Unfamiliar
How healthy behavior can feel bad after abuse
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. It filled up with a nauseous tangle of bad, bad, bad. I felt like I needed to vomit it out.
He hadn’t picked up on it yet. I pulled back and my face contorted.
Noticing my change in demeanor, he immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know that I feel bad.”
He was a safe person for me to say that I felt bad.
I started a conversation with myself, with my body. What was going on? What was this pit in my stomach? Was it a red flag?
We’d been dating more than six months by this time and the flags were all green, nary a yellow much less a red one to be seen.
I never intended to date when I got divorced in 2019. I was focused on my own healing and the safety and healing of my children. I was rebuilding my self-worth, my self-confidence, my discernment, my career, and my safe circle of friends.
Even when I started to date more than two years later, it was at the suggestion of my therapist: “Harm in relationship can only be healed in relationship,” she said.
I was skeptical and self-protective. Eventually, I joined the apps but with no intention of entering a relationship. I just wanted to keep healing - practicing my red-flag spotting and holding to my boundaries.
“Harm in relationship can only be healed in relationship.”
This plan suffered no big loss in that first handful of dates included two racists, a guy who thought I’d go home with him that very evening, and one very unhealthy children’s therapist.
I met Joel kind of by accident.
Accidents happen because… life
In August 2023, while on a zoom call for work, chatting with nine of my colleagues about best practices for writing reports on abuse in faith settings, my phone started blowing up with texts and voice messages. It would turn out to be one of the worst days of my life. Sadly, I can’t even say it was *the* worst, because I’d already been told before that one of my kids would die.
My youngest son was diagnosed with Hunter syndrome, a rare, progressive, and terminal disease at two years old. Even as I worked to save him, to progress the research, to love him and enjoy him, I had still been anticipating his death for the last fifteen years.
But this one was entirely unexpected.
The hospital social worker told me that my 17-year-old son was in the hospital. She told me I needed to get there as soon as possible, but that I should not drive myself. I don’t remember her exact words, but I could tell it was bad.
Very, very bad.
It was indeed very, very bad.
Two days later, I let go of my beloved middle son while playing the song I used to sing to him and his brothers when they were little. We would lie in bed, my three sons and me all cuddled up together, after all the prayers were said and I would sing:
“Goodnight my angel, time to close your eyes, and save these questions for another day.”
Indeed. So. Many. Questions.
Many months prior, I’d planned and paid for a trip to the beach for Labor Day. I also had three conferences on my schedule for late September and October. Feeling like I was being carried along on a swampy river of life I did not control and didn’t really care about, I just kept going. I was not well emotionally, and I needed things to do.
So I drug my body and tattered soul to each event, ordered dinner in, night after night, to the hotel room or AirBnB. People had sent me hundreds of dollars in DoorDash gift cards in the weeks after my son died and they fed me all these days.
The third conference was about abuse in the church. I still had so many things to process after my own harmful experience from my marriage, my ex-husband’s “Christian” employer, the impact of all that on my children, and the role it all undoubtedly played in the loss of my son.
I sat on the floor, tucked into a corner of the balcony with my son’s service dog Chloe snuggled up next to me each day. The last night of the conference ended with a dinner at a friend’s house.
That day would have been my son’s 18th birthday.
I stood around the kitchen counter surrounded by women who had also survived different kinds of abuse within contexts of faith. They cried with me as I struggled with my own will to survive, with my own grief over the wreckage of the last five years of my life, with my own blindness for the last twenty-five years that resulted in such harm to my children that I only wished I’d been able to protect.
I went to bed that night in a wallow of tears.
Joy comes in the morning, but grief remains
The next day opened with a nine-hour drive home with a friend. We started by picking up coffee.
After the night before, I was spent, depleted, wrung out.
I needed laughter. To be reminded that life would one day be less horrible. That I had wonderful friends like the one who was driving. And that God was there since my son was born, in the hospital room at his last breath, and even with me as I wrestled with living.
Somehow we started talking about how horrible the dating apps were. Since she was in a healthy marriage that happened before the apps were a thing, she had no idea how bad it was, I told her.
I opened one up and began to read the profiles to her. I showed her the photos of duck-faced dudes flexing in the mirror, lying in bed with the sheet pulled halfway up their chest, or taking their selfie in the bathroom with female products barely hiding their intended infidelity.
We laughed for hours. Profile after profile of terrible prospects. I so desperately needed to laugh and that drive supplied.
Finally I opened the messages section and saw a kind, normal message. A kind, normal profile of someone who loved to hike and was wary of sarcasm.
“I like him,” she said.
“I like him too.”
“He must have a sister, someone who helped him write a normal, nice dating profile.”
He did indeed have a sister. One who, it turns out, gives great hugs and enjoys concerts in caves and board games in the evening, just like we do.
I was very clear when we first started dating: “I have no intention of getting married,” I said.
When you end up staying far too long in a harmful marriage because it’s simply too hard to leave, and you’ve been trained that if you just try hard enough, it will get better, and that the problem is you and you work and work and work to fix all of the you problems but nothing changes except that it gets worse…
And then God finally rescues you…
You are very wary of ever ending up in a similar situation ever again.
So on that evening when the bad, bad, bad swallowed me, I worked hard to get curious about what was happening.
“Unfamiliar,” I finally said.
He was kind. He was patient and funny. He was gentle and interested in me and the things happening in my life. Those qualities didn’t vary based on his mood or the circumstances, they were central to who he was and how he interacted not only with me, but with everyone else too.
“This all feels unfamiliar, this conversation, this interaction, this relationship, your response. My body doesn’t know what to do with it.”
That pivotal moment reframed everything for me and kept me from retreating into my safe, secure, isolated self and throwing away what would turn out to be the next, beautiful chapter of my life.
When for so long, we’ve experienced confusion and harm, belittling and devaluing, it is hard to know what to do with loving, consistent care. Our bodies send off alert signals of “Danger, Danger, Danger” (read that in a Steve Irwin Australian accent), assuming that the unfamiliar means unsafe.
When for so long, we’ve experienced confusion and harm, belittling and devaluing, it is hard to know what to do with loving, consistent care.
We shouldn’t ignore those signals, our bodies are a gift in their alerts attempting to protect us, but we should be curious:
Are there red flags? Yellow flags? Is their behavior consistent? Is it consistent over time, with different people, in various circumstances?
Maybe, just maybe, the very very good things feel so unfamiliar that our alarm bells don’t know what to do with them.
As for me, the unfamiliar has now become familiar.
It’s been a year and eight months and nothing has changed except that it’s gotten even better. I consider the fact that my son’s birthday connected us as a small wink that he would have loved this chapter of my life. But I still miss him so dearly.
As Kate Bowler writes, “I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, the gorgeous and the tragic. Except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out…. Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”1
Bowler, Kate, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved” (Random House 2021).
Thank you for this, Melissa. I recently experienced this when I had to call someone at church to say I was stepping back from a role I’ve had. I was so anxious. In past churches the culture was to serve until burnout and I was afraid of criticism and judgment. Instead I received grace and encouragement. Like you said, the harm from the past can only be healed by trying again in a safe place.