Recognizing Oppression

We tend to think of abuse in a marriage relationship as being something physical, domestic violence of some sort. Darby Strickland says there are a lot of categories of marital abuse. I'm just thinking of a client of mine who came in and she was slowly beginning to talk about the ways that her husband just would perpetually ignore her. He didn't talk to her at dinner ever. I don't think he talked to her five minutes in a week. So we just have to go slow and begin to label things in God's words as these things are wrong.

It's not Darby saying these things are wrong or them saying these things are wrong, that God has called this man to live differently. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. What makes a marriage an abusive marriage? What has to be going on for it to be considered abusive? And are you in an abusive marriage?

If so, what do you do? We're going to talk about that today with Darby Strickland. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. We're going to tackle a tough one today, aren't we? This is a tough topic. And I think to myself, sometimes when I am in front of our church and I'm looking out at our congregation, I'm thinking probably without me realizing it, there is domestic violence happening somewhere in the homes in these congregations. We'd never believe it if we knew. But it's one of those things that I think is more prevalent than any of us recognize. It's a secret. And I think a lot of people are holding on to that in shame. And I think as a congregation, as lay people, and even as pastors, we don't always know how to tackle that.

Yeah. And I think, like you said, Bob, I think it's the secret in the church, too. In fact, one of our mottos in the back room, the green room, is never underestimate the pain in the room.

And I've never forgotten that because you're looking out there and you're thinking you sort of put on a covering, you sort of pretend everything's OK, and yet there could be that kind of pain, abuse pain, right there in our seats. And I bet it is. Darby Strickland is joining us today on Family Life Today. Darby, welcome.

Thank you for having me. Darby is an author, a counselor. She is associated with the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation in Philadelphia.

She has written a book called Is It Abuse? where you have tackled this subject. And it's a subject you've tackled because the secret comes out when people call you and say, here's what's going on in my marriage, right? Yeah, actually, in fact, most of the times they actually don't tell me what's going on in their marriages. I've had to discover it.

And so more often than not, when I have a young woman or a young married or an older married woman, they're coming to me for something peripherally. They're actually saying to me, Darby, I'm having really bad anxiety. I'm having panic attacks. I feel really depressed. I don't feel like I respect my husband.

I'm having problems being intimate with him. And they're not even recognizing that they're being mistreated and be there being abused. They have so much confusion. So they're not saying that to cover it up. They actually don't recognize they're being abused.

A large portion, I would say. Even in cases where there's physical abuse, right? Their oppressor makes them feel like it's their fault, that they're deserving of the treatment, that they need to be disciplined, that they're not right with God, that their spouse is right to be that angry and frustrated with them. You just use the term oppressor. And in the book, instead of saying abuser and abused person, you use oppressor and oppressed. Why do you do that?

I do. I find oppression to be a biblical category that captures the power and the domination that an oppressor, someone who does the abusing, they want to wound in order to maintain power and control in a relationship. And I feel like the word oppression is a biblical category.

We can open our Bible. We see it all over the place. And so I think it just really captures what's at heart in abuse. And is this going on in the church?

Sadly, it is. Statistics in the world are about 25 percent of marriages are oppressive or abusive. When I first heard that statistic, I really struggled to believe that. And then doing further research, the same statistic is true in the evangelical church, which I just was falling off my chair and I was struggling to believe it. And I sat back and I thought about the marriages that I knew in my church and the women that I was helping in my church and the support group I was leading in my church.

And it quickly just filled up the numbers and it matched. And I was shocked, you know, reading early in your book, the statistics are not that much different in the church than outside the church. And one of your sentences said, if you have 160 women in your church, there's a chance 40 of those women have experienced some kind of physical abuse. That's shocking. It is.

And I say for a lot of people who just believe the statistic, that's OK. Cut it in half, cut it in third, cut it in eighth. It's still a problem. And we really need to address it because any abuse is intolerable. So let's talk about the definition, because there are times when somebody will say casually, you know, my my husband is abusing me. He he won't let me buy what I want to buy.

And you go, wait, hang on. That might not be abuse. Do you have a way to differentiate between what's legitimate abuse and what's I'm not getting what I want? I think that's one actually one of the hardest things to differentiate, particularly of people on the outside hearing a story from a wife and a husband. So I think we always want to be really careful.

We want to go slow. Abuse is a big word. It's a category.

It just means misuse. And one of the things I tell people I want them to do is I want them to describe with accuracy, using all the verbs, not just one incident. Right. I want to hear this. There's just this perpetual wanting or domination of control. And so a one off story or one off incident can happen in any marriage. But there's this perpetual nature of domination and wounding and punishments. And I and I want people to be able to say he was cruel. He was manipulative.

He lied with great accuracy for each incident. And you're talking about something repetitive because we can sin against one another in marriage. We do sin against one another. And so to call someone an abuser or an oppressor who had a bad day. And I'm not trying to excuse it. You understand what I'm saying, right?

Yeah. And if we overuse the word, it's not helpful to the people who are being abused. So it's really important that we're very accurate. We also recognize that abuse happens on a spectrum, right? There are people whose experiences of abuse are more mildly controlling and there's people who have been terrorized and threatened with lethal violence.

So in this area, we want to be extremely accurate. What's happening in a particular case, the particular couple, no two cases of abuse are the same. And so we really have to go slow, know the person, know their story, know exactly what's happening in that relationship. And so you're talking about not only a physical abuse of hitting or punching, you're also talking mental kind of domination.

Correct. So what that would look like, it would be isolating somebody from friends, family, relationships. A thing that I tend to see more in my church cases would be women who are monitored. A friend of mine, actually, she found her husband had her whole cell phone being replicated on his laptop and he always knew who she was, where she was, who she was emailing. He would have complaints about how she spent her time and her day and he would dictate and control her through electronic surveillance.

The other large portion is just just coercive control, just trying to get somebody to live their life the way they want it at their wife's expense. And you don't have to use physical force to do that. You can withdraw from someone. You can ignore them. You can be cruel. Talk about that control.

You know, I don't have Anne's cell phone on my laptop, but I do know what she's spending money on. Did you know that, honey? I do know that because you bring it up. Again, we both do that back and forth.

But, you know, when does it slide into this coercive, you know, control, which is bad? So I think we all have healthy desires, right? And we're all sinners. So there's certain things that we like and prefer. Then all of us, sometimes there's a descent of a healthy desire and it becomes a need and then it becomes a demand. And that can happen in a bad marriage and a good marriage.

I can want my husband to do certain things for me and be upset when he doesn't. And that's not healthy. That's not loving him.

That's not kind. What I'm talking about is abuse as I'm willing to wound and punish another person to get what I want. And so you create a coercive environment where someone's actually enslaved to meeting your desires. But the perpetrator wouldn't necessarily think, I am going to coerce you or I'm going to punish you.

They're not thinking that, are they? I would argue some are and some aren't. And that's what's really difficult, because again, abuse is on the spectrum. So you do have some oppressors who tend to function more like a chess master and they'll play more mind games. They'll say, I never said that you didn't do this.

They might gossip about you at church, purposely trying to erode your relationships. And they're much more strategic. Then you have other oppressors who just want their world the way they want it. And they don't even recognize that what they're doing is wrong and cruel.

They feel so self justified in it. So even amongst oppressors, it's confusing because most women will say to me, does he understand what he's doing? And we don't always know.

And that that's that's very difficult. Often you've said the man, you know, he's doing this. Is it predominantly men that abuse? And I'm not just talking physical, but even course of control or is it is there a balance?

No, I think that's a great question. Thanks for the clarification. Certainly in my experience with women in the church, it's much more prevalent to have women as victims. But domestic abuse is gendered. Most victims are women. However, men can be victims of domestic violence. Women can do the same gross things that men do to women. We see that with child abuse, right?

Women are capable of having the same corruption. The difference is it's rarer because you have to have power and differential in the relationship. And in some relationships, that's easier to establish. So if you had a husband who is disabled or you were the breadwinner or you had more family relationships, you might have more natural power in that relationship. So it's not just a cruel behavior.

You also have to have the ability to have that power in that relationship. And we said earlier, Bob was saying, you know, it isn't like one sin, but more of a pattern. But I was I was just thinking, OK, if I had one time. Punched and hit her with the back of my hand across her face, even though I'd never done it again. I'm just talking to my own. I'd look in the mirror and go, what is that is that is abuse. Just one time, you know, so to clarify that it could be something like that. Right.

I would be I need to I need to get help. Right. If I hit her one time. So is that the kind of thing you see or is it more of a pattern? Well, typically, if we see one incident of physical abuse, there's probably other forms, of course, of control happening. So there might have been one incidence where someone was struck, but then there'd be other incidents where we'd be. We'd go back and we look at how is how is he valuing her, speaking to her, caring for her. So oppression is not an incident, but typically someone who uses physical violence unless they're immediately distraught, broken and get me help.

I never want that to happen again. That's a person who has insight and sorrow for what they've done. Oppressors typically do not. They feel very justified.

You said often women come in, they don't even realize. How do you get them to realize what's really going on, that they are being oppressed? That's really difficult because they love this person. They love the Lord. Often they want to do everything they can do for their marriage. Oftentimes these women come in with just their little notes on pieces of paper trying to tell me, trying to make sense of their world. They've read every marriage book. They have prayer journals for the way that they've prayed for their husband. And when they start to trust you and they start to reveal more of the story, I'm just thinking of a client of mine who came in and she was slowly beginning to talk about the ways that her husband just would perpetually ignore her. He didn't talk to her at dinner ever. I don't think he talked to her five minutes in a week. And then she started telling me stories about how he would come in paying so much attention to the children, bringing them dinner when she was sick and couldn't cook, but didn't provide a meal for her.

So I just create a category of indifference. And so I pick a theme for a particular person and then we just start to wrap those stories and then they can begin to see that. But then when they begin to see it, then they also kind of back up and say, oh, no, no, but I haven't told you all the wonderful things about my husband.

He's a great provider. So they're very confused in their experience. So we just have to go slow, help them gain insight and begin to label things in God's words as these things are wrong.

It's not Darby saying these things are wrong or them saying these things are wrong, that God has called this man to live differently. And one of the questions I would have is you're a professional and somebody is coming to see you. But a lot of times this is going to be somebody coming to a friend like I'm the friend and you're the friend.

Coach us. If we're a friend and somebody starts or we start to see symptoms, what do we do? What do we don't do? So one thing that the oppressed often do is they often float a story. They want to know, can I trust you? So one that I often hear of women that have come to see me is they'll say, yeah, early on I was at a women's Bible study and I asked another woman, I said, you know, how often does your husband want sex? Because oftentimes a lot of my clients have sexual abuse. I just see a lot of that in the church.

So here they are. They're fumbling. They're wanting to know, is this normal?

But they're not saying to you, this is what's happening in my home. They're just floating a question. And so I think one thing we want to be learners of anybody that the Lord puts in our lives is just to slow down and say, why did you ask?

What's going on that would make you ask that question? And so often I think we rush past people. We want to give people answers. We have good theology, we have good compassion, but we're not great at slowing down and eliciting further stories from someone.

I listen to you and I think, oh, this is so important because as a leader of Bible studies for years, I'll hear all kinds of stories. And I'm realizing after I read your book, I thought, wow, I probably missed a lot by giving an answer instead of really as they float that question out of kind of digging into that and asking a little more and not making assumptions that all they need to do is do these two little things that will fix the problem. You know, oh, if you just respect him more or if you just- Make a pie is to say that one.

What's his favorite pie? I haven't done that. But I will say exactly something like that of, you know, well, what's it look like and how are you respecting him? And I'm realizing I wonder if I shut some women down from being able to really voice what they're feeling and what they're experiencing. And I think we all do that because we lack the imagination. What's happening in these homes is so- Well, we want to assume the best.

Right. And we don't, we cannot assume that level of depravity and evil until I began to listen to these stories, these things that these women have told me, I could not have imagined that another human being, let alone one that's pledged to love you, would perpetrate such acts on someone. And so I think for the rest of us who live in even lousy marriages or a wonderful marriage like I do, we cannot imagine the horrors. So I think it's a problem of imagination on our end. And talk about this, because, you know, when you're hearing a story like that, and again, I sit often, I'll stand on the stage as a preacher and look out and think it's probably not that bad. Although I know, don't underestimate.

So there's pain out there. But here's the question, I think a Christian woman that maybe is in a marriage that's physically abusive, sexually abusive, or just coercive control to a bad extreme, she's living under, I need to love him. I need to respect him unconditionally. I've probably preached things that would make her think that I need to forgive him. Christ has forgiven me. I need to forgive him. So I just stay here.

You need to provide for him sexually. Yeah. And so I sort of stay here and take it.

Or at least, you know, I'm honoring God by doing that. Is that a right perspective? Is that completely wrong? Yeah, I think that's a complex issue, right? Because we don't know how to respond to abuse. Sometimes we want to, we want victims to always bring things into light. If you're being mistreated and sinned against, it's actually a higher act of love to bring your spouse's sin to their attention. And maybe that's not safe, so that's what makes abuse complex, but to bring it into the light. But it also distorts your own relationship with the Lord. If you think that he's subjecting you to be treated that way, it affects how you think about the Lord's love of you and your worth as a person, as his precious child.

So it is a balance of saying, yes, we always want to, we try to be respectful. We want to love our spouses even when they're sinning. But when there's such brutal sin, we also have to think about safety. We have to think about exposing sin. And so it gets really complex. There isn't a simple answer. Yeah, I know that I have learned over 30 years of preaching and I didn't know this early.

Bob would be interested to hear if you feel the same way as a teacher of the word of God. Whenever I'm addressing the issue of forgiveness, I have to address that woman or maybe that man. But I always think of that woman who's listening to me, who's maybe being abused. And all she's hearing me say is you have to forgive.

At some point you have to forgive rather than saying you need to forgive. And that's an issue. But you need to get safe first. If you're in a home. And I have to say that every time.

Just a footnote. I just want to make clear if you're sitting here and you're in a home and your husband is physically abusing you. I'm not saying you're going to forgive him eventually. But you need to right now get safe.

You know, first thing is get safe. When I was writing Love Like You Mean It and got to the end of this passage in 1 Corinthians 13 that says, Love bears all things. Endures all things. And you have to pause and go, what's that mean? Bob, what does that mean?

Well, in that moment, you knew you have to be able to say time out. It does not mean you bear abuse. And I said, I think pretty much what you're saying here, Darby. You're not loving someone well when you're enabling them to continue in a besetting sin pattern that is destructive to them and their soul. To blow a whistle and say, we've got to get help for you for this pattern that I'm being oppressed by you.

You're being an oppressor. That's bold, courageous love. And so, bear all things and endure all things does not mean you continue to bear physical violence or endure physical violence. And this is how you've had to counsel women who have come to you and say, the most loving thing you can do here is to bring this out into the light and force your husband to have to deal with this pattern in his life.

And I like to encourage them and say, if the Lord chooses to sanctify them and they are redeemed, they will be grateful that you stopped the harm that they were doing. And I would add the scripture Ephesians 5 22 about wives submit to your husbands. I mean, I always have to add that to submission does not mean that we let our husbands abuse us in any way. But Darby, you also talk about different kinds of abuse. Walk through some of those because some I've never really thought about as being abuse.

Yeah. So, I think one that we don't tend to think about in the church, which is odd because it's very prevalent in the church, is spiritual abuse. We think about husbands using their leadership role, like you're saying, demanding submission versus, right, Jesus.

He delights in our voluntary submission to him and the joy that that brings or lording power over someone saying, this is my role and I'm not going to serve you as Christ serve the church, but I'm going to Lord my power over you. But more subtly, they will, oppressive people tend to use particular scriptures to tear women down. And I remember one woman, she had about six kids. She'd come in and she was again, she's really struggling with depression.

They thought maybe it's just the kids that were too much. I just asked her, how is your husband? He was a pastor in training at the time praying for you. And she just told me, he rehearsed this prayer over me that just was saying, help me tolerate what God cannot stand.

You've given me this wife who is wasteful, is not tending to her little sheep. And it was just this, she went on for 10 minutes with scripture quotes infused. That he would pray over her. That he would pray over her. And that's what she believed she was, just a disappointment to the Lord and a complete failure.

And it was so difficult because she could see those words in scripture. And what did you say to her? Like, do you get riled up inside? I would. I'm sure you don't because you're a professor.

You are right now riled up. It's like, let me at him. But you wouldn't. So how do you respond to that? I think it does depend on the person. So sometimes I'll just say that's not okay. Sometimes I'll just have tears streaming down my face. This is breaking my heart. This is not good.

This is wrong. Other times I have to go really slow because I can see a victim's blindness. And if I push too hard, that'll have her clam up. So it really is, it's hard because there's everything in me that wants to be a rescuer and pick them up and say, get out at least for a time being and get safe and, and know that the Lord loves you.

And this is wrong, but it usually takes me about probably eight months to a year. And what, what happens when she sees the light? Is there a point where you think, oh, she's got it. So when she can tell her story in a coherent way, using consistent categories, not making excuses, not blaming herself, that's usually a really good sign that she sees this is not my fault. This is not how God designed marriage.

And I need help. In that situation, what happens because if she is enlightened to the point because she can see what her husband's doing, but he doesn't, so he's going to keep doing it. What happened? Did she leave him for a time? Did she stay and just. In this particular case, she didn't. She decided we spent a long season in prayer.

I always say we really want to ask the Lord what you'll know what to do when you're confident the Lord is calling you to do it. And it just took her a while again to have the courage to speak. And so what we eventually did is we sat with her pastor and we told him the story. And then they started discipling her husband a little bit at a time. And after six months, he became really resistant to that.

And then it was clear that a separation was needed for him, actually, in his spiritual walk with the Lord. You've talked about spiritual abuse. You've talked about emotional abuse, physical abuse. You talk in the book about financial abuse, controlling financial activity. But you've also brought up here a couple of times sexual abuse in marriage. And I'm just wondering about the definition of that. Is it how often he needs it that determines whether it's abusive or not?

No, that's a great question. So sex abuse, again, is really murky. I would say probably a third of the women I work with were actually violated on their honeymoon.

And then it just establishes a pattern in the relationship that they learn to comply. So, again, that gets confusing. Violated how? They were raped.

Wow. Yeah, in the church. And I'm just seeing that as a very common theme. So it's just on the honeymoon, I would say about a third of the women that I have worked with. You're saying a third of the women, so I'm guessing- A third of the women who are sexually abused.

Okay. But I'm thinking it's their honeymoon. The husband's thinking, this is what we're going to do now. And you're saying the woman, the bride was, I'm not willing to do this yet type thing. And that's why it was rape?

Or is it worse than that? No, I think there was some physical intimacy happening. And then a woman's body got tired. Or it just wasn't enough.

Or her expression of joy was not enough. And so then there becomes this, I want what I want. And I'm not going to put down my desires for the sake of my wife.

And I think that's really difficult. I think in a healthy marriage, you can have a different level of desires. You can have different level of comfortability with different sexual acts. But I can always turn to my husband and say, no. And I'm not pressured. I'm not bullied.

My bank account isn't put off. I'm not forced. So there's a difference between a negotiation of comfortability and even a spirited discussion. And I'm going to wound and punish you and frighten you, humiliate you to get what I want from you sexually.

And that's where the abuse would come in. And I would say the other onset typically tends to be on the arrival of children. Because when you're a newlywed, you can do anything and everything for your spouse. You just have all the energy, the excitement.

And then when you have children, it's not that your heart's divided. It's just your time is less, your energy is less. You're tired. You're tired?

Yeah. And not even just sexually, but what you're making for dinner and how clean the house is. And so usually around birth of children sometime is another time that abuse becomes more apparent.

I've got to tell a story. When Mary Ann, after she'd had our first child, the doctor had told us ahead of time that we should not be intimate for six weeks after the birth of the baby. Pretty normal. And so we went for the checkup after six weeks. And the doctor said to us, so how has intimacy been for you? And I said, well, it's been six weeks. We haven't had intimacy. And he looked and went, oh, you followed that?

And I was like, wait, you mean I didn't have to follow that? I felt kind of deprived and kind of cheated. But the point here that I think is critical is God has designed intimacy to be something where we are giving to another person. It's mutual. Not something where we're demanding from another person. And when your intimacy, where demand is a part of the intimacy interaction, something's fundamentally wrong there, right? Right. And it's supposed to be what an expression of our emotional and spiritual oneness with our partner. And if it becomes attached from that, it's about my pleasure.

I'm entitled to this. It's easily corrupted. And we see that all throughout scripture. You ask the question of somebody, how often does your husband want sex? So if that person says to you every day, you would say there's something wrong here? No, again, not necessarily. See, that's why I love the title of the book. Is it abuse?

Because it's a very complex question, right? Again, that can be mutual. There might not be coercion. You might even have a wife who does not desire it every day, but is willing to provide it, is still joyfully participating, is serving. She does not feel enslaved to meet her husband's desire. I think these categories are so helpful for anybody who wonders, are there things going on in our relationship that shouldn't be going on?

Is this abuse and is this something I should just live with and expect as normal? Or is this something that I should say, hang on, I'm not comfortable with where things are? I think this is a great topic to discuss because a lot of us as women are involved in Bible studies. We're leaders of Bible studies. We have great friendships with women. And I think it's good just to be aware of this topic, of this could be going on. And we need ways in which that not only can we pray, but we can look at this book and say, these are some things that I could do to help my friend. The subtitle for the book in my mind is questions you always wanted to ask and get a real answer to. Yeah. Because there are these and you don't even know who can I ask?

And here's a resource that will give you the right answer. Yeah, the book is called Is It Abuse? A Biblical Guide to Identifying Domestic Abuse and Helping Victims. We've got Darby's book in our Family Life Today Resource Center. This is a book that will be helpful for pastors and counselors, but I think it's also helpful for any of us who have friends or maybe we're trying to determine if our own relationship is actually an abusive relationship. Get a copy of Darby's book. Go to familylifetoday.com to order your copy or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title of the book, Is It Abuse?

by Darby Strickland. Order online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, these are important conversations to have, and I wish those of you who listen regularly to Family Life Today could be here when we have conversations like this, to read the emails, to hear the voices of those who contact us and say, what you were talking about today is what I'm living with, and thank you for being there for me. Thank you for providing clarity and hope.

Pray for me, and we do pray for people regularly who are going through stuff like this. Thank you for the resources you make available. I just want to say to those of you who support the Ministry of Family Life Today, on behalf of those who contact us, thank you for making this ministry possible for them. That's what your donations do. You're helping to effectively develop godly marriages and families throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every day coming to Family Life for practical biblical help and hope, and you make that possible when you support this ministry. This week, if you're able to help with a donation, we'd love to send you a copy of the book we talked about earlier this week, the book Not Yet Married by Marshall Siegel about the pursuit of joy in singleness and in dating. Maybe you know somebody who's single or dating and you'd like to pass this book along to them.

Maybe that's your circumstance. Marshall's book is our thank you gift when you make a donation today. Go to familylifetoday.com to make an online donation or call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY and make your donation over the phone. Be sure to ask for your copy of the book Not Yet Married when you get in touch with us.

Again, you can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to continue talking about abusers, or the biblical term, an oppressor, someone who is an oppressor in a marriage relationship. Darby Strickland will be back with us again tomorrow.

I hope you can be with us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. We got some extra added help from Bruce Goff. And of course, our entire broadcast production team was involved. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.