The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at Brigham Young University on October 24, 2002 by Pam Johnstoneaux.

Pam Johnstoneaux:

You may have heard of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, the things that we need in this world in order to progress and grow. Physiological needs: we need food, we need shelter, we need safety, we need all those kinds of things. Well, safety is security, which is the second one, I’m sorry. We need to feel safe, we need to feel like life is secure. We need belonging, we need love, we need to feel like there’s a part of us. We need worth and esteem, we need to be able to feel like we’re worthwhile. We need self-actualization, such things as being able to work in a profession that we really enjoy, or doing something that we really love, or having hobbies or interests that we really look forward to, those kinds of things. Now look down here at the bottom, the safety needs and the physiological needs. If we do not have safety needs and physiological needs met, what do you think happens to us? We get stuck at that point; we stop. If I can’t even feel safe in my environment, how likely is it that I’m going to go on and become self-actualized, you know, I’m going to be this person that I want to be, how likely is that? Probably not very likely. So that’s something we need to remember. We also have other basic needs: self-value, stimulation, sociality, structure, security, stroking, and if you can kind of look at some of those things on the top as I’m talking, it’s really important for human beings to have these things. We need to feel like we’re valuable. We need to have change in our life. Have you ever been stuck in a very typical pattern, and it just kind of feels like Groundhog Day over and over and over again? We get real tired of that; we get real bored with it. We do what he did, we try to change the circumstances, when in actuality what did he need to change in Groundhog Day? Himself, he needed to change himself. We need sociality. We need caretakers, we need friends, we need people who respond to us. We need structure in our lives in spite of the fact that our teenagers believe that we don’t need this at all, and especially from parents. We do need structure. We need security, we need to know that we’re safe. Just think back over the last year since the terrorist bombings. A lot of people have had serious problems with feeling insecure and worried and with good reason. And we need stroking; we need physical contact, we need emotional contact to help us feel like we’re worthwhile people.

I’m sure most of you understand Erickson’s stages of development--trust/autonomy, initiative/industry, identity/intimacy, generativity and ego/integrity. These are also stages that we need to go through. Does every person go through every one of these stages in the same way at the same time? No. Some people get really stuck, and in abusive situations, we usually get stuck around one, two, and three.

There are three things that every child must have: regulation, autonomy, connection. Think back to how they regulated things in your family. What were the rules? Who came up with the rules? How were the rules enforced? What kinds of things happened if you made a mistake? How many families do you hear about where the child spills a glass of milk at age two or three and then gets a beating? That’s pretty severe abuse for that kind of thing. On the other hand, do children need rules and regulations? Of course they do. They need to know what their limits are, so that’s regulation.

Autonomy is a balance of freedom and responsibility, respect for each other, and cooperativeness. Families teach these things extremely well. How can I cooperate with my fellow family members? What can I do? How much freedom can I have? For example, when my children were very young, I quickly got over the idea that their clothes had to match, because I realized that that was one of the most important ways they could demonstrate their autonomy at age two, three, four, or five. So if we ended up with stripes and polka dots together, I bit the bullet and said, “Okay, let’s do stripes and polka dots together.” If we did lime green and orange together, okay. I’m sure some people who saw the clothes my children wore--now on Sunday we did have certain rules, but other days of the week it wasn’t so important--and I’m sure if people looked at my children when I went in stores and things like that, they thought, “Wow, what a terrible mother. What an awful mother. How could she let her child wear that?” But it was a great way to teach them autonomy. And if they learn autonomy that young, what are they going to do when they get into college? If you keep this up all the way through and give them a little more responsibility and a little more freedom, they’re going to be okay when they finally go out into the world.

Connection, bonding, physical and emotional expressions of love. We have to be touched appropriately. We have to be held, we have to be honored as a human being. We need to know that we have love. That’s connection.

Now let’s talk about some of the things that go wrong in each one of these. With regulation, a lot of the times the family will give us some empty statements, exaggerated statements, confusing statements or actions. Sometimes there’s a lot of manipulation in abusive families, a lot of inconsistency, divided parents, selfishness, even cruelty, perfectionism, control, and fear. What happens to your sense of regulation when some of these things take place? If there’s no constancy, no consistency, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the regulation, there’s going to be some serious problems. A lot of insecurity: that’s one of the primary things. I worked with a man once who, one of his difficulties with his family, especially his father, was that one day he would come home, dad would come home, and he would be so loving and so friendly and just approve of everything this young man did and just praise him to the hilt, and the next day he’d come home, and it didn’t matter what this young man had done, he was wrong, he was stupid, he was awful, and he was horrible. So, yeah, what kind of security do we have if I’m never sure, I have to take the temperature, I watch dad as he comes in, and I say, “Is this a ‘go hide in the closet’ day, or is this a ‘gee, kid I love you’ day ?” Let’s pretend we’re playing Monopoly, and I’m in control. And I decide that hotels aren’t worth anything, but you don’t know that. What’s going to happen? You’re going to buy hotels for all your property, and it’s not going to mean a darn thing because I changed the rules without letting you know. Very, very difficult for children.

Okay, let’s look at autonomy: things that happen, discounting or denying feelings and thoughts, guilt, withdrawal of love, inconsistent, a lot of assumptions, a lot of denial, reality manipulation, invasions of privacy or even physical intactness, disapproval, control perceptions. What’s going to happen? Children will be very confused. Nothing that you really think or feel is acknowledged, your perceptions are so tightly controlled, you can’t do anything that doesn’t agree with the family. There would be two ends of the continuum: either so helpless and so confused and so unable to act, or feeling they need to rebel and won’t keep any rules. Obviously there’s going to be places all along that continuum for certain people, but somewhere along the line, you’re not going to meet the middle very well, because you don’t know what the middle is when you have no autonomy. I’ve worked with people who really felt they had no power to do anything. They couldn’t even act, they couldn’t even feel like it was safe to act; and of course, I’ve also dealt with people who felt like their will was the rule for the world.

All right, how about connection? We need to attach and bond, we need to have healthy intimacy, we need sociability, we need warmth, we need conflict resolution, touch, humor, human dignity has to be respected. A lot of times, the problems include distancing. There is no emotional bond. I remember working with a young woman who was very, very distressed, and as we were talking about her memories of her mother, she said, “My main memory of my mother is of her sitting in a rocking chair looking out the window.” Now what do you suspect about the mother? What was going on with the mother? She was severely depressed. Did the child know, was she cognitively able to say, “Oh, I understand why mother never talks to me or takes care of me; it’s because she’s severely depressed”? Of course not. And so the lack of bonding created a lot of problems. The other end of the continuum is enmeshment, too intense of an emotional bond. Some become pleasers. If I want your love, I have to please you, so we go around pleasing and pleasing and pleasing and pleasing and making sure everything’s absolutely perfect, and then when we get older and the Relief Society president says, “Can you take four casseroles to these different families?” What do we say? “Of course, oh, I’d be happy to do that!” In spite of the fact that we have to work until five o’clock in the afternoon, we have a meeting that night, two of our children are sick, and we really absolutely have no time. Because we’ve learned to be pleasers, we say, “Oh, of course, I’d be happy to do that.” Inappropriate touch or emotional control, including physical or sexual abuse, often happens in the connection area. There’s a lot of shame and blame because, as I said, one of the connections is that we have to allow for human dignity, and if we don’t, then there’s usually shame and blame. Victims feel very worthless, like they have no value at all.

Let’s define emotional abuse now. “Emotional abuse is underneath all other types of abuse. The most damaging aspect of physical, sexual, or mental abuse is the trauma to our hearts and souls from being betrayed by the people that we love and trust.” Now how many of you would have said, “Oh, well, emotional abuse, that’s no big deal. That’s not nearly as bad as if you’re sexually abused, or that’s not nearly as bad as if you’re physically abused.” This statement says no, it’s the foundation for those other kinds of abuse. “Our parents were emotionally abused in childhood because their parents were emotionally abused in childhood. Our parents were our role models who taught us how to relate to ourselves and our own emotions.” And this is very often the case; it’s cyclical. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients say, “My family was so awful, and I didn’t want to do what they did, but when I get in a moment of stress, I find myself doing the same things my mother did, and often it’s emotionally abusive.” Have you ever read a scripture or heard a talk that said, “Every day when you get up, I want you to be really mean to yourself. I want you to tell yourself how stupid you are, how incapable you are, how awful you are, and how you cannot do anything right”? No. We hear exactly the opposite as to how we’re supposed to think about ourselves or how we can be helpful to ourselves. But very often even people who haven’t been through very severe abuse are very unkind to themselves in their thoughts. This is very common.

I want to move into a little bit of what we call object relations theory for just a minute. These are some things that happen to us. Let’s just talk about attachment cycles for a minute. In the first year it’s more about love and the cycle of soothing in the first few months of your life. You have a want and then if you don’t get that want met, or that need, what happens? What happens to a newborn when they’re really, really hungry and you wait that ten more minutes to feed them? They start screaming. They go into a rage. Also in the first year they develop acceptance of limits; it’s a matter of, “Oh, I’m finally soothed. I feel comfortable now; I’m okay.” So then “I feel really good” until the next time as an infant “I need something; I’m wet, or I’m hungry, or I’m tired.” Now can we say to an infant, “Well, you know, it’s not quite your feeding time. We have about fifteen minutes left according to the schedule that we’ve set up, so you’re going to have to wait about fifteen minutes before I feed you”? Do you say that to an infant? No, it doesn’t really work. Unfortunately when abuse takes place, and we’ll probably talk just a little bit more, the wants are not satisfied, and therefore the rage is the main thing that the child remembers.

In the second year of life children learn about trust and control: I have my wants but I have to learn appropriate limits. Now obviously with 2-year-olds, you can’t teach them major philosophical limits, but you teach 2-year-old limits. You start saying, “Okay, we’re not going to hit Jimmy because it’s not a good idea to hit Jimmy,” and how many times do we have to tell the 2-year-old that? About 3 or 4 million times. But this is where we start; we say, okay now, these are the limits. No, you can’t eat your candy before you eat your dinner because dinner is nutritious and we have to eat that before we eat the candy. So you start setting limits for the child; the child begins to accept those limits, and then there are good feelings again, and when the want comes again, you again set some limits. This is when it works really well.

Okay, we also have in object relations what we call positive attachment. Essentially object relations theory says, we need to have an internal caregiver put inside of ourselves, but when we’re first born, we don’t have that internal caregiver, so what we have to do is rely on our parent to mirror us, to protect us, to be attuned in to our needs and our wants, to provide safety and eye contact. Have you ever seen a mother--you’ve probably done it yourselves if you’re mothers or even fathers--hold your baby and say, “Oh, you cute little thing! Look at that cute little nose!” And of course everybody around is going, “Yeah, right.” What happens to the baby during that time? Smiles, enjoys it. So what object relations theory says is that the confident good feeling that the mother has goes into the baby, so the baby creates an internal caregiver of its own, and slowly this develops more and more and more if the mother is attentive and doing the things most mothers do.

What happens if there’s a negative attachment, abuse, neglect, something like that? Usually it comes because the mother does not have an internalized caregiver herself, she can’t even take care of herself. The baby again is a blank slate. But what happens? The child grows up with no real internal caregiver or a real negative look about himself/herself, and again there are all kinds of unmet needs. They can’t self-soothe themselves, they don’t have any empathy, they don’t have impulse control. One of the biggest problems that some of my clients face is how to self-soothe themselves. You know, when I get really upset or frustrated or angry or hurt or something like that, I have a few things in my little bag of tricks that I go do for myself. For example, my family knows that right before bedtime you don’t bother me because I’m in a very, very hot bathtub full of bubbles reading a book, and I don’t want to be called on the phone, I don’t want anybody to come in and talk to me--but obviously if there’s an emergency I would probably bend that rule. But they just know I’m in there self-soothing. So if we don’t learn some of these things that are necessary--how to soothe ourselves, how to have empathy for ourselves and others, how to meet our own needs--we are going to have some really serious problems as we face that world.

Okay, let’s expand this a little. If that bonding doesn’t take place that we talked about in that first year, there’s no internalized caregiver, the emotional circuits get jammed up with rage, there’s an unconscious mental message that gets blueprinted--“I’m not safe, I’m very hateful, I’m awful, I’m a bad person, all adults are not safe.” Now what do I mean by emotional circuits are jammed with rage? In a situation where there is abuse or neglect, rage stemming from unmet needs stays with them. Instead of having it soothed, they just continue to feel rage. What happens if a baby cries long enough for food or to have some other need met? What happens? It’ll finally stop crying, and if that happens day after day after day after day, how does the baby respond? Have you ever seen a baby like that? They stop trying. They say, “Nobody’s going to take care of me anyway, so why should I bother?” You see this a lot, for example, in orphanages where there are just not enough caregivers to go around. The babies will cry and cry and cry and cry. After a few weeks, they don’t even cry anymore. It doesn’t matter if they’re hungry, doesn’t matter if they’re hurt.

Now think of it this way for just a minute. I’m stuck in this first year of life, my caregiver has either been abusive or unresponsive and neglectful. Where does all that rage go? It goes inside of me, and unfortunately I often cannot get past this rage, and so when I’m 27 or 28 or 32 or 45 or 88, I am responding from the rage level of a 1-year-old, so that’s some of the stuff that happens here.

Okay, just a little brain development here. The brain stem basically handles survival and arousal and that’s what makes the baby cry when they’re hungry. We hope that after a certain period of time as the child’s brain continues to grow, they access the limbic and the cortex portions of the brain. But again, if I’ve been in a neglected or abusive situation, I’m stuck at the brain stem, so I get the arousal and I get the survival instincts, but I’m not capable of moving on very well to the other areas of growth. So that’s why abuse is so significant, because it sort of imprints us from the time we’re very, very young.

Okay, these are some of the things that go wrong when we’re raising children: drug and alcohol use, degree to which the child is wanted, the parents’ ghosts in the nursery--what do I mean by that? What are the parents’ ghosts? What did they experience, what are they bringing into this parenting situation? Parents are unable to read and respond for these various reasons, or they are very rigid, abusive, or unpredictable. So these are some of the things that go wrong in this object relations process.

Now I want to discuss what happens not only in the relationships in abusive families, but in the types of relationships we develop when we’ve been severely abused, particularly emotionally. We want to have horizontal relationships; this is what we’re hoping for. I take my personal power, you take your personal power, and we agree to respect each other, to provide one another with that personal power; we have autonomy, we have regulation, we have connection. And you can see what the personal characteristics are in a horizontal relationship. These are wonderful things to have in a relationship, characteristics of the relationship. So in a horizontal relationship, neither person has a need to control the other, so power becomes a non-issue, unless I’m trying to assertively express my needs or wants. The relationship’s very important to me, so I keep trying to develop it. The level of intimacy is negotiated. We’re able to talk back and forth and say, “Whoa, what happened? I didn’t like that. Did you like that?” “No, I didn’t like that. Let’s see if we can do something different.” We’re very willing and open. What happens, however, in a vertical relationship? Most of the time children who experience emotional abuse lived in a vertical relationship. So how do they do their relationships? They do vertical relationships. It’s very, very sad to see sometimes how often a person who has been in an abusive situation will marry a person who is going to ensure that they continue that abuse. You’d think they’d want to run five miles away from it, but they don’t sometimes. Some people do; some people do very well. But some people have a really difficult time being able to balance and realize, “Gee, I don’t want to have the same kind of relationship I came from.” Plus it’s familiar. If I always grew up in an abusive situation, at least I know what that is about. I don’t know what real intimacy is. Yes? No, I did not mean to imply that they do this on purpose. I’m just saying that’s what they’re attracted to. They’re attracted to the familiarity. They’re attracted to this kind of a situation, because like I said, it’s familiar, it’s something that they understand, and often it’s just too scary to work into a horizontal relationship. So what we end up with is either a passive side or an aggressive side. It’s very interesting that most people will switch back and forth. The passive person has their rights violated, their inhibition withdrawn, they use power passively, they use manipulation, crying, pouting, whining, withdrawing, they shame other people, they keep their anger hidden, they have a very low sense of personal power. On the other hand, the aggressive person violates the rights of the other people, is very explosive, hostile, unpredictable, angry, uses power forcefully to meet their needs, physical force, hitting, yelling, threatening to control, shaming other people, a lot of explosive anger and rage, and interestingly, both result in a low sense of personal power and a low sense of value, low sense of worth. So what we end up with are these struggles, the sarcasm, the dishonesty, the silent treatment. Just an example: I had a client I worked with many years ago who was married to a man who was quite abusive, and he was more on the aggressive side. He used a lot of physical force, a lot of shaming, a lot of blaming, ridicule, those kinds of things happened in their relationship. She was just kind of starting the healing process, and so she was in a place where she was really angry with him for being the way that he was, and so we started talking to her about her relationship. Could we change him? He wasn’t coming in; he didn’t like me very much. We couldn’t change him. So we started talking about some of her behaviors. We said, “How powerful is your crying? How powerful is your pouting? How powerful is your manipulation?” And she started to see that she fit into this vertical relationship as much as he did. Now as I said a few minutes ago, often what you’ll find is, we jog along for a little while with Person A being the aggressive one, and then something happens and it switches and Person B becomes the aggressive one, and it’ll go back and forth. But what do we get out of this kind of relationship? Almost nothing.

Now what should happen? If someone loves you, it should feel like they love you. Does that sound like a statement of duh? Could have figured that out all by myself! How many relationships don’t feel loving? Most relationships on occasion don’t feel loving, but it’s really unfortunate when the major focus of the relationship, or the major feeling in the relationship is one of not being loved. So it’s not being overly critical, it’s not shaming the other person, it’s not being abusive in any way, controlling, manipulative, demeaning, humiliating, separating, discounting, diminishing, belittling, being negative, causing trauma. And it should not be painful most of the time. Now unfortunately, children who have been emotionally abused, what’s their relationship like? It’s all these bad things, isn’t it? So they go into a relationship in their grown-up world, and they don’t know how else to be, so a lot of times we don’t even realize we’re being emotionally abusive. We say, “Oh, it’s not that bad; he only hit me once.” “Oh, it’s not that bad; he only belittles me on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.” And in all honesty, if we’ve grown up in an abusive family, we have such a low sense of worth that we believe it. “That’s what I deserve. I deserve this kind of stuff because I’m not worth much anyway.”

These are the parent qualities we need: a deep and lasting desire to make a significant difference in the life of the child, a personal experience of attunement during the early years, experience interacting with healthy babies and toddlers, ability to refrain from personalizing the child’s behavior. My little grandson on occasion will come over to visit me and do something I don’t really approve of, and so I’ll say, “You know, Tanner, we need to stop that. Let’s go find something else to do.” And he’ll lay down on the floor and he says, “I don’t like you, Nana. I don’t like you. Don’t talk.” If I personalize his statement, what’s going to happen? “Well, I don’t like you either. You can just go on home. I’m never going to let you come over to my house again.” So we really have to not personalize it. What I usually say to him if he says “I don’t like you” is, I say, “You know, that’s okay if you don’t like me right now, because I love you enough for both of us.” And he doesn’t know what to do with that; he has no idea what to do with that. He really was hoping it would have an effect on me. High degree of effect regulation and insight, self-insight. That means I can control my emotions. I’m not flying off the handle, I’m not always angry, I’m not crying at small things. Ability to meet my own psychological needs apart from the relationship with the child, willingness to assume a high level of control over a child’s choices and consequences without misusing power. And that high level of control diminishes as a child is more and more able to take care of himself or herself. Comfortable with conflict. In your heart of hearts how many of you are comfortable with conflict? You have to learn to be comfortable with conflict, because it’s always with us. There’s no relationship that we ever have that doesn’t have conflict. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole theory out there that says conflict actually creates intimacy. That’s what actually brings us closer together. As we resolve conflict and work through it well, we’re more intimate. Capacity to provide high level of empathy and nurturance, able to maintain open trusting relationship. You need to have an open relationship with everyone in the family. And a sense of humor. How many of you have found times when your sense of humor saved you as a parent? Yeah! One of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard is about a lady whose oldest son was kind of resisting going to church. He didn’t want to get up on Sunday morning, and the meeting was at nine o’clock, and he’d usually stayed out having fun with his friends until late, and so she really tried a lot of different things to get him to go to church. And finally one morning she hit upon this great idea. She went down and she said, “Honey, it’s time to get up because it’s time to go to church.” “I don’t want to get up; I’m going to stay in bed.” She says, “You know, that is the best idea. I’m just going to jump right in with you and stay in bed with you.” How many seconds do you think it took for that boy to get out of bed and get ready for church? Her sense of humor saved her in that situation.

There are certain things we believe because of emotional abuse. See if any of these fit in your little belief system to some degree or another: the world is unsafe, I’m unlovable, my parents are unloving, I must control at all costs if I am to survive, my parents are my enemy and if they get too close to me I will not survive the pain, and as adults, people who have lived with emotional abuse would probably put anybody’s name in there--my husband is my enemy, the world at large is my enemy, my friends are my enemy. It’s really hard to believe that you can survive the pain of getting close to anybody because it’s so hurtful when you were younger.

Okay, I want to talk about two things that can help us heal from some of our emotional abuse. First of all, we’re going to talk about thought distortions. Self-defeating beliefs--again, let’s see if any of these fit: emotional perfectionism, I should always feel happy, confident, in control of my emotions. What’s going to happen if you believe that? You’re going to be sorely disappointed. Not only that--what does it feed back into? Oh, I’m worthless. Yeah, they were right, all those awful things they said about me, they were right. Immotophobia: I should never feel angry, anxious, jealous, inadequate, or vulnerable. I should never cry. I should never show any emotion to anybody; it’s just not safe. Conflict phobia: people who love each other shouldn’t fight. Maybe I would amend that to, people who love each other should not disagree. What a myth. Entitlement: people should be the way I expect them to be, nobody should ever let me down, there should be no changes that cause me problems, there should be no difficulties, everything has to work out for me. Low frustration tolerance, I should never be frustrated, life should be easy. Kind of not in the real world here. Performance perfectionism, I must never fail or make a mistake, I must never fail or make a mistake, and if I do, what does that feed back into? I’m worthless. How many of you have made a mistake at some point in your life? Most of us are going to experience mistakes. Perceived perfectionism, people will not love and accept me as a flawed and vulnerable human being. This is such a strong belief. There is no way I can be loved because I have flaws. How many of you also know you have some personality flaws, maybe some spiritual flaws, maybe a few other assorted flaws. Yeah. Does that mean you aren’t lovable? No! You’re still lovable. I love my kids with all their flaws and their warts and their bumps, and you know what, they love me too. Of course, they do love to remind me of my flaws and my problems. There’s that saying that you will never believe you’re perfect as long as your children are still around. Fear of failure: my worth depends on my success.

Okay, what do we do? We have to challenge these negative thoughts. I saw a little billboard that had a picture of a little boy, and he had statements written all over his face, like “You’re stupid, you’re worthless, you’re not any good, you’re horrible.” Now I think we have a belief sometimes that we cannot change our thoughts, but we can change our thoughts. We can. I know that there have been times in your life when you have successfully changed some of your thoughts. For example, was there ever a time that you thought you couldn’t succeed in school only to discover that actually you could? Was there ever a time you thought, “Oh, I can’t possibly learn to play the piano,” when with the effort and the practice and the good teacher you learned to play the piano? So we can change our distorted thoughts no matter how awful they are. What you do is you state the distorted thought and you evaluate it. You gather evidence for the distorted thought, and then you revise the distorted thought. Some people think they have to be punished. Now is that a distorted thought? Do they deserve to be punished? Not unless they’re being a sniper or something; then you probably deserve to be punished. What evidence do we have that you need to be punished? What evidence do we have? Have you done something awful? Not that awful. Okay, what evidence do we have that we do not need to be punished? Give me some ideas. We all make mistakes. Mistakes are something we need to learn from instead of be punished for. We have a Savior who atoned for our mistakes. So we say, “What is some of the evidence for that distortion?” And then we say, “How can I revise the statement?” Occasionally I do something for which it would probably be good if I received a little punishment here and there, but then of course we have to define punishment, because there’s a great difference in types of punishment that we see. Okay, let’s look at another example: I can’t do anything right; I’m a total failure. What are the words in there that make that a distorted thought? Anytime and total, evidence and successes. How many of you really honestly believe you probably have more successes than you do mistakes, because most of us do. Most of us have far more. I consider getting out of bed in the morning a great success. I consider getting all my clothes on and matching shoes a profound success. So the revised thought is, I do make mistakes sometimes, but more often I do things well. I do my best and succeed in many things. I try.

So we have to challenge those distorted and disturbed thoughts that we got from that abusive situation. The other thing I want to talk about just a minute is setting boundaries. We have to have good boundaries. Emotional boundaries are violated through role reversal, emotional incest, shame, enmeshment, and we usually end up with a sense of shame, an inability to recognize our feelings, feelings of worthlessness, an inability to say no. If you look at each one of these other ones, is emotional abuse also going to affect those other ones? Definitely. You can have a lot of emotional abuse happen without physical abuse, without sexual abuse, pretty hard without spiritual abuse, but you almost never have sexual abuse or intellectual abuse or physical abuse, you almost never have those without emotional abuse as well. And that’s why they say it’s kind of the foundation of abuse is this emotional abuse.

These are the kinds of boundaries we end up with when we have serious abusive problems. We want strong ego boundaries, but sometimes we have boundaries that are so tight nobody can get in; sometimes we have boundaries that are so loose anybody can get in, and sometimes we have pretty weak ego boundaries that almost everybody gets in, but maybe we occasionally are able to keep our boundaries. Very important problem and very important healing process with emotional abuse is to maintain our boundaries. How do you maintain your boundaries? What do you do to maintain your boundaries? You have to clearly define your boundaries. What else? Recognize them in someone or something, is it good for you. I spent hours with one client trying to help her understand that the drug dealer she wanted to live with was only going to drag her down because she was going to lose her husband, she was going to lose her children, and it was so hard for her to set those boundaries. She just didn’t know how to do it because of the abuse she’d suffered.

Okay, so we’ve got to set some really, really strong boundaries in order to understand and change the effects of that abuse. These are some of the problems we have when we don’t have good boundaries: we can’t say no, we can’t accept compliments. When I used to do a group for women who’d been abused, I occasionally would put them in a circle and put one in a chair and they’d have to go around the whole group and get a compliment, and then they would have to say as they received the compliment from each person in the group, “Thank you; I like that about me too.” Do you know how hard that was for them? Gee, that was hard. So these are some of the assertiveness issues that we have a lot of trouble with when we don’t have good boundaries. What we need to do is learn to communicate, stay in the here and now, keep our responsibility properly placed, make sure you’re hearing whether it’s an opinion message or a fact message. Be oriented toward people. Accept responsibility for our behavior. Treat people equally, respond to all people as worthwhile, and help others to be more responsible. That results in joy. On the other hand, look at the manipulation side. When we set boundaries people don’t like it very much. Lots of times if your habit has been to create equally abusive relationships, you’re going to find that people want you to change back to your old behaviors, so you have to really want to do this. It’s very important.

Let me just close with one statement that really doesn’t have a lot to do with what we’ve already talked about but I think has everything to do with your healing process. There is only one source of complete healing. You can go through the therapists and it’s really helpful; you can set your boundaries; you can be assertive; you can do whatever you need to do, but the final source that will heal you is the atonement of Christ. Don’t ever forget that. He has the power to heal you completely. It is a process; it doesn’t happen overnight, you know, it’s not a right now thing, but it is very, very important.