ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog post #23, Chapter 18 – Manipulation and Marriage — Staying Connected As a Couple to Avoid Triangulation
This week’s blog post gets to the core of my new book — maintaining a strong and unified marriage as foundational to successfully raising children, particularly adopted children from ‘hard places’.
- Manipulation and Marriage—Staying Connected As a Couple to Avoid Triangulation
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal truthfully are His delight. Proverbs 12:22
My husband and I had a good marriage. In fact, we had a great marriage. It was a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ kind of love. As any wife should do, I protected our marriage from the potential of unfaithfulness in my heart, mind, and body. I was also proactive in my efforts to help my husband to not succumb to the enemy’s taunts to become unfaithful with his eyes, heart, and physical being. My husband made every effort to do the same. As far as I know, neither my husband or I ever strayed from our covenant relationship, though I’m sure the enemy worked overtime to tempt both of us to break our wedding vows. We had a close relationship, truthful communication, and after nearly 30 years together we knew each other’s thoughts, trusting automatically each other’s planning and decision-making.
When we adopted children, it never occurred to us that any of these precious children new to our family would have the desire and ability to execute an all-out attack on the heart of our marriage with their lying lips. The first time it happened, I denied the reality of it. Then, both my husband and I individually realized what was happening. Thankfully, we trusted each other’s gut instincts as we openly and truthfully discussed with each other what we believed was occurring. We prayed together about the situation. God gave us wisdom to determine the triggers (was it lying due to fear, survival or…?) and He equipped us with the skills to diffuse and end the assaults.
Daughters and fathers, as well as sons and mothers, can share close bonds, which, in the Almighty God’s perfect design for families, help children be prepared for good communication, respect, and teamwork in their future marriages. When the Lord is not at the center of a family, all can go wrong. When our adopted children came to our family, they had lived in a corrupted version of ‘family.’ They did not experience or even know about the concept of a God-honoring, Biblical covenant marriage and family.
What my precious adopted children did know was the age-old warfare tactic of ‘divide and conquer’ through their manipulative lying. Our not-so-innocent cherubs had also been groomed to use inappropriate sexual advances toward the parent of the opposite gender. These subtleties might be part of playful interaction between husband and wife in marriage, but should not be outside of it. Casual flirting, suggestive touch and massage, inappropriate lap-sitting, leg-humping, revealing or missing clothing, to name just a few, were all being played out.
In addition, these school-age children were masters at manipulating the parents to take sides between the ‘adopted’ and ‘biological’ siblings. They played the game ‘good cop/bad cop’ like old pros. When we realized what was happening, we had to ramp-up our parental communication and problem solving, as well as 24/7/365 supervision.
