Here's a letter I recently wrote to a
member on my church leadership. He is a great guy whom I respect tremendously. He didn’t have the whole story of my marriage so I wanted to enlighten him. I thought maybe it was a good summary
of my situation for people who are curious about my side of the story.
Dear --,
I wanted to respond to some of what you said in the phone call -- there wasn't time at that moment. I'm certainly open to feedback and advice, but I wanted to give you a little more information to give some clarity.
It seemed clear to me when you were
exhorting me to stay in the marriage and giving your own difficult and now
successful marriage as an example, that you did not understand that this is not
just a difficult marriage in which I have simply given up because I do not
understand the sanctity of marriage in the eyes of God. This is not the case.
Please understand that abuse and a
normal difficult marriage are worlds apart. In a normal marriage, there are broken expectations, hurt
feelings, and angry words said on both sides, and both sides need to forgive,
repent and change their behavior to make it work. In an abusive situation, it is one-way. I'm not saying that I did nothing wrong
in the marriage, but abuse means that the destructive pattern is enforced from
one side, to the point that there is nothing that the abused partner can do to
make it better (except leave).
When it benefited him, D deliberately
wanted to hurt and destroy me, and no amount of crying and begging on my part
ever evoked any compassion in him. He said when he saw my tears it made him feel more
aggressive. The only way I could
get him to stop verbally abusing me (for many hours, often through the night)
was to hurt myself physically. (In
[ministry place] I physically could not leave him because I had no money or
social power to call myself a taxi and get away.) However, he would grow immune to the amount I hurt myself,
and so it had to heighten over the years.
By the end of our time in [ministry place] I was putting a rope around
my neck. I was not suicidal; I did
not want to die. But after seven
hours of verbal abuse that would not stop, I simply did not know any other way
to get him to stop. Unfortunately
within a short time suicide threats were not enough either, and he would just
yank me violently away from the rope and then continue to verbally abuse
me. I was desperate, beaten down,
and when I appealed to counselors and admin, D was a master manipulator to
twist the facts and get it to look like it was my fault -- the suicide attempts
did not help my credibility. They
did not believe me. He almost had
me diagnosed as borderline personality disorder by a counselor who never asked
me my side of the story -- when I confronted the counselor, he quickly
retracted that diagnosis. I
probably would have gone into a mental hospital at some point if God did not
give me the clarity to begin realizing over the last year that there was
something seriously wrong with D, and the resources to discover what emotional
abuse was. (I read a book called
Why Does He Do That? Inside the
Minds of Angry and Controlling Men and was shocked at how the depiction of
abuse fit my marriage like a glove.)
The common Christian marriage advice --
to love and forgive unconditionally, for women to submit to their husbands, to
give 100% and not look for 50% back from the partner -- were all disastrous for
me as D used my faith and goodwill against me to subjugate me. I was not allowed to spend money or do
anything against his will, and he would "punish" me for any
infractions of his will even up to a year after I had done them. Yet he was able to maintain a good
front to outsiders -- a front that I helped him keep up since Christian
counselors, leaders, marriage resources, etc. had exhorted me not to shame my husband by complaining about him to
others. The book Love and Respect
gave him the spiritual vocabulary to subjugate me even further. I kept waiting for the outcome
predicted in the book -- if I respected and submitted to him then one day he
would turn and love me back -- but it never happened. The more I submitted, the more domineering and angrier he
became, saying that everything I did that he didn't like -- even what I was
wearing or if I cut my hair -- was disrespectful. But he could easily say the words, "I love you"
and so in his eyes he was fulfilling the book. Normal marriage advice works for normal bad marriages. It doesn't work for abuse.
Abusers have something wrong in their
worldview, making them feel entitled to dominate over their partner completely,
and studies show that abusers rarely change, although they do a master job of
pretending repentance. The worst
of it is the lies and broken promises -- broken deliberately, without
remorse. I have talked about
divorce many times and actually left D a few times during our marriage, and
each time he would beg and "repent" and promise to change -- promises
which produced a short period of good behavior but then turned into "it
was actually your fault" and a deliberate breaking of the promises after a
short time. He would admit
afterwards that he lies in his repentance, and he isn't really repentant. (The way he worded it is that I
"forced him to say things he didn't mean" because I wouldn't come
back unless he said he was sorry.)
There is no reason for me to believe that he is any different now.
If a child were abused by an adult,
would you send that child back to the adult asking her to trust again? I feel like people hear "emotional
abuse" and they don't think it's very serious. They think it just means that he was sometimes mean to me
and didn't know how to control his words.
Abusive men do not need anger management therapy -- they know how to
control their anger, since they rarely show that side to outsiders. They reserve their anger for their
spouse and children. The problem
is their belief that the partner is property and they can treat her any way
they like. It's a much more
insidious and difficult-to-change, deeply ingrained atttitude.
I am asking you: Please do not be so quick to conclude
that God wants me to return to him, without listening to the other side. Please do not try to send me back into
a situation of abuse. I do believe
that God has a plan for D, to redeem, restore, and save him. However, I don't know if our marriage is the context for
that to happen. Historically every
time I've gone back to him it's arrested his growth and need to change, because
he becomes gleeful that he got away with it again, and then much more
hard-hearted the next time.
Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if an abuser will resume abusing
until after the partner has returned because they are great liars and on their
best behavior until they feel secure in the relationship again. There is no easy fix, no pat answer, to
a situation like this. Jesus told
us to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents. I think we Christians are good at the dove part but bad at
the serpent part -- we are naive and easily fooled by manipulators because we
desperately want to believe that they are repentant and changing.
Please know that I am seeking the Lord
with all my heart, scouring the Bible with the desire to see what it truly
commands, and not trying to twist it for my own purposes. I have committed to
do what is God's will when He shows it to me clearly -- and I believe He will
do that in the right time.
However, I get confused by pastors and other people who are telling me
that I am not allowed to divorce him and that God never could want this
marriage to end, without understanding the nature of abuse. One of my pastors (from a different
church) told me that I was technically not allowed to divorce even if he were beating me (he does recommend a separation though -- but is that a marriage? A marriage on paper only). I don't agree with that. My heart breaks for some of the broken
women I have met at the domestic abuse shelter -- most of them with children,
financially ruined, and their sense of self broken -- and some of them
Christians for whom the church did no good in recognizing and helping them out
of abuse. I myself see God as my
Rescuer who gave me the exact resource (the book) I needed to pluck me out of
that situation. I also see God as
loving to D that he took me away and broke D's illusion that he was a good man
and everything he did was right.
I respectfully disagree with you that
God is necessarily going to be more glorified if I stay with him than if I
leave. I think that God will be
glorified in the way that He determines, and we don't know what that is until
He tells us. If I go back to D
every time and he continues to abuse me, is that glorifying to God? I know that in your heart you don't
want that, you want the abuse to stop and us to stay together. But what if the abuse doesn't stop --
and studies show that it's very, very rare for an abuser to change? What if every time I go back he keeps
abusing me? How long until you
would say I'm allowed to divorce him?
Are my six years not long enough?
One pastor said to me, "Don't be so quick to leave him." That hurt me. It feels quick to outsiders because they have only just
heard of it. But I have struggled
with wanting to leave D from the very first week of our marriage, and I've
watched him descend into worse and worse cruelty, and I've seen the lies and
broken promises repeating themselves for years. I endured and stayed with him so long for the glory of God
and the sake of the ministry, until I realized that it was not improving but
getting worse, and God was not being glorified by the lies and
unrighteousness. I paid a heavy
cost to leave D -- it breaks my heart that I may never go back to the people I
love in [ministry place] -- and I still feel that I did the right thing.
The book I mentioned above, Why Does He
Do That? is an excellent resource.
If you are interested to read it (I know you are busy though), I would
be happy to buy it for you. I also
recommended it to my [leadership] and wrote them a guide to which chapters were
the most helpful so that they didn't have to read it all. I remain open to the counsel of pastors
at [church], and desire it. It
would help me if I knew that you all had your eyes open to what is really going
on by reading this book. I'm sorry
for such a long email. I also want
to affirm that I respect you and [church]'s leadership immensely, and if this
email in any way communicates disrespect or disregard for the servants of God,
I apologize and say that it was a mistake in my communication, not a true
depiction of my attitude.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.
In Christ,
S.
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