Growing Together Vodcast | Leslie Vernick

[Music] leslie thank you so much for your message this morning you made two promises and you delivered one of the promises that you made to us is that we would know what we need to do to have a healthy happy relationship or happy healthy relationships and then you also promised us that you would give us some tools to learn what we need to do to change when our relationships are in need of repair and i just encourage those of you who are watching if you didn't get to watch this morning's message you can go back and do it please please please do it some practical practical walk aways and just based on on the word of god as well so we love that um but you can do that on our app you can do that on our website you can do that on your web our youtube channel you can even listen um on our podcast so go do that um but wait till the end of our conversation today uh for those of you who don't know leslie we are honored to have her with us today she's the author of seven books including the best-selling i'm reading right now the emotionally destructive relationship seeing it stopping it and surviving it and then her most recent book is the emotionally destructive marriage leslie's a popular speaker author licensed clinical social worker and she's a relationship coach she received her master's degree in clinical social work from the university of illinois and received her postgraduate training in biblical biblical counseling as well as cognitive therapy but i think the thing that makes her most qualified for this conversation is because she has been married to her husband howard for the past 43 years you don't even look like you're 43 years old that's not even fair she has two grown children and three grandchildren so thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule and it was hard to book this conversation so um thank you so much for doing that we really really appreciate it um welcome i wish i could have been there in person but this is second best yeah a little bit different right for sure and you're in arizona correct i'm in arizona right now and i am in the white tank mountain so i live in the phoenix area which is very very hot so we kind of get up here uh most of the summer so that we can be away from the 115 degrees and have about 85 degrees much different my goodness i don't blame you gotta be hard to breathe when it's 115 degrees it's like you're in a pizza oven oh yeah well um i really want us to dive a little bit deeper into this some of the things that you talked about this morning about maintaining healthy relationships and also repairing broken relationships um and i also really want us to talk about what do we do if you can help us with this what do we do if we find ourselves in an emotionally destructive relationship or what do we do or what can we say how can we help if we have somebody that we know somebody somebody that we love who is in an emotionally destructive relationship so it's a lot to cover in a short amount of time but i think we can do it you on board for this i am all right sounds good before we do that though can you just take a couple of minutes tell us a little bit about what makes you so passionate about the work that you do you know i think christine this is a really important story because i not only understand emotionally destructive relationships and relationships healthy relationships unhealthy relationships from a biblical as well as a professional perspective but i know what it feels like to be in one and my emotionally destructive relationship was not with my husband but it was with my mother and so here i was a young child at eight years old my mother decided she didn't want to be married to my father anymore and she drove to my school one day in a u-haul trailer with all of our stuff but we moved to a one-bedroom apartment in chicago i knew no one no one i knew was divorced i was a gawky little kid i didn't know what to do with myself and my mother didn't know what to do with herself either as a grown up i can understand how rough it must have been for her as a single mom you know in the 60s trying to make life work by herself she had some mental health issues and she also drank a lot so she worked by day as a secretary by night at the weekend she worked at the playboy club in chicago as a waitress so she was often not home and when she was home she was depleted she was cranky she was drinking and that led to a lot of abuse emotionally and physically especially to me as i was the oldest child i think she expected more from me than i was capable of at eight or nine years old and also i probably had the biggest mouth so i always challenged and you know kind of dug back at her things and of course she didn't like that so got a lot of um a lot of emotionally wounding words as a child things that no parent should ever say to a child as well as my teeth knocked out my head put through a window different things that were physically abusive and so finally when i was 14 years old and my siblings were younger my father who had been remarried he had recommitted his life to christ but unbeknownst to us had continually gone to the courts to get custody of us because he saw what was happening at home and he couldn't do anything and so finally the judge awarded him custody and so we went to live with my dad and when i went to live with my dad eventually he you know had all kinds of rules i had to go to church i had to go to school things that i didn't have to do at home as long as i didn't say my mother's way and she wasn't home she didn't know what i did um and so now my whole life is turned upside down and i'm beginning to have structure and stability and i'm not used to that so for those step moms in the audience i want to give you a lot of love and and thank you because my stepmother was a true hero in our lives because we were not easy to absorb into this new family because she had three kids also and so it was rough we were the brady bunch when the brady bunch wasn't on tv yet and there were no rule books to live by so it was tough but i eventually came to christ and then i went and a youth pastor took me under his wing and this is so important because the church often functions as the hospital as well as the family for someone who's broken and bruised and they need the family of god to teach them what healthy looks like and sometimes the church itself isn't all that healthy which we can talk about in a little bit but my church was just this little tiny church and they loved on us my youth pastor loved on me i was his practice counseling client because he was going to seminary he needed somebody to practice with i babysit his kids and so when i went to college i hadn't had much contact with my mother after she lost custody of us she went off the deep end she was still abusive and i went to college i wanted to be a christian counselor finish my bachelor's degree i didn't invite her to my graduation i went for my master's degree i didn't invite her to my wedding my husband met her once my fiance husband he didn't want her to come to our world she was scary she was scary she could be violent she remarried she stabbed her husband in a bit of anger i mean she was a scary woman and so here i am i'm a christian i'm a christian counselor and i'm reading all these verses and i'm trying to counsel people and i'm not even able to manage a relationship with my own mother like do you forgive how do you forgive the unforgivable and if you forgive does that mean i have to let her see my children does that mean i have to let her into my home what if she goes off on one of my kids i don't trust her and so it made me really wrestle is god mad at me am i inadequate because i don't trust her and i don't want to have a relationship with this woman who's not repentant she's not changed she's still drinking she's still crazy and i can't do this and so there's a lot of shame as a christian i don't know how to do this i don't know how to navigate these waters and so that's when i dug deep into the scriptures and i found god has a lot to say about not only healthy relationships but also unhealthy relationships and toxic destructive relationships and he does not require us to have relationships with everyone jesus didn't even have relationships with everyone and so i think that's been an inordinate burden that the church has put on people who really want to follow god and forgive and love their enemy but if they are your enemy they're precisely their your enemy because they've done you harm as my mother did to me and you can't have a loving safe relationship with an enemy you can love an enemy from a distance and so it just brought me on this journey and so i began to work with abused children in my professional life and i began to now this is way back in the 70s like 1970s when i began to go to the churches and say we need a program for supervising and screening child care workers because you're just allowing anybody who volunteers to like take children overnight on a camping trip and we can't do that and of course we can we're christians here we don't have any of those kind of people here well years later and lawsuits later we do realize that we need to have some safety plans and we need to be more proactive in how we deal with destructive people in the church and the wolves and sheep's clothing that look like they're benign but they're actually very harmful and so i began my work with children and then how i got involved in destructive relationships with women who were abused because you would think i would help men who are abused since my dad was the one who was abused and my mom was the abuser but how i got involved with women is that i was writing a book on depression christine my third book and as i was doing counseling in allentown i had a counseling office in allentown um woman after woman after woman after woman christian woman godly women who were seriously emotionally depleted and suicidal and depressed 95 of them were in destructive marriages and i began to ask myself is god requiring a woman who's married to a destructive abusive man to give up her life for the sanctity of marriage is he asking her to stay on xanax and take valium and vodka at night so she can have sex with a man who treats her like garbage and i just couldn't see the bible supporting that so again done deeper and so that's when i wrote my book the emotionally destructive marriage and so that's been my professional and personal journey through this and god when i wrote my book the emotionally destructive relationship i was actually going to turn the corner and i said i'm done with this tough stuff i'm going to write so i wrote i want to be happy that was one book and and i wrote i started writing a happy marriage book how do you have a healthy relationship and all the things i talked about with with you this morning and the lord specifically said i have plenty of people who talk about that nobody's talking about this i'm calling you to talk about the testa so that's what i do and you talk about it with such grace and also um i think it's just so empowering and i think that that's really really important um your story is incredible it's one of the reasons that i am in full-time ministry because of my childhood and the things that i endured very similar um to your story and just did not have it modeled for me right and my husband and i will be married in october for 26 years but that's a miracle because it was it was rough because for we didn't have it modeled for us and so we were just trying to figure out things on our own and we ended up um if there was a season where it was very unhealthy and very destructive and it caused us to seek counseling because one thing that you said um this morning that really really hit me was that we get to write our own story right regardless we don't get to write the circumstances surrounding our lives but we get to write the story within our responses and how we respond and how we love god and how we love one another and will we will our story be a story of redemption right because god that's the bible from the beginning to end the story of redemption and restoration and if you look throughout the entire bible pretty much everyone in the bible is dysfunctional right yeah they're all yeah we want to have a biblical marriage we want to have a biblical family what no god uses messed up people to tell his story of redemption and restoration and so um i just wish that i had you in my life many many years ago to avoid some of the the heartaches but at the same time that's what gives us the opportunities to come alongside of somebody else and said say i've been there i've experienced that here's what i found and here's what i've learned and that's god's great you know incredible grace as well um i'd love for you to talk a little bit about when you talk about maintaining healthy relationships um how do you do that what are some practical things that we can do to maintain healthy relationships and then we'll talk about repair and repairing broken relationships okay so i think it's very freeing for you and i to talk about our mistakes because we all mess up the bible tells us in james 3 2 we all stumble in many ways and so so many times we can't fix something because we can't admit it's broken right and so if we can just start there we we everybody in the bible look what abraham did to sarah i mean he said well i'm afraid you go off and sleep with this guy so the i don't have to you know suffer the consequence i mean what a horrible husband and so god uses broken messed up foolish things of this world to confound the wise as long as we don't keep repeating those stupid foolish broken things then god calls us a fool or you know unteachable and so part of our journey through our mistakes is to become aware of them and stop making the same ones over and over again so here's the difference you've got two sinners who bring a suitcase full of baggage into a relationship whether they be girlfriends or husband and wife or parent child or whatever you've got you've got it and you've got your baggage and you've got your stuff and a healthy person a relatively healthy person when they know their stuff whatever it is my fear of failure my shame my anger my dishonesty whatever that sin we struggle with is when i've crossed the line and i've harmed someone i love so i'll give you i don't think i told this story um in the in the morning sermons i tell the story about my son ryan maybe i did where i broke his arm all right i dislocated his elbow did i share that story no yeah so so here i am i grew up with this abusive mom i get married i'm christian i'm a christian counselor i have a little baby and i work in the child abuse department i work in the hospital in my local community hospital screen teaching hospital workers how to screen for job abuse because the 70s that's when those laws started changing and i'm beginning to have a lot of empathy for my mother because i'm having a screaming baby who's screaming night and day with colic thinking i think i could i could understand how some parents shake their baby and throw them or whatever i didn't do that but i could feel those feelings inside of me so when he was two years old i was trying on clothes in a dressing room because i had finally lost my maternity belly and fat and i wanted some new clothes and of course two-year-old little boys love being in the dressing room and that's nothing better for them to do and so he started throwing one of those fits it was a little boutique shop and everybody in the shop could hear him screaming and it embarrassed me it shamed me and so in a fit of anger because he was acting out i reached down i pulled him up by his little arm and i stood him up to his feet i said stop it right now and he looked at me with his big blue eyes and tears started dropping down his face and he held up his arm and he goes oh you broke my arm really loud for the entire dressing room to hear and in that moment i was horrified because all i could think of is i have become my mother i have become my mother that self-awareness oh my word i have crossed the line so not a perfect person so what i did was i picked him up put him in his car seat drove him to the emergency room that i worked at told them what i did i didn't lie about it i didn't make excuses for it i didn't say he was a bad kid i broke my son's arm oh my gosh what do i do thankfully the doctor knew me he said well you actually didn't break his arm but he does have this weakness in his elbow it's called nurse mate's elbow and it got dislocated let me show you how to pop it in because it's probably gonna happen again he popped it back in but it was a wake-up call for me so so christine the difference is when you have self-awareness and humility which is the qualities that we talked about that are important you see you've crossed the line right you don't make excuses you don't blame your child you don't blame your spouse it's your fault i did that but you take responsibility for what you've done and it's a wake-up call wow i don't want to ever do that again so i got myself help i got myself the help i needed to begin to learn that self-control to learn to have greater self-awareness to learn to develop the social skills to identify what i felt and create timeouts or boundaries for myself so i don't inflict pain on the people i love and that's been a lifelong process as i'm sure you and your husband had to learn and so i think this is part of why i tried to share with your audience this morning that you can't have healthy relationships unless you have some personal qualities like the beginnings of self-awareness when you mess up are you aware that it's you who messed up even if someone provoked you you know jesus says something very interesting he said the good man brings good things out of the good store up in his heart and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil thing evil stored up in his heart out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks since i have an illustration that i think will be really helpful i used to use this in my counseling office back in allentown and when people would start you know not being self-aware and they would start blaming well i wouldn't have said that i wouldn't have lied to her if she just wouldn't be so angry when i lie or i wouldn't have i would have lost my temper and said those bad things if she would have just shut up right all this kind of back and forth so i would bring this bottle out and i'd say watch what happens when i shake this bottle this nice bottle of dasani water and i'd shake it really hard just like i'm gonna do in front of you watch what happens it turns really yucky and then i would say to them did shaking this bottle make it dirty and they'd be like i know this is a trick question i don't know the answer and i'd say of course not shaking the bottle didn't make it dirty the dirt was there all along on the bottom you just didn't see it and so when someone shakes you when my son shook me in that dressing room and embarrassed me where someone plows in the rear end of your car and shakes you or your wife doesn't respect you like you want her to and it shakes you how you act and how you respond is your stuff god is showing you this so that you can become self-aware oh my word i've got work to do it's not her fault she shook me and my dirt came out she might have shook me and now god is showing me my dirt that's the self-awareness piece yeah that's so good and what you said at the beginning i think is so important we need to tell on ourselves because i found when when my kids were younger they're all grown adults now but when they were younger um i had some real anger issues i there were times where i like i i describe it as the monster would emerge right like i was so kind and wonderful to everybody else but my kids could push my buttons like nobody else and it would send me and this monster this rageful angry monster would come out and it would be the same thing i'd be like i'm becoming my mom or i'd be i'm becoming my stepfather and words would come out just horrible words and i it was almost like i was having an out of body experience looking down and going who are you yeah who's this person right yeah but but i looked around and i looked at all my christian friends and they were all perfect and so i thought i'm the only one and then one day i was hanging out with some some um some of my friends and i just finally lost it and i said i am a horrible person i am the worst mother in the world and i just started crying and i scream at my kids all the time and i'm just i don't even know and they all started to cry and the walls just came down and they uh me too me too me too me too and they were just waiting for somebody else to say that they're they weren't a perfect mom they don't have a perfect marriage they but i think sometimes we look around in our churches and we think oh you're the perfect christian family and we strive to be that perfect christian family we try to put ourselves in the mold of now i should be like her or i should be like my husband should be like him and we lose the essence of who god created us to be and we put on this mask and this facade that keeps everybody else trapped yeah i call that the country club you know so we're the country club church there are we got our little smiles and we've got our little shirts on and everybody's good even though we just screamed and hollered on the way to church we're just like okay you know we put our smile on and we're the country club family on instagram on facebook it's just not true it's an illusion and i think the more we can talk about that and be real and confess our sins one to another and be accountable for them the more likely we are to be successful at having healthy relationships that's so true take the mask off just get real and lay the pride aside that i think everything we do if it comes if we come from a place of humility we come with a posture of surrender i think it's psalm 70 right verse 1 says help me right like rescue me oh lord well let's just say that we're all broken and we all need help and let's let's recognize seeking help as a strength versus a weakness this brings us to that story of the prodigal father where the prodigal son was well aware of his mess he comes home to his dad i've wrecked my life i'm really sorry i've made a mess of things and the older son who was so smug and self-righteous was totally unaware of his own smug self-righteous i'm the perfect son and you're the mess and i think we can fall into those two things as christians i remember growing at in my church back in allentown there was a family that was like the perfect family and their kids were the perfect kids and they always did everything right and i was always feeling like such a loser and as i've seen them grow up i see you had warts there all along just nobody saw them and i think if we could just be more real and honest i think people would be more transformed because it wouldn't be so shameful to talk about it that's so good so talk about self-awareness what are some practical tools that you suggest people use to become more self-aware and i love how you say it's not about gazing at your navel right it's not navel gazing it's not becoming self-absorbed but it's just becoming self-aware so that you know who you know what your values are you know your strengths and your weaknesses so what are some practical things you would suggest to do that well i think that journaling is a really good way of becoming self-aware and not journaling like i went to the park today but i went to the park today why did i choose the park what how did that make me feel how did i respond to things was i proud of myself was i not proud of myself am i happy with the person i am am i happy with the person i'm becoming do i know the person i am what do i think what do i feel and i think as you journal different things especially when you feel emotional so when you feel emotional your emotions are like those warning signs on the car dash light check oil when you feel emotional like yesterday i was walking i was just walking i walked every day for five miles but at the end of the walk i started to feel emotional like this big like lung started welling up in my chest and i just wanted to sob and i wasn't sure what that was all about but i was noticing i was self-aware enough to notice i'm feeling this big wad of grief and i just want to cry and cry and cry i wonder what that's about and so being curious about yourself not trying to shove everything down so you can be happy and perfect all the time but ask yourself what's that about and what do i want because what do you want is not a selfish question obviously nobody ever gets everything they want all the time but if you don't know what you want what god has put in your heart for you to do in life is about what you want just like taste buds you know if you don't know what you like and don't like then you can't choose wisely what to eat and what not to eat or what will bring you pleasure and joy even in eating or if you don't experiment with some things and so asking yourself those self-awareness questions but i think the other thing that i wanted to make really clear is you can't become self-aware on your own because the bible tells us that our the heart is deceitful above all else and desperately who can know it so you can't know your own self both your strengths as well as your weaknesses all by yourself and that's why we need those truth tellers that's why we need loving people in our life and sometimes even harsh people you know my mother when she would break me and say horrible things about me there was always a smidgen of truth to them you know and so sometimes even your enemy can say some things that you need to hear it doesn't mean they're going to be your friend but it may mean that god uses the mouth of a donkey or the mouth of someone you don't like to give you some feedback about yourself that you need to hear and that's part of self-awareness too that's so good truth tellers it's painful but but it's so necessary because we do we have blind spots and and i think i heard uh pastor jeff henderson once say ask people closest to you five people what's it like to be on the other side of me what's it like to be on the other side of me and also be aware of what what do you people typically say about you like and you you reject it you know like what is your spouse or your best friend or your child say like oh when you do that it's so annoying and you just go no you know then you tune into that because those are the things that are probably the blind spots that we need to shine a big inhumility shine a big spotlight on so that we can become more aware yeah and i remember when i gave my children permission this was an important thing i gave my children after that time permission to give me feedback about how they were feeling and so what they would start to say mommy you're scaring me right because i'd have this like that monster look you're scaring me and so i might not have known i was close to that line of losing it but they when they gave me that feedback by giving them permission to tell me how i was affecting them i didn't just say oh you're being ridiculous okay that's a warning sign like my engine is about to blow up i better back off here and get some self-awareness my temper is much hotter than i thought it was yeah that curiosity coming from that place of curiosity right realizing i don't have all figured out i need help um and i love what you talked about with feelings right because so many times we can we think that we are the are feeling and i heard somebody recently say when you to observe and to be curious about your feelings when you feel an emotion like you talked about on your walk and just kind of like step back and say okay i see you and somebody actually said that they it was like they reached into inside of themselves pulled the feeling out looked at it and said okay i see you and i see you're trying to help me you're not i'm not you like if it's sadness or loneliness or whatever it is that that doesn't that's not my identity it's a feeling inside of me and now i see it why am i feeling that way be curious about that and then sometimes reach out for help when you recognize that those feelings maybe become despair or um yeah things that you need fresh perspective on it yeah even the psalmist asked himself he said why are you so downcast oh my soul right and so we can ask our feel because our feelings are sort of like our taste buds they can be wonderful and they can be horrible but they do warn you of things i mean isn't it amazing how you can be in the middle of drinking a carton of milk that's gone sour and you don't swallow it because your taste buds at the back of your tongue go right they don't wipe down and so they're acting as your protectors and so our feelings sometimes give us warning bells what but what we do with them sometimes as christians is we suppress them like oh i shouldn't feel like i hate my kids or i shouldn't feel like i hate my husband right now or i shouldn't feel like this i feel like a bad person if i feel like this instead it's not about your personal it's about your feeling and so let your feeling inform you i hate my kid right now doesn't mean you say it it doesn't mean it's true it just lets you know whoa what's going on in you that you have this feeling because you know that's not really true all the time it's just true right now what do you need to do with that so that you don't let that feeling get the best of you that's good yeah and to sit with yourself and be and allow god to um be present in those feelings and in those emotions how many there's so many laments throughout the bible right you said the psalmist like taking the time to lament and we live in a society that is very much a suck it up buttercup get over it what's the matter with you why aren't you happy you know instead of like no just like allow the holy spirit to minister to you in this moment and to be present with you and be held and sometimes we can do that for others as well yeah another thing that i think is really important to under understand self-awareness this is an exercise that was actually developed by saint ignatius and it's called the examine yeah you can get protestant versions of this yeah so i used to do this in in my office a lot and one of the things i discovered about myself that i didn't know about so i would every day at the end of the day i would ask myself a couple questions like what today brought me joy what today brought nourishment to my soul what today happened in the external part of my life or the internal part of my life that felt really peaceful and joyful and loving and what today happened that felt so depleting so depleting and energy draining and discouraging and as i paid attention to the pattern of that one of the things i found that was life-changing for me is that sunshine and going outside was life-giving and so working in an office and sitting all day in a counseling office from seven in the morning until seven at night or nine in the morning until nine at night whatever could deplete me if i didn't intentionally get outside and take a walk and that's why every day now i take a walk for five miles because that is so important but i didn't know that that was so important to my well-being until i began to ask myself that question so just like bathing is important to your overall well-being physically walking for me and being outside in nature that's why we moved from pennsylvania to arizona i just needed a little bit more sunshine all right and that was part of that's not selfish that was self-awareness yeah and the more self-aware you become then the better i love when you talked about this morning about sometimes we were so focused on finding the right person or if you were the right person i would be happy when really we need to figure out how to be the right person right how to be the best spouse how to be the best friend how to be the best parent because if we're self-aware we know those things that make us feel alive and we take care of ourselves we're better for all the people around us there's nothing selfish about that and even asking yourself not what kind of parent should i be or what kind of husband should i be what kind of wife should i be but really asking yourself the deeper question what kind of parent do i want to be what kind of legacy do i want to write as myself as a parent because once you're conscious of that so i can't i've never met anybody who said i really want to be the worst parent i could be right but when we live in default mode without ever self-reflecting on that that's often what happens because we let our emotions impatience and anger and frustration and whatever toward our kids write the story instead of saying wait a minute how would the best version of myself as a parent show up in this moment and that's a completely different story it is yeah because then you parent with the end in mind you parent backwards right you determine what your values are what you want your kids to say about you when you're no longer here what you want them to tell their grandkids about your grandkids about you and we get we get that choice it's what you talked about we get to write the story get to write the story yeah i'm i'm doing premarital counseling with a young couple and last week when we met i said you know what i want you to do i want you to take some time to think about and write out when your kids are sitting in their pre-marital coaching session what in the and the counselor asks tell me about your parents relationship what was modeled for you what do you want them to say [Music] yeah and that's the whole we get to write the story that's so good um tell me a little bit about when we talk about maintaining and um what do you think is the key to the let me say this when maybe we've made some decisions or not been intentional about deciding what the kind of parent or the spouse or the friend that we want to be um and we find ourselves with a broken relationship what do you think is the key to begin repairing that broken relationship in a very practical sense sometimes what do we what do we need to do i think the first step is to self-examine what has been my part in breaking up this relationship so that requires that self-awareness i can't self-examine myself if it's all your fault you left me you broke up our family when perhaps i've committed adultery and watched porn or i've been nasty with my tongue and yet it's your fault that you're breaking up our family that's delusion that's not thinking clearly that's not taking responsibility that's not reflecting on what part are you responsible for in this relationship and if you've done damage and someone's saying that's enough i'm not letting any more damage come my way they're not breaking up their relationship the relationship's always been already been broken they're just being honest about it now wow i think just you have to you cannot fix something whether it's your broken tooth whether it's a mole on your body whether it's um a broken car or a broken wind you can't fix anything if you don't first admit it's there and so we so often go into denial it's not that bad you know it's not really gonna end our relationship we'll get over it and we don't do the repair work and the more you avoid repair work guess what if you don't fix a leaky roof my neighbor just had to tear apart his whole roof because he didn't fix one little leak and then that one little leak did all kinds of damage to the rafters and then that leaked did all kinds of damage to the floor and now he got her partner's whole second story because he ignored repairing a small little leak that would have cost him maybe a thousand dollars now it's probably 15 20 25 000 to fix this damage and i see that happening in relationship all the time and sometimes to be perfectly honest some relationships are not repairable they are permanently damaged okay so what do you do um what would you say because god is a god of hope and he's a god of restoration right and redemption we talked about that right some i know for my marriage like i said it's a miracle that we are still married to today and it's been a lot of work to to be where we are today and it's continual work to have um a healthy marriage and so what would you say is the i think the best way to ask this so if you've tried and you've tried and you tried on your own to fix the marriage would you recommend going like i think if i'm having a heart issue right if i'm feeling like my heart there's something wrong with my heart or i'm getting headaches all the time i'm going to for my heart i'm going to an expert a cardiologist to get the help and we talked about sometimes pride keeps us from doing that but um do you feel like that fresh perspective from an outside voice a counselor is beneficial i mean i would imagine that you do but what do you what do you think i think the outside perspective of people can be very beneficial as long as those people are self-aware and wise enough to give good counsel because you can go to a bad cardiologist and they can say you know what i just think you have an ingestion when you're having a heart attack right um so i think that sometimes we you know when you misdiagnose the problem as a doctor or as a people helper as a coach and you give a a treatment plan because of your diagnosis so you just have bronchitis but you really have covert 19 or you just have the common cold when you really have lung cancer the medication that you would give for the first order of problems is not the same and it's completely impotent to the second order and then we wonder why a couple keeps getting sicker and sicker and the relationship isn't better so yes i think you need some outside counsel but you need some outside counsel from people who know what they're talking about in those areas and unfortunately in the area of destructive relationships i have felt that and i have found that the church tends to value keeping the marriage together or keeping the relationship or reconciling the relationship which is a great value of god but they do it with duct tape instead of really repairing the problem right and so that doesn't really reconcile or restore the relationship it might keep it together for a little bit so that it doesn't fracture apart in the moment but you if my neighbor had put duct tape on his roof it might have saved it for a little bit but the problem is still going to be there because it's still there okay so what if we find ourselves in a destructive and emotionally destructive relationship relationship abusive relationship or i guess the other side of that would be if i know somebody who is in an emotionally or physically abusive relationship what do we do so let me say a couple principles so you said how do we maintain hope and not lose hope that god can work and yet live in reality um there's something called the stockpile syndrome and this was i think it stopped y'all this man he was a vietnam prisoner of war for a long time and he was interviewed in some business books about what kept you sane in an insane situation and he said hope but this kind of hope because the people who died the quickest were the optimists who had unrealistic hope so they would say we'll get out of here by christmas and then christmas didn't happen and we'll get out of here by easter and then easter didn't happen so his hope was i am sure god is at work here and he will take care of me there was no it has to be this way so i think part of when you're in a destructive relationship with someone you have to get your head straight because at least in my bible god never changes anybody who doesn't ask to be changed so there is no miracle that comes down on someone even the apostle paul who was a anti-god person when jesus met up with paul on the road to damascus paul still had a choice was he going to bow his knee to king jesus or was he going to refuse and then paul was changed saul was changed to paul and so we want to understand that when we're dealing with a destructive person and they have no heart to change it's all your fault they have no desire to change they have no humility to change they have no willingness to change they're blind jesus called it blindness and the pharisees they didn't change judas didn't change there's nothing you can do and don't come in with this false hope that somehow god's gonna change someone that never asked to be changed repentance is change me lord i need to change i am a sinner that is what repentance is and pride says it's your fault i don't need to change you said something this morning that chronic adultery addictions and abuse cause marriage problems but they are not marriage problems and they damage relationships and i thought that was so important because sometimes it can take on if somebody has an addiction issue they're abusive they are um you know like you said chronic adulterers it can tend to be like this is our marriage problem but it's not the world needs help to break those negative patterns and that's something this morning who went to like four different christian councils she's in ministry she's her husband are nationally known in ministry and he's got a horrible temper problem and blames her for it all and so they go to marriage counseling every single time and it's always we'll stop pushing his buttons and stop triggering him and stop aggravating him and just do what he wants and he won't act that way that's not true he acts that way because she does shake him and then he acts that way because he's that way this is his dirt to work on because she can't ever not shake him and i'm not saying at some point she doesn't also need to mature but it's not a marriage problem he doesn't act that way or i didn't act that way because of my little boy my little boy shook me and i acted that way because it was in me to act that way right we gotta deal with ourselves it takes two right i remember so i think the most hopeful thing i can say to someone is you can fix something if both of you are humble and willing to do the work you can't fix a broken relationship all by yourself in fact you can't even have a relationship with someone all by yourself including marriage what you can have is ministry to that person jesus had ministry to lots of people he didn't have relationship with it wasn't mutual it wasn't a give and take he gave they took but it wasn't a relationship and don't confuse that yeah that's good what do we do to help someone actually can we start with this what do we say to someone who tells us they're being abused or they're in an abusive relationship what's the most helpful thing because you talked about some of the the hurtful things and the ways that we can actually make it worse but what can we do you know if someone is courageous enough to tell you very specifically that they're an abusive relationship i think you need to applaud them and validate them and say oh my gosh i have no idea i am so sorry and thank you so much for trusting me enough to tell me something so awful in your life because what often happens is you say that and someone says i can't believe that he's a great guy i've never seen him act that way and so you invalidate this person now says it's not safe to tell you no one will believe me where do i go for help if no one's going to believe me and so if someone is that clear with you usually they're not usually they'll say you know i don't know you know it must be me i must be doing something to take him off you know it's usually they'll take responsibility overly responsible for how he behaves or how she behaves i remember talking to a man just this weekend he said the most freeing thing you ever said to me leslie his wife committed multiple affairs every time they would go to marriage counseling was always like what kind of husband are you and why aren't you meeting her needs and why aren't you a better house it was always his fault that she was committing adultery multiple times and he said the most freeing thing you ever said to me is chronic adultery is not a marriage issue it causes marriage issues he couldn't fix her problem she had to fix her problem what do you think what is it that um and think of someone really really close to me who was in a very very abusive emotionally physically abusive relationship for a number of years it was so painful to watch and sometimes if i'm being honest i would get so angry because i would just think how can you how can you stay in that abusive situation um i remember like she was pregnant and he beat her when she was pregnant and my heart just like this is someone i love so dearly and i just couldn't understand um and i think sometimes when that happens we can turn to you know tend to just unintentionally become angry and just like well i don't i don't get it you're stupid and so why do you know keep doing this and then we turn our back on them but help us understand and empathize why does a person typically stay with an abuser you know there are a lot of reasons one would be the whole god hates divorce god hates divorce god hates divorce so he must be calling me to stay and love no matter what we can spiritualize this so much i couldn't love him unconditionally if i say and love him unconditionally maybe that's going to please god and god's going to get to his heart all of those kind of things that's one number two i didn't prepare myself fully as an adult so i don't know how to get a job or i don't have an income or i don't have a career that can support myself if i leave and i've got six kids i don't know what to do third i don't trust him with our children and if he gets 50 50 custody i don't i'm afraid that he would be abusive to them sexually or physically and at least i'm the buffer at least but there's lots of complicated reasons spiritual um self-esteem issues i'm i deserve it i'm not worth much nobody will love me it's just a sad sad thing and so i think if we can come alongside someone who's in that situation and really help them see god cares for the oppressed and he is never on the side of the oppressor because when it's a marriage situation sometimes again as a church we've made a gigantic i think mistake in valuing the sanctity of marriage which is perfectly sacred but more than the safety and the sanity of the people in the relationship and so therefore we're not willing to be honest and confront evil and wrongdoing because we don't want to break up the marriage but the marriage is broken it's broken whether you're divorced or not we're just not talking about it but we need to talk about it we need to make it safe to talk about it what would you say to somebody who is watching right now and they are in an abusive relationship i would say the first thing that you need to do is you need to validate that god hates what's happening to you and your kids it's okay to tell and it's okay to begin to educate yourself because you don't know what to do and you don't have to decide right now but start educating yourself on what does god say about abuse what does god say about how much he cares about you and your children and their safety and their sanity and then get some support support is critical for you to be able to take your next steps and i work with a lot of women all over the world who are supportive of one another because sadly there hasn't been a lot of support in the church especially for women who've been in abusive relationships and men either because it's shameful for a man to say my wife hits me or degrades me or doesn't let me manage the money in the household it's humiliating to talk about it that way so we don't give a safe space to really be honest great well that's so good i know we have a hotline in our an organization in our area called safe berks and there's a hotline um one eight four four seven eight nine and then the word safe seven two three three and that is a uh an incredible resource for people to just reach out and and if you're in danger right now one hundred percent i think the best thing you can do is call 9-1-1 um and then reach out to a hotline to 24-hour hotline i think that that is a great first step but also um you know just reaching out to someone who can help someone who is a safe place for you and for those who are listening you know if you're ever in that situation that when someone does come to you i hope you heard what leslie said validate validate listen right just listen don't don't try to come up with fancy answers or scriptures to you know throw at them in the moment but just be present and listen the ministry of presence is so underestimated and then validate them and then help come alongside of them and help them get the help that they need leslie you have so many incredible resources in addition to your books so many incredible resources on your website we're going to put the link to that to those in in our chat but leslievernix.com right leslie vernick.com and then i have a ton of little short youtube videos that are really safe to watch because you don't have to turn your volume you can they're all um transcribed all the words are on the screen there so you can just watch the video and read the words those are on my also my facebook page and they're all about short little topics like is it my fault and if he doesn't hit me is it really abuse and all different little five-minute segments of just one snippet of this that will educate you even if you just have to watch it silently on your phone you still get the gist of it wow thank you for doing this work thank you for being so passionate about it giving your life to it and helping so many people i've talked to so many counselors that um we're just really really excited you're their hero and their mentor and they follow you and read your books and you inspire them and you inspire me and so many of us thank you for helping us to get this right and to really be able to help people in the most holistic way in the jesus way i think that's really really important that we do that so much to learn and we just appreciate you so very much thank you thank you for joining us tonight is there anything else you want to say as we wrap up i just so appreciate your church caring about this um it's rare there i mean it's not that churches don't care about abuse but to really care about helping couples helping individuals have safe healthy strong relationships and how to repair and heal damaged ones is something that we don't want to talk about because we're afraid we're going to open this kettle of awful stuff and we won't know what to do with it and god can equip us to do things with it if we can just be with it we don't just solve it overnight but just to talk about it be honest be real and god can do some amazing things we can we can we're all broken right and we're all on a journey and we need one another we need authenticity so that we know that it's it's okay to not be okay sometimes you get the help that we need well thank you leslie so much again we appreciate you we're so thankful that you spent this time with us um tomorrow you're going to be spending a couple of hours with our staff and training us on how to how to do better how to help people in in better ways and um we're just grateful grateful to you i'm really looking forward to it thank you thank you you

Channel: GT Church Online

Views: 625

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: GT Church, Growing Together Vodcast, Vodcast, Christian Podcast, Podcast, Christian Vodcast, Christian Church, Bible Study

Id: r7AnJZNIt8Y

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020