How I Left My Abusive Relationship Pt. 1

04/3/2019 at 11:54am

I want you to clear your mind for a second and take a few breaths as I do. Because what I’m about to tell you takes a little digging deep in my soul.

I can start to explain these three words: faith, love and work. Faith is your strong belief and confidence in a higher power. Love is a powerful emotion or affection. Work is an activity done for purpose or a result.

These are three things that I learned on my journey. And each step presented their own challenges. The hardest part for me was understanding where my hurt was stemming from.

Abuse builds up. It  happens over a course of time and includes several different situations. 

Think about the very first moment you allowed someone into your life and they did something to hurt you. It might have been something  they did or they said.  But it stems from a situation where you thought you were in control, and at the end it made your feel bad.  Maybe you sat on the phone when your partner verbally abused you the first time and you thought it wouldn’t happened again. Or, you were out your partner and they made you feel embarrassed or uncomfortable and you overlooked it.

You get tired. It comes to a point that you get tired of making excuses. In the Word, there are no excuses, it’s the truth. And when I exhausted my bank account, when I exhausted my attempts to help my partner. When I exhausted all phone calls to my loved ones that feared what I was going thru, I had to turn back to God and His Word. And the truth stared me in the face.

Faith

Back then, I  would go to work and put on a brave face and mask my internal and external bruises. I would smile, I would laugh, and I would even tell you I was having a great day. But I really wasn’t. I felt like I had a big secret that no one knew about. I felt weak, alone and ashamed that I was even in this situation. I avoided every mirror. I was a woman who was afraid to look at her own reflection because of what she saw within myself.

How did I get like this and how do I get back up? I would ask myself those questions not even realizing that I already knew the truth. I wasn’t ready to face it.

Women are made to be nurturers and it’s a natural instinct to want to make things better. But sometimes it wont get better for reasons we don’t understand. We can only find understanding through God and His Word.

Faith reminds us that the Word of God never fails. 

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever

Isaiah 40:8

Faith reminds us that we are never alone.

The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cry and saves them.

Psalms 145:18-19

Faith gives us courage we never thought we had.

The Lord is my light and salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is my stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid.

Psalms 27:1

Whatever happens in my life, I can always fall back to the Word of God and it will never change. I found comfort in knowing that people can change and all things around me but the Word never changes. It Is the same as today as it was yesterday and tomorrow.

Faith got me to my first step because it reminded me who I was and whose I was. As I begin to find time to read the word of God and to look at myself in the mirror again, I began to feel better. Not much was changing on the outside but my mind and how I saw life changed. The more I dug deep in myself and studied the word of God I began to see that I was in a situation where I desperately needed help out of.

One of the hardest parts for me was deciding it was time to walk away from the person I loved and who abused me.  I am guilty of trying to change a person. Whether intentionally or not intentionally, I thought I can do whatever it takes to help. I tried to see the good in every situation but we are human. I realized in my efforts where I failed so many times, is that you have to give them to God. Nothing I could do in my human form can satisfy or help the situation. But the God of my understanding who sees and knows all things, from the beginning to the end, can help both of us. In. His. Time. Not Ashley’s.

Taking a stand to solidify my faith allowed me to find the root of my real problem. If you just clip the leaves of the tree, it will grow back instantly. You would never know what that tree had been through. But if you dig deep and it gets messy, you have to pay attention to the root. If you don’t, you may fall victim to the same circumstances again.