When Relationships Go Bad By Sandra Madden
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n the beginning, when God was making all things, He made it all good. In fact, He says He made it VERY good. He made woman for and from man and made the two to be each other’s companions, work in His garden, and bear children as a fruit of their relationship together. Adam and Woman didn’t have power struggles, argue over the direction of the toilet paper roll, try to one-up each other, or have an idea that either of them could even conceive of doing something mean or hurtful to the other. H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 8
Unfortunately, our first parents’ fall into sin contaminated all their subsequent generations. We still live in the good world God created, and still have intimate relationships, but now those are also affected by sin and the sinful people in them. Sometimes couples just have minor spats and disagreements. Other times...it’s downright scary and abusive. We don’t like to talk about those situations, and so we often pretend they don’t exist. But they do. For teenagers, too. Sin has messed up our world so much that abusive
relationships aren’t even something that we recognize when they’re right in front of us. We hear about celebrity accusations of abuse on an almost weekly basis. Books and movies (even for young adults and children) portray abusers as romantic, dashing, and protective. We gloss over the fact that the victims in the stories fear that they may do something “wrong” and face extreme consequences from their partners, or possibly even death. What Is Abuse? Before we get much further, we need a definition of abuse. That word gets thrown around far too easily and it is misunderstood to mean “when someone does something mean to another person.” However, intimate partner1 abuse is a deliberate pattern of behavior used by a person in an intimate relationship to intimidate his or her partner and thereby gain or maintain power and control over the other person.2 It’s easy, from the outside, to confuse intimate partner abuse with situational violence. Situational violence happens when an argument between two people escalates into a violent episode—mostly because one or both don’t have effective conflict resolution skills. Abuse is different. It’s deliberate. There may not have been premeditation, but it’s definitely not due to a loss of control. How do we know? Abusers don’t act that way at school or work. They don’t act that way towards teachers or teammates.
