however I am learning what it means to really love. This is how God has helped me to see myself in truth and to help me regain my identity back. Yes the whole ordeal broke my heart tremendously and no I was not brilliant in the way I handled it for much of it I was very angry however no matter how angry I have been and no matter how much I hated the way I treated this other person or hated how they treated me I could not bring myself to truly hate them. Oh at times I wanted too however I am thankful that I have been given the time away from them so that I could deal with myself and with the reality about the whole situation. Yes at times I felt like I was in the land of confusion and I did feel as though God was part of the delusion, but in it all God has always been there He was not the delusion but the truth and the reality I needed.
To really love another person we must know how to truly love ourselves. This means that we are able to show ourselves true compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, and be willing to stand up to ourselves when we are wrong. The same goes in relationships with others. When we disagree with another person it is not breaking a pact or an agreement to love. Often people who are manipulators feel as though that when another person does not agree with them that they are being betrayed. Truth is it is normal for people even close intimates to disagree at times, simply because we all have our own thoughts and perceptions. A true relationship is one where there is room for disagreements and love.
I read an article earlier today about how to handle controlling and manipulative people in that article it said:
This is very true. I am now in recovery, I am recovering from being a door mat and I am also recovering from being a manipulator. It isn't easy! The road ahead is often very hard, however truth truly does set us free. Now that I realize I do have a right to my own personal boundaries and a right to speak for myself and think for myself and feel for myself I am able to know myself. Any person that doesn't allow us to be our own self is a person that has lost themselves to gain control of others. It is a sad and devastating sort of life actually it is not life at all. Just as the person who is being manipulated and controlled is a captive so is the person who is the manipulator. The sad truth for the manipulator is that they honestly believe they are in control of themselves and others yet the truth is they don't have control whatsoever not even of their own manipulative schemes.
This has been the hardest part of my own journey of healing because I was so afraid to see the truth about myself, I was afraid that I would see a horrid evil and vile person because I had believed I was for so long that I was afraid that my beliefs about myself were true. Actually they weren't true.
Recently I told a dear loved one that what makes bad people bad is that they know the truth and yet they remain in the lie by choice, they do not seek help instead they consciously make a choice to continue on in their bad behavior. Not all bad behavior is associated with a conscience choice in other words sometimes bad behavior is a learned trait and until we are able to see that the behavior is destructive then we as human beings believe it is right behavior. However when we realize that it is not right behavior and yet we purposefully continue on in that behavior then we are guilty for such actions.
Another thing I have also learned on my journey is there will be times of set backs and stumbling and falling back in old mind sets however the Lord is faithful to pull us back out. But the process of life is growth and just as a child matures in their learning so do we! Through out our lives we go through a maturing process. True maturity has nothing to do with age but with the heart and soul of the person. A child can be more mature than an adult and the same can be said about wisdom.
One thing to keep in mind though book knowledge does not give us the ability to read minds nor see the heart only God can do that and we must leave such matters like that to Him and deal with our own.
However what counts is how many times we do reach up and grab a hold of the truth and go forward. And I constantly have to remind myself because in the process of renewing my own mind I have to work through the old mind set and with time the old mind set falls away and the new takes hold but time in itself does not heal however the Lord does.
The link to the article I quoted about how to handle controlling and manipulative people is HANDLING DIFFICULT PEOPLE
Truth is not always easy and trust me when I started seeing the truth about myself I wanted to throw in the towel, I wanted to quit/ give up and just die but that was just my old mind set haunting me and I had to see through all that and realize that there is no pit to deep that God's love can't reach. What I have learned is this is my life and I have a right to fight for it even if it means to stand up to myself at times. Fear and lies are tools not of God but of the enemy of God and when we identify these tools we must remove them from ourselves and we can do that by resisting them and given them no place in our lives.. our tools to overcome this is with the truth and with love.
My thing is "Don't give up" no matter how many times you fail instead allow yourself the same compassion and hope to get back up and try again. The following video is a song that came to my mind while writing this
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