My blurb next to my senior picture was a glimpse into how I viewed my place in the world.  I had already been kicked out of my fathers house and told by my mother that she didn’t know what to do with me, so I crashed at grandmas often.  I was unwanted to the core and I chose words for the yearbook to acknowledge where I had come from, yet determine where I was going.  So when my aunt blurted out that I sounded sad and dreary, I knew she was dismissing the drive inside of me because my mother had.  It was an infectious disease, the hatred my family had for anyone else succeeding outside of their influence, but my prophecy spelled out the overcoming power my life was going to look like, and that scared them.  At the time of graduation, I didn’t realize the cost of breaking out from a lying system of dysfunction, but it afforded me the ability to claim my identity even at the risk of rejection.  I never did fit into the mold of scapegoat my relatives tried to shove me in, which is why I have helped countless others break out of that same oppression.

You can drive anywhere and get a feeling about the area just by seeing the environment and sensing your surroundings.  According to the degree of oppression, you can determine if your whereabouts is safe or dangerous.  This however is not as easy to discern when we are children.  Our immediate environment and care takers have the most influence over the beliefs we form concerning safety in the world, and especially safety within our own psyches.  Because we are spirit beings created to gain love and acceptance from a spiritual governing, we lose connection to both ourselves and God when parents pass on their limited view of what faith is.  Should neglect and abuse pass down from our generational line, we simply form ideologies around that as being normal behavior, until we are old enough to recognize that the emotional suffering is wrong.  By the time many of us find our voice, we have lost hope in any God who proclaims to father us from heaven while we have felt emotionally abandoned by those on earth.  When parents slack in their roles, kids believe God does also.

I had a lawyer friend who was convinced that a family who stayed together was far better than one who divorced.  He came by his observations honestly because his repeated criminal caseload represented individuals from broken homes.  And that was indeed what I had believed when I wrote a similar statement describing my outlook on life as a graduating senior.  Death is final but divorce lingers because family members may be disconnected from someone their subconscious longs to adhere too. Yet my vision was limited at that time because brokenness comes in many unspoken forms.  I equated my depression and physical ailments to my parents divorcing, ignoring the bouts of rage from my father as equally impactful.  It wasn’t until many years later when I was 32 years old, that my sexual abuse memories surfaced after repression.

What we know now about our brains is that they have exponential power to mentally protect us from negative perception or traumatic memory when we are kids by compartmentalizing those events into storage banks.  Whenever I hear clients say, “I didn’t have any trauma,” I usually let time reveal the excessive demands, name calling, inappropriate boundaries, poor attunement, detachment or chaos that surrounded them as children: all very traumatic.  Subtle disrespect is absorbed into our psyche over time and greatly persuades our relationship bonding skills.  Only when our bodies and minds grow tired of suppressing our past emotional pain, will our brains release the data that can help make sense of our current behavior that fails at coping.  It is the reason why most of us seek so hard to define who we are between the ages of 18-35.  That vast range covers years of believing one is a scapegoat, homosexual, sickly, suicidal, addicted, or any other maladaptive person based on something perceived before the age of 7.  If God did not create our brains to scoop up these evil assaults against our identity, than we would self destruct before adulthood.

This happened to me and so many others who have crossed my path.  That’s not to negate that divorce is a major attack on the confines of marriage, but before anyone walks down the aisle, each individual has to be healed enough from childhood in order for any union to work.  So if lawyers see criminals who came from broken homes and counselors see abuse survivors who came from two-parent homes, both professional groups are still correct, because the problem is always a spiritually, individual one.  That’s why prostitution isn’t fixed through drug rehab, the core issue is sexual abuse which invited drugs as a coping mechanism. What we cannot define based on evidence remains a question of its spiritual significance.

Remember when we were in kindergarten and taught that we were responsible for our own behavior?  If two of us went to the teacher tattling on the other she would ask us, “what was your behavior in the situation, not the other guy?”  We had to give an account for our actions.  However, children usually recreate scenarios that they have witnessed at home while in school, which is why bullying is an indication of mistreatment from the home front.  If children aren’t governed into believing that emotional and verbal expression aides in their growth, they become stunted adults who fight for what they never got from parents.

That’s why every profession which employs the betterment of civil duty and aide to those who are lacking mental, emotional, physical and spiritual understanding, are always seeing a different side to the story.  If anything manifests negatively through behavior, its source lacks the perspective of heaven: spiritual reality defines itself as either good or evil but the world can’t perceive it.  What psychotherapists are discovering is that complex-trauma involves all assaults against an individual through ones senses.  The importance of coupling Christianity with counseling is my intention because I have lived to talk about spiritual realms that battled for my life.  I was both a product of abuse and divorce, but the devil convinced me in the womb that I was conceived out of obligation.  Just because my mother said she planned me doesn’t mean that love and acceptance pumped through the umbilical cord through her.  We never know the thoughts and feelings of an individual like Jesus does, but if they aren’t founded in Him, we sure as hell suffer the consequences.  That’s because satan uses the law against humanity.

And by the law I mean fire and brimstone Biblical accounts where people screwed up and God punished them.  The law which is meant to protect us today as long as we abide by its rules.  That same law which has been amended by man and made to enslave people to fearing a far off God.  Yet that law was fulfilled when Jesus came as a man to stand in the gap for all of our mistakes and misguided behaviors.  But one must believe that Jesus died on the cross for all the pain and suffering one will endure while on this earth.  That choice is individual.  Unfortunately we know that the average person would rather work hard, gain a title, pay somebody else or sue another person before believing an invisible Savior that’s already dead and gone, is going to fight his battle.

And that’s where satan kicks our butt all over the earth.  He can twist and contort every good thing intended for God’s glory into a recipe of dissension just by manipulating the emotions which are trapped inside of adult bodies who still feel like they are fighting at recess.  If you have an angry man marry a peaceful woman and they stay together, raise two children, have a fenced in yard and money in the bank, my lawyer friend would question why the oldest daughter was even in court.   But all I would have to do is visit the household and witness the roles of each family member to realize that abuse is covered up through a grid iron facade that the parents present for appearances.  The dynamic of demons putting two spiritually inept people together is for the sake of destruction to become their legacy.  Should that angry husband/father dabble in darkness of any kind, that entire household is under his demonic authority where suffering is silenced to ward off an eruption of his unwarranted cruelty.  Those families never divorce, and the children almost always grow up believing that God is far off and just as abandoning as their role models.

Which is why every person is responsible for their own behavior and healing.  The law of the land twists and contorts the love of God because it’s based on performance and making sure you grow up to be what everyone expects of you without considering the circumstances which influenced you.  Not everyone will be born into an equally providing household, and Daddy in heaven knows that.  Only His love and acceptance will become the significant difference in your family, and most likely it will be through you.   If you have endured trauma built up over time, or designated moments throughout life which traumatized your spirit and soul, know that there is a loving parent who smiles down on you from heaven with expectation for your recovery.  You WILL overcome the enemy.  Your future has never been a question, only your belief of it being a good one.  And yet, He understands that too.  Trust me, He desires to see His children transform into who they are really supposed to be.

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Angela Denise Andrews, 1993

To be happy with all my decisions even if I can’t control their outcomes and to dance my way into a prosperous life without giving up.