Ending Abuse Begins With Educating Our Children

If I've learned one thing over the past two years, it is that our society is ill-equipped to deal with emotional and verbal abuse, and more than 75% of the time, we do not recognize it when it happens to us. And if we do know it is happening, we're reluctant to label it as abuse. Instead, we seek to "understand" and "forgive" or "toughen up and deal with it" believing our minds and hearts should be able to "overcome" somebody's hurtful words and manipulations.

We think we should be "better men" and "rise above" the verbal violence via passivity and silence (and maybe an apologetic smile if the abuser lashes out around friends, family, or the strangers in the canned goods aisle at the grocery store).

Reactions to Verbal Abuse

But you know what? I wish (I wish I wish I wish) that the first time my abuser hurled an insult my way I had stood up proud and strong, stomped my foot and said, "Knock it off!" and then turn heel and walked out the door. I wish I had not given a second thought to what he'd said to me. I wish I recognized that he was wrong, that it was more than a lack of tact, and that I didn't deserve to hear his crap for even one second of my life. (King James Version, Ephesians 4:31 "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice")

If I had withdrawn my attention from him, refusing to provide an audience to his two-year-old temper tantrums, each and every time he insinuated, insulted, yelled or pounded his coffee cup intimidatingly...I bet our relationship wouldn't have lasted three weeks.

For one, the time we spent together would have been greatly reduced and I would have asked, "What's the point of being with him when I can't be in the same room with him for 15 minutes?!" I could have weeded my abuser out of my dating pool before our relationship turned into the stagnant swamp of a marriage it became.

If Only I'd Been Educated About Abuse

But, perhaps more importantly, being able to know when to say, "Knock it off!" would show that someone had taught me what abuse was, how to recognize it when it was happening, and what to do about it. If someone taught me and I didn't listen, I am truly sorry and wish I'd been paying attention to you. Your lesson could have saved me many wasted years feeling alone and worthless and spared me from recurring depressive episodes (even after I'd left my abusive husband).

Now, feeling battered about by knowing my brain is not functioning the way I'd like and coming to grips with the signs and facts pointing to being depressed again, I am really truly pissed off that I stayed with my abuser. I handicapped my God-given and brilliantly designed mind by forcing it to withstand abuses it wasn't designed to process.

God and Abuse

I believe that God put us here to further His design. He made us into likenesses of Himself and dropped us like seeds into the fertile soil of the world He created. When Lucifer rose up against Him, God didn't give a second thought to casting the evil away from Himself, exiling Lucifer so far from heaven that the bible says there is no hope for reconciliation. And, need I remind you, God loved Lucifer like a son.

But even God did not tell his children, Adam and Eve, what to watch out for in the Garden of Eden. God only told them to stay away from that tree; being childlike, A&E's temptation to at least visit the tree over-rode their one commandment. If God had told them that in the tree would be a whispering voice that sought to drive a wedge between them and their Father, whom they loved, do you think they would have been as likely to curiously wonder what magics the tree held?

I'm just a lowly human, but I think that by the time God created Jesus, God learned that being a good Father meant explaining things before-hand. Jesus came into this world knowing that He was special, knowing His mission, knowing when He would die and why it was to be. God gave Jesus a heads up so He could maximize His time on this earth and teach more love and acceptance in 33 years than anyone else in the history of man.

Teach Children About Abuse

So people, if you follow my thinking and if you want to rid the world of the evil we call Abuse, then educate your children about it. Educate all of them - even the ones who you think will be "strong" enough to withstand it and wise enough to recognize it if it happens to them. Abuse education is more than telling children that no one should touch their private parts. Abuse education encompasses:

• what abuse is
• how to recognize it when it happens or by the feelings they feel after it has happened,
• what to do about it, and
• that even people who they love are capable of hurting them without leaving a scratch.

New Living Translation, Ephesians 5:11-14 "Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them. It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret. But their evil intentions will be exposed when the light shines on them, for the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said, 'Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light.'”