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| As I've been thinking more about marriage, romance, love, and all that stuff... I've also been reading about what makes for a bad relationship, and how to avoid it. After all, sometimes finding out what something is, comes in discovering what it is not. It's been some good reading.
I read an article this past weekend entitled something to the effect: "How to ensure a bad relationship." One of the top things was manipulation.
ma·nip·u·late (m-npy-lt)
tr.v. ma·nip·u·lat·ed, ma·nip·u·lat·ing, ma·nip·u·lates
1. To move, arrange, operate, or control. especially in a skillful manner
2. To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously
3. To tamper with or falsify for personal gain
I've never considered myself a manipulator, (at least not much since my parents worked very hard at remedying it when I was the ages 2-4!) but rather one, who in the past, seemed to attract manipulators. I've asked myself if it's because I appeared as one easy to manipulate, or just because there are a lot of folks out there who know how to manipulate and that's just what they do.
Or was it because I struggled with the fear of what others thought about me, and thus became an easy target for those who are controlling... I think so. I became a victim of some manipulators and it took the near tragic loss of my baby a few years back for my eyes to be completely open and to find freedom from their grip. I find when the fear of man tries to trip me up, I find myself often times again, a victim.
Manipulation makes victims: we make ourself a victim to it's control if we manipulate others, and we make victims of others if we manipulate.
I think there are those who are totally blinded to their habit of manipulation in relationships - it's a way of life that started very young. It's all they've known. They may even see it as a means of survival. It's a way of life and maybe no one has been able to get through to them the freedom that would come if they saw people in relationships to GIVE, instead of always blindly using others, even in the name of goodness.
I read something that I thought really nailed it -- and brought painful relationships to my mind that mirrored these words to the T! (I know God had me read it so that I could find forgiveness all over again!) Here is an excerpt from the book "In Sheeps Clothing: understanding and dealing with manipulative people:"
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"For a long time, I wondered why manipulation victims have a hard time seeing what really goes on in manipulative interactions. At first, I was tempted to fault them. But I've learned that they get hoodwinked for some very good reasons:
A manipulator's aggression is not obvious. Our gut may tell us that they're fighting for something, struggling to overcome us, gain power, or have their way, and we find ourselves unconsciously on the defensive. But because we can't point to clear, objective evidence they're aggressing against us, we can't readily validate our feelings.
The tactics manipulators use can make it seem like they're hurting, caring, defending, ..., almost anything but fighting. These tactics are hard to recognize as merely clever ploys.
They always make just enough sense to make a person doubt their gut hunch that they're being taken advantage of or abused. Besides, the tactics not only make it hard for you to consciously and objectively tell that a manipulator is fighting, but they also simultaneously keep you or consciously on the defensive. These features make them highly effective psychological weapons to which anyone can be vulnerable. It's hard to think clearly when someone has you emotionally on the run.
All of us have weaknesses and insecurities that a clever manipulator might exploit. Sometimes, we're aware of these weaknesses and how someone might use them to take advantage of us. For example, I hear parents say things like: "Yeah, I know I have a big guilt button." – But at the time their manipulative child is busily pushing that button, they can easily forget what's really going on. Besides, sometimes we're unaware of our biggest vulnerabilities. Manipulators often know us better than we know ourselves. They know what buttons to push, when and how hard. Our lack of self-knowledge sets us up to be exploited.
What our gut tells us a manipulator is like, challenges everything we've been taught to believe about human nature. We've been inundated with a psychology that has us seeing everybody, at least to some degree, as afraid, insecure or "hung-up." So, while our gut tells us we're dealing with a ruthless conniver, our head tells us they must be really frightened or wounded "underneath."
What's more, most of us generally hate to think of ourselves as callous and insensitive people. We hesitate to make harsh or seemingly negative judgments about others. We want to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they don't really harbor the malevolent intentions we suspect. We're more apt to doubt and blame ourselves for daring to believe what our gut tells us about our manipulator's character."
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Responsible for teaching the seven children God has given me, I've been asking myself if I am raising them to be manipulative in anyway - Am I raising them to spot the manipulative person and avoid them, instead of being used? Have I in anyway demonstrated to them by my actions or words a manipulative heart towards them or my husband?
I don't think any one is void of being birthed with the disposition to manipulate. It comes naturally. But as a child grows, it can either be encouraged, or flushed out. It can become habit, or it can become something the child is aware of that they learn to detect and detest.
Reading about manipulation, I've been talking to the kids about it. It hit me that manipulation isn't always something that comes out looking or even sounding bad. Most often it is dressed up as goodness. Oh, the grossness of manipulation dressed up as goodness, and even worse, christianity, or ministry.
One of the forms manipulation can take in the christian community is in the form of deriving sympathy. Making one's situation to be out worse than it is so that others will give. Making one's story to be out much worse than it is to get loyalty, defense, to have people take sides. All this done with the right words, facial expressions, tears if needed. Or even at times, lack of any words.
When manipulation is present, true love cannot exist. When we love others free from control and manipulation, a real genuine love relationship can grow and mature. I want to always apply this to my marriage, and to the relationships with my children. I know it will make a world of difference in whether or not they will truly find me to be a loving mother and wife, and whether my children will be manipulators in their own love relationships one day.
They become what they see in me. I'd like for manipulation to be pointed out and dressed up for what it is: sickness. And goodness to be just what it is: because of Jesus living through me.
Imagine relationships void of manipulation.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
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Two love quotes for today:
"You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly."
~S. K.
"More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse." ~D. Larson
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A starting list I've been making about keeping love alive in marriage:
Tell your spouse "I love you" every single day.
Hold hands. In the home and out.
Compliment your spouse every day on something.
Don't let money, or lack there of, push you apart.
Take dates.
Communicate, work at it.
Encourage don't condemn.
Intoxicate him with your love. “Sweep him away."
(How fun.)
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A verse study about love that I read off a Sovereign Grace website:
(and one of the reads that had me thinking about the topic of manipulation.)
“SHE does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life.” Prov. 31:12
"Who is to bring my husband good? None other than me.
I have been created, fashioned, designed to bring my husband—with all his strengths, flaws, talents and weaknesses—good.
Our Savior is the one, after all, who transforms our motives from “I do me good” to “I do him good.” If it weren’t for God’s grace at work in our hearts, the only “good” we would do our husbands wouldn’t be good at all, but rather manipulation dressed up as goodness.
He’s the one who gives us the desire and he will help us persevere in doing our husbands good."
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A special Valentine's Treat - Oreo's covered in white bark chocolate. Yum and easy.
Sweet boy who loves to bring me things he finds out in nature. (I'm curious ~ you mothers of boys, do you house these items in a box and keep them, or do you keep them for a little bit and throw them out when they've forgotten about them?)
We had one warmer day this past week. With all the rain, the creek on our land is incredible full. There are several springs that come out of the rocks above the creek. The boys took drainage pipes and made all sorts of water ways. Here's the one made for the little ones. They "worked" in the water and mud for hours.
There is one thing I'd like to manipulate - the laundry that comes from letting six children explore life.
a. ann~ | | |
| At I Heart Faces this week... go check um out. There's bound to be some awesome kissy pictures to browse through.
Bubbie was feeling a little left out of the brotherly love.
a. ann~ | | |
| Today's personal favorite love quotes :
"People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is; they marry illusions and images. The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is." ~J. L. Framo
"What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility." ~G. Levinger
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything."
~Katherine Hepburn
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On the subject of love and God:
"Are you having hard times expecting from the one you love here on earth, something that only God can give you? If it so, you need to be aware that no human will ever fulfill your "deepest of the deep" desires. You also need to know that if your main love spring is not God…well…men or women will sooner or later disappoint you, yes, including your spouse. However our sinful nature – flesh must die, we need to focus on what God wants us to be for our spouse."
"The answer to religious complacency isn't working harder at a list of do's and don'ts. It's falling in love with God."
a. ann | | |
| This month I'm taking tiny moments out each day to glean wisdom from others on marriage - whether read, or heard, or seen lived out. I've been combining all of it on a quickly filling-up textedit page on my computer desk top. Each thing I find myself typing in has in some way pulled at my heart strings, in someway I found I could relate.
I think throughout this month, I will from time to time, take a moment and post some of my findings here too. I won't pretend to understand much about love, or suggest that because I take notes on what it is, that I have come anywhere close to perfecting it. But I want to grow and I think in any marriage there is always room for growth. When one begins to believe there is not, then love is dead.
You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. Successful marriage demands a certain death to self. ~Jerry McCant
Do not marry a man to reform him - unless you want him to "reform" you as well and the both of you have called it a deal.
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"...Where your attention goes, energy flows. So the next time you’re facing a mountain in your marriage, focus on the next foothold and soon enough you’ll find yourself over the top..."
“Whoever said being soul mates was going to be easy?” Her husband of 52 years nodded, then added, “Marriage is a bed of roses, thorns and all.”
"...the best marriages are served with an extra helping of acceptance for one another’s peccadilloes. “And that’s the beauty of marriage,” said Maurice... “All of our individualities, all of our wonderful differences. You gotta have friction. You can’t get any heat without friction. We would do well, they say, to expect non-perfection; practice patience and give the acceptance we want in return. There’s no doubt that this is hard work, but judging by the end result, it’s well worth the effort."
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"We learned that love is not a passive emotion. God intends us to actively engage in love, to be purposeful with our love, just as God actively uses marriage to accomplish His purpose for our lives. God wants our marriage to be much more than polite “civil” arrangements. He wants us to be dynamically involved with Him in allowing this marriage to make us more like Jesus Christ."
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Yesterday I read a quote that I pasted into my page and I felt it so applied to the way I feel this very day towards my man:
"I love you, for putting your hand into my heart and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there, and for drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite so far enough to find."
~Roy Croft
"...Love is patient..."
"...Love thinks the best..."
Yes, with the cold rain and babies with coughs, I'm day dreaming of summer already. 
a. ann~
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"...We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love..." ~Author Unknown
It's February! And I've decided I am liking it better than January because it means one month closer to spring time.
I like it because Valentine's Day is in February too. I have never thought of myself as a romantic type. Not at all. Romance always seemed silly to me, until after I married. I'm not at all into novels, never was.
I didn't cry at the end of Anne of Green Gables film growing up either.
But I do like the Jane Austin films, Dickens and others that have come out since I was highschool age. There is always a character I feel I can identify with to some degree... and always characters that remind me of others in my life as well, both good and bad! So I guess I like those romantics, but I'd never take the time to read a romantic book.
I especially like Emma and Mr. Knightly. And North and South. Maybe because in both the man and woman seem an unlikely pair that do not expect to marry, so different in personality, upbringing, culture, and yet, they are so drawn to the other. I can relate to that. That is our story.
Growing up, I never was one to have crushes, or feel I needed a boyfriend. I was always quite content, thinking very little about romance or marriage. That just wasn't at all my focus. Maybe because I was too busy wanting to do so many other things along the way.
What is funny to me is that I married a helpless romantic. And I love it. He has taught me more about romance than anything I could have read or wanted to become. What I use to think was silly, has become very dear to me. I do hope all my sons are taking notes because if they are, they will make some wonderfully romantic husbands one day.
(okay, edit here - I got to thinking, there is something that can make me cry it's so romantic: love songs. Yep, I'm a sucker for love songs. Music gets to me.)
Anyway, February is here and I am glad. And with it I want to put up a header that makes me smile and reminds me of February's special day. Let me know which is your favorite~
Oh, and I will have to post some of the out-takes. The afternoon we took these the children were in such funny moods and some of these pictures had us laughing.
number ONE:
and one of it's funny out-takes:
number TWO:
and one of it's crazy out-takes:
number THREE:
One of the random out-takes:
number FOUR:
and a typical one of Brighton suddenly stealing the show:
number FIVE:
and one of the silly faces out-takes:
number SIX:
and one of my favorite out-takes:
and here were a few other random shots we took that make me smile:
unimpressed with Valentines.
Our very obnoxious Valentine's Day hat. The boys loved it~
"...I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon." ~Author Unknown
On another note...
This is my fav song for this month. I LOVE THIS SONG. The children & I are working on our own version too.
(go to the bottom of the page to turn off blog music first.)
And this is my fun love song for the month. This makes me smile everytime I hear it.
Happy February. Walk around in big red top hats... or at least eat lots of heart shaped chocolate.
a. ann~ | | |
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