What is spiritual abuse?

A total violation of trust regarding decisions you have made, your family life, finances, friendships, etc.

The Victim

Once you have been spiritually abused, you can get stuck spiritually until you receive healing.

When you have been abused spiritually you feel inadequate, powerless, guilty, condemned, ashamed, and more. This is the goal of your abuser. So that he or she can have complete control over you. The abuser completely overpowers you as if raping you.

In most cases of spiritual abuse the abuser is typically someone you have learned to completely trust. Someone you have a relationship with.

When you are in a abusive relationship, it becomes a one way relationship. Instead of loving and caring for you, they take from and use you for their gain.

This is where it gets tricky. Because, this is an area that has taken many people in the body of Christ captive. Simply because of the way(s) abuse sneaks into the spiritual relationship.

Dependency; first a relationship is formed

A healthy balance of dependency: A man and a woman being joined together in marriage and have drawn a closeness together because they have become one flesh. They have become one because they have both had a closer relationship with the Lord than with each other.

An unhealthy dependency: When you have helped someone physically or spiritually and he or she begins turning to you for answers for instead of God or they turn to you for answers more often then they turn to God.

It’s important to understand that in an abusive relationship, one of the individuals is trying to create a dependency due to an unmet need, so they are searching for a way to find gratification in the relationship. Generally this is ego based, control based or for monetary gain. Essentially, any time you enter a spiritually abusive relationship , one person is depending on the other in an unhealthy balance or there’s an unhealthy soul tie.

Satan’s plot is to destroy your relationship with God. So he begins to create a mistrust of all authority, but most of all, a mistrust of God. Suddenly, you develop an anger towards God. This causes the victim to put walls up to protect him or herself from being hurt any further. (walls and boundaries are two different things).

The next step that often occurs is you become suspicious and you begin to isolate yourself. What the walls are actually doing is destroying our intimacy and begin separating us from God. Sometimes we put up such thick walls that we make an inner vow to never trust another person. So we start to isolate ourselves from the body of Christ. We have to deal with these issues or we will have only surface relationships with no transparency and never deal with offenses and sin, thus never growing spiritually beyond that point.

An example is the gift of prophecy. We began justifying prophetic words as God’s voice and we ended up being deceived instead of lining up the word and hearing God’s voice ourselves and allowing the prophetic voice to confirm and affirm us. We took the word we wanted to hear and ran with that as God’s word.

The Spirit of Anti-Christ (The strongman that comes with spiritual abuse)

The closer we get to the end times, the more abuse will be released, so we need to break its’ power. We need to be able to discern this principality and war against it.

Earlier we mentioned that in an abusive relationship one of the individuals is trying to create a dependency due to an unmet need, so they are searching for a way to find gratification in the relationship. The system of abuse works off of shame and inferiority. Taking advantage of weaknesses and knowledge. i.e.: I am a stronger Christian then you are, and you need to be rescued by a stronger or more powerful person.

The foundation of the stronghold is shame. The foundation of abuse is shame. Control is maintained by a continual supply of shaming messages. This is where we have wrong foundations in the church. This is how codes and rules that are not scriptural get put into place within the body of Christ. This is where harsh rules are created and all freedom is abolished. This is also when legalism, fear, suspicion, paranoia, and the fear of man creep into the church. This is where idolatry steps in with doors wide open because now there are relationships of shame and man suddenly gets his or her sense of value from man.

The cornerstone of this type of church with an antichrist system in place is man. The foundation is shame, inferiority, and insecurity. The mentality of that church is you can control me and abuse me because I am weaker and powerless. This ungodly structure has to be destroyed.

(Gal 3:1) You crazy Galatians! Did someone put a hex on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it’s obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives. His sacrifice on the Cross was certainly set before you clearly enough.

(Gal 3:2) Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you?

(Gal 3:3) Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it?

Dynamics:

The victim feels so much shame that he or she feels like he has to live up to spiritual standards or he has to perform to prove their spirituality or to be accepted. Suddenly the motivation becomes performance. The victim becomes enslaved to a man rather then a bondservant to Jesus Christ.

The victim is left with guilt, shame, judgment, condemnation, and confusion about their worth and their relationship with God.

To read Part 2 of How To Break Free From Spiritual Abuse Click HERE.