«Held Hostage» by Ralph Sanders

ARE YOU BEING HELD HOSTAGEIN YOUR RELATIONSHIP?An emotional hostage-taker can be your partner, your child, your parents or any person in your life. They can be hard to spot and even harder to cope with. What will be consistent is a dynamic that is destructive and painful. These people have not learned to accept responsibility for their own feelings and actions, and your unawarenesswill allow them to assign you that role.Hostage takers are not necessarily 'bad' people, but they are extremely dangerous. In my case, the hostage-taker was a hostage herself, someone in need of healing and compassion. Because her wounds were hidden, what started as a romance deteriorated through an erosion of trust and an endless, draining crisis of faith…. I was caught off guardin my own choice to ignore the signs, slipping into a web of danger that could have landed me behind bars. My personal boundaries were as ineffective as a soap bubble, leaving me an emotional hostage in the end.My situation ended when the nightmare of my partner's break-down culminated in a suicide attempt. Though I had already made the choice to live, literally, as an open book and sharing my life's lessons, I nevertheless have lived much of my adult life living with a past that could've easily destroyed my future success.After what for many people would have been an affair at the end of a marriage, with all the messiness and moral responsibility to address the emotions around it, I found myself embroiled in a court battle and countless months struggling to identify what was hunting me, grasping for any closure. It took this desperate need for closure and a lot of emotional and spiritual work to identify the traps of my own unawareness and desire for a woman— an experience that could've even had me shot and killed over a false 911 call.“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares theLORD, «plans to prosper you and not to harm you,plans to give you hope and a future.” — Jeremiah 29:11