BP 192
I knew a woman once who had been abandoned by her father.
Sarah was only seven years old when her father left her mother and her three siblings. Sarah never saw it coming. Yes, her parents fought occasionally, but she had no clue that her father was going to bail on the family. No idea. One day life was normal, then suddenly an earthquake ripped a 1000-foot fissure in her young world. Her life would never be the same.
So it was that when her father suddenly left and moved in with a woman she had never met or even seen before, Sarah could not believe it. She prayed every night for months that her daddy would come back. Of course, he would come back, she thought with her magical thinking. How could her beloved daddy leave all five of them for some other woman?
The reality of it all was inconceivable for Sarah—her worst nightmare.
Her daddy never did come back.
Years passed and Sarah turned eighteen. It was only months after that milestone birthday that she experienced her second traumatic loss: her older brother shot himself with his father’s revolver.
Sarah was in shock. She could not think at all, and her body shook violently from the unbelievable event. Her father’s abandonment had been life-altering, but the loss of her older brother possibly hurt even more, maybe because it was a second tragic death on top of the first unimaginable death of the family.
Five years after she watched her brother’s coffin being lowered into the shadows of that dreaded hole in the earth—an image branded on her frontal lobes–Sarah married her husband, Mike. The marriage went well for a few years despite Sarah’s anger toward Mike whenever he failed to live up to her expectations.
Sarah had very high expectations.
And she hated surprises.
Especially people leaving her.
Marriage counseling in the third year of their marriage seemed helpful. The therapist helped Sarah to see that she had been disappointed so terribly by her father’s abandonment that she expected her husband to be perfect. Because of her past wounds from the first man in her life, Sarah watched Mike like a hawk and jumped all over him when he failed to love her the way she needed him to. It was almost as if she expected Mike to heal the wounds her father had inflicted on her with his perfect presence.
The marriage labored along for another ten years. Sarah’s high expectations and anger at her husband’s failures did not abate. Eventually, Mike reached a breaking point with the constant criticism and sharp anger. He left Sarah and his three kids. For Sarah, it felt like déjà vu. To her utter shock, a second man had left her just as her father had.
Mike was a better man than Sarah’s father, however. He did not file for a divorce but initiate a new round of marriage therapy. This time, a deeper truth was excavated from Sarah’s unconscious. Even though it was a profound discovery like finding a twenty-pound gold nugget under the tree in your back yard, Sarah received it with great resistance. Nonetheless, it slowly changed her marriage.
What was this deeply buried nugget that was uncovered in Sarah’s heart?
The truth was that Sarah from day one of the marriage was so worried that Mike would leave her just as her father had that she unconsciously battered him with impossible expectations, relentless criticism, and bitter anger that no man could tolerate. He would have to leave eventually because the persistent negativity and contempt was too damaging and castrating for any man who had a soul or an ounce of self-respect.
One would think that these behaviors toward Mike would be the last thing a woman who feared abandonment would do. After all, wouldn’t Sarah want to err in the direction of being nice and winsome with her words and affection so that her husband would have every reason to stay and not leave her? It seems counterintuitive for her to induce the very thing her father did.
Unless she wanted to drive her husband away. Unless subconsciously she was attempting to make her husband leave her. Maybe she had some type of repetition compulsion or reenactment dynamic roiling around in her psyche.
But why would Sarah attempt to invite the outcome she feared so much?
In the end, Sarah alienated her husband because she wanted to be in control. She didn’t want any more surprises. She didn’t want to be blindsided by abandonment. So, what was her primitive solution? Make her husband go away. He was going to leave her eventually anyway, the child in her reasoned. So, instead of being shocked again by someone leaving her, be in control of his leaving. Then there would be no surprise because she had made him leave. She saw it coming.
It is difficult to be shocked by surprise when you are controlling the outcome. It is impossible to be at the mercy of a man abandoning her again if she is inducing the abandonment, if she creates the abandoner, so to speak, if she makes him leave instead of helplessly waiting on pins and needles fearing his departure.
It seems that Sarah feared the dreadful shock of surprise even more than her husband leaving her. Control was more important to her than her husband staying with her. Manipulating the environment was better than being at the mercy of someone else–internal locus of control and all that psychobabble.
Sarah hated feeling powerless before the whim and fancy of a man who would leave her, so she arrived at a plan that empowered her even at shockingly great cost to her. A Pyrrhic victory, so to speak.
The point of Sarah’s story is to highlight the complexity of fallen human nature originally created in God’s image. People are capable of deep thoughts and coping, some of them conjured up in the unconscious world of fear and survival.
What is a better option than control at the expense of incredible loss? Trust. You see, Sarah didn’t trust men. She didn’t trust that her husband would stay with her. She also couldn’t trust herself because she continued to view of the world through the lens of her childhood abandonment. Truth be told, she also struggled to trust God because He allowed her father to leave and her brother to die.
No one could be trusted. Sarah claimed to trust herself only, but that statement was false because the manner in which she was coping was very destructive to her. As an adult, the person she could trust the least was the girl inside of her who had been abandoned decades earlier.
The conclusion, then, is to trust God. Whatever it takes, remove all barriers that rise up between you and God because He built you to trust Him and other people. Distrust goes against your original nature. So, learn to trust people and that might lead you to trust God, or learn to trust God and that might help you to trust people.
Whatever you do, don’t pull up the drawbridge between you and the world and seal yourself off in an impregnable fortress that feels safe but is actually your coffin.
Too many people die alone due to overprotection or striving to control everything in their lives.
Don’t be one of them. You might drive everyone away and find yourself all alone.
Choose love and let God protect you.
”8We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. 9Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. 10He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, 11as you help us by your prayers” ~ 2 Corinthians.
”12Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” ~ Colossians 3
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