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| Written by Ken |
You are sitting in your sixth counseling session with your
Christian counselor and you blurt out, “How
can I validate my wife’s feelings when they are not valid! How can I assure her
that I understand and accept her feelings towards me when most, if not all of
those feelings are not true!?”
The counselor looks over her glasses at you and calmly replies
with a smile, “You don’t need
feelings to be valid to be able to validate them. Validation is often more
about being present with a wife during her upsets, being understanding and
accepting that this is how she feels. Even if she is projecting her bad
thoughts and feelings that come from her painful childhood on to you, and such
feelings have no basis in what you have said and done, you can still validate
her as a person and be understanding, without believing that what she is
thinking is true. By being with her, holding her hand, speaking kindly to her
and telling her you understand that she feels this way, you make her feel
heard, and you keep her from feeling silly, stupid, or defective for having her
feelings.”
“Got it,” you say, “But we are on our sixth
session with you and you have not yet told her that these feelings she has
towards me do not originate with me, but are found in her bad thinking. You
have yet to speak any Biblical truth into her life and explain to her that she
no longer has to carry around a backpack of sinful hurts and pains from her
past because Christ has taken them all and placed them on the cross. All I hear
from your coaching is not be realistic and truthful, but instead I am to learn
the 10 Steps to Validating my Wife and go on this journey to learn Splanka so
that our marriage can be healed. Hey, I guess I can try anything to heal my
wife and marriage, but why not just tell each of us what the Bible says are our
individual responsibilities and challenge us to live up to them? Why do we
dance around her feelings?”
This scene is playing out across the country in many sessions
where counselors are trying to help mend Christian marriages with a small dose
of Biblical teaching and a heavy dose of modern psychology, sometimes mixed
with Christianized eastern mysticism. I don’t want to be hard on Christian
counselors as they are more often than us in the same tough spot that Lori and
I find ourselves when mentoring; recognizing that past emotional interferences,
especially a poor bonding experience with parents, now play havoc in a
marriage. And if they go too fast, or say the wrong thing, their patient bolts for
the door, still lost and unwilling to listen.
It is the healthy spouse who catches the stream of misdirected negativity and blame from a broken spouse's soul. Lori’s tireless work to try and get as many mothers as possible to stay home with their young children, and develop their souls, is in part from seeing the regular soul murder perpetuated by the neglect of young children as they are robbed of the ability to properly bond with their parents when handed off to a Day Care even before one year old. When parental bonding fails, many emotional disorders appear later in life from the damage, seen and unseen, wrought decades earlier.
Our work, and the miraculous healing we have seen and heard from
the testimonials, stands firmly on our understanding of New Life principles as
found in the Word of God. The understanding that no matter what our past, all
our sins and the sins committed against us can be placed at the foot of the
cross and healed if we choose to give them all to Jesus. This simple yet powerful
promise that we can indeed be dead to sin, freed from sin, and made alive in
Christ Jesus, springs forth from all over the New Testament, and is predominant
in the apostle Paul’s writings (Romans 6-8; Ephesians 2, Colossians 3). Paul,
the murderer of Christians, got it. He could hand his baggage of guilt, shame
and remorse, to Jesus who would dispose of it on the cross in 30 A.D. Beyond
this he could hand his Pharisaical legalisms and Jewish disdain for the Gentile
to find freedom that only Christ can give (Galatians).
I am not opposed to using any reasonable means for helping those
trapped in their emotional prisons to find a way to be released, including
using meds for a time, to bridge the body, mind, soul connection when some
Believers find themselves in depression, anxiety and despair. My questions are:
“Have our counselors first established the important Biblical
framework necessary for proper healing? Have they fully shown their
patients what God says about their past, their wrong thinking, and raw emotions
that have little resemblance to being like Jesus? Will they tell
their sick patients that they are indeed walking in sin when they will not
reach down into their Will and choose to believe God’s Word over their
mismapped or faulty amygdala’s?”
If you are one of the large percentage of people who suffer from
some form of mental or emotional pain and upset, my heart breaks for you. I
have watched too many who suffer with their emotional sickness go into regular
upsets, broken relationships, anxiety and depressions. There are no
definitive answers for you in psychology or counseling, but a counselor can
help expose wrong thoughts and projected feelings to a place where the light
and truth can help to heal them. But I have yet to see anyone get healed apart
from their own desire to be healed. To reach into their God given Will
and fight to replace their lies with the truth.
Jesus came to set the captives free. “I am the Way, the Truth and the
Life” he says, and “The truth will set you free.” In no case can a counselor, or husband
help free a wife who is not choosing to be free. God does not trample on our
choices, even as He brings truth and circumstances to move us to where we need
to be to grow up into Christ Jesus. But to get to healing, the Believer must
use their own Will to surrender it at the foot of the Cross, and in turn to
their godly spouse who should be their best coach, and trust that God can and
will make them whole if they are willing to let go of the past and hold onto
Jesus and God's promises.
I was sitting across from a couple whose wife suffered greatly
with hypersensitivity and upset. Having spent hours explaining who she was in
Christ, and God’s demands upon her life and behavior, I noticed what I felt was
a hesitancy to grab a hold of God’s truth and apply it. I said, “I sense that even knowing the
truth you still are not ready to apply it to your life. What keeps you from
surrendering all of this past hurt, pain and continual upset at the foot of the
cross, and beginning to do 'all things Christian?'” The question was met with a shrug.
She could not understand herself what it was that kept her racing back to the
pit of despair and unhappiness, except that it was still a part of her. A part
that she most likely was feeling unable to give up, because to do so may mean
giving up the self-justification as to why she has behaved as she has for far
too many years.
That poor little girl inside who longed to be bonded with Mom and
Dad was being asked to give up the few strands of false self-value and shreds
of self-worth that Satan had left attached to a series of lies and emotional
distress for a leap of faith into the arms of Jesus and her loving husband. It
was a leap too far, even as she tried so many times to make it. God’s Word
seems so beautiful and so full of hope, but seemingly impotent against a
broken, emotionally broken soul. Or is it?
If you asked those who have come through the awful emotional pain
of significant childhood interferences what finally gave them relief and
healing, most would say it came when truth properly applied with love was
allowed by their stubborn will to help them break the strands of self-love and
begin to bond to Christ and others in a new, yet scary way. To recognize that
what they have now is only a shell of reality that needs someone who loves them
most to speak the truth with love into their new lives, now fully surrendered
to God. It is a false self-love, that leads to self-protection and
self-justification and keeps them from releasing fully that little thing called
a "Will" to do what they know is the right thing to do, but can’t
seem to be able to do it. To begin to remap their emotional brain with new
pathways based on truth so they can properly process their feelings and
hypersensitivity. To recognize that their anger or rage comes from past hurts
and circumstances and not from their loving spouse who can help heal them if
they will only trust them enough to listen and follow.
If you are continually finding yourself at odds with your own
self, regularly going against what you know to be true to try and chase down a
feeling, self-justification and control, then begin to see the pattern for what
it is. You may have attached your self-worth and feelings of well-being to a
series of lies planted long ago by the Father-of-Lies. Your salvation has come
in Christ Jesus, and yet to experience it you must use the same faith that
saved you for eternity to believe that He can save and grow you up in Christ
right here, right now. Our faith is not one that just saves us for the future,
but one that saves us for the here and now. But you and I must turn over our
stubborn Wills to Him and allow His Spirit and His truths to set us free.
With all the difficulties I see trying to get some Believers to
give up their emotional past and lay them at the foot of the cross, I am not
opposed to any reasonable counseling that can help bridge a Christian from
their current state of emotional and mental distress to the promises of
Jesus. What I do oppose is an extra-Biblical primary focus instead
of using God’s Word as the final arbiter of truth. Apart from God’s promises we
are all doomed, and “His
divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness,
through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3). Or is this promise not true for all Believers?
God forbid!
So practice your validation skills, and learn your Spalanka if you
like. Even trust that your counselor is trying to find the bridge to help move
your spouse out of their prison of raw emotions and bad thinking into the
glorious light of the truth. They may be trying to get him/her to discover that
they need to surrender their Will to the Lord and to their godly spouse without
biting the helping hand. Often when such delicate approaches are not taken the
patient may bolt from the counseling with more self-justifications, holding
tightly to their dear friends of emotional pain and misery. There is no logic
to such self-anilinism, but if you tell them this. they will erupt with years
of passionate anger and hide even deeper in their past emotional pain.
Oh for the one who will take their God given Will and reach out
and grasp by faith all of God’s promises, deciding to walk therein. If there is
one thing that both modern psychology and the Word agree upon, it is that apart
from the surrender of the Will to the truth, there is no real hope, or personal
growth, for one whose soul has been damaged by their past emotional
pains. Whether it is early on in counseling, or years later, the final solution
is often the same: “I decided to grow up.” To grow up personally by beginning to
treat others with common human decency in everything I say and do. To grow up
emotionally by no longer trusting my raw feelings without a healthy dose of
skepticism to my hypersensitivity. To grow up spiritually by believing in God’s
Word and walking in His promises by "doing
all things Christian in my home."
How our heart breaks for Christian couples who regularly
experience the Crazy Cycle of emotional upsets where one spouse pushes away the
other to feed their broken soul with a fuel of lying feelings. It is so
flabbergasting for the godly spouse to watch as every little thing seems to
cause an upset striking a blow to a fragile ego. Even when the truth is given
nothing seems to penetrate the person who is in bondage to their emotions. To
have the answers all plainly given in God’s Word, but to watch no healing come
because of the stubbornness of heart, or the person’s inability to process the
truth because of their emotional state of mind. Is this the fulfillment of the
promise that "if you
live according to the flesh you will die" (Romans 8:13)? It's a slow
death of the body, mind, spirit and relationships.
Thank you, Lord Jesus, for the promise that we, as Christians, can choose to believe that we are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, and can put to death the deeds of the flesh. We will always give the Believer hope that someday soon their spouse will be delivered from the bondage of sin by the Spirit and Word of God; freedom from their sins and the sins committed against them. Hold tightly forever to the Word of God!
For the word of God is living and active,
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of
spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of
the heart.
Hebrews 4:12
