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Relationality of Women: A Pastoral Theological Understanding of Wives' Loyalty to the Family Regardless of Husbands' Infidelity

  • Journal of Counseling and Gospel
  • Abbr : Jocag
  • 2010, 14(), pp.262-282
  • DOI : 10.17841/jocag.2010.14..262
  • Publisher : Korean Evangelical Counseling Society
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology > Pastoral Counseling
  • Received : March 30, 2010
  • Accepted : May 13, 2010

Ha, Jae Sung 1

1고려신학대학원

Candidate

ABSTRACT

Why do many women in Korea with a problem of husbands’infidelity insist to stay with them regardless of the painful experience of brokenness in relationship?Pastoral theologians allegedly claim that relationality illumines women’s distinctive tendency toward mutual dependency as part of their development and maturation. On the one hand, relationality makes women provide care for family. It overburdens them by essentializing their motherly care on the other. Husbands who are unfaithful to their wives tend to abuse power over women in order to keep them loyal to the family regardless of their infidelity. Women’s relationality can be manipulated when faithless husbands depend on the cultural bias against women whose presence in the family they regard as essential. Pastoral theologians have closely paid attention to women’s sufferings by analyzing power dynamics at the socio-cultural level. By rejecting patriarchal approval of men’s infidelity, they try to encourage women to recover the language of the self. For this purspose, pastoral counselors for women must primarily understand women’s life in their relational environments. Pastoral theology distinguishes itself from typical tips for a simple solution. The pastoral counselor must empathize the betrayed wives by helping them break the silence and crack down the unconscious homeostatic belief that women are always responsible for their husbands’ infidelity.

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