Honest Talk When a Partner is Abusive

Honest Talk When a Partner is Abusive

By: Kimberly Dimick

Nothing will work until he understands that because of his choices to abuse drugs, abuse you and to reject Christ that he has put HIMSELF in the position of losing you and his daughter. Sin has to be confronted with consequences.

I am glad you want to give your boyfriend boundaries but the consequences when he fails to follow those boundaries mean cutting him off completely and not seeing him or his daughter for a time AND repeating this process over and over again until he gets that you are are serious.

If he thinks he can get away with anything then he will try and pull the wool over your eyes, threaten you, abuse you further with rage and anger because you are not capitulating or giving into his way of doing things. The concern is that a man canNOT have a complete heart change without the Holy Spirit. if he will not abide by those boundaries. 

One cannot entertain abuse and come out unscathed. God tells us in His Word to flee an angry man and have nothing to do with a man who mocks God.

When we have to deal with a man who persistently and consistently chooses himself rather than doing the right thing then you have a foolish and wicked man on your hands.

Yes, we are all responsible for out choices but, still a man who respected you, dear heart, would not have given promises of love just so he could exploit you sexually. I get that you agreed to have sex with him honey, but a man who would ask a girl to have sex before marriage while he claimed to be a Christian and promise to marry her is manipulation on his part toward you.

God talks about people that are predatory. Your boyfriend pretends to have a real affection for you but only so he can get what HE WANTS. As soon as you confront him he may give you backlash!

The very reason a woman does not give consequences or put her foot down is because she fears his reprisal. She is afraid he will leave her high and dry.

Fear holds her hostage to his demands. That is something you have to to choose to trust God with. God knows at the very same time that you are on a learning curve. God is NOT saying to you that this is your fault or you are to blame for not knowing what you did not know. It is after we have received a knowledge of the truth that you are accountable before God.

I had to face this dilemma myself when God taught me that my husband was abusive and to cut him off from bringing anymore needless ruin to my life. It is at this point I knew I had to obey God.

God is not taking your boyfriend away….your boyfriend did that. God is trying to SAVE you and your tdaughter from any HARM. It is not possible for an abusive man to love another human being until he first learns how to receive God's love for him. A man must humble himself before God and receive His mercy with the understanding this means a whole new way of doing things.

God's Word gives us clear guidelines about what kind of man to marry. You cannot expect your boyfriend to be any different than he is, as he himself would say, he is not a Christ-follower or truth-lover.

Unbelievers act like unbelievers. This is no surprise. God is not surprised. I think your boyfriend needs way more than what any amount of boundaries can accomplish at this point. Yet, Christian love does not mean that we offer an abusive unbeliever access to our heart or spirit over and over again.

We risk our own love of truth when we do that all for the sake of fear or feeling afraid of our future. I was terrified, literally shaking to my depths to realize I may face my life alone without a husband to care for and watch over me. It was so agonizing to me. God knows it is scary. God knows this is not what He planned for you but we must allow God to do what HE needs to do to get his attention. I think from what the Bible says, especially Proverbs, that confrontation and extreme consequences will be the only thing to prove you are serious about following Jesus no matter what you lose.

There is no desperation for God in him right now and so you applying boundaries will be very short-lived. The voice he listens to and believes is the voice he will honor. His EGO has a voice that tells him that his selfishness and being the way he is, is all right and if you do not like it then it is your problem.

The truth is this is not any of your problem unless you believe his lies. Abuse can be very confusing and really mess with your thinking.

An abused woman often does not know which way is the right way as she is constantly going back and forth between his cruelty and then his niceness. This is what we call a "cycle of abuse."

He is not really being loving or nice, he is setting you up to manipulate you, so HE can have a false sense of acceptance and love.

Yes, he is crying out for true significance and worth but abusing you is only making it worse. To send the message to a man that you will "work" with him is actually telling him the way he is going about finding value is by keeping you in his cycle with him and he never really sees his utter emptiness from being without Jesus.

He believes right now that you are not worth being loved as God commands. He is defining what kind of love is good enough for you. 

Your boyfriend is wanting to make you feel ashamed and guilty so he does not have to face his own shame and guilt. Now, yes…God can save his soul but not after you allow him in your life to destroy yours.

I pray that your boyfriend comes to a relationship with Jesus and THEN he of his own free will pursues your heart. I do hope this for you but also be prepared that it may not happen. We have to be willing to face both outcomes and put our hearts in God's hands. I do hope for your boyfriend's sake that he is set free and delivered and then comes to his senses for a beautiful testimony but in the meantime, protect your daughter and yourself from any more violence to your soul.

God tells us to judge PROPERLY. We must have wisdom in dealing with different kinds of people. Jesus said that there are TWO ways we must judge properly. The first is dealing with a person who we see has an issue to rectify, or, you could say, there is no good fruit (behavior) – that proper judging would be to look at ourselves to make sure we take the log out of our own eye SO THAT we CAN judge the sin rightly…theirs and our own.

Jesus is teaching us that it is perfectly fine to judge as long as we keep our own failings in perspective or a speck versus a log. This keeps fellow Christians from judging too harshly or rashly.

The other face of judging is that we are NOT to be so blind to the character of a person that we try and confront them in their sin. Why? Because they will turn and tear you to pieces and trample God's pearls of truth and wisdom under their feet.

God does not want us to let this happen. We cannot help that people scorn God but this does not mean we also give them the opportunity either. This is one of the reasons we tell women to not speak and to go dark. A woman cannot put herself in a position to mishandle the Word of God by allowing another person to use truth against them, thereby treating the precious and sacred things of God with mockery and reviling.

God warns us about sex outside of marriage. We become one flesh with that person and are joined to whatever spiritual condition they are in. This is why the Word of God talks about being in agreement with others.

We cannot both love the truth and be in agreement with the enemy. Yes, we all sin and I know you get this but to continue hoping he will love you when he mistreats your dignity and honor as God's daughter does not look good. God wants you to look at this realistically.

The reality is that your boyfriend is nowhere near a loving and responsible man. Knowing this makes you responsible about what you will choose to do with the truth you know about him. It is one thing to be ignorant and another to invite anguish and pain into our lives deliberately.

In a normal courting situation, he would be wanting to pursue your heart and win it. Jesus said, "Even unbelievers love those who love them" – so this is the natural flow of things, even in the world.

Yet, for your boyfriend to love you the way God wants His daughters loved is a completely different story. This love is sacrificial without regard for himself. You may think that this sounds harsh or unloving to see and talk about the stark reality of this relationship but it is actually loving of God to so turn his life upside down that he will reach out to God as his soul and eternity is more important than anything.

Redemptive love will undo us so we can be remade by His Spirit. We have to face who we really are apart from Jesus to truly see what great love and mercy God has given to us as a free gift.

I also get that he needs to mature to the level of having some kind of relationship with his daughter but he is proving to you that he is willing to damage her mother without regard to how this will effect his own daughter's heart and her emotional health in years to come.

And it does effect your daughter. When she hears fighting and hears you cry, her emotions are being traumatized. She is too little to handle this so it damages her and scars her. Sadly, it only grows worse honey, not better.

Once an abusive man is exposed, nothing will change him unless he receives and loves that correction early on. Talking with people has not thus far affected him either.

God also does not want you unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. This will not only affect you but it will affect your daughter in the long run. God calls it being yoked to satan.

You certainly do not want to be in agreement with the enemy. This is what Paul was talking about throughout 1 Corinthians 7. You are called to peace, which in the Greek means without the tyranny of war and without God's rest.

Hebrews tells us to be careful to enter into His rest and to not resist God. Paul actually COMMANDS us to LET the unbeliever depart and not chase them all over creation hoping that they will change as this leads to putting the believer in bondage and captivity which means to make yourself a slave and bondman to another person. My point is that the nature of abuse works this way.

There is no reasoning with a captor and with treachery and betrayal.

These are MANY Scriptural reasons, that we are seeing that you are having a difficult time seeing clearly. This is NORMAL for abuse victims. Without getting into too much detail, the reason you reach out to be loved by your boyfriend is because of the sexual bond this desire activated in you.

This has "glued" you together. This act awakened love before its time or before the act of marriage was rightly sealed in your lives through a marriage ritual. Jewish people are betrothed and THEN the groom returns for her and consummates the vows he previously made to her. Sex seals the covenant AFTER it is made.

Havoc is created when we are out of God's order. This awakened the "desire is for her husband" in your heart and is why you feel overwhelmed with him ruling your emotions with control and power rather than with connecting to your true need as a woman and honoring God by honoring his wife.

I too was overcome with fear about being alone and being financially destitute without my husband. I feared being rejected, abandoned and unloved the rest of my life.

One of the the most profound truths the Lord taught me was that I thought I could change Joshua by loving him more. God had to teach me that this was self-righteousness because I thought if I behaved better or was a "good" person then Joshua would love me. I am good because of Jesus alone. It ends up creating more problems for myself and my spiritual health.

The Lord had to correct me and discipline me in this by showing me that my thinking was messed up as Joshua's love or lack of it was controlling me. God told me that my merciful heart was way out of balance and I was actually keeping my husband from God rather than allowing God to have him.

In letting Joshua go into God's hands was the only way to protect my sons and myself. I regret with a sorrowful heart that I did not leave my husband years before I finally went to divorce him. The anguish and the damage he has caused my son's souls and spirits is something only a miracle from God can undo.

They have suffered the fall out of this too. To this day, I have a hard time forgiving myself that I ever for one moment of their lives let abuse come near to them. I weep for their souls as because of the abuse and hypocrisy of a supposed Christian father, they walked away from God.

I understand how you feel. I know that you love your boyfriend and would, if you could have anything, have a lasting and God-honoring relationship with him.

I will add here that it is not healthy for a child to grow up with an abusive father. The toll that this takes is inestimable as you know in your own family. Honey, I have to be faithful to speak the truth or God would hold me accountable for not intervening when I clearly see a destructive situation before my eyes.

To stay silent or encourage you with this young man feels like I am dishonoring everything I know to be truth concerning injustice, abuse and defending the weak and oppressed. If i am silent or act like a spectator and just watch this unfold without crying out to you to go a different way then I am disobeying God.

This is why men are in the state they are in. The Church REF– USES to speak the kind of truth that cause a man's hearts to TREMBLE. NO ONE will say anything.

No one will offend like Jesus did to SAVE many people alive. God's love is most often bloody and messy and gut-wrenching to save us from ourselves or our own immaturity and ignorance. His people perish because we want we think we want instead of trusting God to bring to us in his timing what we need.

I am NOT saying that God's redeeming love cannot reach his soul. Yet, HOW God wants to do that may look very different from what you or I think. If you were my daughter, courting a young man like this, I would tell my daughter to RUN for the hills and get as far away from him as possible.

Most Christians think that redemptive love is letting people go at their own pace and moseying along, acting anyway they want, hurting people but never being called into account for it. This is NOT redemptive love.

WHEN, and only WHEN he repents, then of course showing grace and mercy is in order. We want to give grace and mercy even though confrontation and facing their own harsh reality WITHOUT God is the most loving thing to do. 

When God changes his heart it will be because GOD has done it and it will be real and life-changing for your boyfriend.

Editor's Note: Woman to woman, an honest talk like this is something I could only dream of and yearn for, when I was enduring an abusive marriage. I can only imagine what my life would have been like if I had had Kimberly's words back then. I could have saved my children from so much heart ache. This is why I publish Kimberly's words, with her permission. I hope you have been helped as much as I!

Kimberly and Joshua Dimick Speak on Marriage, Divorce, and Recovering from Spiritual Abuse

Kimberly Dimick and her husband, Joshua Dimick, know how it feels to lose everything: marriage and family, church and reputation, finances and careers, and so much more. Together and separately they have walked the path of Love, a narrow path, a path that is lonely and not well-used.

They intimately understand the soul-shattering pain of separation and divorce and they also know "The Way Home" to a life of choosing unconditional love. The surprising answers to a happy marriage are shared in their posts, articles, and a book-in-progress.

As you venture on this journey with Kimberly and Josh you will experience how God shines His most brilliant light in their darkest hours. Today their mission is to provide a voice to women suffering in silence, shining the Light of Truth into the dark places of marital and spiritual abuse.

As you journey with Kimberly and Josh you will witness a true life transformation that will shatter the misinformation and lies commonly fed to women that keep them in false submission. 

Read More of Kimberly and Joshua's Stories Here!