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I have wrestled with this thing called your spiritual side for many a year. When someone would say to me, you need to get in touch with your spiritual side I would close down. I was brought up in a strict religious, church going family. I started rebelling against the church when I was a teenager, so when someone said I needed to get in touch with my spiritual side; to me they were saying go back to church.

Now for me that was not an option. I had tried going back to a few different churches and I could never find one that I felt comfortable with. A few years ago I started re-reading the Bible, it had been at least forty years since I had even looked at one. I guess I picked up one that had been changed, because it was saying things that were different than what I had been taught as a kid. Of course it was the same bible that my folks had given me when I was about fourteen. I guess maybe because I was just reading it without any preconceived notions, or maybe because I read the whole thing and not just the selected parts.

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Relationship dangerousness in women’s eyes is often too narrow of a definition. Often women equate dangerousness only with physical violence. If he hasn’t hit her, then the relationship can’t be ‘dangerous’ to her.

Women’s relational harm that happens in dangerous relationships can include:

* Emotional danger and damage
* Physical danger and damage
* Sexual danger and damage
* Financial danger and damage
* Spiritual danger and damage
* All of these kinds of danger and damage to her children and family members as well

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