A parasite doesn’t kill its host. If it did, it would destroy its own source of life. Instead, it feeds carefully. It takes what it needs while ensuring the host is just healthy enough to continue supplying it. The host slowly weakens but the parasite grows stronger.

In a parasitic relationship you are food. You are the source of needed supply. You will weaken physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually but the parasite does not mind as long as you continue to feed it.

What Is a Parasitic Relationship?

A parasitic relationship exists whenever one person, or one system, becomes entitled to another person’s life. You are the host and, therefore, what you want, what you need is irrelevant as long as you remain available to be used.

Healthy relationships give and receive. Healthy churches give and receive. Healthy families give and receive. A parasite is different, it only takes.

It assumes access. It begins believing that your emotional energy, your time, your gifts, your stability, your compassion, your wisdom, your labor, your availability, and your sacrifice belong to it. It doesn’t ask. It is entitled to your life.

Your “yes” becomes assumed. Your “no” becomes offensive.

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The Parasite Doesn’t Think It’s Wrong

Sucking the life from another is normal for them. They’re surviving the only way they know how. They make no apology for they don’t believe they are doing anything wrong.

The emotionally dependent husband isn’t usually thinking, “How can I manipulate her?” He’s thinking, “I need her to do this and this and this for me so I don’t have to.”

The parent isn’t trying to erase their adult daughter. They simply cannot imagine functioning without her. Her time is theirs as they need it.

The friend isn’t consciously controlling. She’s trying to regulate her anxiety through you so she feels entitled to call and keep you on the phone for hours.

Even institutions do this. Organizations become dependent upon certain people carrying enormous emotional and practical weight until those people no longer exist as individuals but as resources.

The parasite doesn’t see itself as stealing. It doesn’t view itself as doing anything wrong. It sees itself as surviving. It takes what it needs without considering what it does to the host. It believes you are its legitimate source of supply. Which means something profound happens the moment the host begins setting boundaries.

The parasite experiences the boundary as harm, deprivation, unfair.

If you’ve always regulated my emotions and suddenly stop...you’re hurting me.

If you’ve always solved my problems and now insist I act like an adult...you’re abandoning me.

If you’ve always volunteered and now prioritize your life...you’re becoming selfish.

If you’ve always absorbed my anxiety and now refuse to be my emotional dumping ground...you’re being unloving.

Nothing actually changed except one thing. Access. The parasite had mistaken access for ownership. They don’t see that you have a right to not be siphoned.

This Is Why Boundaries Feel So Wrong To Them

When you refuse to be fed upon, the parasite’s survival strategy has been interrupted. If you don’t feed it, comfort it, supply it then it is lost. It does not have within itself what it needs and does not know how to find it apart from you.

The parasite cannot imagine that the host has needs equal to its own. From its perspective, the host exists only to feed and care for it. Its needs are legitimate, the host’s are not. To not supply is to steal.

If I believe I need you to survive, then your refusal feels cruel.

So I pressure. I plead. I shame. I remind you of everything I’ve done for you. I question your love. I tell you you’ve changed. Not necessarily because I’m evil. Because I need access restored. I am a child screaming to be fed and you will not feed me.

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The Church Can Be Parasitic

Churches are made of people. And people build systems. Those systems become parasitic and begin feeding on women instead of feeding women. The church cannot function without women being available to be drained.

Think about how often women become the emotional infrastructure of the church.

They organize. Teach children. Cook meals. Comfort the grieving. Lead Bible studies. Mentor younger women. Visit the sick. Remember birthdays. Carry the emotional climate of the congregation. Keep everything running.

In true parasite form the church feels entitled to women as supply but do not see them as valuable for any other reason. They do not want women to fully live the life God gave them for that would jeopardize their entitlement. Hosts are not people, they are things to be used.

When women start claiming that they are equal and not there to only serve men, they are told that wanting to fully use the gifts God gave them is pride. Their role is to submit happily to the parasite using them for its own gain and deny that they have any other purpose.

Leadership becomes reserved. Teaching becomes restricted. Questions become rebellion.

Their gifts are welcomed as long as those gifts keep the system functioning. The moment those same gifts begin challenging the system... access is threatened.

When a church continually receives life from women while discouraging them from fully becoming who Christ created them to be, something has gone terribly wrong.

Healthy churches nourish people. Parasitic systems consume them.

The Real Prize Is Your Sovereignty

The greatest thing a parasite steals isn’t your time. It’s your ownership of yourself. What it really needs is for you to surrender your sovereignty so that its access becomes unquestioned.

The husband tells the wife, who wants him to be a partner in their life rather than suck the life from her, that she is a nag. He doesn’t want to participate, he wants access without accountability. He wants her life, her time, her body to be his. He is a parasite. He doesn’t care that she is exhausted, overwhelmed, overburdened. He just wants his continued entitlement to her soul.

And, he often gets it.

Women are conditioned to be drained. They are groomed to believe that wanting a life that is theirs is ungodly, ungrateful, and unbiblical. Submit to the draining. Submit to your role as source of supply. Submit to the parasitic relationship. And, they do.

Once that happens, they begin running the scripts inside their own mind. That’s the deepest level of parasitism - the host submits to being forever used.

You stop asking, “Who did Christ create me to be?” and start asking, “What do they need from me?”

That is the loss of sovereignty. And once you’ve surrendered sovereignty, you’ll willingly feed anything that convinces you it has a right to your life.

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Next Week

If this resonated with you, subscribe so you don’t miss Part 2. We’ll explore why so many compassionate women become hosts in parasitic relationships—and how the hidden scripts we learned long ago keep us there.

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There is a conversation happening about you. It has been happening for a very long time. It happens in pulpits and in elder meetings. It happens in books with serious covers and footnotes. It happens in podcasts where men with good hair discuss, calmly and at length, what you are permitted to do with the one life God gave you.

Can she teach? Can she lead? Can she preach, vote, pastor, prophesy, or speak when men are in the room? Can she, can she, can she?

You were invited into that conversation. Not to settle it. To stay in it. You were handed a chair at the table of your own limitation and told that politely participating in a discussion of what you can do was the godly thing to do.

Be humble. Be teachable. Keep the conversation going.

So you did some research. You read the complementarian argument and the egalitarian argument. Weighed the Greek. Considered the historical context. You listened to both sides. You sat in the small group where everyone was very respectful and nothing was ever decided. And you told yourself that all of this careful, prayerful, endless discussion was a form of progress.

I want to tell you something that took me far too long to learn.

The debate is the trap.

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The Deception of Productive Sounding Circles

The debate feels like something is happening. It has the texture of progress. You are reading, thinking, praying, discussing. Your brain is busy. Your calendar has things on it. You feel engaged, serious, intellectually honest.

But put your hand on your actual life and ask one question. Has anything changed?

Are you doing the thing God put in you? Are you teaching, building, leading, creating, going? Or are you still in the waiting room, magazine in your lap, certain that any minute now the conversation will reach a verdict that releases you to live?

It will not. That is not what the conversation is for.

The conversation is designed to keep you seated. Every minute you spend defending your right to exist fully is a minute you are not spending existing fully. The argument consumes the very energy you would have used to live. It is motion without movement. It is running on a wheel and mistaking the spinning for a journey.

I have watched brilliant women spend a decade in that conversation. Ten years of articles and rebuttals. Ten years of proving, explaining, justifying. And at the end of the decade, the men who control the table have not changed their minds, and the woman has not changed her life. She is exactly where she started, only older, and more tired, and somehow convinced that the exhaustion would actually move the needle.

It was not holy. It was theft. And she handed over the key herself.

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You Cannot Win a Game Designed to Keep You Playing

In many corners of the church, the debate about what women can do is not a search for truth. It is a holding pattern. It is the thing they offer you instead of your freedom.

As long as you are debating, you are not leading. As long as you are explaining, you are not building. As long as you are asking, you are not living. The conversation is not a road to your release. It is the fence around the yard, and they have convinced you the fence is a discussion you are welcome to join.

You will not argue your way out. You cannot win permission from people whose authority depends on never granting it. The verdict you are waiting for is not coming, because the people you are waiting on have no incentive to deliver it. It is the same reason Congress will never vote for term limits and take away their power.

The debate is not stalled. The debate is working exactly as designed. So stop waiting for it to end. Walk out while it is still going.

What God Already Settled

I am not waiting for a committee to tell me I am fully human. God already did that on page one.

“So God created humans in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27.

Both. The image of God in both. Not the image of God in the man and a supporting role in the woman. Both bear the image. Both were blessed. Both were told to be fruitful, to fill the earth, to subdue it, to have dominion. That was the original commission, and it was given to her with the same breath it was given to him.

When God needed a judge to lead a nation, He raised up Deborah, and she led, and the nation had peace for forty years. When God wanted the news of the resurrection delivered first, He gave it to women, and they carried the most important message in human history to the men who were hiding. When the early church met, it met in the home of Lydia, and in the home of Priscilla, who corrected the theology of a gifted male preacher and was commended for it. When Paul listed the people who labored with him, he named Phoebe a deacon and Junia outstanding among the apostles.

These are not exceptions God apologized for. These are women God used, on purpose, without a disclaimer.

So I am settled. I have read the arguments. I have done the work. My other books make the full case.And the verdict is this. You are made in the image of God. You are commissioned. You are gifted. You are called. You do not need the table to agree before you go and live your God-given life.

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Some People Will Disapprove. Oh Well.

Let me be honest about what this will cost you. It is going to cost you.

When you exit the debate and just live your life, some people will think you have gotten proud. Some will say you are rebellious, unsubmissive, deceived, worldly, divisive. Some will quote a verse at you. Some of those will be people you love. Some will be people whose approval you have spent your whole life collecting like a currency you were sure you would need someday.

You will not need it. You cannot spend it because they won’t let you. And the day you stop trying to earn it is the day you get your life back.

So here is what I want you to be able to say, out loud, “Some people are not going to like this. Oh well. I will live my life as God has designed anyway.”

That is not arrogance. That is freedom. It is the simple recognition that you cannot live a God-sized life and a small-enough-to-keep-everyone-comfortable life at the same time. You have to choose. And the women who change anything, in their homes, in their churches, in the world, have all chosen the same way. They chose the life. They let the disapproval fall where it falls.

The Decision Is the Whole Thing

This isn’t about what you feel. It is a decision.

You are leaving the conversation. You are not slamming the door. You are not writing a manifesto. You are not announcing it on the internet or starting a fight at Thanksgiving. You are simply, quietly, finally, getting up from the chair and walking out into your actual life while the discussion continues behind you, without you.

Let them talk. Talking is what they do. You are going to live.

You have exited the debate. Now let’s enter your life.

*I am done debating whether I am allowed. I have my answer. I am going to live.*

Today, you stopped asking the room. Tomorrow, start on the voice in your head that is there to limit you and teach it to love who you are.

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Dana was fifty-one when she sat across from me with her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone white. Her grown son had moved back home three years earlier “just for a few months” while he got back on his feet. He had not gotten back on his feet. He slept until noon, left his dishes in the sink, spoke to her with a sharpness that would have made a stranger gasp, and asked her for money every few weeks in a tone that suggested she owed it to him. When I asked Dana why she kept giving, she said the thing I have heard a thousand times in a thousand different rooms.

“You don’t understand what he’s been through,” she said. “If you knew his story, you’d understand why he is the way he is.”

She was right. Most people who wound the ones who love them have a story. But Dana had taken his story and turned it into a permission slip. She understood his pain so completely that she had stopped requiring him to do anything about it. She felt his struggle so deeply that she had agreed to struggle in his place. She had become the shock absorber for a life that was not hers to cushion.

That is toxic empathy.

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What Toxic Empathy Actually Is

Empathy is one of the most powerful strengths a human being can carry. It lets you understand another person, connect with them, sit with them in their pain instead of leaving them alone in it. It lets you love deeply and perceive accurately and act with real compassion. Your empathy is not the problem. Your empathy is a gift.

But a gift without boundaries wounds. And empathy, when it loses its boundaries, does something quiet and dangerous. It begins to distort.

It starts as feeling with someone. That is healthy. That is connection. Then it slides into feeling for them, where their emotion becomes your emotion and you cannot tell anymore whose feeling you are carrying. Then it slides further, into feeling instead of them, where you do the grieving and the worrying and the fixing that they should be doing for themselves. And at the very bottom, it slides into the worst place of all, where you feel their consequences while they feel nothing at all. They make the mess. You lie awake. They make the choice. You pay the bill. They cause the harm. You carry the shame.

That is the line. Toxic empathy is not compassion, and it is not kindness, and it is not love, though it wears all three like a costume. Toxic empathy is the reflex to absorb pain that was never yours, to protect people from the natural consequences of their own behavior, and to carry emotional loads that belong on someone else’s back. It is empathy without boundaries. It is empathy without discernment. It is empathy that slowly erases the woman doing the feeling.

If you have ever been wrung dry by another person’s emotions, if you have swallowed your own truth to keep someone else comfortable, if you have taken more responsibility for someone’s healing than they were willing to take themselves, then you already know what toxic empathy feels like from the inside. You have lived there. You may be living there right now.

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The Three Things That Turn Empathy Toxic

Healthy empathy is grounded. It keeps its feet on its own floor. Toxic empathy is consuming. It leaves its own floor and moves into someone else’s house and forgets the way home. There are three specific shifts that take a beautiful strength and turn it against the woman who carries it.

The first is over-identification. You do not simply understand what someone feels. You absorb it. Their anxiety becomes the knot in your stomach. Their sadness becomes the weight on your shoulders. You take their pain personally, as though their suffering were an accusation against you. You merge your emotions with theirs until you genuinely cannot tell where you stop and they begin. A friend calls upset, and three hours after she hangs up and goes to bed, you are still upset, carrying a feeling she has already put down. That is not connection. That is a loss of self disguised as love.

The second is compulsive responsibility. Your reflex, before you have even thought about it, becomes the same three sentences on a loop. I’ll fix it. I’ll handle it. I’ll take care of it. Underneath those sentences live beliefs you have never once examined. If they are hurting, I should help. If they are upset, it is my job to calm them. If they suffer a consequence, they will fall apart, and it will be my fault for letting it happen. So you step in again and again until responsibility has quietly replaced equality. A relationship between equals becomes a relationship between a caretaker and a person being carried. And no one ever decided that out loud. It just happened, one rescue at a time.

The third is the most dangerous. Toxic empathy gives moral permission for harm. You allow people to mistreat you because you understand why they do it. You take the disrespect, the moods that swing without warning, the manipulation, the broken promises, the coldness, the cruelty, the lies, and you run every one of them through the same machine. He only acts this way because of his childhood. She only says these things because she’s hurting. He doesn’t mean it, he just gets overwhelmed. You become so fluent in explaining the pain behind the behavior that you stop noticing the behavior is crushing you.

Pain does not excuse harm. Ever. A person can have the most heartbreaking story in the world and still not be allowed to bleed on you for it. Understanding why someone hurts you is not the same as agreeing to letting them hurt you. You can hold deep compassion for what made a person who they are and still refuse to be their whipping post.

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The Beliefs Holding It All Up

Every toxic-empathy pattern stands on a foundation of beliefs you absorbed so long ago that you have never thought to question them. They do not feel like beliefs. They feel like facts. They feel like reality. They feel like simply being a good person. Let me drag a few of them into the light, because a belief loses most of its power the moment you can see it clearly.

If I don’t help them, they’ll fall apart. This belief turns you into someone’s life-support machine, and a life-support machine is not allowed to leave the room. It cannot rest. It cannot have needs. It exists only to keep someone else breathing. You were never meant to be a machine.

If I set boundaries, I’m being unkind. This is exactly backward, and it may be the most expensive lie in the whole book. A boundary is one of the most compassionate things you can offer another human being, because it tells them the truth about where they stand and gives them the dignity of carrying their own weight.

Their pain matters more than my peace. This is not humility. Humility does not require you to disappear. This is learned self-erasure, taught to you by someone, somewhere, who benefited from your willingness to vanish.

If I don’t step in, who will? So you become the permanent volunteer for every emotional emergency in every life you touch, on call twenty-four hours a day for a job no one is paying you to do and no one will thank you for.

They’re hurting, so I can’t hold them accountable. And there it is again. Pain does not cancel accountability. The most loving thing you can do for a hurting person is often to expect more of them, not less.

I’m strong enough to handle this. Maybe you are. That is the trap. Your strength has become the reason you keep getting handed loads that were never yours. Strength misused does not build anything. It just lets you carry destruction longer than a weaker woman could.

Where It Always Ends

I wish I could tell you that toxic empathy leads somewhere different for each woman, but it does not. It ends in the same handful of places almost every time, and you may recognize the address.

It ends in emotional exhaustion, a low constant hum of overwhelm that you have lived with so long you have stopped calling it anything. It ends in identity loss, the strange day you realize you no longer know what you want, only what everyone around you needs. It ends in self-neglect, your own feelings filed somewhere at the bottom of a list that never reaches you. It ends in resentment, the bitter math of giving far more than is healthy and receiving far less than you need, even though you swore you would never become resentful. And it ends, finally, in burnout, when your nervous system simply puts down what your willpower refused to.

Dana reached all five. By the time she sat in front of me, she was exhausted and unrecognizable to herself and quietly furious at a son she also deeply loved. The empathy that had once made her a wonderful mother had, without boundaries, made her his enabler. The same gift, pointed in a destructive direction.

Here is what I told her, and what I am telling you. The goal is not to feel less. You are not here to become hard. The goal is to feel with your feet still on your own floor. To love people without dissolving into them. To understand a person’s pain and still hand it back to them, and say, this is yours to carry, and I believe you can.

That is not the death of your empathy. That is its healing. And it begins the moment you can name the thing for what it is.

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Chaos theory says that every small change can lead to a significant, unpredictable, and unexpected outcome. So a butterfly that flaps its wings in Zimbabwe can cause a tornado in Tennessee. Not right away, of course, but the ripples from its tiny action can be felt around the world.

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that when one object exerts a force on another, the second object exerts a force of equal strength in the opposite direction on the first object.

When you throw a pebble into a pond, the action of the pebble hitting the water creates ripples that spread outward. The bigger the pebble, the bigger the wave. When you change something in your life, it has the same effect.

The point is that everything has an impact on something else i.e. Newton’s third law. We do not always know what that impact will be, we just know it’s going to happen. Change is inevitable because there are always actions and reactions happening in our lives.

Competing reactions.

When ripples collide with other ripples they interfere with each other. That can create patterns where they combine and make larger waves or cancel each other out. Our lives are not independent even if that is our desire. It is constant waves coming from us and to us.

Things can get pretty complex with interactions bouncing off one another. It’s how we get triggered, trigger others and create new waves.

What I do can impact what you do and send off a wave in a whole new direction. Our ripples can also collaborate and make far greater changes than they could alone.

Life ripples, from others we know and some that we have never heard of (the butterfly in Zimbabwe), are continually lapping against our lives. Good, bad, big, small, physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, health, government etc. are all in play.

Ripples hit us daily. Sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere and others we see headed our way and we have to brace for impact.

That means it is probably a good idea to see what pebbles are being dropped into us from the outside world as well as those we choose to plunk into our own hearts.

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Everything has meaning, everything has potential impact.

Nothing is arbitrary or without some importance. Even the daily mundane impacts our nervous system, our motivation, and dreams. Sleeping, eating, daily self-care, or lack of it, will affect our mood, behavior and walk with God.

Our reactions to life are our ripples running into the other ripples hitting us from all sides.

You’ve probably guessed that this month our topic is how what we do or don’t do, what is done to us or isn’t, how we are intentional about our lives or laid back, all determine what impacts us and how. It all matters.

Have solid boundaries on what can be dropped into you.

Life changing ripples can come from seemingly insignificant interactions. Books. Movies. Music. Sermons. Nature. People. The Word. Old wounds and new.

We cause ripples in our lives by what we think and do, what we ingest and release, and who we are with. We don’t think about it much but every day we live in a very active pond.

It’s your life, your pond, you can control to some extent who has access to it. You have almost total control of what you bring into your life that has the potential to impact you in good and bad ways.

Be holy for I Am holy.

Recently the Lord impressed upon me that some movies I watched, while seemingly not a big deal, were creating ripples that would impact who I am. I immediately chose to remove them.

He also asked me to add in a deeper study of a particular book of the Bible. I’m on it.

What did God do? He removed those pebbles that disturbed my pond (sorry, but I’m going to stick with this metaphor the whole way through this letter) and added in one big one that would push out other ripples and overpower them.

I’ve heard many people say that they had to stop watching the news or remove themselves from social media or add in Christian music, stay away from certain people, change churches etc. to clean up and protect their hearts.

Awareness is the first step in regulating not only how the world impacts us but also how our daily habits and thinking and interactions do as well. Then we can drop in new pebbles or stop plunking in what is not advantageous. What if you were totally aware of the plunk, plunk that happens daily? Might that empower you to have a bit more control over your life?

When God points out what He would like us to control, it is for our good. Our obedience in even a small way can have an immediate, as well as an eternal impact. So can our disobedience.

We will start here.

• What obvious pebbles are dropping into you?

• What might change in your life if you were intentional and protective about what you allowed to stir your waters?

• Where are you obedient and those ripples are impacting your life (that can include how others react)?

• Where are you not obedient and what impact is that making on your life, heart, thinking?

Ripples are inevitable. Some are meant to destroy us.

We have an enemy trying to drop boulders into the waters nearest us hoping to overpower the good that God drops into our lives continually. He’s good at it and he seems to throw them at us from different directions so that we are hit in many different ways at the same time. We end up on defense instead of asking God Himself to drop into our lives to overpower what he is attempting.

My goal is to have God be the biggest impact at the center of my life so that everything else hits His ripples and is absorbed before it can do any damage to my heart.

Let’s flap our wings and create some ripples.

Do not discount your impact on your world. Your wing flapping might seem as significant as a butterfly’s to you but remember that it can change the world down the road.

Marla brought me to Christ and I have never been the same. She was the pebble God used and what she did has rippled through me to change a thousand lives. It is still causing waves. She had no idea that our conversations that night would ripple into my seminary degree, transformational counseling, books, and a life dedicated to loving God and making Him known.

Recognize that what you do, and even what you don’t, is impactful. Be faithful in small ways and then allow God to use that to ripple however He sees fit. You may not know what happened from your faithfulness until you meet someone in eternity that was impacted by you.

Be careful and intentional of the ripples you cause. Our ripples might be changing something in someone met only yesterday or on the other side of the world. We don’t know what those ripples might be but we can absolutely know that they are happening. If you were to carry a bag of pebbles just so you could stir up the waters, what might they be?

Pebbles that bring life & light

• The Word

• Prayer

• Study – the life-changing kind

• Connection with healthy others

• Being in God’s creation

• Creativity

• A grateful heart…

Pebbles that weigh you down

• Social Media of all kinds

• The inner bully

• Unhealthy connections

• A too small life

• Fear

• Staying silent

• Lacking purpose…

Little things, small waves that lap at us constantly can be ignored or discounted but they add up. Water is powerful.

It splits, dissolves and transports even great rocks. It can create new pathways with ravines and canyons. It flows around, under or over obstacles. It’s flow affects habitats and the life around it. Clean water is life giving.

Your pond and what you allow in it is important.

• Where are you flapping your wings and impacting the world?

• What decisions are others making that impact you?

I’ve been working with a woman in another state. Her wounds are being healed, she is being set free and finding a purpose for her life with Christ. I expect that she will be sending out ripples in vast amounts. Her pastor’s wife recommended me to her. I don’t know anyone in that state so couldn’t figure out who it was. But the last time I talked with her she told me who the woman was.

I’d worked with the woman who referred me almost two decades ago. She’d become a doctor, had three children and the work we had done together was still great enough that she remembered me to another.

The pebble Marla dropped into me and the pebble I dropped into my former client are still rippling out decades later.

Take time this month to clarify what you allow to be dropped into you. Think of what you can add, delete and change to make the purity of your butterfly flapping impactful. Never doubt that God will honor every effort of yours to be holy before Him and spread His holiness around.

Just think what we can do together.

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I come to you, point my finger and say, "You are a duck."

Do you actually need to argue with me that you are not a duck? Will you desperately point out that you don't have webbed feet, a bill and feathers?

When I bring up that I've seen you swimming so, therefore, you are indeed a duck, will you then try to prove that humans happen to swim too?

If you argue about this rather than telling me that I am crazy, you have the perfect example of what happens with our inner bully.

We fight against the accusation when they are really just “duck thoughts” and can be ignored.

The great accuser of our soul

Most of us have an inner critic so we don’t need others to accuse us.

That voice is relentless. It won't stop with "I can't believe I did that." It continues with "I can't get anything right." "I'm such a loser." I always mess things up." "Why does anyone even want to be around me." I'm so stupid." "Everyone probably hates me." "I wouldn't want to be around me."

And, on and on and on. Duck thoughts.

Since all of this was in 1st person rather than someone standing there pointing their finger, we think it is our own voice. It's not. It comes from outside and has taken up residence in our minds.

It started most likely when you were young. Parents, teachers, abusers all gave you messages.

"You must be perfect to be loved."
"You are worthless and incompetent."
"You are lazy and never do your best."
"Why can't you be more like your sister?

The messages told you that you were not enough, you are imperfect, flawed, stupid, incompetent etc. Then you internalized the voice to "help" you become worthy, loved and significant.

Instead of a benevolent coach it became a malevolent tyrant. Now, it verbally abuses you constantly.

Just like you don’t have to prove you are not a duck, you don't have to engage in proving that you are not what the accuser tells you. Instead, just tell yourself, "NO AGREEMENT!" Or, to make it more obvious that the accusation is false, say, “I don’t argue with duck thoughts.

Defending and arguing are taking up your time and energy. As long as you are focused on the duck thought you are not free to actually live your life in Christ.

Don’t invite it in for tea

KNOCK, KNOCK

You open the door and there is the inner bully pointing its finger at you.

"You are a _____" You can fill in the blank here with its personal message to you.

So, you invite it in to discuss it. It then proceeds to point out everything you've ever done that "proves" its lie is true. You join in by adding to the conversation instances it hasn't pointed out.

Your head drops, your heart hurts, you are what it said.

Stop it!!!

Slam the door in its face. Turn to Christ who is always with you and ask Him what is true.

You: "I'm worthless."

Christ: "Seriously? Didn't I value you enough to die for you? Aren't I here with you now as I always am? You can’t possibly be worthless."

Funny that we listen to the lies more intently and believe them more readily than we do God's words to us.

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Only Christ can reflect the true you

Take every thought captive to Christ. Every. Single. One.

If Christ would not think it about you then you shouldn’t either. Christ never condemns. He does not point His finger at you. He pointed it at Himself on the cross.

You have to stop the accusing thought the moment it comes to you. Refuse to give it any of your time, none of your heart and all of your resistance.

Have you ever seen a circus mirror?

You stand in front of one and it makes you short. Another makes you look taller or fatter or just weird. They are funny because you know that they are not an accurate reflection of who you are.

We see one another through our own imperfect understanding of life. We also see ourselves imperfectly. So, if you are trying to find yourself by looking at others, you will always get a warped reflection back.

Except with Christ.

He knows you better than you could ever know yourself. And, He sees the true you - the perfected, glorified, called, chosen, adopted, loved and cherished eternal you. This is why we must go to Him if we are to know the truth about ourselves.

He will gently show us where we need to grow. He is careful with our hearts and understands that this side of heaven we are still in process.

Look only to Him to find yourself and don't accept anyone's warped reflection of you.

The truth will set you free

We don't get to pick and choose what to believe about ourselves if our desire is to follow God. We are only to believe what God says. He alone knows who we are and will become. He has the truth.

His truth says that you are loved, accepted, valuable, significant, chosen, holy, and that you are His child. He says that He sees you in eternity, holy, perfect, and glorified even though you do not yet experience it.

It's a done deal. All hell can't stop you from going to live with Him forever if you have placed your faith in what Christ has done for you.

All that is left for you is to accept His truth about you, to go deeper in your love relationship with Christ and to continue to grow in Him. Ignore the ridiculous duck thoughts. Embrace His thoughts of you.

Like a child, you will fall many times learning to walk on this path to the true you. But, since He already sees the completed, matured you in eternity, He is not discouraged when you do fall. We don't belittle and berate a child for those normal falls as they learn to walk. We need to give ourselves the same grace and understanding every time we stumble.

Freedom comes when my head and heart believe the same things as the Lord and I see myself through His eyes alone.

Continue to speak to your heart the way you would to a child. "I love you. You are amazing and I like you. You are growing up each day and I can't wait to see who you become. I am here for you always and I believe in you."

Christ gives you grace each day. Join Him in doing the same thing.

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“What are you thinking trying to be a leader? Maybe you have a ‘Jezebel spirit.’ Don’t you know your place? Do you not understand that your godly beauty is in your submission and serving? It does not matter whether or not the Spirit has gifted you. You will only be blessed if you use those gifts in your role as a “keeper at home.” Stay in the place God designed for you. There are still things that you can do to support men and their families and that is where your worth lies.”

Maybe you’ve heard a version of this and wondered if your desire to be more, to do more is just your flesh fighting against God’s will. You have been taught to question yourself, to lock away those desires that didn’t fit with the role you were told that God designed for you to have. Should you?

A great many women in the church have grappled with staying in their “place” while having to gaslight themselves into denying the Spirit’s call and gifting. They feel silenced, diminished and angry and then guilty for feeling that way.

Many times they are overwhelmed, under-appreciated, carrying the full load of marriage, parenting, work and church life. They are caught between cultural and church expectations, feeling like something is missing but not knowing what. They just want to be free to be themselves but feel trapped between expectations and longing.

Is there an answer for this that honors God and allows one to live their full design without guilt? Can she be a leader? Is there a way to unlock those parts of herself that long to be released and that she has only tentatively looked into?

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Men are to lead and women are responders. Right? Every time I see a post about this I cringe. It assumes two things: women are not to be leaders or capable of being a leader, and, that women are just floundering waiting for men to lead us. Um, no.

Children need a leader. Adults do not. Children do not have the intellect or experience of an adult. They are not capable of making the assessments and decisions an adult can. So they need supervision and someone to lead them.

Adults are usually intelligent, capable human beings who are able to make rational decisions about their lives on their own. Women are adults and, therefore, not in need of someone to lead or supervise their lives. They can initiate not just respond.

Way back in Genesis, God acknowledged this. He could have told Eve that Adam was to lead and she was to follow him but He did not. Instead He said that male and female are both made in His image and that THEY were to rule and subdue the world together. Not only that, He said that man was not able to do this by himself. He needed someone that was his equal to partner with him to accomplish this great task.

Sin entered the world and ever since Adam has deemed himself solely in charge of all things, including Eve. Her God-given intellect, abilities and agency were discounted and she was forever to follow him even if sometimes he would lead them over a cliff.
In truth, men and women were, and are, both capable of leading. To flesh this out a bit more let’s dive into what exactly is a leader and how I unlock the leader in me.

leader /lē′dər/ noun

1. One that leads or guides.

2. One who is in charge or in command of others.

3. One who heads an organization.

4. One who has influence or power.

A leader forges the path, is in charge of those on the path, is the head, has influence and power and, has followers. Gender is not mentioned in this definition. But most women are told that none of those things apply to them just because they are women. A woman is quite capable of filling this definition regardless of what she is told.

Not let’s look at who is following this leader.

follower / fol-oh-er/ noun

1. a person that follows another.

2. a person who follows another in regard to their ideas or belief; disciple or adherent.

3. a person who imitates, copies, or takes another as a model or ideal.

4. an attendant, servant, or retainer.

A follower is led by another, takes on their beliefs, becomes their disciple, and serves the leader’s desires before their own. Again, we see no gender in the definition. But most women are told that all of these things apply to them just because they are women.

The status quo is that men are to lead and women are to follow. This paradigm is especially obvious in the church.

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In the Bible there are the stories of two wives.

One followed her husband to the death and one’s husband had a heart attack and died when he heard what his wife had done against his orders. One woman lead in spite of her husband and one followed him. Which do you think was the righteous wife based on what we’ve talked about so far?

Abigail chose to step up and lead when her husband’s leadership doomed them all. Because of her actions she saved many lives by doing the right thing even though it was against her husband’s wishes. She chose not to follow Nabal, not to take him as her ideal and not to serve him in his commands.

Sapphira joined with her husband in his leadership to defraud the church and both she and her husband died because of it. She followed him, taking his ways as her ideal, copied his decision and attended to his wishes.

Nabal and Ananias were unfit to lead. Their wives then had the choice to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord or in the eyes of their unfit husbands. Abigail, in choosing the Lord, helped David to honor the Lord while Sapphira joined her husband in trying to deceive the Lord.

What do we make of this? Should Abigail have submitted to her husband in all things even if it got them killed? There are certainly churches that tell women that submitting to their husband even when he is wrong will be honored by God, that it is their godly duty and that they should protect his ego by not pointing out his mistakes. I disagree.

We are to follow the Lord, His will, His ways and His commands regardless of what anyone else thinks, including those closest to us. We have a God and our husband is not Him. We are to be his partner not his obedient subject.

In addition, women, who are adults, can think for themselves, make decisions that honor God and submit to the Lord in willing obedience to Him alone.

Women do not move from intelligent, capable adulthood to reverting to child status when they marry. If single women are able to run their lives well, lead their own lives and make decision on their own behalf then why would that change when they marry? Did something inherently change in her that suddenly made her not competent and in need of someone to lead her?

Did she lose intellect? Did she lose her priesthood and ambassador status and is now in need of someone to mediate her relationship with God?

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Abigail’s leadership was unlocked and she was able to step forward into that role because of the circumstances that came upon her. When her husband made a terrible decision, that opened the door to her stepping into leadership. And she did well.
Abigail was actually her husband’s good partner for she took action to keep him from making a huge mistake. That is what men and women should do for one another. That is what ruling and subduing together looks like. It is a partnership.

This makes me think of Priscilla and Aquila who together spread the gospel, had a church in their home and helped Paul.

Abigail used her agency, intelligence and love for God to lead. He had equipped her and given her the same mandate in the garden as He gave to Eve. When opportunity came she stepped up to the call.

Women ARE to be leaders. Being a leader is actually a mandate for all believers. In 1 Peter we are told that we are all priests. We are all to lead others to the good news. We are all called to be God’s ambassadors to a fallen world. Women and men are to represent God in all aspects of life.

Like Abigail we might have to bypass the leader/follower paradigm that places women in a non-leadership position and a permanent follower position in order to do what is right. Unlike Abigail, we do not have to wait for unfortunate decisions to be made before we are unlocked and set free to lead.

Share Healed, Whole, Free - Dr. Kim West

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Here is a sleight of hand that has fooled millions of intelligent women, and I want to show you how it is done, because once you see it you can never un-see them.

You take something ugly. You take the old, crude idea that men are above women, that a woman is a lesser creature made to obey, the kind of thing your great-grandmother heard from the pulpit and your grandmother half believed and your mother quietly resented.

No one wants to say it out loud anymore, because it sounds exactly like what it is. So you do not say it out loud. You give it a new name. A soft name. A churchy name. You wrap the cage in velvet, hang a needlepoint blessing on the bars, and call it a gift.
And then, this is the genius part, you convince the woman that the cage is for her protection, that the lock is an act of love, and that wanting out is a sign that something has gone wrong with her heart.

The New Word That Means Everything and Nothing
The word you will hear most these days is complementarian. It sounds lovely. It sounds like two puzzle pieces, like a duet, like a marriage where each person brings something the other lacks. Complementary. We complete each other. Who could be against that?

I am not against that. I believe men and women are gloriously, wonderfully different, and that those differences are a gift. If complementarian actually meant what it sounds like it means, I would print it on a tote bag.

But watch what happens when you ask the one question that matters.

Ask what specifically a woman is not allowed to do that a man is allowed to do. Watch the answer come back. She cannot preach. She cannot teach men. She cannot lead. She cannot be an elder. She cannot stand in the pulpit. She cannot, in the strictest rooms, even read the announcements or hand out the bread.

Notice that the list is not a list of differences. It is a list of restrictions, and they all run in one direction. A true complement goes both ways. There is no parallel list of things a man cannot do in the church because he is a man. There is no role reserved for women that a man is told, with sorrow and Scripture, is simply not for him.

A relationship where one person has a list of things they may not do, and the other person holds the pen, is not a complement. We have a word for that arrangement, and it is not a flattering one.

So complementarian turns out to mean equal in worth, but unequal in everything actual worth would get you. You are precious, dear, infinitely valued. Now please sit down. It is the theological equivalent of telling someone they are the most important person in the company while quietly removing their name from every door.

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Separate but Equal Had a Cousin
If equal in worth, lesser in role rings a faint and uncomfortable bell, it should.
We have heard that exact sentence structure before in this country, applied to a different group of God’s children, and we rightly recognize it now as a lie. Separate but equal. Equal in dignity, the argument went, simply meant to occupy a different and lower place. Different water fountain, same humanity. Back of the bus, same value in the eyes of God.

We see through it now. We are ashamed that anyone ever said it with a straight face, let alone with a Bible in hand. And yet the very same logic, equal in essence, lesser in place, is preached from respectable pulpits every Sunday about women, and we are told it is not discrimination, it is design.

Servant Leader?
The second phrase you will meet is servant leader, and it is my personal favorite, because it is so beautifully constructed to end every argument before it begins.
Here is how it works. A man is given total authority. Final say. Headship. The deciding vote in the home and the only vote in the church. And then, so that this does not sound like the raw power grab that it is, you staple the word servant to the front of it. He does not rule you. He serves you. He leads, yes, but humbly. He has all the authority, but he carries it like a cross.

It sounds so holy that to question it feels like questioning Jesus Himself, who, after all, washed feet.

But notice what the phrase quietly protects. If he leads well, the system is proven good. And if he leads badly, if he is harsh or controlling or simply wrong, then the answer is never that he should not have had that authority. The answer is always that he failed to be servant enough. The structure is never the problem. The man just needs to hold the unquestionable power a little more sweetly.

That is a system designed to never be wrong. And any arrangement that can never be wrong is an arrangement you should examine very, very closely, because that is precisely how abuse protects itself.

In my counseling office, the most dangerous homes are not the ones where the man admits he is a tyrant. They are the ones where everyone agrees he is a wonderful servant leader, and the wife cannot understand why she feels like she is slowly disappearing.

A real servant does not need a title that reminds you he is in charge. Jesus, when He knelt with the towel, was not running a leadership seminar. He was on the floor. The “servant leaders” I have known in the worst marriages were never on the floor. They were on a throne, while their wives did all the actual leading and serving.

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Biblical Womanhood, a Costume Sold as a Calling
Then there is biblical womanhood, which is presented to you as if it were lifted whole from the pages of Scripture, timeless and fixed and obviously God’s design.

The specific picture of biblical womanhood you were handed, the soft voice, the deference, the supportive smile, the gifts pointed safely toward children and casseroles and never toward a pulpit, is not a snapshot of the women in the Bible. It is a snapshot of a particular culture’s preferences, dressed up in Scripture and sold back to you as the will of God.

Because the actual women in the actual Bible will not fit in that frame, and the people who coined biblical womanhood know it, which is why you were quietly steered past them.

Deborah led a nation and commanded an army, and the man in charge would not go to battle without her. Huldah was the prophet the king’s own priests ran to when they needed to hear from God, while male prophets were alive and available. And, let’s not forget Jael who drove a tent peg through the head of an enemy.

Priscilla taught the great preacher Apollos his theology, and her name is often listed first, before her husband’s. Phoebe carried the letter to the Romans, the most important piece of mail in church history, and almost certainly read and explained it to them. Junia was called outstanding among the apostles, until centuries later some uncomfortable men decided she must have been a man and changed her name in the text. And it was women, every Gospel agrees, who were the first preachers of the resurrection, commissioned by the risen Christ Himself to go and tell the men.

That is true biblical womanhood.

It is bold, it is public, it is leading, teaching, prophesying, carrying the gospel into rooms full of men who needed to hear it. The version you were sold is not biblical enough.

The Tell
Whenever a teaching about your place comes wrapped in language so nice that questioning it feels like sinning, stop and look for the lock. Ask the one question. What can he do that I cannot, and who decided? If the words are true, the answer will be reciprocal and gentle and go both ways. If the words are a costume, the answer will always, every time, leave you holding less and them holding the pen.

Patriarchy learned long ago that it could not survive being seen. So it changed its clothes. It put on the vocabulary of servanthood and partnership and design, and it walked right into the sanctuary. It sat down in the best seat, and it told you the seat was yours, dear, you just have to move so a man can use it.

1. Complementarian means lesser.

2. Servant leadership means authority over you.

3. Biblical womanhood, as you were taught it, means stay small.

You are allowed to call these things what they are. Naming the trick is not bitterness. It is insight.

You did not fall for something because you are foolish. You trusted holy-sounding words spoken by people you loved in the house of the God you adore. That is not gullibility. That is faith, twisted into something God never meant to be.

The shame belongs to the ones who built the cage and called it a gift, not to the woman who believed them because she wanted so badly to obey God.

The same Spirit who is making their words feel suddenly hollow is the One who inspired Deborah and Huldah and Priscilla and Phoebe. He is not asking you to become someone new. He is calling you back to who the women of God have always been, before someone renamed them.

The cage was always a cage. They just got very, very good at decorating it for you.

Open the door and step into your free life with Christ.

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