Relationship Road: Authentic, Emotionally Healthy Christianity

By Carole Reitsma

Stop lying awake at night, feeling empty and alone, longing to be seen, known, and heard, exhausted from "trying harder"-thinking you just need to "do more" to get the relational intimacy that you hunger for. Find the intersection of your spiritual identity and emotional health. Relationship Road is the GPS for your so

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887381831

Carole Reitsma

Carole Reitsma has been a Christian for fifty-plus years, was a pastor of an inner-city church, an adjunct professor at a large Christian university, and an intensive care RN, and for the past twenty-five-plus years, has been counseling thousands of Christians as a licensed marriage and family therapist. She is passionate about teaching Christians how to live authentic and emotionally healthy lives. She lives on a small farm in southern California with her husband of forty-four-plus years and her son.www.RelationshipRoad.com

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RELATIONSHIP

ROAD

Authentic, Emotionally

Healthy Christianity

CAROLE REITSMA

Dedication

Psalam 25

4. "Lord, direct me throughout my journey so I can experience your plans for my life.

Reveal the life-paths that are pleasing to you.

5. Escort me along the way; take me by the hand and teach me.

For you are the God of my increasing salvation. I have wrapped my heart into yours!

8. […] Joyfully you teach them the proper path, Even when they go astray.

9. Keep showing the humble your path, and lead them into the best decision.

Bring revelation light that trains them in the truth.

14. […] There’s a private place reserved for the lovers of God, Where they sit near him and receive The revelation-secrets of his promises.

17. […] Turn to me, for my problems seem to be going from bad to worse.

Only you can free me from all these troubles!

20. […] Let it never be said that I trusted you

And you didn’t come to my rescue.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment is such an inadequate word to convey the enormous gratitude for the people I get to live in beautiful, in-to-me-see relationships with and who have helped me author this book. Not only with their expertise, evaluation, and editing but even more so in walking out the principles of Relationship Road with me.

Scott Reitsma, my sweet man! Forty-four years ago, I said, I do, and we have lived through all kinds of pain and sorrow and joy and peace together. And now, in the sunset of our marriage, the tremendous joy and peace and comfort that I still find in your arms is my greatest blessing from our Jesus. Relationship Road has truly been proved out in the crucible of pain in my own life and yours!

Thank you for sticking it out with me on this roller coaster called marriage and living out intimacy with God and me. I am so grateful for your encouragement, help, and cheerleading of me and Relationship Road. Your advice, opinions, and editing prowess made this work possible. My heart bursts with enjoyment and love for you, more today than in all these last forty-four years together!

Oh, Scotty, my sweet son, the joy of watching you grow into an amazing man of God is all my heart could ever want! The first day that I held you in my arms began a journey into the depths of my own soul and childhood. I cherish being your momma! Thank you, sweet son, for your prayers over me and this book. Thank you for your thoughts and especially for your eagle eye thoroughness in validating every verse and every Bible story and every name in Relationship Road.

You are an amazing man of God with wisdom from Him that is beyond your years. I am so grateful that I have gotten to watch what the Lord is doing in your life. You inspire me daily to walk closer to God and to live humbly before Him.

To Patty Schlesinger, my spiritual momma. You really did not know what you were getting into the day I walked into your office so many years ago! And yet, through your compassion, quiet strength, comfort, and your speaking truth into the depths of my soul, God has used you mightily to change my life and so many others after me. I have no words for the gratitude and love I feel toward you. The journey that you took with me from the brink of emotional collapse to acceptance, joy, and peace in emotional health and wholeness, the intimacy and vulnerability you gave me year after year, spoke volumes to my little girl’s heart, and I grew to really love God and myself through you. Thank you for being my Jesus with skin on and for teaching me how to hug!

Jen Nece. Sweet woman of God. I cannot read one page of this book without seeing your edits, your humor, and your comments. Even more than the amazing, selfless work you have done on Relationship Road, your love and encouragement in my life, walking honestly and vulnerably with me and allowing me to do the same, is a most precious gift from the Lord to us!

My spiritual daughter, my sister, my friend, my consoler, my Ruth. I love you beyond any of these labels. I admire you and have loved every moment of watching you grow in love with your Jesus and your commitment to emotional health and spiritual maturity.

Pain + comfort = joy has truly been the melody of our lives together! We have reminded each other so often that redemption wins when we cannot see through the pain in front of us. I trust You, Jesus, has been the shout of truth in our lives together these many years, and He has always come through! I love you so much! Tristan and Alia, Auntie Carole loves you, and it has been my great privilege to watch you grow into beautiful young adults who love Jesus! Bryan, you are so full of laughter and great insight. I love your analytical skills!

Mylene Abrego, a couple of years ago, we sat on my porch and talked about the backburner of my Relationship Road book. True to who you are, unknowingly, you gave me the encouragement to finish Relationship Road! You will never know how that simple conversation changed the trajectory of this book. I have loved watching your journey, and I am grateful that you considered me safe enough to walk with you in your journey to emotional and spiritual health. I love seeing how your work has paid off! Julia, Auntie Carole loves you, and I know that you will be a wonderful spiritual momma to all those you counsel! Hours and hours of playing Gin Rummy with you two gave me so much peace during a time in my life that was full of pain and agony! I will play Gin Rummy with you two any day, as long as Julia sings the whole time!

Grace Floyd, your honesty and openness to correct the spiritual abuse of your childhood and to fight to walk out healthy relationships have been so inspiring to me! Jesus has rebuilt the walls of your city! He has created safety and security within your soul, and I love watching how His redemption wins in your life! You go, girl!

Even though you gals think that I mentored you, the amazing gifts of honesty, vulnerability, and intimacy you have fought to obtain in your relationship with God, yourself, and others have been a precious and invaluable gift to me! Thank you for believing in Relationship Road, especially for how you have taken the principles and, through the pain in your own lives, embraced in-to-me-see! Boy, Relationship Road has proved the principles through the crucible of pain in our lives, hasn’t it? I love this journey of life with the three of you!

Earl Henslin, years ago, you were with Scott and me as Scotty lay in an ICU bed, fighting for his life! Your always calm demeanor, your love for God, and your willingness to walk through so many avenues of pain in our little family’s life gave us the example of the strength of a fatherly man that Scott and I never had. I learned so much from your expertise and experience! I pray that I have done justice to all of the wisdom you have poured into my life!

To the 2001–2004 POTs class at Eastside Christian Church. Your willingness to listen to me teach Relationship Road in its infancy, as God began the work that would become this book, warms my heart. Every time I think of all of you and the selfless ways that you took care of us during Scotty’s hospitalization, I am so thankful and humbled by your love and care for us. To this day, all these years later, when I hear of any of you, I am filled with gratitude for you all!

To all my clients over the years. I have been honored to walk alongside you in your truly courageous journey to finding in-to-me-see. I have sat with you through so much emotional and spiritual healing, which has only happened because of your refusal to live under the lies of the enemy and to boldly take hold of the emotional healing that God longs for each of you. I am humbled and grateful for your willingness to open your spirit and soul in vulnerability to me and for allowing me to watch as you have taken hold of God’s healing power in your lives.

You have validated and affirmed over and over that the L principle, experiencing God’s love and having it flow from you to others, really is His plan for abundance, peace, and joy as we live on Earth and await Jesus’ return! Your work in receiving God’s love, loving yourself, and giving it to others, has proven that God’s love and His way to love always works. It is a never-ending circle that continually increases in greater intimacy with Him! It affirms God’s design and His words, That it isn’t good for man to be alone! My prayer is that our time together in therapy taught you how to walk in love with God, yourself, and others and that you are never lonely, and that your soul is filled with acceptance and peace! Your process of being in a healthy relationship with God, yourself, and others, has proven that Relationship Road always works, no matter the storm!

Table of Contents

Dedication 5

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction 13

Chapter 1: How Did I Get So Lost? 17

Chapter 2: Ripped from His Arms 31

Chapter 3: Can I Get a Different Family Tree, Please? 45

Chapter 4: Three Generations of Dysfunction 63

Chapter 5: Even Paul Got It All Wrong! 79

Chapter 6: The Other Side of Intimacy 101

Chapter 7: King David, the King, the Legend…

the Codependent 125

Chapter 8: Living from Your Spiritual and

Emotional Integrity 139

Chapter 9: The Care and Feeding of Your Soul 155

Chapter 10: Becoming an Emotional Matador 171

Chapter 11: Pain—the Uninvited Visitor 187

Chapter 12: Find the Lie—Run to Abundance 197

Appendix A 241

Appendix B 245

Appendix C 249

Appendix D 255

About the Author 269

Endnotes 271

Introduction

Life began for me in a town in Alabama in the ’60s. My father had grown up in Alabama and was a prominent member of an infamous white supremacist group. On Saturday nights, they had their meetings in a little Baptist church out in the country. My dad would pour 80-proof whiskey down my little throat, force me into the trunk of his car, and take me to a gathering of this group.

After the meeting, I was auctioned off (or given as a favor) to a member who would take my sweet little girl’s body and savagely rape me. Yes, rape me. You see, this group hates everyone. They are racist, and they are hatemongers. And they feel powerful by torture, rape, and abuse of any and all that are below them, including their own wives and children.

Sunday mornings, my family went to church. We hid out in church with many other of this group’s families. I would look at the men’s shoes in order to recognize them from the night before when they were in hoods and robes. These men used the Bible to twist and condone their beliefs in their superiority through extreme rigidity, control, and male authoritarianism, and it kept all of us quiet and in fear of them. The popular church denomination that we went to had a fear-based and strict fundamentalist relationship with the Bible but without any understanding of grace and mercy and peace and love in the Holy Spirit. My mother often quoted Scripture while she beat me in order to justify her horrific anger and abuse.

My dad was also a serial adulterer and a pedophile. I was four when the sexual abuse began with him, and by the time I was in high school (in California), he was selling me to whoever would show up at the warehouse, pay the price, and do every vile form of sexual abuse you can imagine to me.

The biggest mistake that my parents made was hiding out in the church. Even while my little mind and body were dissociated from the abuse, my spirit starved for the Word of God. And I found great hope in the Bible. I thought that, just maybe, if I prayed hard enough, or was good enough, the fear-based God that I knew would save me.

My spiritual walk was genuine and heartfelt. I taught others about God. I often admonished them with the scripture, It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31, NKJV). My spirituality was one of shaking with fear and not wanting to go to hell.

Hell was already here on Earth for me. My emotional being and soul were so very damaged. My body still bears the scars of torture and abuse. But my spiritual being was alive with the hope of the good news of God…and hoping beyond hope that He would someday accept and love me.

There was a hole straight through the center of my being that was filled with so much shame and guilt and fear that someone would find out that I was a monster, and especially that I was worthless.

I bet you can just imagine how emotionally damaged I was. Addiction, codependency, violence, abuse on every level, and dysfunction were rampant and hidden from the purview of the outside world. The shameful secrets of my father’s sadism and my mother’s ritual abuse were placed in me as if they were my own. There was no way out, and truly there was no way to tell the secrets and live. That same hole inside of me kept my childhood torture and abuse a secret, even from me. The lies from the enemy in childhood kept me a prisoner from a real relationship with God or myself or my husband. True intimacy was a luxury that I could not afford. Because true intimacy meant being seen, known, heard, and believed. If I were seen, the shame—the soul murder that I lived with and the information of my past would annihilate me. I had one really great survival skill…hiding.

I got married at nineteen to a wonderful man, and eight years later, we had Scotty—the love of our lives. The career, the spouse, the house, the child, the dog, and the money in the bank could not fill the hole inside of me that threatened to swallow me up.

I especially feared for my little boy, but I did not know why. Everywhere I went, there was this looming darkness and the threat of very real danger for my son. I hid from everyone, especially myself…until my son’s fourth birthday.

As Scotty got closer to turning four (the age when I had been first abused by my father), my momma’s heart for my son and that huge hole inside me could no longer contain the secrets of my childhood. In the very depths of me, I feared for my little boy’s safety, especially when my parents wanted to see him. The first thought that broke through my emotional dissociation was the realization of how much I could not stand my father’s hands and how that was not normal. I even checked with friends to see if they hated their father’s fingers as I did. And with that realization, the self-awareness of the secrets in my soul began.

In my newly found self-awareness, I found the answers to why my world always felt so dark and dangerous and why I feared for my little boy’s safety. I essentially blew an emotional gasket and told everyone who had anything to do with them how unsafe my parents were, and especially I kept my sweet little boy away from them. The awakening of grace in my life was dramatic. As soon as I realized my childhood fear was of my earthly parents, my understanding and relationship with my heavenly father skyrocketed!

The grace in my life was like bringing color to my black-and-white world. And as I opened up and dared to look at and process the abuse of my childhood, the hole in the center of my soul began to shrink. The most surprising part of the process was that my spiritual walk with God became alive and joyous as my emotional health grew.

The more emotionally healthy I became, the clearer God’s Word became about the nature of our soul and our emotional health. I found that in emotional and spiritual health, I found the place where my spirit and my soul cooperate, and I can joyously live life in intimacy, and I am truly seen, known, and heard by God, myself, and others. After many years of personal counseling, Bible study, professional licensing, and as a college professor, I created Relationship Road—the intersection of spiritual maturity and emotional health, which is how to return to relational intimacy with God, yourself, and others. And the lessons of how to live in abundance, peace, and intimacy became the cry of my heart for others to learn as well.

Relationship Road became the GPS of my soul. At any moment of the day, I can see where I am in intimacy with God, myself, and others, and I can quickly find my way out of deprivation and into abundance. No longer do I have to live in confusion, feeling empty and lonely, and without a way of understanding why or how to change the trajectory of my life.

Most of you, I pray, have not lived a horrendous life of abuse, and I am sure some of you have. But all of us have been born into a fallen world, and therefore, our emotional health has suffered, and consequently, our relationships have too. If you are like me and keep trying harder, praying longer, and trying to do enough to feel closer to God, then Relationship Road is for you.

If you find yourself being too hard on yourself or lacking love and acceptance for yourself, then Relationship Road is for you.

If you began your married or dating life in blissful love, and now you find yourself lonely, even when you are with him/her, then Relationship Road is for you.

If you have secrets and shame hidden deep inside that you can’t dare to whisper to someone else, then Relationship Road is for you.

And finally, if you are absolutely satisfied with your spiritual and emotional health and live in intimacy with God, yourself, and others, Relationship Road is still for you!

Chapter 1:

How Did I Get So Lost?

Excuse me, how do I get to Boyle Heights from here? I asked the gas station attendant.

Lady, you are in the middle of Watts! How did you get here? he answered with fear in his voice.

With those words, my heart sank within me, I am in Watts? It was the middle of the night, and, as a mobile acute hemodialysis nurse, I had been called out to an emergency. A woman had overdosed, and the emergency room staff was doing CPR to keep her alive while they waited for me to get there with the blood-cleaning dialysis machine.

In my sleepy haze, I had not written down the directions very well, and I found myself at 2 a.m. in an extremely dangerous situation. The gasoline attendant’s declaration, Lady, you are in Watts! really said, You, lady, a woman driving alone at 2 a.m. in a state of emergency, are not even aware of your surroundings and are smack dab in the middle of one of the most crime-infested places in America. You are alone, lost, without protection, and your presence here screams vulnerability. You are a victim waiting to happen.

I was suddenly aware of the danger surrounding me and of the attendant sitting in a concrete room looking out at me from behind bulletproof glass. The only door to his concrete room was protected by steel bars. The protection around him told me of the danger I was in…and of my very real and palpable need to get out of that place. I needed to get to a place of safety and security again.

But I needed help. I needed clear, concise directions from someone who knew where I was and where I needed to go.

So many times in my emotional and spiritual life, I have found myself in similar circumstances. I have awoken from a relational fog to find myself in a place where I feel totally alone, vulnerable, emotionally injured, and absolutely lost…not knowing how I got there or how to get out. The need to get back to a place of relational safety and security with God, myself, and my loved ones is great—but how do I get there?

Like Hansel and Gretel, I cannot just go back and retrace my steps because the birds of pain, resentment, and bitterness have stolen my bread of life. I find myself longing for a time when I felt closer to God, which helped me feel content in myself, which then helped me know I have something to offer the ones I love.

I needed clear, concise, and personal directions. However, if the gas station attendant had handed me a map of the US, or even if he tried to guide me with more specific directions and said something like, You know that broken-down house with three broken windows about a mile back, in the row of broken-down houses, in the sea of broken-down houses with broken windows… You get the idea…these directions and maps would not be helpful but would only prove to frustrate me and add to my panic. I needed very clear and understandable directions of where I was and how to get to safety! Now!

So often in the religious, corporate Christian culture of today, it seems as though everyone is holding a global religious map—and yet I can feel so lost and clueless to a simple, clear-cut understanding of where I am right now in a relationship with God, myself, and my loved ones. Even worse, the spiritual gas station attendants in my life (my pastors, teachers, or church leaders) are often locked up in their own little concrete boxes—fearful or judgmental, staring at me—incredulous as to how I got myself in such a lost and vulnerable state! Religious global maps are not helpful when I need a GPS for my soul!

The fascinating thing about a place of safety, a place that feels whole and right and good for me, is that it can be so taken for granted by me—until it is 2 a.m. and I am in the middle of darkness and danger, lost and clueless.

Relationship Road is such a road map—the intersection of emotional and spiritual health. It is a straightforward way to know where I am in my relationship with God, myself, and others. It will help me know where I am when I get lost and how to get to safety: the beautiful place of safety that the Old Testament calls shalom. Shalom means peace and wholeness, with nothing missing and nothing broken. Shalom is also alluded to in the New Testament and is called the kingdom of heaven, which is love, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit. In Relationship Road, we simply call it abundance. Abundance is the original state of relationship that God designed for Himself and man…a state of intimacy.

You see, God made us, in the beginning, to love and be loved by Him—with all our heart, soul, and strength. And secondly, He made us to love our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27). We are created with the deep need to be loved by God and to express that love back to Him. When we experience and reciprocate His love, we know that we are loveable, and then, and only then, do we