Continual emotional abuse means that while you know reality and truth, you can’t accept it as truth and reality for yourself because it is at direct conflict with how you have been treated by prominent people in your life.  So it makes sense that you would have a difficult time understanding God’s love for you.  Your brain wiring gets crossed up and you end up living in an upside down and confusing world. 

On one hand, you understand and know that you aren’t bad and you don’t deserve what’s happening but on the other hand, evidence seems to support the opposite. Because you think, if you’re good and of value, why would you be treated as though you are not? 

That’s not even touching what gaslighting does to you.  

When you add in that factor, you get evidence that you’re of value, and then the moment you start to feel ok, it’s yanked back and you go into a deeper conflicted confusion.  Because, you then argue with yourself.  Gaslighting can be so subtle and hidden  that when love is taken back and you are blamed for it (made out that it’s in your head), reality may not jive with your experience a lot of times, but then sometimes it seems to.  

It’s like someone telling you there’s a tree growing in the yard and you see the tree. But then they tell you there is no tree there, and even though you KNOW the tree is there, they make it seem like you must be crazy.  And then you actually start to question if the tree is really there even though you KNOW it is.  

I’m here as a living example that you CAN understand His love and that you are worth not just what you were being made to think, but infinitely more than that.  I’m still learning, because I still slide back into unexplained and unsupported feelings of not being good enough, not measuring up, not belonging.  But I have an ever growing evidence to the contrary.  I think this is why isolation is a necessary thing when you are coming out of so much messed up, learned wrong thinking about yourself.   Because there’s a period of vulnerability when if the wrong person entered, you would be at high risk of being sucked quickly back to that world before realizing it.  Brings up again the clean heart and the demon bringing 7 more back in with him.