White Lines III

White Lines III

I sat with the third counselor in a row and heard the same thing repeated again. It wasn’t until that third time that my mind finally let it actually register. “You are not the narcissist in this picture; your husband is.” This is where the whole horrific ride began for me. I was going to be forced to understand what narcissism actually is, and that, as bizarre as it is, it is a reality. Like most people, I thought I knew, at least basically, what it meant. As it turned out, I didn't have a clue. Don't be surprised if you discover you didn't either. If you've ever driven a highway on a foggy night, rain pouring down, and that highway had no visible white lines, then you'll know how difficult this was to travel through. 

On my three-week road trip, and actually the day I found out my former husband had already gotten remarried only one month and a few days after our divorce was final, and only weeks after he had been seemingly sincere in weeping over needed solutions for our marriage, I made a critical stop off in Gallup, New Mexico. It was a Thursday. Former pastors of mine who live in North Carolina work with the Hopi and Navajo reservations there. I would stop there to meet some of their ministry friends and pray over a project they are all working on together. My former pastor texted me and asked what time I would arrive. My GPS gave an eta of 6:33, which is my life verse (Matthew 6:33). He informed me that he’d just found out that his friends were having a church service at 6:30 that night. Who has a church service on a Thursday? They do! And my oh my, was it a church service! Powerful celebratory worship was pouring out as I walked in. A female pastor came and found me, having been told I was there. At the end of the service, I went down for prayer. The place was on fire and thick with the presence of God. The prayers over me were so on target. It was all such a gift from God. 

The next morning, one of the female pastors and I got together for breakfast and began sharing ministry stories. We wound up in one of the most important ministry conversations I have had in a very long time. She explained that one of the most difficult cultural aspects of ministry for her and her husband was the fact that families “honor the dishonorable.” This phrase alone struck me like lightning. She went on to explain, for example, that families would go to great lengths to “honor” family members by protecting and hiding the evidence of say, their sons who were molesting children, or stealing, or dealing drugs, etc. This false form of honor was deeply ingrained in the culture.

I have all my life been told that I'm seen as one full of love. “You're always the one who brings love to the room, Jill,” someone will say. “Oh, Jill, in 15 minutes of conversation with you, anyone knows you are full of love and grace,” another will say. They also often say, “You are having too much grace for this, Jill.”  There are two things I’ve had to sadly face over the past year and a half about my walk of love. I, too, honor the dishonorable in the name of grace and love. Also, I habitually over-own my part of things. I do this to make sure that I have fully owned my part, and to make others feel better about their part. This is a form of enabling, I've learned, and a wide open door for “narcissistic abuse” - a term I was not yet familiar with. 

At a time when I was finally running with a musical vision God had given me many, many years ago, but definitely for such a time as this, which carries a central message of returning to love and reconciling relationships, my own marriage burst into flames. The relationship had been like a semi-turbulent plane ride for several years, but immediately after I debuted the stage production for this musical vision, it seemed the marriage took a thirty-thousand-foot nosedive out of the air, crashed, and burned to a crisp!   

The entire ordeal left my confidence in my own walk of love rocked. What people were seeing on social media and in person was a complete facade for eight years. I initially took part in the facade in the name of love and grace, naively expecting it to all be redeemed eventually. I desperately fought to hold my former husband accountable for the abusive things that were going on. These things were happening only behind closed doors when no one else could see. The central problems were constant lies, omissions of truth, but more alarming and noteworthy were the multiple uncommon forms of dishonesty. Naturally connected to those patterns were betrayal, dishonor, and disloyalty. Along with these patterns were blame-shifting and false narrating patterns. The most damaging pattern was the increasingly intolerable fits of berating rage, and specifically because they were not based in reality or truth, which was finally witnessed by a few friends and one therapist. This element - the losing track of all reality and truth is related to the main purpose of this blog series. All of these patterns were considered childhood habits that simply could not yet be helped or healed. I am not purposely stringing the reader along in this series. It is important to have context before I can fully reveal what my real point and purpose of all this is. 

In the beginning, he had come to me with a seemingly sincere desire to fully surrender to God and walk with God in the way he believed I walked with God. He would express a deep desire to get free from these behavioral patterns and especially the guilt and shame he carried from the long list of damaged women he had left in his past. We openly discussed and prayed over these things. He was writing a book confessing these things. He believed, as I did and still do, that full surrender to God was the only way to freedom. About 2 years into the marriage, I began to watch him make a slow and covert U-turn from the ways he had initially convinced me that he wanted to walk with God, to moving more and more back toward a very carnal version of Christianity, and more and more trying to convince me that my walk with God was delusional and out of line.

In Matthew 16:23, Peter took Jesus aside and began to reprimand him for saying such [“delusional”] things. Jesus then said the famous line we all know, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” He was clearly not talking to Peter there. He was talking to Satan. But then Jesus said, (clearly to Peter,) “You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not God’s. You are a dangerous trap.”

This was the second time my former husband had chosen to falsely narrate me in this way. The first time, he'd spent a few years spreading the same type of narrative. This was sparked by my efforts, as a friend, to encourage him to simply be fully honest with his first wife in his efforts to reconcile their marriage. This only angered him and he didn't choose this path. His first wife eventually got remarried. This, of course, was all before we ran into each other in Tennessee years later. This false narrative in fact, was what he came to confess and apologize to me for, and even purposely in the presence of another witness, because he not only wanted to reconnect as friends, but he actually wanted to marry me. Based on believing in the sincerity of those confessions and apologies, I became convinced, like so many other onlookers did, that we were witnessing one of the most beautiful acts of God's redemption. Let me be clear. A beautiful redemption from God was without a doubt offered, sprawled out like a feast on a long banquet table, but ultimately, from my perspective, it was spat upon and walked away from, and much earlier than I had even realized. I now wonder if this wasn’t actually the case from the very beginning because so many little hidden motives within the behavioral patterns sadly became more and more apparent through counseling. The false narratives this time around were even worse than the first time around, including half stories purposely spread about me to countless mutual friends and family members. These narratives made me look like the only problem, and him look like the only hero/victim.

What I’m about to say didn't actually happen - I repeat, what I’m about to say did not happen but it will draw a clear picture of how his false narrative tactics work. Let’s just say, for the sake of example, that he would tell mutual friends and family members- and again, this is just a fake example to make the point.  “Jill slapped me today!” They would say, “Wow, that’s terrible. She’s a real problem! You need to get out of this marriage! I’m so sorry you’re going through this, poor guy!” What he purposely failed to tell them (again, this is a fake story) was that he had sucker-punched me in the gut, and in a knee-jerk reaction, I had slapped him and then immediately apologized, saying, “I’m so sorry! That was a knee-jerk reaction! Are you ok?” In anger and sometimes fits of rage, he would shame me for the “slap” but never even acknowledge or admit to the “gut punch.” That’s how it works, and these half-truths are shockingly effective. The increasing frustrations and critical attitude I openly confessed in the former blog series were almost 100% in reaction to the things going on behind closed doors and then falsely narrated to our friends and family. My frustrations were becoming more and more apparent to those around us, especially those who'd been fed, and even helped spread the false narratives of those half-stories he'd been telling. This is why people who knew the truth were concerned about my “one-sided” confessions, and it did in fact confuse people, but as I've explained, I stuck to my convictions at the time of writing that blog series because I wanted to own my frustrations and faults without justifying it all with any of his behaviors. 

I have wanted my life and music to remain exclusively all about “love and reconciliation,” especially in light of the musical project I had been led to share. A new and crucial understanding of boundaries and the sad, but absolute necessity for division in some cases, is where I wound up. I am noticing more and more people talking about the desperate need for love and unity in our society. I still stand firmly on this sentiment - immovable, but I’ve had to also accept that, especially the further we move into or closer to end times, the more absolute division is going to become necessary, and our propensity to honor the dishonorable by participating in facades and hiding whole truths in the name of love and grace is going to need to stop - on a micro level and a macro level. 

I’ve had the privilege of being referred to several renowned experts on the trauma-based patterns that my former husband is stuck in. My heart has been shattered by this discovery. I have had to face and accept it all in a shocking unveiling of the painful truth about these behavioral patterns. For example, one alarming fact is that when a professional therapist works with a person who operates in these patterns, they have to employ three other therapists to keep themselves tethered to the truth and in emotional check because these behavioral patterns are so insidiously deceiving and defiling. Another fact that was shared over and over with me is that it would take no less than two years of intensive therapy to even begin to see a change in these behavioral patterns. According to my belief, that is only true short of the miracle healing and liberating power of Jesus. The leading U.S. expert on these behavioral patterns recently stated that she believes this is the number one public health crisis in America. As she stated this, other experts on the panel nodded and verbally agreed.     

At the end of the day, my former husband is my childhood friend, and his freedom still very much matters to me. I’ve come out of this experience with what I believe are extremely important things to consider and share about how we unknowingly, but ineffectively, handle, in devastatingly counter-productive ways, these behavioural issues within our current society, both on the micro and macro levels. I believe it is vital that I speak up and that together, we take a deeply honest look into it, and if for no other reason, at least for the sake of the coming harvest. Again, I vow to handle the writing of this series with deep care and speak truth from a sincere heart of love. In the next blog, I will cover the main purpose of writing the series. 

Love to all,

Jill