One of the biggest issues creating stumbling blocks for breaking free and healing from emotional abuse is a well-meaning response which does not take into account the deviant thinking of someone who resorts to emotional powering-over to manage their environment.
I want to give you tools not only to help someone heal from emotional abuse but to also steer you away from heaping on further harm.
Give her a voice. The moment someone is silenced in a relationship is the moment trust is broken. This is true in the marriage and in counseling. And when trust is broken in the counseling relationship for someone who has experienced emotional trauma, very little of what you say to help will not be heard, and that which is will be filtered through suspicion and shame.
What hurts the most becomes not the cruelty of the abuser but the silence of the bystander.
-Unknown
If she has been systematically silenced, given little to no room to speak her concerns, hopes, and opinions, she will be hypervigilant to ANY implication about what she’s done/has not done to contribute to or maintain the abuse. She’s been blamed and condemned for too long!! Don’t ask questions about what her part has been, or what she’s doing to “fix” it, or how she could have been different. She has done what she knew todo! She needs to you hear her, empathize and validate her pain. The very
Expect the answer to be something like, “Please make the abuse stop.”
Believe Her. She may have spent so many years having been told -or implied to her – that she’s stupid, she is oversensitive, over-reactive, over-emotional, and that nothing about her core personhood is worth listening to or caring about. How she thinks is absurd, irrational, or disrespectful. She’s been gaslighted for so long she doesn’t trust her own perceptions or memories – which means she has been taught to ignore her own intuition and gut feelings. Every conversation feels like another expose’ on how immature, selfish and unforgiving she is. He’sbeen an expert at hooking her back into the brokenness to heap on more brokenness, all the while blaming her for it and
And then he demands sexual “intimacy,” and claims she is in sin because she cringes from his touch. There is not a bit of it that feels intimate or loving.
Helping bring new life to her heart entails validating her experience, and helping her move through it in order to live well. In other words, use HER perspective to help her navigate to a place of health and wholeness.
She needs to know that her thoughts are her own. Her feelings are her own. Her dreams, desires, hopes, longings, are her own. And they are valuable simply
She needs to hear us say, “That DID hurt.” I want her to know I believe her. What she endured has absolutely been devastating, or painful, or frightening, or sinful against her.
She has been managed down to silence.
She might be very confused, but if she can learn to listen to her gut and begin to trust her perceptions and thoughts and feeling, she can use it to inform her next steps toward healing.
At this point, it’s normal to have a dead heart toward her spouse! It’s normal to be ambivalent about reconciling even IF he changed. Do not allow her to feel guilty for not having “love” for him. Thatis the very natural consequence for the way he has treated her heart! And it may not be a consequence that God takes away just because he “repents” and”changes.”
God CAN restore her heart toward her husband, but that may not happen. It will NOT happen without her husband making very real, lasting behavioral changes that start with a heart transformed by God. Even if he does, the consequence of his sin may very well be permanent death of her heart toward him, and that will be a stumbling block they will have to deal with. It will be important to avoid making reconciliation the goal UNTIL you have re-established safety and trustworthiness.
Her “trust” doesn’t make him trustworthy. Her “forgiveness” doesn’t make the abuse stop. There must be change.