At this point, my husband and I simply agreed to "lay low" in the church.
We wanted to continue being a part of our wonderful spiritual family (people that we had shared life with for four years and were our closest friends).
What we didn't want, however, was to come into conflict with our leadership over issues that we had now grown to hold as very important to our marriage.
We refrained from leading any small groups or doing much of anything except the athletics ministry.
My dh and I were now equipped with Christian materials that gave us an entirely new paradigm for Christian marriage. This new paradigm had nothing to do with authoritarian models but dealt with mutual submission in the home and in the church. We felt so liberated and so much happier in our own marriage. Things were still far from perfect. There was still fighting. I was still very angry. There was still too much control on both our parts. Yet there was a measure of hope that we hadn't had before and we felt that we had better tools to cope with a lot of our issues. I didn't realize it at the time but what we really needed more than anything was support. By not reaching out to our church friends, we were very isolated. However, we knew that we couldn't reach out to our church friends because they were all ensconced in the same paradigm that we had been and wouldn't be able to support us in our new path. It was a rough place to be.
So, with things seeming first better and then worse again, I decided in November of 2008 to begin attending a ministry called Celebrate Recovery at a local church. That was probably the best decision I made during this time. These people were experts in dealing with broken, dysfunctional Christians and helping them get a handle on life again. I got a wealth of support material that I had never experienced. No one was telling me that I was a bad wife or mother. I was met with grace and sympathy and a growth path to help me discover the "why" behind my behavior.
My husband started attending as well and we both felt a great deal of relief at finally getting hooked up with some Christian people who understood the depth of pain we were in and could help us walk through it on a regular basis. While we were beginning to make connections at CR, however, we still didn't feel as connected there as we did at church. We felt torn in many ways, wishing that our church family was involved with CR or vice versa.
Several things were happening during this time that are important:
During this time, I started to notice that several women at church had husbands who were just plain abusive and didn't seem to recognize that it was wrong and that they should take some action. As I heard story after story of husbands who demanded bizarre sexual favors, husbands who hatefully told their wives, "I'm going to leave you and you'll be destitute," husbands who related to their wives that they were no longer Christians and were threatening to leave. I was getting really distraught because I knew that these women had the mindset that they were not allowed to draw any kind of boundary with their husbands "biblically." I tried to speak to two ladies in particular about how their husbands weren't going to change simply through prayer and having a "submissive" wife. That is simply not human nature and God doesn't ever call us to tolerate evil. I tried to explain that the person with the most influence over their husband was THEM and not to wait for a leader or pastor to come fix the situation.
I was met with resistance on the part of one lady (I'll call her Jessica) and so I sort of dropped it. I decided that if she wanted to talk about it or do something, she would contact me or ask for help. Probably six months went by and I happened to ask her again if she remembered what I had told her and I was shocked to hear her say, "You told me to leave my husband." I most emphatically did NOT tell her to leave her husband and reiterated that to her. "No, no. I said you have to draw boundaries with your husband. I told you that leaving him would be your last resort. I don't understand how you could've misunderstood me." I know now that this all-or-nothing thinking is very common with people who do not know how to draw boundaries so I'm a little more aware now of how people can take this and misconstrue it.
Also during this time, we learned in our CR group that we are "only as sick as our secrets." One day a friend from church (I'll call her Karly and her husband Manny) texted me just to see how I was doing. My husband and I had had a particularly bad fight in which I lost my temper completely and had injured him. I was weary and tired of being so angry all the time and tired of being so fake at church, not letting people know what is going on really. I made a decision that would probably alter the course of my life in several ways. I decided to call her and tell her what was going on in our home. This was the first time that I let anyone really know how bad things were in our marriage at times. I was deciding to let go of the shame in favor of healing. I was risking a lot; I could sense it. I knew that marriage dynamics were very, very important in our church and that I had a lot to lose if any of our leadership found out that things were still going badly.
To my surprise, I was met with sympathy and understanding. She told me that her husband also struggled with terrible rage and anger and had done some pretty upsetting things in the past as well. We agreed to get together as couples and talk about what we were going through. We had a good time, seemed to get along well, and I sat and received advice from the husband about my anger and some useful things that he had done to deal with it.
We tried to spend a pretty good deal of time with this couple since they seemed to "get" the concept of angry, dysfunctional Christians. But, in addition, I also decided to open up to another person at church: a fellow small-group leader and one of my very best friends. I'll call them Angela and Joseph. As it happens, this couple were the small group leaders for Karly and Manny. A fact that would come into play later.
One more note in this section about the dynamics going on at this time. During this time, the church had signed on a man and his wife, Tommy and Janna Briggs, to do "lay counseling." Tommy's father was a professional counselor at a local mega-church and although Milestone didn't have the funds to hire a staff counselor, they offered this couple as a resource. My husband and I occasionally met with this couple on a counseling basis and were specifically promised that, "Anything that you tell us is confidential. I will tell Derrick who we are counseling but I cannot tell him what it is about or any details." This is also important to remember. It is also important to note that Tommy and Janna were good friends with Angela and Joseph as well. You can probably start to guess what will happen as a result of those relationships meshing.
Ok, in the interest of full disclosure (lest I be accused of not telling the whole story), there was a time somewhere in the early part of 2009 where my husband feared that I was suicidal. I had told him something to the effect of "I feel like I can't go on anymore" and he was very worried. He forwarded my email (believe me, we took that issue to counseling) to my midwife and Derrick and our counselor.
I believe Derrick's response was something like, "You guys need to take a break from any leadership activity for a while." I can remember my dh being so upset and frustrated because he was fearful for my life and got basically no response or help from the leadership that we had looked to for guidance and pastoral care. I don't think that he even get a phone call. I think that was a real turning point for him, too, when he realized that there had been a promise extended to us that our spiritual family would care for us and that they really weren't equipped to help us at all. They seemed to be the only ones who didn't realize it, though.
Now on to Part III...
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