Exercises That Will Help When You’re Offended

Several years ago, I was counseling a woman who had severe depression marked by suicidal tendencies. After a month of counseling, most of the depression had lifted. But every time we made progress, she would return to issues regarding her sister. She could not let go of the pain her sister had caused.

She refused to talk about it. She would get choked up, and the knot in the center of her brow tightened. Finally, after we had exhausted every avenue of getting past this hurt, I told her I didn’t think there was anything else I could do to help her.

I could see her struggle internally – and then she decided to tell me.

“She told everyone in the family I was always going to be fat!” As she said this, her skin became flushed, she knotted her hands together in the middle of her chest and she bent over in pain. This hurt so badly it even caused somatic symptoms. It had happened 27 years before, when the girls were teenagers.

John Bevere, in his book “The Bait of Satan” calls this “personal offense”. He believes that personal offense is the root cause of almost every relationship problem on the planet. I have taught on this truth in seminars and no one ever disagrees with it. Unfortunately, the solution most people recommend is to “gut it out” and “just forgive them.” I really wish it were that simple.

But it isn’t. You cannot  just will away the hurt others have caused you.

But I have found we can dig up the root reasons for why personal offense burrows into our soul and eats away at our peace of mind. Here are eight exercises (and one final healthy response) I recommend to my counseling clients when they struggle to let go of past pain and move forward into forgiveness.

1. Think of a time when you did something similar to the thing you are offended by. Part of the ache we experience comes from a sense of injustice. It is not fair that others lie to us, gossip about us, take advantage of our trust. It is fascinating though, if I ask people to think about a time recently when they did something similar to the way they have been mistreated … people often feel the internal knots start to loosen.

Most of us commit offenses on a semi-regular basis, but we often don’t see the troublesome nature of our actions. It is only when it is done to us that we get upset. As we go through the exercise of thinking how we have done the same thing, it gives us a measure of empathy for those who have sinned against us.

2. Ask God to show you how He sees the situation. Several years ago, a friend of mine made a list of things I needed to improve upon. It was not a pleasant list; many of the items called into question my intelligence and choice-making. I was deeply hurt by the list. After marinating in my inner irritation for several days, I asked God to show me how He saw the situation.

First, God pointed out how some of the list items were actually true. Second, he showed me how my friend had been feeling cut off from me and didn’t know how to express his own hurt. This gave me enough solace so I could forgive him and set up a meeting. During our time together, I expressed my regret at how I had cut him off recently. Then I proceeded to tell him how some of the items on the list were very true. I also ended by helping him see how he had gone beyond the truth in some items as well. We re-established our relationship at the end of that meeting. (By the way, I have his permission to share this story).

3. Ask yourself who the person who offended you reminds you of. If the same person keeps offending you, and especially if your reactions to these offenses seem more intense than they ought to be, ask yourself if this person reminds you of someone else you were hurt by in the past. Often, we have trouble letting go of a personal hurt because the person reminds us of a person or situation we have not forgiven years before.

4. Put yourself in their shoes and ask how they would want others to react to the situation. If we can begin to see how it probably looked from the point of view of the person who hurt us, we may perceive the incident differently. Perhaps what we interpreted as a criticism was just a simple question. Or maybe the attack was motivated by fear for our safety. Even if the offense was truly offensive, we may discern how it was motivated by something we had done. Seeing things from the other person’s perspective softens the blow.

5. Keep short accounts. Wherever possible (and it’s always possible) try to let go of the hurt before the end of that day. Each day you coddle an offense, the larger it grows. Think of it as a debt. The longer you take to pay off a debt, the more you will have to pay and the more onerous the burden.

6. If feasible, talk to the person who offended you. Don’t just assume they know what they did or how you reacted to it. I can’t even begin to count how many times couples have said to each other in counseling, “You know what you did”. The reality: they often don’t.

7. React in the Opposite Spirit. One of the great teachings found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7) is this concept of giving people back the opposite of what they give you. If a person speaks hurtful words, speak a blessing. If they take something from you, give them even more. If they force you to do something you don’t want to do, help them in love. This will completely leverage your own soul and feed it while they witness you are not affected by their hurtful behavior.

Early in my walk with God, a man cheated me at a local business. The details are unimportant. I made plans to go to the local Better Business Bureau with the hope of causing him some kind of grief. My roommate in college offered to pray with me about it. As we prayed, I had a sense I was supposed to go into his shop and ask if I could pray a blessing over it (even though we both knew he had broken something of mine). When I went down there and asked him if I could pray, he mumbled that I could do whatever I wanted. So I prayed God’s blessing on his business. I left that place a free man.

8. Forgive and Release. When you have done some of the exercises above, then meditate on this question: Do I feel free now to forgive them? If you don’t, do some more exercises. But keep testing the water of your soul until the release comes.

9. Set boundaries that are safe and healthy. If a person keeps on hurting you, and if there is something you can do to prevent that hurt from happening, do so. The best medicine, after all, is preventative medicine. I have a friend whose husband had cheated on her four times. At one point, as she concluded he was going to keep doing this, she asked him to move out and get his own apartment. She told him not to tell her about any of his extra-marital relationships. In the end, she fought through her personal offense and decided not to divorce him. She often had him over for family dinners with her and the children.

So why did she ask him to move out? He had truly broken the marriage bonds between them and she didn’t want to keep hating him. If he stayed in the house while continuing to trample their marriage vows, the pain would not end. She truly forgave him, but she put a boundary so she didn’t have to keep looking at his offense.

The woman I mentioned at the beginning of the article did several of the exercises written here. What finally helped was going to God and asking how He saw her sister. God showed this woman that the sister was jealous because the mother favored the older sister. She got revenge by criticizing her sister in public. My client realized she had carried all this pain for years and had no idea what her mother’s favoritism must have done to her sister. Within a year, they had reconciled and now have a healthy adult relationship.

This works wonders if you’ll allow it.

Solution to False Beliefs in Marriage

This is a re-print of a series of two articles on false beliefs in marriage. They rank #8 on the most viewed articles on this blog.

Jenny dragged Lawrence into my office. They had been married for 14 months and I was dismayed they were already having marriage problems. Granted, Jenny had been married twice before and Lawrence once, but they had changed a lot since their previous marriages; and I was sure all the premarital counseling we had done would preempt future crises. Of course, I was wrong.

Jenny had grown up with a father who was physically violent and cruel. Twice, he broke her arm and once gave her a skull fracture. She left home at seventeen and never regretted it. She became quite successful as a flight attendant and married a pilot. After ten years of marriage, he also became violent and at one point hit her so hard he knocked her unconscious. She eventually divorced him and remained single for several years. When she did marry again, it was to a very gentle, kind man (her words). After five years of marriage, however, he also became abusive. She immediately filed for divorce and moved. She ended up in our fellowship of Christians where she met Lawrence. He was also a gentle man, something I could readily affirm. By his own account, he had never hit anyone in his life. He abhorred violence and he came across to Jenny as loving and stable.

But here is why she brought him into my office. She had begun noticing a change in attitude over the previous few months. She couldn’t quite identify what had changed, but she was frantically worried he would hurt her. I can imagine  you reading this thinking “I can see why she would think that. Every man in her life had done this”. But I suspected something deeper and more sinister was afoot. I asked Jenny to leave my office and asked Lawrence to stay. I looked him square in the eye and said, “Lawrence, do you ever feel like hitting Jenny?” He looked everywhere else but in my eyes. As he studied his feet, I asked the question again.

“Mike, I have never hit anyone in my life” he said.

“I know Lawrence. You’ve told me. Answer my question”

“Sometimes, I have this overwhelming urge to hit her. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it worries me.”

I brought Jenny back in the room and immediately asked Lawrence to tell her what he had admitted to me. Reluctantly, he faced up to her and admitted the truth about his thoughts. She exploded and ran out of my office. What happened in the next hour was one of the greatest revelations I have ever received in 30 years of counseling. But before I get to the rest of her story, I want to build a framework for the solution we found.

In a previous blog post, I noted several beliefs that could ruin a marriage. All of our emotions and actions stem from things we believe. Therefore, when emotions and behavior are ruining a relationship, you can be sure that some kind of warped belief system is at the root. Root beliefs (also known as “core beliefs”) are not thrust upon us. We always choose what we will believe. There are some behavioral psychologists who teach the inevitability of some beliefs. For instance, they may claim that all abuse victims grow up with a belief that power has been taken away from them. That certainly is true of many people, but not even most abuse victims feel the loss of personal control. There are abuse victims who feel guilty; others feel fear; still others focus on shame. As we grow (especially between the ages of 5–10), we are presented with thousands of choices about what we will believe about life, other people and ourselves. Any number of these beliefs may doggedly hang on into adulthood, severely affecting our relationships and marriages.

What is the solution? There are four steps to any process of solving the problems caused by false beliefs. These steps may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to enact, but there is no way to bypass any of them.

1. Acknowledge that your emotional reactions and negative behavior are always the result of something you believe. Too often, we want to maintain our emotions are simple reactions to simple causes. But many times, our reactions do not line up with the force of our reality. We often react too strongly to minor causes, or, in some cases, react weakly to major causes. We then try to blame our behavior on our partner. What we do with this is take responsibility away from our own belief system. For instance, I know a woman who, when she learned of her husband’s affair, went out and had a one-night stand. Then she came home and told him about it. When we were in counseling, she steadfastly held to the position that her actions were justified. Months later, we came to the conclusion her actions were based on a belief that she needed to take revenge when people hurt her or they would continue to hurt her.

2. Identify the belief at the source of the action or emotion. How do you do that? If you recall the incidents leading up to your behavior, ask yourself what you were feeling. As you focus on the feeling, note what thoughts go through your mind. In those thoughts you will identify some beliefs. Those beliefs, in their basic form, are what you need to focus on next. The woman who had the one-night stand had anger. But with the anger was a sense of fear. As she followed the fear in her mind, she had a thought that if she let her husband get away with his behavior, he would keep doing things to her like that. Her belief was that only revenge will stop the pain.

3. Follow the Belief to its Source. We do not usually come to false beliefs as adults. Generally, they have lodged themselves somewhere in our childhood memories. As you focus on the belief and the emotions surrounding that belief,recall a time when you felt and thought the same way as a child. It shouldn’t take too long if you’re being honest. When a memory comes (even if it isn’t all that clear how it connects with the present) walk through it again. Note the things you were feeling and believing in that memory.

4. Ask God to come and show you the truth in the memory. When we allow a false belief to take root in our souls, we cannot destroy it by outthinking it. We must get external input to help us make a decision. Our one-night-stand woman followed her belief back to a time when her brother bullied her constantly. After one time, he pulled her hair so hard she fell down and chipped a tooth. That night, she got a tennis racket and went into his room while he was sleeping and started to beat on him. All she remembers is that he never bullied her again. From that day on, she vowed she would never allow another person to hurt her without paying them back. As she walked through this memory, she invited God to speak truth. God showed her that revenge is not going to work. He showed her that her brother and her were never really close after that. God pointed out that she traded revenge for reconciliation and she was doing that in her marriage also. She chose to let go of the revenge belief and it helped to put her relationship back together with her husband.

As I worked in counseling with Jenny, I also explained that our inner beliefs do have an effect on our deepest relationships. Her personal belief was all men will hurt her. She lived this out in such a way that it affected the men around her. Don’t get me wrong; the men in her life who had hurt her were completely to blame for their actions. But she also had to come to grips with the reality that her belief made their actions easier. She and I walked through the four steps mentioned above and she heard from God that not all men will hurt her –  and she forgave her dad and the other men for what they had done. Since that time, Lawrence has reported absolutely no recurrence of the inner prompting to hit her. And from that day, her fear of being hurt has vanished.

This can apply to any false belief. Though it won’t change your partner all the time, it will change you; and if you are changed, then that will change the core nature of the relationship.

False Beliefs that Can Destroy a Marriage

This week, we are featuring the top ten most viewed articles on this blog. Today’s reprint is #8 on that list with over 4,000 hits. It is a two-parter. First part I will post this morning and the second part this evening.

Cathy’s husband wiped his oil-stained hands on the rag beside his workbench. As he came into the house, he realized the rag was getting so dirty there wasn’t enough ‘clean’ on it to sustain another wiping. He saw Cathy reading the newspaper and casually remarked “Remind me to wash all the rags in the garage before Monday.” Cathy dropped the newspaper, narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Then she said, with an acidic tone: “I will have you know I worked hard today. I didn’t get around to the garage after cleaning both cars, wiping little kiddie butts and straightening out the mess with the IRS.”

Within 2 hours, Cathy was in the car headed for her parents house, leaving behind a bewildered husband and two preschoolers. Within two years, they were divorced. Her husband had no idea what hit him.

My wife used to work on a hospital ward devoted to people with emotional challenges. One of her regular patients was a young man who used to have code words to identify “unsafe” people. The problem was, no one knew what the code word of the day was until you said it. He would randomly collect the first word that went through his head. If anyone said that word throughout the day, he would refuse to talk to them for the rest of that day. Nurses and doctors were left to wonder what part of their speech had produced the silence. It might be a simple word like “talk” or something more complicated such as “remember”.

Cathy and this young man in the hospital had exactly the same problem. They exhibited this problem to different degrees, but essentially it is the same problem. Cathy and the patient were both operating on a false premise. The young man’s false belief was that a spoken word could identify a dangerous person. We will discuss Cathy’s false belief at the end of this article –  suffice to say, it is just as real as the young schizophrenic.

The false beliefs we gather to ourselves over the years become like tendrils of kudzu that wind their way around every healthy thought, seeking to choke the life out of them. Nowhere does this show its effects more than marriage. Allow me to quickly summarize several of the most common false beliefs and how they affect husbands and wives. At the end, I will use Cathy to show how the false belief infiltrates a person who would otherwise function quite well in society.

Here then are the most common false beliefs that can ruin a marriage:

1. Independence: This is the belief that we really don’t need anyone else in life. It has a 100 variations, but they all focus on the self-sufficiency of the individual. This belief prevents a spouse from allowing the other person to get close, to interact on a deep level or to partner in marital goals. Those with Independence beliefs often have separate bank accounts, enjoy much different life pursuits than their partners, stop short of really expressing their needs, are constantly making new friends and discarding older ones and run away when they are asked to make deep commitments to their partner.
2. Abandonment: A person with abandonment beliefs sees many situations as the springboard for their spouse leaving them. These beliefs are often accompanied by fear and result in both over-accommodating behavior and flashes of rage. The person with abandonment premises will constantly ask their spouse to account for their whereabouts. They will express how insecure they feel about the future. When their spouse criticizes them even moderately, they will say things like “well why don’t you just leave. I know you want to”.
3. Love based on Performance: This belief says “I will not be loved unless I perform adequately”. Those who hold to this foundation often are overly critical of their spouses, seeking to bring down the performance of another person to elevate themselves. They can become workaholics, alcoholics, clean freaks, clingy, anorexic, bulemic, suicidal, or obsessive-compulsive. Their core idea is that must constantly be doing something to earn or deserve the love they receive from their spouse. It doesn’t help to tell them they are loved –  they won’t really believe it.
4. Love Will Not Be There: There is an equally large group of people who just assume they will not be loved no matter how hard they try. Many of them just give up without really trying. These people will often test their partner by failing in really obvious ways in order to see how the other person will react. This belief can even push them into relationships with people they don’t really care about, just to prove they don’t care if they’re not loved. In addition, people with this belief may question their spouses to death, showing a total lack of trust.
5. Alone: There is a common belief with many people that they are going to be alone. This is similar to the abandonment belief, but it has a nasty twist. They don’t really think a person is going to leave; they are more fatalistic than that. They often fear their spouse will die, or will be swept away in an unavoidable situation. They therefore go through life with few boundaries, allowing their partners to do anything they want to them, fearing the relationship is simply on borrowed time.
6. Shame: This is a simple belief, but deadly. It is the core understanding a person carries that there is something wrong with them. When they were children, it came out as “I am stupid”, “I am going to be beat up”, “I can’t ever get this right”. In adulthood, this person often allows their spouse to find many things wrong with them, accepting blame when they have done little wrong. Shame beliefs foster such behavior as closet drinking, sexual deviancy, serial adultery, lying, self-mutilation, depression, anxiety disorders and even violence.
7. Helplessness: These beliefs (and there are many) come from situations in childhood where a person was treated unfairly and given no recourse to bring closure to the issue. This unfair treatment leads a person to conclude they will never get a fair shake, and therefore they need to protect themselves. Helpless beliefs can result in adultery, pornography obsession, eating disorders, obsessive drug use, phobias, prostitution, violence, angry speech, etc. These beliefs often result in the worst of behaviors, since the behaviors are often ways of bringing a sense of “control” back into their lives.
8. Escape: These beliefs focus on the only way to deal with reality –  run away from it. Every time life gets hard, this inner belief is triggered and the person finds some way to get away from it all. This often cuts the other spouse out of the picture and hurts them deeply. Most people with this belief abuse substances or use sex as an escape. Compulsive masturbation, compulsive gambling and spending are often seen.

There are other beliefs than these, but I have found this list to be the most common. But every person brings their peculiar beliefs into a marriage. When two people come into a marriage relationship with false beliefs, this mixes up a soup of disaster. Let me show you how it worked with Cathy.

She had a belief that no matter how hard she tried, everyone who mattered to her would eventually leave. You would think this sprung from a traumatic childhood experience, but the roots were very simple. Her two older sisters were both hippies and moved out of the house quite young. They had been best buddies to Cathy and now she was the only child left at home. Her mother reacted to her oldest daughters leaving by drinking gin every night until she passed out. Dad dealt with his wife’s inebriation by working 60 hour weeks. Cathy spent most of her days quite alone with her thoughts.

In high school, she made up for this sense of being abandoned by trying to over-compensate. She became hyper-flirtatious and joined every club at school. But because she feared being dumped, she often got clingy with both boy and girls. The result of this clinginess was that people didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Thus, they fulfilled her fear and abandoned her. This just served to reinforce her fear. In order to overcome this, she tried even harder to get people to stay with her. With her girlfriends, she was known as the one who would help out in every way. She spent her own money and bought gifts, helped with homework, staying up half the night sewing cheerleader outfits for her friends. With boys, she basically allowed them to take any sexual liberties they wanted. Yet, despite this extra effort, people still got tired of how hard she was trying and rejected her.

When she married her husband Ben, she really wanted to overcome this. She knew she tried too hard, so she sought to back off and give him breathing space. But her fears kept growing. So often she would get angry and say “Why don’t you just leave? I know you’re going to leave”. Her fear led her to get violent at times, hitting Ben in the head. She sometimes even took out her anger on the little girls.

The day she left, her fear of abandonment had been acute for weeks before. She determined she was going to solve this fear by praying every morning and then serving her husband in love. She had been reading a few books on Christian marriage and she read that if you serve in love it will cast out fear. Now, that is a good principle, but it was no match for her false belief. For a week or more, she tried to anticipate Ben’s every need. But it was exhausting. By the end of the work week, she was an emotional wreck.

When Ben came in and innocently mentioned the grease rag, it echoed against her deeply-ingrained fear. He had one more demand she couldn’t meet. Something inside her snapped and she realized her fear had only been submerged in her cleaning and service. Now, it came rushing out with a fury. Even though Ben had not been criticizing her at all, that is what she heard. False beliefs often affect our hearing, causing us to interpret all communication according to the matrix of the belief. Cathy left and never returned. Her example is repeated millions of times a year, by both men and women.

Examine your own life. Can you see evidence of these sort of beliefs?

There is an answer, and it’s quite straight-forward. More about that in the next article.

Looking at her Diary…then His Diary

This week, we  are reprinting the ten most popular blog entries from the last ten years. Not as deep as others essays on here, but enjoyable and revelatory.

This explains about 98% of male-female conflict:

Her Diary:

Tonight I thought my husband was acting wierd. We made plans to eat at a fancy restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset that I was a little bit late arriving, but he never said anything about it. Conversation wasn’t really flowing, so I suggested we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn’t say much along the way. I asked him if I had done something to make him so upset and he said “I’m not upset. You didn’t do anything wrong.” On the way home, I told him I loved him and he just smiled at me. Then he kept driving. He never said a single thing on the way home and when I tried to engage him in conversation, his answers were really short. I can’t explain his behavior; I don’t know why he didn’t say “I love you” back. When we got home, I was sure I had completely lost touch with him. He just sat down on the couch and watched television for an hour without saying anything. All he did was stare straight ahead. Finally, when the silence got too much, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he too came to bed, but once again didn’t say anything. He seemed so distracted and distant. Within a few minutes, he fell asleep. That’s when I lost it. I began to cry, wondering why I had lost him and trying to figure out how to rekindle our marriage. I’m almost sure he is thinking about someone else. I feel so lost.

His Diary:

Motorcyle won’t start…can’t figure out why.

How Important Is Trust?

For the next few weeks, I will be reprinting the 10 most viewed posts from this blog. This one today, posted three years ago has had over 10,000 hits. I give it to you with no explanation other than to say, it is time we learned how to trust the way God does.

“Mike, she has lied to me too many times. I just can’t trust her any more – I can’t do it!” He kept twisting the telephone bill around and around in his hands, siphoning off some of the anguish he felt in the process.

“I can completely understand why you don’t trust her. She hasn’t given you any reason to trust her, has she?”

“So it makes sense to you why I don’t want to be married anymore? I just assumed you would tell me we have to stay married. But how can you stay married to a woman you can’t trust?” I could tell by the tone in his voice and the look of finality on his face that he had already decided. I knew he wasn’t going to like or understand what I was going to say next. Fortunately, that has never stopped me.

“Since when does trust have anything to do with love and marriage?” I asked. As soon as I said this, his head shot up and he looked me right in the eyes. I could tell he wrestled with exactly how he wanted to word his objection, but after discarding several versions of his indignation speech, he just said, “What?!”

“Listen. You assume that love and trust go together, don’t you? I know you do, because almost everyone does. But everyone just happens to be mistaken in this case. We have been duped into thinking that you can only love someone if you can truly trust them. As soon as that trust relationship is broken, love cannot follow. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?”

He agreed. That was what he had always been taught.

He had been taught poorly.

I explained that this view of love and trust do not come from either common sense, from acknowledged teachings of the Bible, or any other philosophical writings. This view of love owes more to pop psychology than reality.

For instance, Dr. Joyce Brothers (the diva of pop psych sex counseling) says “The best proof of love is trust” and ““We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.” I assume most people reading those words find some sort of resonance with them. But they don’t really make sense in the real world, not when you think about it.

Let’s start with the basic concept of God. Christian teaching establishes that God loves us, each of us. My question is this: Who loves us more than God? By definition of who God is, no one can love us more. Yet who trusts us LESS than God? He knows everything about us, analyzing us from our motives to our hidden faults. When we have fooled the rest of the world into believing that we are holier than Martin Luther King, God has all the evidence.

So look at the equation: God loves us more than anyone else and trusts us less. We are told this about Jesus in John 2:24:

But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people.

Yet his amazing love extended to a point where he surrendered his life to pay for our spiritual debts. Such great love; such little trust.

A parent of a four-year old does not trust their child very much. We know that the second we turn our backs, they will be shoving nickels up their nose or grabbing oreos by the armload right before dinner. Yet we love them passionately. The love of a parent does not rest on any shaky foundation of trust any more than a bridge rests on a foundation of sand and mud.

Trust is actually an emotion. It is an emotional response when we notice and admit others around us are consistent in their actions. I say “admit” because if we have decided we can’t trust people, no amount of proof is going to change that emotion.

But we can always love. Love is a decision that says “I will do the best thing for you. I hope that next month you will show me more reasons to trust you, but until that time I will love.”

When we love before we trust, we show the greatness of our character and the durability of our impact on the lives of those we love.

Who are you having trouble trusting? Then don’t. Don’t trust anyone absolutely, but do love them.

Sex and the Single Christian

The other night, my wife and I caught an episode of “Parenthood” on Netflix before bed. If you know the show, it’s the episode where 16-year old Haddie admits to her mother that she and her 19-year old boyfriend are having sex. Mom panics. Mom tells Dad. Dad panics. Dad and Mom agree that Haddie needs to be warned to use contraception (“not just the pill, but condoms as well”).* See Note at the bottom.

Then Haddie’s parents, Adam and Christina, look at each other and say “What else can we say to her?” In their minds, they both remember they had sex the first time before high school was over and it didn’t kill them. So they decide to give Haddie the ‘responsible warnings’ and move on past it.

I told my wife that many Christians we know would have been scandalized by that episode. They would have risen up out of their chairs, incensed that the parents did not offer any moral assistance or guidance. They would have observed it is difficult for parents to give children a moral compass when they didn’t have one at the same age.

But I’ve been wondering lately at some of the messages we send single Christians about sex. Many Christian book authors and bloggers are wondering the same thing. For instance, Sarah Bessey in an article titled “I am Damaged Goods” tells about a Church youth rally she attended:

I was nineteen years old and crazy in love with Jesus when that preacher told an auditorium I was “damaged goods” because of my sexual past. He was making every effort to encourage this crowd of young adults to “stay pure for marriage.” He was passionate, yes, well-intentioned, and he was a good speaker, very convincing indeed.

And he stood up there and shamed me, over and over and over again.

Oh, he didn’t call me up to the front and name me. But he stood up there and talked about me with such disgust, like I couldn’t be in that real-life crowd of young people worshipping in that church. I felt spotlighted and singled out amongst the holy, surely my red face announced my guilt to every one.

He passed around a cup of water and asked us all to spit into it. Some boys horked and honked their worst into that cup while everyone laughed. Then he held up that cup of cloudy saliva from the crowd and asked, “Who wants to drink this?!”

And every one in the crowd made barfing noises, no way, gross!

Read the entire article here.

At the end of the article, she concludes:

“No matter what that preacher said that day, no matter how many purity balls are thrown with sparkling upper-middle-class extravagance, no matter the purity rings and the purity pledges, no matter the judgemental Gospel-negating rhetoric used with the best of intentions, no matter the “how close is too close?” serious conversations of boundary-marking young Christians, no matter the circumstances of your story, you are not disqualified from life or from joy or from marriage or from your calling or from a healthy and wonderful lifetime of sex because you had – and, heaven forbid, enjoyed – sex before you were married.”

If you’re like me, you start to respond “yeah, but…” and then trail away.

If the statistics are correct, 80% of Christians have had sex before marriage. And if the anecdotal evidence from many Christian counselors is accurate, pre-marital sex does not ruin your sex life in marriage; and conversely, maintaining virginity does not guarantee you will have an enjoyable sexual relationship with the person you eventually marry.

Here is the bottom line: God-followers are running out of the stock answers for why Christians shouldn’t have sex before marriage. For the past twenty centuries, we have fallen back onto these:

1. No one will want to marry  you if you’ve had sex before marriage (almost always applied to women).

2. God will judge you for having sex.

3. You will open yourself up to demonic attack.

4. You can get pregnant (women), STD’s (men and women), mental illness.

5. Society will reject you (once again, women).

6. Your future marriage will be doomed to failure before it starts.

As you can see, most of these no longer apply in the twenty-first century. Contraceptives have gone a long way to eliminate the scare of pregnancy and STD’s. Western society no longer punishes or segregates those who have sex. Marriages don’t seem to be ruined by people who have premarital sex (any more than those who got married as virgins).  And perhaps most noticeable, Christian singles have sex and no lightning from the sky falls to smote them. Indeed, it seems like most of the reasons we have told each other for abstinence no longer seem as scary or applicable.

Chanel Graham, writing on her experience with Christian singles in New York City, observes,

When I moved to New York City in the years following college, I was devastated to learn how many of my Christian friends were regularly hooking up at bars and sleeping with boyfriends and girlfriends with no plans for marriage. And more than that, they didn’t seem to feel bad about it. The sub-cultural sentiment was that abstinence is worth preaching through the college years as parental influence wanes and students bumble through the early years of adulthood. But for twenty and thirty-something Christians, for mature adults who had yet to find the one and had been battling hormones for a decade-plus, waiting was child’s play. Celibacy among my Christian peer group was viewed as cute and commendable, but certainly not crucial.

Since few single Christians are willing to abstain from sex forever, what should be the next dialogue for the Church and single Christians?

I had a close friend tell me a few months ago that there are no valid reasons and we should give up telling them to abstain. I didn’t agree with him then or now, but I admit the reasons are not as obvious as they used to be in days gone by.

The easiest way to put this is we should not have sex before marriage because God does not want us to. That’s the easy answer. But that just begs two more questions:

1.What does God say in the Bible about pre-marital sex?

2. What happens to unmarried Christians if they do have sex?

So let’s dive into these two incredibly relevant questions.

So when did God first address issues concerning pre-marital sex? God didn’t say anything to Adam and Eve or their children. This is noteworthy, since it is obvious there was a lot of sex taking place in the early days of man’s existence: There was a whole lot of begetting going on…and apparently, it was all okay. God never mentioned sex to Noah before the flood or to Noah and his family after the flood – other than “Be fruitful and multiply”. And apparently, all this was okay too.

We see the same pattern with Abraham. Abraham even engages in extra-marital sexuality (see the relationship between he and Hagar, his wife’s maid). God never says a word about Abraham’s sex life. Nor does God intervene with Isaac and Jacob. Jacob married a couple of sisters and has sex with both of their maids as well (with his wives’ permission…they had a little bit of a sibling baby competition going). Still, God does not say anything.

With Jacob’s children, a lot of extra-marital sex happens. Probably the strangest incident involves Judah and his daughter-in-law, who gets pregnant by him by pretending to be a prostitute. At this point, God is still silent over the entire issue of what sexuality is allowed and what isn’t.

Thrown into the mix however, is a poignant scene where Sodom and Gomorrah are incinerated…most likely because of their homosexuality. However, we’re not even sure if that was the entire issue (Ezekiel also points out the sin of greed as the partial reason for Sodom’s demise).

So where does God start talking about extra-marital sex? In the giving of the Law to Moses, God begins to lay down some boundaries regarding sexuality. In Exodus 22, Leviticus 19, the same set of limitations are placed on sex. They were not to have sex with relatives. They were forbade from homosexuality and bestiality. They were not to engage in sexuality related to idol worship or group sex. But in no case is premarital sexuality addressed. Nowhere in the Mosaic Law is there a prohibition against premarital sex.

If you peruse the rest of the Old Testament, there is a complete absence of prohibition on pre-marital sex. In fact, there are many commentators who point to the Song of Solomon as a tacit endorsement of enjoying sex before marriage. I do not agree with most of their assessments, but it is clear that Song of Solomon does nothing to show the dangers of sex outside of marriage.

In the prophets, however, we get the first glimpse into God’s true heart on the matter. I need to qualify this to point out we only get a glimpse of God’s biggest purposes in sexuality. All of the relevant passages say the same general thing, so I will just deal with one of them.

Isaiah 23:17 (NIV): “At the end of seventy years, the Lord will deal with Tyre. She will return to her lucrative prostitution and will ply her trade with all the kingdoms on the face of the earth.”

The word for “prostitution” here is a word which refers to “fornication”, most commonly defined as sex outside of marriage. In every case where the prophets mention this word it is in reference to two things: People having sex related to idol worship (forbidden in Deuteronomy) or as a picture of nations courting other nations for protection.

In other words, there is no absolute verse in the Old Testament that does more than hint that sex outside of marriage is wrong. However, the references made to this sexual practice through the prophets do show that God does not think highly of sex outside of marriage. I can just see some Christian singles wanting to stop right there and be satisfied that their sex life is just fine as far as God is concerned. But please, keep reading.

There is much in the New Testament that is worthy of study. But it is not as straight-forward as parents might like when talking to their kids. Take for example,

Matthew 15:19: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.”

The inner heart of man can conceive of many shades of evil thoughts…one of those is called “immorality”. It is a Greek word that sometimes means adultery. However, because “adultery” is used right before it in this list, it cannot mean that. The other meanings of this word include fornication, group sex and idol/temple related sex. There is no reason to believe that Jesus would be referring to either group sex or pagan temple sex, for neither of these were practiced in Israel at that time.

Therefore, he is referring to sex outside of marriage in whatever form it happens. And in this verse, Jesus is not talking about the act, but the heart that conceives these things. The core of a heart that wants sex outside of marriage is called “Evil”. The Greek word there is Poneros. Though it means ‘evil’ the root of the word means “that which causes pain”. These are painful things. It is not that a person is called evil at their core, but that these thoughts lead to pain. Murder is obvious, as is adultery. But Jesus lumps immorality in with the rest. Why? It doesn’t say here. But it is pretty clear this is not God’s best plan.

Years ago, I had a couple of parents drag their 16-year old daughter in to see me so I could “talk some sense into her”. She had just admitted to her mother that she had sex with her boyfriend. She had not become pregnant and didn’t know why her parents were making such a big fuss. I was furious inside that they would totally shame their daughter in front of me. (Later, I did sit them down to tell them how much they owed their daughter an apology). But the conversation I want to relate at this point happened with the girl.

She was 16. She admitted the details of the sexual encounter and how badly she felt about it all. In fact, she looked sick as she told me what happened. What began as a make-out session quickly led to sex. Her boyfriend talked her into going “all the way”. She was not sure what was happening; and then it was all over.

She felt horrible and hated her boyfriend. It ruined their relationship from that point forward. Most of her questions for me had to do with why anyone would ever want to have sex. It hurt, she felt betrayed and everyone “hated” her afterward – including her boyfriend.

I assured her she had experienced one of the worst-case scenarios regarding sex. If she were to sit down with 100 women who have had sex before marriage, most would have related a better story than hers. Most would also have said that the experience was not everything they had hoped for.

But the key thing she realized after several counseling sessions is her early entrance into the sexual arena was painful in so many ways. This is the idea inherent calling extra-marital sex “poneros”…it can be very painful at so many levels. In order to see what this really means, we need to look at the most detailed explanation of God’s view on sexuality, found in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7.

First, it is no surprise that a letter to the Church at Corinth should contain clear teaching on sexuality. Even by the somewhat “loose” moral standards of the ancient Greek and Roman world, Corinth stood out as an extreme place. Any and all sexual practices were flouted by the Corinthians. Orgies were relatively common and temple prostitution abounded. Women who went out in public usually had to cover their entire head so as not to be confused with a temple prostitute. (Note: This is the point Paul will make in 1 Corinthians 11 when he warns Christian women not to go out with their heads uncovered).

But in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul has several points to make about immorality of all kinds. We can safely assume this includes all types of extra-marital sex. Here are the highlights of what he says:

1. The life we live in the Kingdom of God does not fit well with sexual immorality. - 1 Cor. 6:9-10,

“Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

All of these activities hinder the sanctifying work of the Spirit in our lives and stunt our spiritual growth. The verb tenses here mean that each of these sins are ongoing problems, not just one-time experimentation. This verse isn’t talking about someone losing their virginity but rather a person who has sexual encounters as a regular part of their lives. The more someone indulges unhealthy, painful activities the more it blocks the work of God in their lives. The Kingdom of God is not primarily about salvation but more about the Sanctifying work of the Spirit.

So the first thing we learn here about immorality is it blocks the work of the Spirit and thus the working of the Kingdom of God in our lives. Sexual immorality causes a person to walk more and more focused on pleasure and renders them less capable of seeing the godly path in front of them.

2. Our physical bodies are not the only part of us involved with the sexual act. In 1 Cor. 6:13-17, Paul says,

“ You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.  By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! ¹⁶ Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit”.

Even though Holy Spirit is spirit, his presence in our lives affects our bodies also. Romans 8:11 affirms this:

“And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Our bodies are somehow affected by sexual immorality. I do not know how or to what extent this happens. This is not judgment per se. No one should say that God sends disease or disaster on us because of sexual immorality. More to the point, the act of sexual immorality blocks the healing flow of the Spirit and therefore blocks some of that life he is giving to our mortal bodies.

Also, we are reminded that our lives are given over to Christ when we become a Christ-follower. In these verses, Paul wonders what happens if a person joined Christ to a prostitute. This person is reminded that we are one with Jesus in spirit. Therefore, there is some connection deeper than the physical that goes on between two people when they are sexually joined.

This perhaps is a hint toward the deeper meaning of sex and the deeper danger of sexual immorality. If the physical joining is also the beginning of a deeper connection between two people, then casual, flippant sex is dangerous. It potentially creates bonds between people that are harder to break than non -sexual friendships.

3. Sexual immorality causes us to sin against ourselves: 1 Cor. 6:18-20 puts it this way:

“Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. ¹⁹ Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

If you commit sexual immorality – i.e. sex outside of marriage – you probably hurt no one more than yourself. It doesn’t describe how we hurt ourselves, but I think we can imagine. Our lives are a delicate balance of the physical and spiritual. We know that any kind of psychological pressures and failures can wreak havoc on our bodies. When someone is involved in sexual relationships that are less than God’s ideal, it will have some emotional effect. And this emotional effect will take some type of toll on the body.

I’m not talking about superstitious things like hair on your knuckles. I am not talking nonsense like those who claim AIDS is a judgment for homosexuality in our world. I think we rob our bodies of energy and compromise our immune system by creating deep sexual bonds with other people before we’re ready.

All of this is saying that sex is more complicated than two people joining their reproductive organs together. You don’t even have to be a Christian to know that. Our emotions are so heightened when sex is involved. When a couple goes from being friends to being sexual, immediately the stakes are higher. What might have provoked mild jealousy in the friendship stage, now causes huge emotional reactions in the sexual stage. How many people can handle that kind of stressor in a relationship that has yet to be fully defined?

The value of waiting until marriage for sex is that it brings those stressors under the boundaries of a covenant relationship. At least in theory, two married people are required to work through any problems they have in their sexual relationship. That is not the case with teenagers. Haddie and her boyfriend had sex and their relationship inexorably changed (as it always does). Eventually, the escalation of their relationship into sexuality was a prime factor in why they split up a few months later.

Paul in Chapter 7 of 1 Corinthians concludes the discussion on premarital sex this way: “Now for the matters you wrote about:

“It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”  But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband.

Paul does not see sex as inevitable. There is nothing in God’s mind or Paul’s that concludes everyone has to have sex. It is not a right or an absolute need. However, Paul also recognizes that some people will go through life eternally distracted by the opposite sex if they don’t get intimate. So he proposes this is why God created marriage. It is a place where sex can be bound to a covenant. It makes life a little less complicated, a little less painful and somewhat sexually satisfying.

I qualified all of the above statements because as long as sex exists in this world, it will be the point of so many problems and contentions. That’s why Paul probably advises to stay away from it if you can. If you can’t, help sexual pressures out by putting it in the boundaries of marriage. This is the better way.

If you have had sex before marriage, you have not necessarily ruined a future marriage. You have not become a candidate for God’s wrath. You are not a dirty person. You have not given away your best gift. You simply have a choice what you want to do from here.

I believe there is a best way.  Most people today are not finding that way…getting lost in the vagaries of sexual experimentation. But, if you don’t find it at first, keep looking for it. Certainly, don’t allow the enemy to our souls to discourage you if you are no longer a virgin. Virginity is not the point at all. The point is that we have to choose each day how we want to walk with God.

The Bible and the Spirit of God will help you.

*[Endnote: I am concerned that the writers of "Parenthood" did not use the plot of the show to address the illegality of 16-year old Haddie and 19-year old Alex having a sexual relationship. In California - where the show is set - this is called Statutory Rape. This is irresponsible by the show. Teen viewers may not realize they are watching something illegal if someone doesn't point it out. My wife told me she has been informed by the authorities (as a school nurse and thus a mandated reporter) that they will not enforce the Statutory Rape law when the sex is consensual and the parties are this close in age. My point is, it is irresponsible of the show not to address this issue, especially since they were willing to bring up the issue of underage sex].

Complementarianism Gone Crazy

Just to be clear. I am not a complementarian. I am an Egalitarian. The Complementarian believes that God ordained that men rule over women in the marital relationship. This position points  to Genesis 3 and the Fall of Man where God tells Eve that her desire will be for her husband and he will rule over her. An Egalitarian believes that the Death and Resurrection of Jesus changes many of the relationships broken by the Fall. And that includes the marriage relationship.

I respect the Complementarian position, but I don’t subscribe to it. I believe that God gives both men and women in a marriage the same mandate to love one another, the same command to submit to one another and the same Holy Spirit to live in harmony with each other. Equal. Together. Holy.

And even though I respect the other position, sometimes it is hard to do so. In a recent article from the Gospel Coalition (a mainstream Complementarian group), Jared Wilson talks about one area that has always been seen as equal ground by both the Complementarians and Egalitarians: Sex and Sexual Pleasure.

Here is the article, and here is a selection of what he says (it is not taken out of context):

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

This is outrageous! He is basically saying that sex is all about a man conquering and taking charge of a woman. The other side he calls “egalitarian pleasure party”. What he is saying is that the desire of a man to pleasure his wife is unbiblical.

Apparently, he is forgetting that the Apostle Paul is the one who says,

The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor. 7:3-4).

Many of my complementarian friends will be outraged by this article and how badly he portrays their position, but I need to point out one thing. This is where all of the Complementarian philosophy logically  ends: Men are in charge and women have to submit. That adheres completely to Genesis 3 and does not recognize the power of the Cross to change human relationships broken by the selfishness of Humankind.

I am not presenting this man’s teaching as a Straw Man argument on why Complementarianism is wrong. I am presenting it as a caution to where this teaching is often applied. And as a counselor, I do mean “often”.

This idiotic article may help some of you to rethink your position. I hope it does.

UPDATE: Jared has published an apology. Read it here. His original link no longer works…he has taken down the article. What is interesting is that the person he was quoting in his egregious statements about sex is now angry at him for taking down the quote.

Wedding Shows Are Another Ploy

I once officiated at a wedding where the Bride and Groom spent over $18,000 on the wedding ceremony. There were real swans on the lawn as she drove up, ten musicians playing coronet trumpets as she ascended the stairs, a 20 foot train on her wedding dress and the church was a 200-year old landmark that her father pressured politicians to allow her to use. Result: Their marriage lasted 5 years and they split up. That’s about $3500/year.

It used to be that people found this story amusing. It used to be that people found it to be quirky, unique and out of the ordinary. Now, it doesn’t really cause anyone to bat an eye. Why? They see this all the time on the half dozen “Wedding” reality shows. And I believe the effect this is having on couples is much more insidious than people realize.

Most people who read this blog regularly are followers of Jesus Christ. I realize a number of you are not. So, let me be clear on a few things that the Bible teaches us. I am not asking you to agree with what the Bible teaches, just to acknowledge that it does.

First, there is nothing wrong with being single. There is nothing that makes a married person more important than a single person. In fact, the Apostle Paul almost seems to endorse the idea that if you’re single you can serve God with a greater fervor than a married person. Let me say it this way: If you want to be single, good for you. God has no problem with that.

Second, God also tells single people that having sexual relationships with other people is unhealthy. Sex does more than bind two people physically together. It creates emotional, psychological, relational, spiritual, social, financial and memory bonds that cannot be broken completely. The reason for sex within the marriage covenant is that sex creates ties that are best expressed when there is a lifelong commitment attached.

Third, the Bible teaches that if you’re single and the need for sex is getting too strong, there is nothing wrong with getting married soon. And the goal is to stay married.

Now, what do wedding shows have to do with this? They make weddings so altogether more important and EXPENSIVE than they need to be. In some misguided ideal promoted by wedding dress manufacturers, cake designers, rental hall companies etc. we are led to believe that you cannot have a great marriage without a correspondingly great wedding ceremony. There could be nothing further from the truth.

The sole purpose for a wedding ceremony is to drive home the permanent nature of the vows to the bride and groom. All the rest is fun and games; and I don’t have anything against the rest of the hoopla except this. If the cost and complications of a wedding ceremony are keeping you from getting married any time soon, you need to do one of three things:

1. Get married now in a simple ceremony and have the big ceremony later.

2. Ditch the big ceremony altogether.

3. Break up and find someone who hasn’t been sucked in to wedding shows.

I’m not trying to be funny either. People have always struggled with sex outside of marriage. I am not here to pound that pulpit or say that everyone is evil. Sex is as natural a need as we have. But there isn’t a person on this planet that doesn’t think that sex complicates great friendships. And I don’t know a lot of people who can be in a deep committed relationship who can abstain from sex forever.

So, my advice for all of us who have a biblical mindset is to stop watching these unrealistic and distracting wedding shows and just go back to being smart again. Have a small wedding and enjoy your guests. Put away the swans…put away the huge meals…and have a wonderful marriage. That’s a thousand times more important.

Or stay single and celibate. It doesn’t matter.

The Solution to False Beliefs in Marriage

Jenny dragged Lawrence into my office. They had been married for 14 months and I was dismayed they were already having marriage problems. Granted, Jenny had been married twice before and Lawrence once, but they had changed a lot since their previous marriages; and I was sure all the premarital counseling we had done would preempt future crises. Of course, I was wrong.

Jenny had grown up with a father who was physically violent and cruel. Twice, he broke her arm and once gave her a skull fracture. She left home at seventeen and never regretted it. She became quite successful as a flight attendant and married a pilot. After ten years of marriage, he also became violent and at one point hit her so hard he knocked her unconscious. She eventually divorced him and remained single for several years. When she did marry again, it was to a very gentle, kind man (her words). After five years of marriage, however, he also became abusive. She immediately filed for divorce and moved. She ended up in our fellowship of Christians where she met Lawrence. He was also a gentle man, something I could readily affirm. By his own account, he had never hit anyone in his life. He abhorred violence and he came across to Jenny as loving and stable.

But here is why she brought him into my office. She had begun noticing a change in attitude over the previous few months. She couldn’t quite identify what had changed, but she was frantically worried he would hurt her. I can imagine  you reading this thinking “I can see why she would think that. Every man in her life had done this”. But I suspected something deeper and more sinister was afoot. I asked Jenny to leave my office and asked Lawrence to stay. I looked him square in the eye and said, “Lawrence, do you ever feel like hitting Jenny?” He looked everywhere else but in my eyes. As he studied his feet, I asked the question again.

“Mike, I have never hit anyone in my life” he said.

“I know Lawrence. You’ve told me. Answer my question”

“Sometimes, I have this overwhelming urge to hit her. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it worries me.”

I brought Jenny back in the room and immediately asked Lawrence to tell her what he had admitted to me. Reluctantly, he faced up to her and admitted the truth about his thoughts. She exploded and ran out of my office. What happened in the next hour was one of the greatest revelations I have ever received in 30 years of counseling. But before I get to the rest of her story, I want to build a framework for the solution we found.

In a previous blog post, I noted several beliefs that could ruin a marriage. All of our emotions and actions stem from things we believe. Therefore, when emotions and behavior are ruining a relationship, you can be sure that some kind of warped belief system is at the root. Root beliefs (also known as “core beliefs”) are not thrust upon us. We always choose what we will believe. There are some behavioral psychologists who teach the inevitability of some beliefs. For instance, they may claim that all abuse victims grow up with a belief that power has been taken away from them. That certainly is true of many people, but not even most abuse victims feel the loss of personal control. There are abuse victims who feel guilty; others feel fear; still others focus on shame. As we grow (especially between the ages of 5–10), we are presented with thousands of choices about what we will believe about life, other people and ourselves. Any number of these beliefs may doggedly hang on into adulthood, severely affecting our relationships and marriages.

What is the solution? There are four steps to any process of solving the problems caused by false beliefs. These steps may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to enact, but there is no way to bypass any of them.

1. Acknowledge that your emotional reactions and negative behavior are always the result of something you believe. Too often, we want to maintain our emotions are simple reactions to simple causes. But many times, our reactions do not line up with the force of our reality. We often react too strongly to minor causes, or, in some cases, react weakly to major causes. We then try to blame our behavior on our partner. What we do with this is take responsibility away from our own belief system. For instance, I know a woman who, when she learned of her husband’s affair, went out and had a one-night stand. Then she came home and told him about it. When we were in counseling, she steadfastly held to the position that her actions were justified. Months later, we came to the conclusion her actions were based on a belief that she needed to take revenge when people hurt her or they would continue to hurt her.

2. Identify the belief at the source of the action or emotion. How do you do that? If you recall the incidents leading up to your behavior, ask yourself what you were feeling. As you focus on the feeling, note what thoughts go through your mind. In those thoughts you will identify some beliefs. Those beliefs, in their basic form, are what you need to focus on next. The woman who had the one-night stand had anger. But with the anger was a sense of fear. As she followed the fear in her mind, she had a thought that if she let her husband get away with his behavior, he would keep doing things to her like that. Her belief was that only revenge will stop the pain.

3. Follow the Belief to its Source. We do not usually come to false beliefs as adults. Generally, they have lodged themselves somewhere in our childhood memories. As you focus on the belief and the emotions surrounding that belief, recall a time when you felt and thought the same way as a child. It shouldn’t take too long if you’re being honest. When a memory comes (even if it isn’t all that clear how it connects with the present) walk through it again. Note the things you were feeling and believing in that memory.

4. Ask God to come and show you the truth in the memory. When we allow a false belief to take root in our souls, we cannot destroy it by outthinking it. We must get external input to help us make a decision. Our one-night-stand woman followed her belief back to a time when her brother bullied her constantly. After one time, he pulled her hair so hard she fell down and chipped a tooth. That night, she got a tennis racket and went into his room while he was sleeping and started to beat on him. All she remembers is that he never bullied her again. From that day on, she vowed she would never allow another person to hurt her without paying them back. As she walked through this memory, she invited God to speak truth. God showed her that revenge is not going to work. He showed her that her brother and her were never really close after that. God pointed out that she traded revenge for reconciliation and she was doing that in her marriage also. She chose to let go of the revenge belief and it helped to put her relationship back together with her husband.

As I worked in counseling with Jenny, I also explained that our inner beliefs do have an effect on our deepest relationships. Her personal belief was all men will hurt her. She lived this out in such a way that it affected the men around her. Don’t get me wrong; the men in her life who had hurt her were completely to blame for their actions. But she also had to come to grips with the reality that her belief made their actions easier. She and I walked through the four steps mentioned above and she heard from God that not all men will hurt her –  and she forgave her dad and the other men for what they had done. Since that time, Lawrence has reported absolutely no recurrence of the inner prompting to hit her. And from that day, her fear of being hurt has vanished.

This can apply to any false belief. Though it won’t change your partner all the time, it will change you; and if you are changed, then that will change the core nature of the relationship.

False Beliefs That Can Ruin a Marriage

Cathy’s husband wiped his oil-stained hands on the rag beside his workbench. As he came into the house, he realized the rag was getting so dirty there wasn’t enough ‘clean’ on it to sustain another wiping. He saw Cathy reading the newspaper and casually remarked “Remind me to wash all the rags in the garage before Monday.” Cathy dropped the newspaper, narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Then she said, with an acidic tone: “I will have you know I worked hard today. I didn’t get around to the garage after cleaning both cars, wiping little kiddie butts and straightening out the mess with the IRS.”

Within 2 hours, Cathy was in the car headed for her parents house, leaving behind a bewildered husband and two preschoolers. Within two years, they were divorced. Her husband had no idea what hit him.

My wife used to work on a hospital ward devoted to people with emotional challenges. One of her regular patients was a young man who used to have code words to identify “unsafe” people. The problem was, no one knew what the code word of the day was until you said it. He would randomly collect the first word that went through his head. If anyone said that word throughout the day, he would refuse to talk to them for the rest of that day. Nurses and doctors were left to wonder what part of their speech had produced the silence. It might be a simple word like “talk” or something more complicated such as “remember”.

Cathy and this young man in the hospital had exactly the same problem. They exhibited this problem to different degrees, but essentially it is the same problem. Cathy and the patient were both operating on a false premise. The young man’s false belief was that a spoken word could identify a dangerous person. We will discuss Cathy’s false belief at the end of this article –  suffice to say, it is just as real as the young schizophrenic.

The false beliefs we gather to ourselves over the years become like tendrils of kudzu that wind their way around every healthy thought, seeking to choke the life out of them. Nowhere does this show its effects more than marriage. Allow me to quickly summarize several of the most common false beliefs and how they affect husbands and wives. At the end, I will use Cathy to show how the false belief infiltrates a person who would otherwise function quite well in society.

Here then are the most common false beliefs that can ruin a marriage:

1. Independence: This is the belief that we really don’t need anyone else in life. It has a 100 variations, but they all focus on the self-sufficiency of the individual. This belief prevents a spouse from allowing the other person to get close, to interact on a deep level or to partner in marital goals. Those with Independence beliefs often have separate bank accounts, enjoy much different life pursuits than their partners, stop short of really expressing their needs, are constantly making new friends and discarding older ones and run away when they are asked to make deep commitments to their partner.
2. Abandonment: A person with abandonment beliefs sees many situations as the springboard for their spouse leaving them. These beliefs are often accompanied by fear and result in both over-accommodating behavior and flashes of rage. The person with abandonment premises will constantly ask their spouse to account for their whereabouts. They will express how insecure they feel about the future. When their spouse criticizes them even moderately, they will say things like “well why don’t you just leave. I know you want to”.
3. Love based on Performance: This belief says “I will not be loved unless I perform adequately”. Those who hold to this foundation often are overly critical of their spouses, seeking to bring down the performance of another person to elevate themselves. They can become workaholics, alcoholics, clean freaks, clingy, anorexic, bulemic, suicidal, or obsessive-compulsive. Their core idea is that must constantly be doing something to earn or deserve the love they receive from their spouse. It doesn’t help to tell them they are loved –  they won’t really believe it.
4. Love Will Not Be There: There is an equally large group of people who just assume they will not be loved no matter how hard they try. Many of them just give up without really trying. These people will often test their partner by failing in really obvious ways in order to see how the other person will react. This belief can even push them into relationships with people they don’t really care about, just to prove they don’t care if they’re not loved. In addition, people with this belief may question their spouses to death, showing a total lack of trust.
5. Alone: There is a common belief with many people that they are going to be alone. This is similar to the abandonment belief, but it has a nasty twist. They don’t really think a person is going to leave; they are more fatalistic than that. They often fear their spouse will die, or will be swept away in an unavoidable situation. They therefore go through life with few boundaries, allowing their partners to do anything they want to them, fearing the relationship is simply on borrowed time.
6. Shame: This is a simple belief, but deadly. It is the core understanding a person carries that there is something wrong with them. When they were children, it came out as “I am stupid”, “I am going to be beat up”, “I can’t ever get this right”. In adulthood, this person often allows their spouse to find many things wrong with them, accepting blame when they have done little wrong. Shame beliefs foster such behavior as closet drinking, sexual deviancy, serial adultery, lying, self-mutilation, depression, anxiety disorders and even violence.
7. Helplessness: These beliefs (and there are many) come from situations in childhood where a person was treated unfairly and given no recourse to bring closure to the issue. This unfair treatment leads a person to conclude they will never get a fair shake, and therefore they need to protect themselves. Helpless beliefs can result in adultery, pornography obsession, eating disorders, obsessive drug use, phobias, prostitution, violence, angry speech, etc. These beliefs often result in the worst of behaviors, since the behaviors are often ways of bringing a sense of “control” back into their lives.
8. Escape: These beliefs focus on the only way to deal with reality –  run away from it. Every time life gets hard, this inner belief is triggered and the person finds some way to get away from it all. This often cuts the other spouse out of the picture and hurts them deeply. Most people with this belief abuse substances or use sex as an escape. Compulsive masturbation, compulsive gambling and spending are often seen.

There are other beliefs than these, but I have found this list to be the most common. But every person brings their peculiar beliefs into a marriage. When two people come into a marriage relationship with false beliefs, this mixes up a soup of disaster. Let me show you how it worked with Cathy.

She had a belief that no matter how hard she tried, everyone who mattered to her would eventually leave. You would think this sprung from a traumatic childhood experience, but the roots were very simple. Her two older sisters were both hippies and moved out of the house quite young. They had been best buddies to Cathy and now she was the only child left at home. Her mother reacted to her oldest daughters leaving by drinking gin every night until she passed out. Dad dealt with his wife’s inebriation by working 60 hour weeks. Cathy spent most of her days quite alone with her thoughts.

In high school, she made up for this sense of being abandoned by trying to over-compensate. She became hyper-flirtatious and joined every club at school. But because she feared being dumped, she often got clingy with both boy and girls. The result of this clinginess was that people didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Thus, they fulfilled her fear and abandoned her. This just served to reinforce her fear. In order to overcome this, she tried even harder to get people to stay with her. With her girlfriends, she was known as the one who would help out in every way. She spent her own money and bought gifts, helped with homework, staying up half the night sewing cheerleader outfits for her friends. With boys, she basically allowed them to take any sexual liberties they wanted. Yet, despite this extra effort, people still got tired of how hard she was trying and rejected her.

When she married her husband Ben, she really wanted to overcome this. She knew she tried too hard, so she sought to back off and give him breathing space. But her fears kept growing. So often she would get angry and say “Why don’t you just leave? I know you’re going to leave”. Her fear led her to get violent at times, hitting Ben in the head. She sometimes even took out her anger on the little girls.

The day she left, her fear of abandonment had been acute for weeks before. She determined she was going to solve this fear by praying every morning and then serving her husband in love. She had been reading a few books on Christian marriage and she read that if you serve in love it will cast out fear. Now, that is a good principle, but it was no match for her false belief. For a week or more, she tried to anticipate Ben’s every need. But it was exhausting. By the end of the work week, she was an emotional wreck.

When Ben came in and innocently mentioned the grease rag, it echoed against her deeply-ingrained fear. He had one more demand she couldn’t meet. Something inside her snapped and she realized her fear had only been submerged in her cleaning and service. Now, it came rushing out with a fury. Even though Ben had not been criticizing her at all, that is what she heard. False beliefs often affect our hearing, causing us to interpret all communication according to the matrix of the belief. Cathy left and never returned. Her example is repeated millions of times a year, by both men and women.

Examine your own life. Can you see evidence of these sort of beliefs?

There is an answer, and it’s quite straight-forward. More about that in the next article.

Tags: marriage,+false+beliefs