As a parent myself, I understand every decision made concerning my childhood and why. Regardless of the validity and logic of these reasons, my family dynamic created an emotional void within because of how I internalized those events. Even after I began to live with my mother full-time, a part of me still felt like I had to prove my value and worth.
In his book Destroying the Spirit of Rejection, John Eckhardt (2016) wrote:
We try all kinds of ways to cover up rejection: people pleasing, attention seeking, perfectionism, anger and bitterness, hard-heartedness, pride, isolation, addiction to drugs or alcohol, and sexual promiscuity. We use any number of things to either gain love and acceptance or to protect ourselves from being hurt again. Rejection is a vicious cycle that takes us deeper and deeper into sin and destruction. After it does its damage, rejection leaves lives desolated and in ruins (p. 2)[3].
As a Christian, I believe that I have a real enemy who uses tactics so subtle that he led me to believe that my perception of my childhood, my value as a person and my idea of how little I thought I deserved were “normal”. Viewing life through the lens of rejection skews or taints every part of it.
I took something like scholastic achievement and what I perceived as success as a type of armor to justify why I deserved to be loved and accepted. I created a cycle of performance and perfection that became more and more difficult to maintain. I got tired of working my way into people’s good graces.
Any pathology that isn’t resolved will be perpetuated. I found myself entrenched in various relationships that I found emotionally draining. I was often perceived as the rescuer, or to be brutally honest, the enabler in my marriage and in several of my friendships. I couldn’t figure out why I was putting out so much and getting very little in return.
I was smart enough to understand that the only thing in any given situation I have the ability to change is me, so I turned on the light and took out the microscope. I became very introspective.
One of the biggest questions I had in counseling was why I chose my husband as a mate. I needed to understand why I made that decision so that I could avoid making it again.
When I was ten years old, my mother married a wonderful man who has treated me like nothing other than his child. He has been a quiet and supportive influence in my life since then. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t the model I used when it came to choosing a partner.
Ms. Weiler explained that people often choose mates to fill an emotional void. That made perfect sense. My pastor has always said that there is something in you that draws and connects the people that you associate with. The wounded little girl inside me drew the wounded little boy inside my husband.
My husband was the product of an adulterous relationship. He was embraced by everyone in his father’s family but denied by his father. Subsequently, we both had daddy issues that negatively impacted our relationship.
The brokenness in each of us created toxicity. There were needs that we each had that were impossible for either of us to fulfill. There was friction and chaos from the very beginning of our marriage. We found ourselves in a downward spiral of separation and reconciliation that proved more exhausting than dealing with the tension that became the norm at home.
Spiritually, I couldn’t figure out how two people who professed their love for one another couldn’t honor the covenant that they made before God and man. One of the reasons why I fought for my marriage so long was that I naively thought having two parents in the household would prevent my children from having the same abandonment issues I struggled with most of my life. I also naively thought that because we both attended church and shared a common faith in God, we would both use His principles to help us to overcome the obstacles we were facing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find this to be the case. The fact of the matter is marriage only works when both parties are willing to put in the work to make it last. The more I worked on me, the less I liked who I had become for the sake of saving the marriage—or saving face, because I had to prove all of the naysayers wrong. The more I worked on me and established the boundaries that I needed to be able to look myself in the mirror every day, the more I realized that the cost of saving the marriage had become too high. I realized that we were on a merry-go-round to nowhere.
We were only teaching our girls that strife and disrespect were normal. We had inadvertently allowed our desire to provide a two-parent household for our children to be used by the enemy to recreate the same dynamic of rejection and abandonment that we both struggled with.
Ephesians 6:12, NKJV
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
This season in my life really began to show me who my real enemy was. My eyes were open to the fact that my issues ran much deeper than what was obvious. Although I was willing to take ownership of my choices, I also began to take note of the significance my family history played in the formation of these circumstances. I realized that I could find similar patterns
