Defining Love: Healing After Emotional Abuse
How are you defining love? If you're defining love from a worldly mindset, it may be more difficult to experience healing after emotional abuse. Here's why.
The worldly mindset says: "Love hurts." "Love is pain." If you subscribe to these worldly clichés, you're more likely to make excuses for your abuser's toxic behaviors because you're already expecting love to hurt and cause you pain.
If things get so bad that you do leave the abusive relationship, what happens to your mindset that love hurts, love is pain? It still lingers in your heart while you're trying to experience healing after emotional abuse. You may try to rationalize the negative treatment that you've experienced as something normal that most couples go through. You may even be inclined to take the abuser back because you're thinking to yourself that it wasn't that bad.
Thoughts like these that can manifest after leaving an emotionally abusive relationship will make it more difficult to heal because they're rooted in the concept that love hurts, love is pain. But if you're a child of the Most High, you cannot define love by human logic. You have to define love by what the Word says and that is:
In the Word's definition of love, it does say that "love endures all things". But does this mean you should tolerate emotional abuse and just tough things out? No! You have have to look at "love endures all things" in context with the rest of the passage. For example, if "love is patient and kind", then it cannot also be abusive. So then enduring an emotionally abusive relationship is not the Most High's will for your life.
When you look at love through the lens of the Father and not the worldly definition of love, it should help remove some of the pain from your heart, so you can truly experience healing after emotional abuse. If you're holding on to the worldly mindset that love hurts, love is pain, I encourage you to cry out to your Heavenly Father to remove this false mindset of love from your mind and fill you with a right mindset of love.
