Why Christianity Can Be Dangerous for Women

“Turn the other cheek”

“Love Thy Enemy”

 “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

 

Many of us have heard these quotes of Christ and use them as our guiding posts in the way of love and interpersonal conflicts. They seem harmless, kind, a message of peaceful relations.  But for abused women, who tend to be caregivers and codependents who don't want to have ill feelings towards others, these words can be lethal. Also, for people who have just started out on the spiritual path, they will also use these teachings inappropriately and justify and minimize a whole slew of poor behaviour from others, not having healthy boundaries. I know because I did this when I started out on my spiritual path. 

Faithful, good-hearted women are more likely to tolerate poor treatment because they are conditioned to be people pleasing, nice, pleasant, thoughtful, kind, extremely forgiving, etc. They will ignore horrific treatment, disrespectful behaviour and demeaning comments made to them, and believe that prayer will save the sinner.  They believe they have to be Christ’s bride and look graceful and pretty so they can get into heaven and join Him.  They will cover up the emotional or physical bruises that are left on their souls instead of taking a stand by staring their abusers in the eye and telling him to back off. They can spend their whole entire lives in an unhappy marriage with an alcoholic, or make excuses for the man who is beating her, believing that this is a good Christian thing to do.  

With the help of scripture, they become the ultimate doormat and the abusers learn that they can get away with beating the women or intimidating the people in their lives.  Because bullies will find the weakest link, they will gain more and more power as they allow their abuser to overshadow them.  The men will feel strong and great, while the women meekly imitate Christ and bow their heads in victimized humility.

I strongly believe that God wants us to feel happiness, to stand up to evil, to face bullies, to heal our hearts and to learn discernment.  We are meant to feel alive and joyful, not full of fear and death. Anyone you meet who has survived an abusive relationship will explain to you that they felt like they were in a fog, or they had no idea why they stayed so long, that they believed it was because they couldn’t love their partner enough – until one day something snapped and she got up and left. I would suggest that that was the day when she was actually listening to God and divine intervention happened.  

I say this with the utmost compassion for Christian women in abusive situations. Because it happened to me, as well. I believed the jargon of the Bible – love the enemy, love the criminal, just pray, turn the other cheek.  I ended up in a relationship with someone who had done jail time, had serious mental health issues and was looking to dominate a vulnerable woman.  He nearly destroyed me and my self-esteem, and I ended up feeling ashamed that I didn’t see what was so obvious. It was because of my desire to live a spiritual life that I ignored the common sense realities that this was a severely broken man who was ready to bring down everybody in his path.  He knew how to con nice girls and emotionally manipulate them to feel sorry for him. He made me feel guilty, that somehow I wasn’t loving enough and he used tools like racial guilt, implying that I was a stuck up white girl so I would feel bad about myself. He accused me of flirting with other people – when I was merely talking to people--and started a whole slew of attacks to make me doubt myself.   

My desire to grow spiritually over-powered my intuition and voice and made me tolerate and participate in ways of being treated that were humiliating.  Luckily my feminist background kicked in and I took a stand against him that I am NOT going to be abused in this lifetime and we ended the relationship 6 months after it started.  It took me 2 years to wrap my head around how I allowed myself to become pulled in by him.  I tried to justify it, not to see myself as a victim, show that I was compassionate towards him. But the truth is that he was a manipulative person who was so deeply warped that he had no concept of respect, integrity and honesty with others. And I was a lonely woman who wanted to be loved (I hadn’t been in a relationship for 3 years).  I also assumed that everyone who claims they are on a spiritual path has this code of ethics within them, only to realize that wasn’t the case. I got duped, fooled, humiliated and roped in to his wounded self. And Christ’s quotes made me blind to how I was giving away my own sense of self so I could feel like I was a good, spiritual woman.  

Yes, I’ve forgiven him. Eventually I could see how tormented he was. I see that there were parts of him that I did love, that’s why I wanted to be involved with him. I had admired how much he healed from his experiences of childhood. I liked his faithfulness in his Native Tradition. I saw hope that if God helped him, Spirit could help me. But no amount of prayer or Higher Power could make this man someone safe for women. He needed serious psychotherapy for his deepest wounds.

I have regained my inner strength and healed my heart, with thanks to books, personal prayer, counsellors and healers.  I’ve learned to discern the psychopath and sociopath to understand their psychology so I won’t get trapped again.  I’m fine with trusting my perceptions of those who are safe and healthy and those who are warped and dangerous.  I’ve learned to not believe that everyone who tells you they love you does. I discovered that my naïve, nice girl self can actually kill me and lead me down a dark and depressing path. I really don’t ever want to go down that road again.  I know now that I deserve to have a happy life. And I don’t need Christ’s mixed messages to tell me how to live. Because he wasn’t a woman and he wasn’t living in this time period. He has no idea what we have to face on a day-to-day basis and his so-called wisdom is actually a form of foolishness and denial, leading women astray.

I’ve come to realize that I’d rather be the spiritual person who has a lot of street wisdom, than the naïve sitting duck pretending I’m not afraid. Yes, forgiveness is good. But wisdom is better. And every person on this planet is called to growing in becoming loveable. That’s the other person’s job, not mine nor Christ’s, if they want to open their heart to love and respect.

The Search for Home

Home.  It can be a loaded word – it could mean trap, pain, struggle, lostness. Or on the flipside it can mean comfort, cave, hideaway, protection, safety.   

For me, it’s been one of my ongoing difficulties in life – to find my place in the world, on the earth and amongst others. I’ve lived in 2 other cultures – Jamaica and Mexico – and understand that feeling of being the outsider. I grew up in a home that was rife with conflict, so much so that I left at 16 years old.  I have moved over 50 times in my 38 years on this earth, and have lived in other parts of Canada, as well.  

 The feeling of aloneness is a place of strange comfort and knowing for me.  I’ve had a hard time feeling like I belonged anywhere, and couldn’t feel at ease with making friends, believing there would always be tension or they would leave or it would end in a crisis. Letting others get closer to me was a sure road to disappointment and suffering. I’ve walked with a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Because, in my mind, people are people and the spiritual adage that all things are impermanent actually created a feeling of stress for me rather than ease and allowance. Life was one big journey of heartache and impossibility for me.  

Feeling at home in my body has also been a challenge in the face of sexual objectification of women, harassment, weight fluctuations, sexual and emotional victimization. Also, having white skin in countries where people saw me either as dominant and a threat, or totally admired and revered, created really uncomfortable feelings within my body.  Self-hate and self-blame was a natural go to place within my being and I would find all the ways in the world to make my life uncomfortable.

So when I went to my first Coming Home Retreat with my life partner, Russell Scott (www.awakentheguruinyou.com), I had expected that I would have more negative stuff to work out. I felt like a mess within myself, that it was hopeless for me and that my life would have to be a series of just surviving in a world of hurt and pain.  That the spiritual path was meant to be punishing and suffering and that perhaps I’ll never be able to work out my karma and issues.  

On the first day, I saw that the schedule seemed rigid, the technique precise, and I felt like I was under yet another system of control that was going to reveal to me that I was weak and that this was the lifetime where I was unfit to grow spiritually or emotionally.  I believed others had it all sorted out and they were clearly more evolved than I was on the spiritual path.  But as the hours unfolded and others opened up their more vulnerable selves, revealing their truth courageously and unabashedly, I realized that I was not alone in this world. Others did have compassion, and they struggled with fears and anxieties and depression, and yearned to feel peace, connection, love and life, just like me. Through the sharing and unveiling I peeled off layers of my misperceptions, my identity with my wounds, my feelings of inadequacy, and found a place within myself so lovely, serene, beautiful and totally independent of the conditioning of other people’s shoulds, have tos, come ons and beliefs about the way life is supposed to be lived. 

I busted through illusions I was living under that I was somehow a bad person, a person who could never be worthy enough to have happiness and abundance in my life, and that I was somehow chosen by the divine forces to live in a purgatorial state of feeling alone, different, misunderstood and hidden.  

Instead I discovered my own intuitive knowing, realized how brave, courageous, resilient and phenomenal I am just because I breathe. That I’ve been conditioned by people who are unconscious of their own light and divinity and they are also just surviving the best way they knew how with all of their wounds.  The pain from my perpetrators melted away and my heart found a warm place of compassion and understanding for them, seeing that they are living out their own hurt and are blind to their true nature.  

I could feel the life force in my body and never felt more beautiful in all my life. All the ways I twisted and contorted myself to meet other people’s expectations unwound from my body. And my heart could open up to me. I finally found a stable home within myself that no one in the world could ever take away from me. And that is when I found true peace within myself, knowing that no matter others say or do to me,  I am loveable, loving, and worthy of goodness, and I have the clarity and power to make a life that has more genuine love, softness and kindness in it.

***

Heather Embree is a soul coach, energy healer and psychic reader in Guelph, ON and offers services for women who are recovering from heartbreak. To find out more about her, visit: www.blossomingheart.ca