I write a lot about not approaching life from a place of fear or anger. I still believe that, but just as the Bible says there’s a time and place for everything. I know it is okay for me to feel fear and anger. The danger is letting that fear or anger get to be more important to me than God. When a person’s life revolves around what they fear or what angers them, then there’s no room for God to be at the center of their life.
For me, recently, I have been reminded that letting something get out of control in my life is really easy. At the beginning of September, I felt like I was okay. Then my mother fell and broke her femur. Since then, everything in my life has fallen apart and that OCD feeling of wrongness has spiked. I have had some of the worst panic attacks that I have had in many years. I am having one of the worst cluster migraines that I have had in many months. I have been barely able to function at work and I haven’t been able to write. I knew part of it was about fear and I tried to deal with it, but there’s an another much more deeper part that has to do with anger.
When someone abuses another person and they want that person to feel helpless, they socially isolate that person. The abuser limits contact with other people. I never realized that my mother was doing this to me. I already had a difficult time making social connections, but every time I made a friend, she sabotaged it by making me think that they really didn’t like me. She did it with every relationship I had. She told me that I was so naïve that I couldn’t tell how people were trying to use me. Today, I am an extremely paranoid person who has trust issues because she was always in my ear telling me that I should be questioning everyone’s motives.
The worst part though is when I needed help. I came to her, and she got mad at me. I left the house feeling destroyed and alone. Then she turned around and told my brother and father that I had hurt her. That lie would put a wedge between my family and me for the rest of my life. I still feel isolated today. I always felt like I was isolated because I was weird and the black sheep of the family. Then about a month ago, I realized she had been lying about me. She was isolating me. Just like all the other abusers, keeping up the lies and manipulations is so much easier if I don’t have other people to go to who can tell me that she is gaslighting me.
There have been so many years that I have felt all alone because of her damn lies. Now, I realize the truth isn’t going to matter. My truth doesn’t make any difference to anyone in my family. That hurts and I feel angry. That’s why my life is falling apart. That horrible emotion is like a burrowing parasite inside of me just waiting for the right moment to infect my entire body, mind, and soul.
I don’t want to let that happen. I’m angry. She took my family away from me and it hurt. I have learned to live with it, but for years I thought it was my fault and now I realize that it wasn’t just me. The isolation was done to me.
So, God, please take this anger from my heart and replace it with love and understanding. Help me to forgive this horrible abuse that was done to me. I want to be able to be free from it. I ask knowing that I put my life in Your hands and only Your hands.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
