Describing Abuse as a System

It helps I think to describe abuse as a system — so it can be seen in its entirety.  This is because isolation of the parts of a system is one of the ways we don’t see abuse for how it actually is.  

I was introduced to a system called Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, which I’d not previously heard of.  

Here are its component parts:

1. ISOLATION — this can be both overt and covert, easy to see and difficult to confirm.  Social isolation and control over the environment or engineering situations cleverly promote learned helplessness and resignation.  Love offers freedom.  

2. MONOPOLISATION OF PERCEPTION — there is only one narrative allowed in gaslit atmospheres, where memory games, cruel trickery, and one way of seeing things prevails.  The worst abuse is targeted at the mind and it breaks the spirit, harming the soul.  Good partners cherish an independent mindset in their partner.  

3. INDUCED DEBILITY AND EXHAUSTION — deprivation is soul-destroying, as are starvation and the systemic overwhelm of exhaustion.  It’s a weak and insecure person who insists their partner be weaker still, broken for being better.  Health is not a luxury afforded in a transaction for being a good partner, it’s a necessity and basic need for every good relationship.  

4. THREATS — there has to be some overt aggression as part of a system of abuse; times when it’s pure intimidation.  When manipulation doesn’t work, there is born a moment for intimidation.  Threats used in isolation from others so there are no witnesses promote a mindset of confusion and overwhelm designed to shatter a person’s will.  

5. OCCASIONAL INDULGENCES — what maddens those who look on is the subtle coercion of ‘good things’ done in the name of manipulation.  Small rewards rationed out with the control, “Oh, and be thankful (that I’m being nice to you).”  

6. DEMONSTRATING OMNIPOTENCE — the way the environment is tightly controlled, reinforcing the helpless estate of the one ‘under the thumb’ of the tyranny.  

7. DEGRADATION — humiliation and blame are the tenets of breakage needed to undermine the person at the fissures of their being.  

8. ENFORCING TRIVIAL DEMANDS — as if the foregoing weren’t already enough, when both the perpetrator and victim/survivor know what’s going on, it’s soul-destroying for everyone who witnesses the carnage, where senseless demands are insisted upon with much schadenfreude in the perpetrator on proud display.  

When Sad, Be Sad

Be true to your emotions.  That’s the invitation of the Bible.  

Indeed, facing our emotions, being truthful about how we feel, is the first important step in healing grief, trauma, and mental, emotional, and spiritual pain of any kind—yes, it’s essential if we ever wish to “consider it pure joy when we face trials of any kind,” as James 1:2 puts it.  

The vast majority of the verses in the psalms are tearful laments; even those who finish with joy ordinarily have shards of pain uttered within.  

So, when sad, we ought to BE sad.  

There are times in every week, certainly every month, of my life where I’m inexplicably sad—in an otherwise blessed life.  I have learned to pray the psalms, that is to read them aloud, to add some of my own words to the lines, to bring meaning to what I feel.  

Even if that doesn’t “fix” me, and typically it doesn’t, I know that crying out to God in tearful, groaning lament is how I connect with the Divine.  

Such a faith as a lament to tearfully utter my sorrow before God, I know is the activator for a healing that ordinarily comes the following day—when perspective and hope return.  

One of the keys to humility, according to Dallas Willard, is to refuse to pretend.  That means I must be honest about how I feel if I’m to reconcile it and turn sorrow to a deep joy—even in the midst of circumstances that cannot, for now, be changed.  

The miracle of a well-placed truthful lament is the healing that psalms like Psalm 51 exemplify.  David starts out spiritually broken having betrayed his God.  He finishes that psalm in the 17th verse restored spiritually—actually feeling never closer to the God of his salvation.  

If you’re sad and you don’t follow God, please know that faith will lead you to the healing you so need and ought to experience this side of eternity.  

So, if you’re sad, be sad.  If you’re joyful, rejoice.  These two emotions run along a continuum, and only in faith can they be brought together; we have capacity to take joy into the sorrowful place, and to take a measured sobriety into our celebrations.  

Mastering the emotions is simply being truthful IN them.  

Being truthful in our emotions certainly requires vulnerability and integrity, courage and strength… 

Yes, being sad takes strength,
enough to surrender to how we actually feel,
and enough strength to imagine the encouragement we are to others who are sad, even as we may risk the judgement of others.  

Being authentic is being brave, and it is easier to go with how we truly feel than we realise.  If you find it hard, practice.  

Our hearts are protective for good reason, whether it’s trauma or we’ve never felt safe enough to be true to our emotions.  It’s never too late to work on being more emotionally true.  

When sad, be sad.  

When overwhelmed, sit and be.  

When angry, be curious about why, without judging ourselves.  

When confused, acknowledge we don’t always know why.  

When in pain that cannot be rationalised, go gently.  

And when in doubt, let the tears flow when they will come.  

Find your therapy and engage in it.  

The peace in accepting others’ perceptions

One thing we have no control over is how other people perceive their world, or how they perceive their perceptions — they see how they see, feel how they feel, think how they think, and respond based on these.  

The spiritual path of life is perspective enough to see and accept that others’ perceptions can only be respected as the way they see.  

We all think, feel, speak, and act out of our perceptions — occasionally reflecting, considering wisely, before, during, or after; perceiving our perceptions, moderating our behaviour — but also on occasion reacting out of those perceptions.  

We all think, feel, speak, and act out of our perceptions, which are filters for life based on our lived experience, our upbringing, the culture we’re immersed in, our biological personality, and many other factors.  

Of the over eight billion sets of human senses on Planet Earth, as much as our faces are unique, and as much as our senses ‘see’ and define our being, the mystery of perception is enigmatic to even ourselves.  

Do any of us have any idea of what’s coming and how we’ll perceive it?   

None of us do.  None of us know the terrors or ecstacies that lay in wait.  We would all like to think we could predict how we would react.  

All these concepts of truth help us empathise with our fellow humans, for surely we empathise with ourselves.  

Each of us has battles the next person knows nothing about.  No matter how well they know us.  For, how well do we even know ourselves?  How well (or not) we’ll respond to the challenge five minutes from now.  

A level of anxiety threatens ever-presently out of the constancy of the uncertainties of life.   Life can be a battle for the mind.  

Being kind to one another is surely the right response.  Being kind because we know how tough our lives can be.  Being kind as to not be unfair, even if others are unfair to us.  

We are existentially all alone, cosmically separated even from ourselves in so many ways.  What makes sense of all this is it’s our common lot.  You read these words and have some assurance that, “this guy senses the world the same way I do.”  

So we can empathise with the next person, for they have only as much control over their perceptions as we do — maybe more, maybe less.  

None of us can judge but God alone for why another person responds the way they do.  It’s not for us to pretend we have the market cornered on truth — all knowledge as only God does.  

And it’s a gift to our sensibilities to acknowledge what little we know about life, let alone what little we know about others.  To say “I withhold judgement because I don’t know the whole story” is wisdom.  

This is wisdom each other person needs us to live — for their sake.  And actually, by default, for our own. 

BUT… have you struggled?

YEARS ago I remember reading some luminary saying — like it was God speaking through them — that writing on suffering will always be needed.  

It resonated with me because of the journey I’d been on.  It spoke to my purpose.  

It seems absolutely berserk to say that suffering produces goodness in us, but of course, the Bible’s said this longer than even Jesus’ teachings.  

Not that any of us embraces the journey of suffering.   

The point of this article is this: 

We cannot pretend we know the wisdom,
maturity, and fruit that comes from suffering.  

We need to have BEEN THERE to credibly and capably state truths resplendent of the “deeper magic” as C.S. Lewis put it.  

I believe God allows us to struggle whole seasons of life so we genuinely KNOW in the deepest fissures of our being what it is like NOT to be able to easily escape such an existence — eternally speaking, the passage to a gift if we would learn it, but hell in a world like ours.  

In counselling those in existential conflict I’ve drawn on this so many times.  It is a saving grace to have been caught up in the vortex of suffering for an extended period of time — we would not learn the deeper humility to be gained in such seasons if we weren’t caught there for months or years.  

Grief always takes far too long.  

Getting to the point where our lives and happiness are secondary is the purpose of the journey — having died to ourselves — but truthfully, as human beings, in humility, we never remain there.  That’s okay, because God can show us enough in a glimpse of death what we can carry for the rest of our lives.  Re-reading these words, it can be easy to just write them; living them is another reality altogether!  

But I’m getting distracted.  

Who is it that can speak authoritatively
into the space of suffering?  

Usually the person who does so consistently speak into the space, for they cannot speak on other matters.  But the person needs to have been there, to the pit of their own personal hell — to be held there for a time — to have been kept there — for a substantial period of time.   

Suffering teaches us so much, not least that one person’s suffering is worlds apart from another’s.  Humility is the wisdom of the person forged through fire.  

My real question when I see a person ministering in the struggles of others, is, have you, yourself, struggled?  

I need to see this in the person counselling others in the temerity of pain they have no idea about.  Counselling’s the most humbling task — you have no idea.  What an anachronism if the guide hasn’t been there — to their own existence of suffering, I mean.  But the guide who has been there knows in the pit of their gut that they know nothing.  

But they do know how inextricably painful it is to suffer.  And that’s enough.  

For the person assisting the sufferer, the person walking alongside, if you have been chosen, you have the noblest task.  

The sufferer sees something in you, and you may well doubt your worth to them.  This is an important doubt to have, because God will only shine through you, and use you, when you insist He fills you, because you otherwise have nothing to offer.  

BUT… have you, yourself, struggled as the one before you is?  You stand on sacred ground around them.  Your work will go well when you know you stand right where God does as you minister together.  

There is no greater work in the whole of life than to sit with another in their suffering and, like them, to have no answers either, but to wait on God who is the answer.  

Who am I?  What do I have to offer?  Nothing.  And yet it is everything in this work.  

The most certain personal reality to come

The older I get the more I think about a day to come: the day I’m no longer counted among the living.  As I muse at every funeral I go to or conduct; one funeral closer to my own.  

I think about such things daily, or most days.

It seems bizarre to me to be alive right now from the context of a time when I wasn’t or are no longer.  Even if I live 100 years, far more of time passes where I either did not exist or exist no longer.  

Yet life feels long.  Ten years ago feels like a long time ago given how much my life has changed over that ten year period.  And yet, the same could be said for the previous ten years.  And the previous 15, which cover my entire adult years.  

If I live another 30 years, depending on how I’m feeling from one moment to the next, there are aspects that that’s too long or not long enough.  There are times when I’m resigned to the idea that this life is too hard — times of intense discouragement where I’m guilty of catastrophising.  But there are the realities that once I’m gone, I’m eternally missed by loved ones left behind.

All this convicts me to ensure God is holding me to a short account with myself.  I’m not getting away with anything.  All will be revealed, all truth, in the time to come, how I treated people, including having to face my own predilection for failing love and courage (to mention only two).  Am I afraid of this?  I don’t think I need to be, I will inevitably face what I must face, but I also have the opportunity now to live as truthfully and as lovingly as I humanly can.  

Whilst the nature of this reflection is personal, I’m hoping it gives pause to others to imagine what lies ahead, whether it’s one day or another 10,000 or more.  

The nature of time is that it goes.  Psalm 90:5-6 talks of human beings as grass, new in the morning, by evening dry and withered.  Being a grandfather now, one thing I’ve noticed is getting up off the floor is harder than it used to be.  All signs of a gentle but certain withering.  

I watched an astounding video recently where a 92-year-old woman reflected over her life and remarked how the last thirty years went quicker than the first sixty.  It’s sobering.  We know that the seconds don’t actually tick by faster, but it seems like they do.  

In any event, I trust in a good God and that ultimately the reality beyond this life is not only safe but beautiful — “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived — the things God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

My apologies in advance for the mind-dump here.  I hope there is some benefit to you in the few minutes you’ve taken to read it.  

What Death Teaches Us

LOSING MUM in 2022 taught me that no matter how much we prepared for her passing, we never truly believed she would be taken from us.  Strange as that is to comprehend 3.5 years later.  As I say at every funeral I officiate, “death always catches us by surprise.”  

Losing Mum taught me that losing a parent is different than losing a child.  These lessons also seem so obvious now, as if I should have always known.  

You will no doubt be reading this conscious of your own precious losses, and I invite you to bring that to your present thanksgiving awareness right now.  Take a moment to honour it.  

We grieve because of love,
that most bittersweet
of concepts in this life.  

When we lost Nathanael in 2014, in spite of the pain of losing him, something was added to me.  I also learned that I grieved better for his loss — with a ton more acceptance — than I had when I lost my first marriage in 2003.  

It was useful to me to observe this in the gait of my grief, over and again — it helped me to face the fact that I was better off for an initial grief that I’d endured a decade before.  

I’d learned an acceptance wisdom that has served me ever since.  The wisdom of letting go.  This is a wisdom that benefits our whole lives, and as our lives always ripple into others’ lives, theirs is benefitted from our benefit, too.  

When I lost a career that was very dear to me — at the time, the centre of my identity — it taught me that my identity was in the wrong place.  So many times I’ve had to learn and re-learn this lesson — a thing that’s stuck a little more in 2022 and then again even last year.  I don’t pretend that I have arrived, I expect to learn more in future on this lesson, but there are some things I’ve completely let go of that needed to be let go of.  

An everyday non-religious way of positing the truth of Job 1:21 summarises a key juncture of our development: 

“Life gives and the Life takes away,
blessed be Life for what we learn.”    

Only when we learn the lesson of accepting the
loss of things have we mastered the key lesson in life.  

The purpose of loss is shrouded in what we gain, what we learn, what we glean; yes, from within the caverns of pain we find ourselves in, from within the fissures of desolate disconnection we endure.  

Never more true: out of loss there is gain.  Spiritual gain for what we learn.  For the wisdom to live life well.  

Love finds itself defined in truth

There are many ways of saying it, but “love finds itself defined in truth” is a good start.  This short article will not be a perfect treatise on the matter of love within truth or truth within love, but it is no less worth writing.  

Truth is an inherent part of love, and what besmirches love is conditionality — a betrayal of love — a place where conditions are or must be placed on the love.  But there is generally an initiator of such conditionality in love, and the parties who respond with conditionality (the abused/neglected) always do so because of the harm the conditionality evokes.  

Conditions can be placed on love, either through the initiation to love — which can make love a thing of abuse or neglect, often based in the initiator’s sense of entitlement — or through the response to love, where safe boundaries are placed in response to the initiation of conditional love.  

Of course, conditional love is one antithesis of love.  

Love by inherent design is sacrificial, unconditional.  

Such inadequacies of love are placed there by those who have been hurt and have not healed or learned to trust again, or by those who feel entitled to love (feeling entitled to love is an antithesis of love — not recognising love’s a respect to be earned and maintained — that loving is giving without expectation of return), and by those who respond to those who feel entitled, installing boundaries for their and others’ protection.  

Where there is conditionality in love, there is also conditionality of truth.  People who cannot handle the truth tend to be those who initiate conditional love.  And in these situations, we tend to be drawn into reciprocating part truth for part truth — it becomes a stunted relationship that cannot reach its full potential; it can feel impossible to safely reciprocate trusting the untrustworthy with truth.  It can be unsafe and unwise.  

There is much more that could be written here, but let me move to truth’s central role in love.  

Let’s turn to the positive duty in love which finds itself enunciated in truth.  

Where truth reigns in a relationship, love is supreme and the parties can live in safety and grow freely as a result.  

Where love is grounded in truth is in the concept of faithfulness.  

One cannot be faithful without being truthful.  

Where there is faithfulness, there are no lies.  The test of true love is whether there is space for lies.  

A lie = any nontruth.

Of course, in our human relationships, we wrestle constantly with sin, which is that capacity in us all to do the wrong thing.  Even if it’s only 2 percent wrong, it’s not right nor loving, especially because we tend to underestimate the value of our wrongs and overestimate the value of others’ wrongs.  In other words, if I think I’m 2 percent wrong, I’m probably 10 percent wrong and other people may think it’s a lot more than that.  

This is where love and truth are aligned.  Love serves to the commitment of truth.  Love doesn’t miss the mark.  Love honours truth.  Love duly repents to the fullest discernable measure of the truth when it is wrong.  

The faithful person is the best person to be in a relationship with because they’re trustworthy.  

The faithful person honours truth and therefore loves unconditionally — the best they can, and when they miss the mark, they repent (make amends).  

The irony is that our task in life is to BE this person.  It’s only when we’re faithful, honouring truth, fully committed to love, that we experience the fullness of peace, hope, and joy available in this life.  

God blesses the faithful, and the more devoted to truth we are, the more abundant life we will experience.  

POSTSCRIPT: I find it’s quite common for people to think I’m writing this about you.  Truth is some of this many relate with.  I wrote this as it came to me as an idea to write on, i.e., not from any actual situation in my life.  It certainly doesn’t relate to any of my pastoral or chaplaincy work.  What I’ve written is to be seen as observations from me, that’s all.