We don’t talk about domestic abuse in church. Whether physical or emotional, overt or covert, abuse often goes unnoticed, unchecked or worse.
In this episode, Gina has a vulnerable conversation with Annette and Bucky Oltmans. Annette is the founder of The Mend Project. Birthed out of their story of brokenness, Mend seeks to raise awareness of emotional abuse, covert emotional abuse and double abuse, as well as equip victims to seek help and begin a road to healing.
If you or someone you know is experiencing some form of domestic violence, visit themendproject.com for resources.
If you are in a crisis situation, please contact the Domestic Violence hotline:
1−800−799−7233 or visit www.thehotline.org.
Click below to listen starting at 26:51 to follow along.
The Valley of the Shadow of Therapy
Gina:
You were seeing a couple therapist. What was or wasn’t working in that scenario? Because I think it’s really interesting, in the early nineties, even into the two thousands, faith, Christianity and psychology were kept in different corners. I was raised in a denomination in the Calvary world. Which was like psychiatrists and all that just terrible. It’s evil, it’s pop psychology. It’s all self-centered.
The whole idea of counseling or therapy was not accepted. There were reasons for that, but it was probably taken a little too far. We’re in a season now, where there’s become more awareness and the church is getting a little bit more understanding. But even in that, there’s different therapists, there’s different styles, there’s different experience with the different types of things. It isn’t necessarily one size fits all, just like healing.
I appreciate you said that it’s not every marriage that has an abusive or covert abusive situation, follow the steps that Annette and Bucky did and you’ll be fine. Every situation is different. You’re bringing two families of origin together, you’re colliding your experiences with faith. There is no one size fits all.
But with therapy, can you share that journey a little bit? Because some people will go to a therapist and it doesn’t work and they just give up or they think that one therapist is the end all be all. They don’t resonate with, or they can’t get help through there, then they just walk away.
Annette:
In our case, we had the financial resources to afford therapy. I can honestly tell you, there was never a time in our marriage where we weren’t in therapy. We had a lot of conflict. I was feeling distressed and we were trying to get to the bottom of it. But what I’ve learned in my research after interviewing hundreds of victims, hundreds of therapists and hundreds of pastors, is that therapists don’t receive training in their academic studies on domestic violence and abuse.
It’s around 12 to 15 hours of abuse training in their entire academic studies. That’s crazy, isn’t it? They get to choose what topic to study on whether it’s sex trafficking or child molestation or whatever it is. Most therapists don’t even know that emotional abuse is a form of domestic violence, let alone be able to identify the covert kinds of emotional abuse that I was experiencing.
Bucky never called me a name. He didn’t scream and yell or rage at me or any of those things. It was more defensive tactics. I felt punished. He would withhold speaking to me, the silent treatment, passive aggressive behaviors, things like that. As those things would play out in a therapeutic session, they weren’t catching onto them. I was there waving my hand saying “This is the same dynamic that we experienced last week and you’re not seeing the pattern. You’re asking me details about the minutia and the minutia doesn’t matter next week, it’ll be a different minutia.”
What matters is this pattern of these certain behaviors that kept playing out and they weren’t equipped to identify them. We went to Christian counselors and we went to Christian counselors who had published many books, who we felt were very reputable. And trust me, one of them was $700 an hour. It was ridiculous. After three years getting nowhere, I was utterly spent and so traumatized from those sessions.
They weren’t identifying what I was starting to see more and more of. I was gaining more and more clarity, the longer that I was in the relationship. I didn’t have the words that I have now after studying it for seven years. But at the time I think I did a reasonable job explaining the dynamics of what I was going through.
I even recently went through and looked at some of my old emails. I was looking for content in something I was writing and I was astounded at how articulate I really was and yet they didn’t get it. It was really harmful and it wore us down and it just was more damaging than it was helpful.
Bucky:
I didn’t get it either because I felt supported. I didn’t understand it anymore than the therapist did.
Annette:
I think I was more judged in therapy for being frustrated. They would say you seem really angry. Yes, I was getting really angry, doesn’t mean that I was screaming and yelling or anything like that. I wasn’t even allowed to express my emotions. I felt criticized and Bucky was supported. They would say things to me that weren’t particularly helpful. They would say things like, “Well, he’s never cherished you.”
I realize that he has never cherished me, but it is you telling me he’s going to cherish me. Is there any hope for this? That’s just not particularly helpful. I needed to be told that what I was dealing with was a form of domestic violence, so that I could have sought the help that I needed from a domestic violence agency to teach me how to become empowered. And then I would’ve known better and Bucky would’ve known better. This specific type of help that he would need to change his faulty thinking.
Gina:
I would think that when you have lived your life and you were married for 30 years and there wasn’t a problem and then you’re married now.
Bucky:
Obviously there was a problem because the marriage ended. But, we didn’t have any disputes. I need to backtrack just a little bit, because the way I was raised, there were no disputes in our family. The women were considered to be emotional and men just tuned them out. I never had to deal with conflict. I never really knew what it was.
I guess I knew what it was theoretically, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. My actions as I described them as large defensive, I was making it up as I went along. I didn’t have a healthy response to dispute resolution. I didn’t even know what it was.
Annette:
What would you say about your need to control?
Bucky:
Without realizing it, I was quite controlling. I really wanted to control my environment. Anything that threatened that, it got to a point my anxiety level would raise because I wasn’t used to being in that situation. When my anxiety level would go up, I would say things I didn’t remember saying, I would say anything out of a defensive posture.
Annette:
That’s so common, that there’s such an intense need to control everything in the relationship. It manifests in ways that powers over and oppresses the person that they’re with. But there’s also the internal stuff that’s going on. For him it was anxiety. It was entitlement too, I don’t want to speak for him, but he’s already shared that he felt that women, you just push their voice aside. But there is the dynamic that’s going on internally.
Gina:
Correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like you’re in this relationship and clearly something’s going on and there’s conflict. You’re trying to do what was modeled and you’re used to doing, which is disregard and ignore. That’s not working. You can’t control what’s happening over here.
The anxiety is building and building and building. That’s coming out in all sorts of passive aggressive ways like silent treatment. When we’re talking about silent treatment, we’re not talking about being quiet for 30 minutes.
Annette:
Prolonged! Sometimes weeks at a time.
Gina:
What we’re talking about isn’t just, “Annette is just needing too much. And Bucky was reasonable.” There was some stuff that was deep and wide.
Bucky:
I was probably trying anything and everything that might work. All unhealthy.
Annette:
Anything that might work to gain control back.
God’s Design of Marriage was for Relationship
Gina:
Annette, what did that do to you and your relationship with the Lord? You mustered up the courage to share with the people. I think you felt that you could trust the place that you thought would be safe. Please hear me. This isn’t an accusation. We’re not here to point fingers and speak poorly. This speaks to something that happens often when people don’t know how to respond or what to say.
Their presumption of how Christians should behave or act supersedes empathy and compassion and what it means to actually love people and what a healthy relationship is. What did that do to you when you finally got the courage to speak, and then you were either questioned, accused, not believed, ostracized, given ultimatums? What did that do to you? You already had so much stress. But what does that do to your faith, to your relationship with Jesus?
Annette:
It was earth shattering for me at the time, because like I said, they reached out into the broader community and spoke to others too and slandered me. I felt completely overwhelmed by the response, devastated and so disappointed. Because I wasn’t asking very much, all I was asking was to please encourage my husband to have an accountability partner. I will do anything if he will do that one thing.
Because I need transparency in our couple’s therapy was what I was asking, because I knew it wasn’t working. It traumatized me. It is exacerbated my trauma. It was almost unmanageable. It was extremely overwhelming to have complex post traumatic stress. There’s a great Wikipedia page on it. That’s actually written by an MD. Anybody can look it up.
But in terms of my faith, I turned off the news. I turned off the radio. I only listened to sermons. I watched TBN and sermons on the television all day long and read my Bible and just got on my knees and really strengthened my faith. I felt alone in the outside world. I had two or three friends that really stood with me, which thank God for them.
It was just letting the Lord speak into me. I knew that I was doing the right thing, because before I asked for a separation, I prayed fervently one morning and I just said, “I’m so confused. Please give me a sign.” And within 15 minutes there was a huge double rainbow outside this window right here. And I just knew that I was doing the right thing. I just didn’t feel confident because it’s so confusing. The church puts the institution of marriage above the wellbeing of the victim and children inside a marriage. I felt like I was sinning by separating.
Gina:
I’m so glad you brought that up because there’s such a distortion in the understanding of marriage and the role of what partnership actually is in marriage and what God really intended it to be. And the submission model, which is greatly promoted, and honestly distorted, has really been the catalyst to a lot of abuse and to a lot, on the lighter side, maybe women just disregarding the call on their life or the things that they’re passionate about for the sake of just being pulled behind the speedboat of their husband’s will and whim, but it can go all the way to abuse.
I had a dear friend get married to a pastor who was very beloved. The wedding night, it started unraveling before it began, because he had a horrific porn addiction that led to so many other things and it was horrible. There was so much more shock that, “I can’t be this person. We’ll surround him and help him.” But the amount of help that she got was little to none. The amount of shame that she experienced was horrible.
Recently I met a woman whose daughter was raised in the church that they all went to. Met a boy in the youth group. They grew up together, got married, started having problems in their marriage. There was some abusive things happening in their marriage. They went to the pastor for counseling. The pastor meets with them once decided the guy’s fine and says that the girl needs to meet with the pastor, one on one for counseling.
And the counseling was, “You’re not having sex enough. You’re not pleasing your husband. If you were, this wouldn’t be happening.” And she subjected herself to that for a long time until her parents finally found out and had confronted the pastor. Then the whole family was ostracized from the church.
It’s not vilifying the guy, because what’s manifesting is the brokenness in his life. It’s not helping him to surround him and support him and avoid the brokenness and the unhealth and the bad behavior. It’s perpetuating it. I want my readers to know, this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s an epidemic really in the church on many levels.
The reason I wanted to have you on is because I think the amount of Christian marriages that are in crisis, that are covertly in crisis. The amount of Christian marriages that are settling for so much less than what God intended that relationship to be is alarming. The church is ill equipped.
Equipping the Church to Respond to Abuse
Gina:
The church is equipped to recognize it. It’s ill-equipped to care for those marriages, either party, either the abuser or the victim. We’re just ill-equipped. A big mission of the Mend Project is to equip organizations and churches to know how to respond. Do you want to speak a little bit about that and how you do that?
Annette:
We are just coming out with our comprehensive curriculum. It’s a seven session curriculum. It’s basically how to respond to abuse. If you’re a first responder or a church leader or a therapist. Available now on our website, you can see what we call the healing model of compassion. Which is a simple guideline, simple tool for how to interface with a victim, what to do and what not to do and what not to say. It’s very simple.
We also have our accountability model of courage. It takes courage for us to step out of ourselves and confront abuse. But that’s what we actually need to do. Bucky said it in his story, he wasn’t confronted. It wasn’t until he was confronted that he started changing. And the best abuse books out there say that more than judges, lawyers, police officers, it’s families, friends, and clergy who have the biggest ability to influence an abuser’s mindset.
Because they have a faulty belief system. They have entitlement. They have faulty thinking. It’s not their feelings that are coming into play, it’s their thinking. That needs to be unpacked and confronted by people who are willing to come alongside them and say, “The way that you are responding or the way you are treating your spouse is not right.”
And be willing to walk through the steps of what it is like to be an accountability partner in a healthy way. Bucky, once you were confronted and you started to recognize and see, how then did you change? How do you behave differently now? How were you able to change your mindset and then how did that play out?
Bucky:
One thing I do remember that Dr. Hawkins convinced me of, was that feelings are valid. Everybody has feelings and they’re all valid. I was judging Annette’s feelings. He said that everybody responds differently to whatever’s happening around them.
And those feelings of those responses are natural. They’re honest, they’re valid. They’re to be believed and respected. And that’s where it started. That allowed me to see Annette as an equal, more than I had seen her in the past that way.
Gina:
That’s a big deal. The church perpetuates that faulty mindset, that emotions are not good. When we were not recording earlier, Bucky, you brought up something that I think is really true as well, in addition to the submission model can be very distorted and used to really create a lot of unhealth and dysfunction in marriages. But also the church’s view on divorce.
Divorce has become the ultimate sin. Which is ridiculous, because there is no sin scale. There is no, this is an okay sin, but this is a bad sin. Sin is sin and there is grace. We all fall short and we all stumble and we all make mistakes, but there’s redemption in that, there’s redemption in the things that happen.
When the fear of divorce and the outward appearance, not being disrupted, oftentimes the health and the wellbeing of the people in the marriage is sacrificed for the sake of the appearing not having the divorce.
Annette:
I love that you’re reemphasizing that, because I cannot overstate how critical it is that we give victims the absolute choice to choose the path that is right for them. Because whether they decide to stay, we don’t know all that’s at stake. Whether they decide to leave, we don’t know all that’s at stake there either.
In our case, it took Bucky by his own acknowledgement, two years with Dr. Hawkins to change his thinking. If he hadn’t been fully supporting me financially, if I had to have the stressors in the midst of complex post traumatic stress of having to get a job of having to deal with a divorce of, or having to deal with retaliation, we had a lot of setbacks, the average victim. They’re not going to be able to tolerate that kind of recurring trauma, to go through that. I want to caution people to not place that expectation on them. It has to be an individual choice.
Gina:
One of the things that was evidenced by your experience with the Bible study, is it’s easy for people on the outside to make a judgment call and decide what truth is. And that’s a really dangerous place to be. A dangerous thing to presume what is real and what is true. What are some things that people can recognize or that they can go past their judgments and actually look at the behavior and the things that are manifesting that are actual huge red flags?
Annette:
That’s a great question. On the victim side to help you identify a victim, whether it’s a victim of domestic violence, emotional abuse, physical abuse, or a child who’s being bullied at school, you’re going to see the signs of post traumatic stress disorder. And those signs will manifest in things like the fight, flight, freeze and appease symptoms, where they’re either going to blurt out and be really angry, or they might be absolutely terrified and in tears.
And you think, “Why are they so terrified about what they’re telling me?” It’s because it’s an accumulation of traumatic events that literally they cannot tolerate more. The anticipation terrorizes them. You’ll see these signs and we need to take those signs as tangible evidence that this is not just them looking unstable, which is what so often people do. This means something real is happening that is causing this.
This is now a disorder. It is now symptoms of something much deeper, that I don’t necessarily have a full grasp on. But you can’t ignore those symptoms. We have to take them in and take them serious. Then on the abuser side, one of the best ways to know who’s telling the truth or who isn’t or who’s the abuser, is the abuser is usually really calm and they don’t show a lot of emotion there.
There’s almost like a detachment between what you would expect their emotion to be. It’s almost like their affect is off, or they might just be blaming, blaming, blaming, and criticizing their spouse. But there’s one question that you can ask an abuser and they won’t be able to answer it. And that is, “Tell me how you think your spouse is feeling right now?”
Because they don’t have empathy. They’re going to immediately go into their own complaints. They won’t be able to answer that. Those are two clues that on each side of the equation that I think can be really helpful.
Gina:
That’s good. If somebody is in a situation where they’re in a relationship with someone and they’re picking up on some of those red flags, what do you do? What’s the next step?
Annette:
The next step is to go to our website and make sure that you’re interfacing with them in a way that is not going to add trauma or is not going to breach the confidentiality of the victim because it could put them in a dangerous situation. The victim knows best as to the level of danger that would be involved.
Then download our tools and definitions. Download our definitions to give to the victim to say, “Some of what you’re describing sounds like some of these things, why don’t you read this list and see if there are more behaviors that you’re experiencing.” Help them gain clarity. Refer them to resources.
If you think there’s abuse, there are wonderful classes at domestic violence agencies like personal empowerment programs for victims. There are batterers prevention programs for abusers, but I think the church needs to step up and get trained in this and get involved because they really want to intercede and minimize divorces.
They really need to know how to come alongside particularly men. It’s not always men, it doesn’t discriminate, but predominantly men, particularly in the church because of patriarchy. You need to get involved and get trained on how to interface with them properly.
Gina:
It’s for healthy marriages. It’s for healing and wholeness. We were made for relationship first with Jesus, and then with each other, we talked about this before we started recording. What does healthy intimacy look like? Whether it’s with God or your best friend or your spouse.
The church should be the place that is building up and equipping us to have healthy relationship. But it actually has fallen short on that. We’re not talking about a witch hunt. We’re not talking about going and scrutinizing every person in every relationship. But we’re talking about being prepared and being equipped, being discerning. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Annette:
Talk about it from the pulpit. People don’t know what they don’t know. If a pastor were to actually speak about what defines domestic violence, the emotional and the physical and the financial and all of the aspects that go into that. Power and control wheel. That would really help so many marriages, so many victims. It would help, because a lot of people behave these ways out of bad habits that they’ve gathered along the way.
When they’re brought to their attention and they realize that that behavior is actually considered abusive. I used to minimize my children. I didn’t know I was abusing them by minimizing them. I thought it was more important to teach them empathy and to minimize their own feelings, which was a big mistake.
Once I realized I was making a mistake, immediately I stopped and I went overboard apologizing to them. Trying to tell them, “Don’t listen to those things I said to you, this is what I should have been saying to you.” A healthy person is going to want to change out of a wellspring inside themselves on their own.
Bucky:
I might add something in. In the church, people have a facade that they want to maintain. They’re so afraid to be judged by other Christians. Pastors on down. I think to break the ice, if pastors could preach from the pulpit that it’s okay to not be okay.
Gina:
That’s so huge. That is the primary epidemic. Because if the enemy can convince us to isolate and he does it all the time, you walk into church and shame and all the stuff starts pointing a finger at you, “If they just knew what your marriage was like or what you were thinking or what you did this morning.” That insidious tape that keeps going on that causes more and more isolation and more trying to prove that you’re something that you’re not trying to put comparison.
And it rears its ugly head and it takes people out constantly in suicide. I know a young lady whose husband was a worship pastor and he killed himself. He was battling with things and nobody knew, and he didn’t feel like he could say anything because of his role. How ironic, that the people that are supposed to care for the congregation and can’t care for themselves because there’s no permission to. The church should be the safest place.
Check out The Mend Project
Check the rest of this conversation What is Abuse?
Check out the Dwell Meditations
