Lord Jesus, Come!

I believe the Lord is showing me something in my spirit…and has been for some time now. The next few writings will deal with these things. I’m going to be covering the spirit of this age, the attack on the family structure, the division of people and the creation of an angry and hostile life. I’ll go into how the situation we are in is global and that there is nowhere on Earth to run to escape this EXCEPT to the cross of Christ Jesus. Furthermore, I’ll show how this current situation seems to be a march to Armageddon.

Romans 8:27-29
²⁷ And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.²⁸ And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.²⁹ For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

Most of my life, I was subjected to abusive behaviors without being able to pinpoint the exact nature of the abuse. What I mean by that is there was a pattern of abuse that repeated over and over again with different people acting as the abuser. They all seemed to have the same play book of torment… they all seemed to attack the same areas in my life. It was almost as if I had an assignment against me…. that’s what I thought when I began to look into things and stumbled upon the attributes of Narcissistic Abuse. Suddenly the pieces fit and I start gaining an understanding of the way this abuse has effected my life. God, being such a loving God, used my past to draw me in to start studying up on this systematic abuse called Narcissistic Abuse or as the Bible calls it, the Jezebel Spirit and from learning about this, I saw something in the Spirit that really is opening my eyes about what’s coming at all of us.

The Narcissistic Spirit also called The Jezebel Spirit

Since learning about narcissism, I’ve broken contact with people who are narcissistically abusive towards me. The effects of this abuse on my mind and body have changed me forever…but, God has taken all of that and turned it into a powerful and usable experience for me to use for myself and others. Briefly, without a lot of detail, the abuse eventually caused me to have a mental collapse followed by 6 years of severe mental illness and more psychiatric medication than most people have seen….so much so the man who delivered my medications to me commented to my father that he was deeply concerned not only with the medications I was taking, but the combinations and amounts. I was told that I would be on these medications for the rest of my life after being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic or schizoaffective. What I was really going through was something called a double bind. Because I was in this double bind for such a prolonged period of time with many acting abusers, I became suicidal, psychotic and too exhausted to crawl my way out.

So, what exactly is a Double Bind?

It’s not by coincidence that the very best example of a double bind comes from a book or movie by George Orwell called 1984. The scene is of the protagonist being retrained by what is called “The Ministry of Love” which ironically is anything but. The protagonist is strapped down and asked, “How many fingers am I holding up?” No matter what he answers and if he doesn’t answer at all, he is tortured.

The double bind was a theory developed by Gregory Bateson from things he observed. Bateson, an anthropologist, noted that people subjected to certain types of abuse where they are placed in a situation where there is no outcome that isn’t painful, will develop schizophrenia. The situations are a person is given 2 options, both of which lead to something painful. Then the person has to decide which option they’ll take and if they don’t decide they face one of 3 painful punishment. The victim is forced to adapt to the false beliefs of his or her tormentors, or they are punished. Here is another example of a double bind, when Sophie from Sophie’s choice is forced to select one of her children and give the other one to the SS officer or face both being taken, she is in a double bind.

While most situations I endured were not on the level of what Sophie faced, the long term abuse with several abusers still took its toll on my mental health, and eventually I suffered a severe break-down.

This break-down manifested itself in paranoia, depression, delusions, hallucinations, anxiety and suicidal ideations. Not every person has all of these, but the takeaway is that these are also how schizophrenia presents itself. I disagree with Bateson on a double bind causing typical schizophrenia. What I know it does cause is a situation that looks and behaves like schizophrenia, but it also behaves like complex post-traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features, typically seen in long term abuse. The reason I know this is twofold. First, because the situation also has additional features that are common in CPTSD and Second, because the medications given to treat schizophrenia seem to make things worse, not better. With typical schizophrenia the medications address the symptoms because they are chemical imbalances, but with CPTSD the symptoms are from a mental and emotional imbalance. It’s on par with treating an infection with aspirin. I feel ok challenging Batesons claim even though I don’t have his education… and technically, his education when he developed this theory was in anthropology, not psychiatry or social science, which he later obtained, but I feel I can argue that the double bind does not cause typical schizophrenia, but a pseudo schizophrenia stemming from CPTSD because I actually walked this mile personally, not as an observer, but a victim of it.

How does this relate to me now?

As I said, I spent 6 years severely ill…and in truth the illness became less about the double-bind and more about the toxic medications I was given. Eventually, I got off of the medications on my own and this includes some that I had to SLOWLY ween off of because when I tried to stop abruptly I was launched into severe withdrawals. Eventually, I stopped the medications and I wish I could say I was instantly out of the fog, but I can’t. That took another year. It was in that year that my journey to learn about Narcissistic Abuse began, even if for the longest time I had no idea that is what it was called.

I wrote a VERY angry blog detailing all the abuse and who did what… I was angry at everyone… and even God… I was so ANGRY… because anger is easier to process than pain. I wrote and wrote and detailed and detailed and discovered things I had stored away because these things hurt too much to remember… and vomited all of my past onto a blog. God was dealing with me… see, he wanted to heal me, but I was afraid of what that could mean. Like I had been spiritually abused by narcissist who would annex my love for God to force me to forgive them and stay in the abuse… so I resisted God because I thought that was what submitting to him would mean… that I would have to embrace my abusers again, forgive and forget. I knew that my abusers would not change, my research into Narcissistic abuse showed me that, so forgiving and forgetting, so I could have a relationship with God would mean resubmitting to the abuse… And I couldn’t do it. To make matters worse, the narcissistic person who abused me was playing the victim card and gaining the support of the Christians around me so they were also coming to me to forgive and forget and when faced with my refusal, they would reject me as ungodly and side with my abuser who was now being a SUPER CHRISTIAN in public. Once again, I was in a double bind. That was exactly how the devil wanted it… to continue to break me down… and like Jezebel in the Bible who used the men of God to murder Naboth for his vineyard, the Jezebel I was dealing with was doing the same. My problem was, I couldn’t see yet that God was not going to require me to be in a relationship with this person. Had I gone to God straight away, he would have helped me to forgive and move forward without reestablishing a relationship with my abuser. It was just that for all the years of abuse…. 49 years of it, God was always used as a weapon against me by my abusers to keep me in line and let me know if I did anything to defend myself I would be in trouble with God…. and they could only use that on me because they knew I wanted very much to be pleasing to God.

So I wrote an angry blog… and I poured it all out and even developed an interpretation of the bible that gave me permission to stay in unforgiveness with my abuser. It was wrong, and I repented of it, but it was from a place where I wanted to keep God’s love for me without having to be subjected to more abuse to get it. Another gift from my narcissistic abusers was that I felt love was always conditional, and I had to earn it…and God has a dim view of unforgiveness.

God is so Merciful and so Good

God saw that I was trying to work out my relationship with him and protect myself at the same time where other people just saw me going off the rails. Slowly, God drew me back in a way only God can. With love and gentle patience, he dealt with me. I was like a wounded bird in my loving healers hands. I began to heal and as I began to heal the anger cooled and my mind calmed down. I revisited the forgiveness beliefs and realized some truths that I had missed while I was raging on trying to handle it on my own.

What I learned about my situation

That whole time I was fumbling with scripture trying to justify unforgiveness, I had no idea what it even meant. The narcissist in my early childhood taught me that forgiving and forgetting were joined and if you don’t forget what happened, you aren’t forgiving…and if you are forgiving and forgetting, you will deny your hurt, shame, pain, wound etc and go back to the relationship and act normal while you do it. This was to trap me in abuse, but it was a lie.
The entire time I was fighting to not forgive, I had already forgiven. The fight to forgive or not to forgive wasn’t what was happening at all… my fight was to not forget and/or restablish a relationship that would subject me to more abuse. So I had forgiven…and I know this because….I never wanted revenge… well, never seriously wanted it anyway. I’d be a liar if I never wanted them to feel the way they made me feel…but I see that that is exactly what made them the way they are. They ALWAYS feel that way…

One way to look at it is, they have a defect of compassion, love, joy, alturism and pretty much every good thing that a human can exhibit. They can never feel any of those things because something happened to them and they made choices to deal with it in a way that seared their conscious… and they want to reproduce this same type of dispair in others because misery loves to reproduce itself for company. It’s like if they can bring you down with them, then it soothes their shame for a while. I feel sad for them that this is the only way they can ever feel good…. so I do forgive and I pray for them.

God does not require me to knowingly subject myself to abusive behavors if it serves no purpose in leading the person to the Lord. If the person professes to know God as my abuser did, the Bible clearly states this Ephesians 5:11-13 ¹¹ And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.¹² For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.¹³ But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.
Also… Proverb 6, tells us about the things that we need to look out for.

So, God does want me to be forgiving, but he doesn’t require me to knowingly and pointlessly submit to someone who will likely abuse me even more. All of this story above is how I was lead through this battlefield and delivered from it by God and how God took this situation that was designed to destroy me completely and turned it around to teach me things that I need to know and share with others. My next post will be what I learned and how it relates to this time in history.