The best solution for poisoning words to the soul’s core is attacking a person’s weakness to dehumanize, belittling, demeaning, and humiliating one. The belittled person must learn to face the attacker and neutralize the negative comment or statement when it falls out of the utterer or sayer’s mouth.
A person of low thinking with irrational reasoning power falls prey when they respond to the attacker erratically or eccentric. The victim feels guilty and apologetic to the poisoning person. The emotional response maintains behavior recurring in life and becomes a handy winning weapon for the attacker.
To maintain a healthy relationship in marriage, family, job, and elsewhere, the victim must learn ways to nullify any negative utterances through a heart of wisdom using the educational statements. The rational, non-emotional responses help the victim stop the attacker from using the poisoned Word or message again.
Any time the victim has no wise answers, must take time and pray for God to usher with wisdom, rational, and neutral answers. Otherwise, the victim ends up apologetic and reinforces the behavior of the attacker. The attacked must avoid engaging in speaking out until they research what is best to say.
For example, the degrading states are for some people. The order of the day. Look at Jezebel, the King Ahab’s wife told the King, her husband, “Is this how you act as a king over Israel?” (1King 22:7, NIV). As the result of humiliating the King, three people die at the end of the story: King Ahab, his wife, Jezebel, and Naboth.
King David’s wife, Michal, told the King in disgust, “how distinguished King of Israel looked today shamelessly exposing himself to the servant girls as any vulgar might do!” (2 Samuel 6: 20, NLT). Michal lost favor from her husband.
Job’s wife told her husband, “are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9, NIV). Her statement counted as an unwise one.
At my time, my mother lowered my ability to use my typical voice sound by repeatedly saying to us children to use a low voice when talking that we should not hear our voice sounds as we spoke or play.
I feared to listen to my voice. I sang in a low voice, and my mother would demean my singing voice and say to me, you are singing like you are crying. I avoided hearing the sound from my mouth. I was comfortable singing in a group to hide my voice in the singing group.
Anytime I stood at the pulpit to preach the Word of God, my mother told me to know I was not supposed to stand in front of the congregation, that I was a woman and am not allowed to preach, and she made me feel guilty for disobeying my mother.
As a window I had a space to sing and preach, I feared hearing my voice and had to control myself to maintain my mother’s norm.
At age seventies, I decided to get fear out of me. I would sing all hymns I knew in Gīkūyū’s hymn book, Nyimbo Kiswahili, and English hymns. I had difficulties raising my voice high because of dry throat, dry cough, and hard breathing. In three years of singing a hymn or two every night and recording my voice, I gradually improved. My breathing, dry throat, and cough disappeared.
My takeaway is through practice; I realized it was doable to recreate the possibility of doing a new thing and meeting life’s goal. Having the knowledge to neutralize the poisoning words of the attacker and stops the behavior and the life continue.
“…my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6, NIV). The solution for an individual is to take immediate action and undo the poisoning words in any relationship for the relationship to live.
And for the marriage to remain intact, bring down the number of divorces, and make children grow in a healthy environment. In a marriage, job place, and elsewhere, we would have peace and joy of life in Jesus Christ. For there is power in Jesus Christ to help us live a winning life.