The Faith and Mental Health Connection

Love. what is that?

Growing up, I didn’t have the best father figure in my life. You see, my biological father went to prison when I was just a few months old. I spent a good portion of my childhood wondering why. When I found out why, my heart was shattered. Selfishly, I thought “Why didn’t my father love me enough not to do what he did?”

Insert my first step father who was an egotistical, narcissistic abuser who loved nothing more than to beat my mother, spew hatred at my mother and her children, and intentionally caused heartache and pain in our home in any way that he could. The bulk of my memories of this man are all negative. I remember him purposefully leaving the bird cage open and the front door open so that my pet bird would fly away. I remember him throwing my cats up against the wall. I remember him yelling at my mom and us. And I remember him leaving us one day, without a single word, without a single goodbye, and never returning. I have one positive memory of him. I remember riding my bike around the side of a home, and, unbeknownst to me, they were getting rid of bats in the awning of the home. When I got closer to the backyard, my stepdad swooped in and snatched me off that bike and carried me into safety as the awning had just broken open and bats were flying everywhere. One positive memory in over six years spent growing up with that man.

Living life as a child who felt abandoned by everyone, who felt alone even with others around, created a sense of needing to belong and needing to find affection and love wherever I could. While I was a “good” kid in the sense that I didn’t get into outward trouble, I did many things that nobody knew about. I lost my virginity at the age of 14. I sought attention from males by dressing provocatively and not how a teenager should have been dressing. I craved attention because, as the saying goes, if you don’t show positive attention and only negative (or in my case no attention at all), then the other person will consistently act out in the way that gets them the most attention.

Enter scene: the narcissistic and abusive husband. I met my first husband during the summer after my senior year of high school. My friends and I had gone to another friend’s house to “kidnap” him for the night because he was leaving town. I immediately fell for this man. I ignored so many red flags because…well…it was “love”. But love doesn’t shatter your soul. Love doesn’t degrade your self-worth. Love doesn’t take every piece of you and break it into nothingness. I dealt with this “love” for 8 years. The only beautiful things that came from this time was my three precious children that kept me pushing to stay alive through it all. I encountered many nights where I wanted to end it all. I felt alone. I believed that there was no way out of the hell that I lived. My every move and every choice was watched like a hawk. My social media accounts were logged in on his devices so that literally anything I did was monitored. Verbal, mental, and emotional abuse was the norm, but only when we were alone. If we were around others, he was the “perfect husband”. I was a stay-at-home mom who had no means to support myself and three children, but I knew I needed to leave. So for a few months, while physical abuse started rearing it’s head, I was secretly devising a plan to leave. That plan was escalated when he became physically violent with me while my daughter’s friend was in our home. I found every ounce of courage I could muster to run to the neighbor’s home to call the cops.

During this time, I experienced the following (not an entire list):

• being slapped across my face while I was asleep with my 8 month old sleeping next to me.
• my entire archive of baby pictures of my children deleted because he knew the way to make me “obey” him was to go after my children and anything associated with them
• 4 phones destroyed in a 3-month time span
• being manhandled while I was pregnant
• being locked out of my home while i was pregnant
• finding naked pictures of his coworkers on his phone
• finding messages with former high school girlfriends telling them he wanted to go over to their home in the middle of the night to kiss them (while I was 9 months pregnant with both of my sons)
• having chewing tobacco thrown in my face and being pushed to the ground while my 7 year old sat holding my hand with her father yelling at her telling her that I didn’t love her or her siblings because i was trying to destroy our family (then yelling at her to get away from me and go to her room)
• being woken up as he tried to break into our home to “talk” after being released from jail
• Being told i was worthless, that i didn’t matter, and that i couldn’t do anything without him

8 years. 8 years of believing that I was the cause of the turmoil. 8 years of walking on egg shells. 8 years of living a nightmare.

After leaving him, my relationships afterwards steered towards the same. A damaged woman is typically prone to attracting narcissists because the woman’s craving of attention and affection is something that narcissists feed off of. However, I attempted to find my boundaries. I attempted to end something whenever I saw the same red flags that I had previously ignored. And I did well. However, anytime something remotely positive came around, I always self-sabotaged because, in my mind, I still wasn’t worth anything good or positive in my life, so I might as well have it leave before it makes the decision to leave me anyways.

During the next decade, I spent a lot of my time focusing on my children and the love, care, and attention that they needed. I neglected myself and healing myself fully because I was the only thing that my children had. I poured my heart and soul into trying to raise them as individuals who listened to their bodies, who understood their worth, and who respected others. While I thought I had grown and healed, the saying “time heals wounds” is not all that accurate. In 2022, band aids and scabs were ripped off old scars from my first husband when he came back into our lives and made our lives a living, breathing hell. I had to endure countless court motions filed against me. I had to endure not just him, but his girlfriend, her friends, and people I used to call friends spying on me and relaying information back to him that he would then try to use against me in court. I couldn’t ask for used uniforms without him making it out to a judge that I couldn’t provide for my children because I wasn’t buying them brand new clothes. The turmoil he caused frayed the relationship I was in to the point that that relationship failed.

I have lost relationships with childhood friends and family members because of him. My own cousin publicly celebrated when he got my injunction lifted against him. I had childhood friends call me an awful and horrible mother for keeping my children away from their father. I had another “friend” tell me that I was wrong for not allowing him to see his kids because, in her words, “even if a father is abusive, he still has a right to see his children.” When everything came out into the light about what he did, nobody believed me except my own mother. I had nobody.

You don’t know what it is like to live in a world where the victim of abuse is looked at like she must have been the cause of a man being abusive, unless you have lived it. You don’t know what it is like to sit in fear wondering when the next outburst is going to happen, unless you have lived it. You don’t know what it is like to want to leave and not know how you can even do that, unless you have lived it.

It is easy to sit back and tell people who have suffered abuse that they should have just left or that if you were in that position, you wouldn’t have stayed so long. Yea, I would probably say that too. But I’ve lived it. Have you?