Catholic Guilt...

ingrained since early childhood...

I anticipate guilting children with the wrath of God was not originally intended to be a negative thing.  I wonder whose idea this was...  follow the rules or suffer the consequences and go to hell...

For the most part, this teaching keeps people in line of making the right choices and doing the right things...  and the idea of a higher power who hands down consequences for bad choices is not necessarily a horrible thing, if believing in such brings one to a higher place.

But I will not teach my child this... EVER...

My personal tug-of-war with the Catholic Guilt Factor caused me to remain in a domestic-violence situation for nearly 5 years.  I was NOT going to break the promise I made in God's presence... I vowed "for better or worse" and "in sickness and in health"...  Obviously there was a reason for all of this...  Obviously God put me here because He needed ME to help him...  Obviously all of this was going to make me a better and stronger person...

What it really did was kill the person I was...  that woman who knew what she wanted, knew what she deserved...  the one who wouldn't put up with someone's bullshit...

It turned me into an enabler...  enabling someone else to act as they wish and to do things that were unacceptable...  it made me accepting of ill treatment and no equality...  it allowed me to make excuses for someone's bad behavior... because as a result, I would have found favor with God because He wanted me to handle this...

What I found is... it doesn't matter how much you love someone... it doesn't matter how hard you try to make things "right"...  if the issue belongs to another person, there is nothing you can do about it if they choose not to do anything about it themselves...

I believed if I kept my promise, everything would work out...  funny thing is, it never occurred to me that he had already given up on getting better...  he had already broke his promise... it was never going to get better...

And most of all, I learned... I DESERVE to be treated with respect... I DESERVE to have good things in life... I DESERVE to be loved and cherished for the person I am... I don't have to settle... and I never should have allowed anyone to treat me as anything less than the TREASURE that I AM...