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.

The Final Lap

By Mike Phillips

(Reprinted by request)

Gary believed he would never get what he really wanted. In essence, he saw a recurring relationship between telling people what he wanted and not having it. The more he wanted something, the less chance it would come his way. So he reasoned the opposite would also be true: If he didn’t tell people what he wanted, then he might get it. As confusing as that logic is, it had interesting effects on him. He would never reveal his deep desires to his friends. He never told his wife what he wanted. But when he didn’t get what he wanted, he adopted an angry passive-aggressive shell which alienated people in his life. He also struggled with several behaviors related to passive-aggressive anger.

This entire game he was playing in  his mind is actually a lie. First, there is no correlation between expressing our desire for something and not getting it. Most people who receive what they want or achieve what they want begin by identifying what they want. For Gary to believe that he only gets what he doesn’t want is wayward thinking. It also affects the people who work with him and live in the same house.

For instance, if he wanted a promotion at work, he would never mention it to anyone. Instead, he tried to put the thought of promotion out of his head. He refused to accept compliments on his work. This had the effect of hurting or confusing well meaning people at work. Eventually, the pressure of wanting the promotion so badly would overwhelm him and he would mention it to someone in desperation. But the despair made it come out the wrong way to the wrong person at the wrong time. Of course, he wouldn’t get promoted and then would be hurt. This reinforced his belief that he would never get what he wanted in life if he told anyone. As he looked at his life, he believed he would never get what he really wanted if he expressed that need. As we looked at in the last article, this caused him to keep running into people who would deny him joy and accomplishment. He kept running laps on that same emotional track.

At home, Gary would have expectations of his wife but never expressed any of them. When she did not fulfill those unspoken expectations, he would act hurt and withdraw from her. This made her anxious, and she would tell him how worried she was about their marriage. As a result, he was convinced the marriage would never work and eventually she would leave him. After years of living with Gary and his lie-based thinking, she eventually gave up and divorced him.

How did he stop? There really are two simple rules to getting over this type of thinking. First, Gary needed to challenge the very root of his beliefs. I explained to him that if a person believes, for instance, they have a sign on them that says “Please lie to me”, they actually behave as if people are destined to lie to them. They believe everyone is out to deceive them. Because God is committed to each of us living in Truth, God makes sure that person keeps running into liars until the sign is gone.

It is difficult to challenge the roots of beliefs, because we have often lost sight of where they started. This is where God can help. As we get hurt by another person in life, we must spend moments of reflection. ”How does this feel?”  ”What do you believe when you are feeling this?”  Let yourself feel the pain and be overcome by the false belief. Then follow your heart to the source of when you started to feel this way. Your heart knows when you began to believe this.

Gary did this one day. He followed the belief to a birthday party when he was seven. They told him to blow out his candles and to make a wish. He did as he was told and he wished for a new bike. So he told everyone about it. His mother told him that wishes didn’t work if you tell everyone. During that season of Gary’s life, his parents were going through divorce and he had prayed every night for them to stay together. When they divorced anyways it was a shock to him. Why hadn’t his prayers worked? He concluded inside that his parents got a divorce because he wished it wasn’t so. He also didn’t get the bike, so in that moment, it all seemed to make sense.

What is the second step to ridding oneself of this false belief? Ask God to show you the truth. God is the God  of Truth, and he can show us what is real and what is not. Gary asked God to show him the reality of that painful season of his life. God revealed his parents’ divorce had nothing to do with his wanting them to stay together. God also showed him he never got the bike because he never told anyone he wanted a bike before that day. He had laid unfair expectations on his mother who was coping with being a single parent.

If you have a sign on you…that is, if people keep treating you in the same harmful way….follow these two steps.

1. Follow the belief to it source.

2. Ask God to show you the truth.

As you do that, watch that sign get ripped to pieces. And then you won’t have to keep running the same laps over and over with people.

Protecting Children From Lies – Part 2

Emotions often hold power over our beliefs; especially pain, anger and grief. This explains why children don’t voice their most deeply held lies – they do not want to reveal what they’re feeling.

Let me give an example. Margaret was eight years old when she experienced something a child should never go through. I won’t reveal the details of the molestation, but it was heinous and involved a man known to the family. He was a good friend of her father’s. She felt unclean, unloved and abandoned throughout the period of that ordeal. Her mother was not stupid;

Protecting a Child From Lies – Part 1

Jen began training with us with the goal of being a people-helper. During the training, she confronted a half dozen beliefs that were hurting and defeating her life. As she let go of each belief, she felt more freedom to live as an adult. I use the words ‘live as an adult’ because these beliefs were all childish. One belief in particular had affected almost every relationship in her life. It all started so simply. When Jen was three and a half, her mother made her a beautiful white Easter dress with a large pink bow around the waist. She had never worn anything so lovely or expensive (her family was dirt-poor, and this was a major step up in clothing value). At that time, she was the only child in her family, so she had no one to show her pretty dress to. She went outside that Sunday morning looking to display her finery. The only thing walking around was the neighbor’s dog. She followed him into his yard, all the while telling the dog how much she loved her new dress.

The dog was unimpressed, as Jen remembers. He kept walking away from her and went into the next neighbor’s yard. Jen quickly climbed the small picket fence so she could follow the dog. When she got on top of the fence-line

WDDJD

In actual words…What Devotions Did Jesus Do? By “devotions”, I mean that spiritual moment or time when we spend time with God, whether by reading Scripture, praying, worshipping or even appreciating aspects of his creation. It can include disciplines (like Contemplation or Solitude), attitudes (Confession or Thanksgiving) and even actions (Journaling, kneeling, imagining). These are all human creations to attempt to solidify our tenuous-feeling working relationship with our Creator.

Jesus, the one who was both God and Man, spent time solidifying that Daddy-Son intimacy. Since he is completely human as we are, he felt those moments of isolation and responded to them with discipline and a process of thinking through the day. So what “devotional life” did Jesus have?

My favorite glimpse into his life with Abba comes in Matthew 4. I won’t take time to deal with the entire section, but the first part of Jesus’ encounter with the Father of Lies (satan) in the wilderness shows us something of his life with God. Jesus has just spent 40 days alone with the Spirit of God. This time followed his incredible filling with the Spirit at his baptism and the earth-shaking voice of the Father who said “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”. But that was 40 days ago, and as all of us face, Jesus cannot recapture the words spoken over a month ago. Every day has a new impact and even yesterday’s exciting victories ring hollow in the face of attack and hunger.

In verses 2 and 3 of Matthew 4 it says

2After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

The word “tempter” means “tester”. As I noted a few weeks ago, this is satan’s role: he is the Proctor, he delivers our tests. We prove who we are through these tests. He designs the tests individually for each of us. This test was for Jesus. It was not as simple as it sounds. Jesus heard the Father, saw the Spirit come down on him. Felt the baptism. But our humanity is frail. He cannot hold onto that memory. Now satan wants to see if he will doubt the Truth of Abba’s words.

Here is what Jesus answered:

4Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

His answer can seem glib on paper, but it reveals so much at the first level down below the bare words. First, this quote is from Deuteronomy 8. In fact, every answer that Jesus gives to the Proctor is from Deuteronomy, chapters 6-8. They didn’t have chapters in those days, so let’s just say it came from the same general region in the same historical book. Coincidence? Hardly. You don’t have these answers unless they are recently familiar to you. I get a kick out of teachers who look at this section and tell people this is a takeaway suggesting we memorize Scripture. Don’t bother. The Proctor knows the Bible better than you do. Simply quoting the Bible back to him when your heart hasn’t processed Truth and embraced it won’t pass this test.

Second, Jesus’ understanding of the Truth in Deuteronomy 8 was deeper than just quoting something to do with Bread. The passage in Deut. 8 speaks of Manna and humbling. To go out every day and collect bread in the desert and have to rely completely on God to feed them was humbling in the sense that they had to completely rely on him. Jesus got that! He is telling the Proctor that if God tells him to turn the stones into bread, he will do it. But not a second before. What an incredible answer. He also uses the word “word” correctly in Greek. The Greek word is rhema, which means a message intended for a specific reason, situation or person. If God told Jesus directly to turn the stones into bread that day, for a particular purpose and for God’s glory, then, and only then, would Jesus do it.

Do you prepare yourself in the Scriptures that way? It means bringing the Spirit into that time and preparing your heart with Truth that can be lived (as opposed to Truth that is just memorized to win a discussion). Then when the test comes, you will pass the essay questions as well as the fill in the blank ones.