Letter to my abusive husband

Dear Husband,

I wonder if you will ever understand why I left.  It seems to me that you were left bewildered on that final day, even though I'd been talking for months about divorce and my inability to take any more.  Why all of a sudden did I snap, did I refuse to take more?  All along you thought every mention of separation was an idle threat, that I'd never carry it out.  You thought you had me for life.  

I want you to know.  I had to leave you to save myself.  If it were for not my emotional survival, if I were not hanging on by my bloody fingernails and slipping, if I could have sustained it, I would never have left.  I did not enter into marriage wanting it to end.  I wanted a marriage, a partnership, a husband who loved me and who would receive my love.  I wanted to love and serve you unconditonally.  I made treasure hunts for you and threw lavish birthday parties and brought you tubs of warm water to soak your feet.  I hate kitchen work but I would slave over gourmet meals and ask you to rate each dish, and I never repeated a dish that was less than four stars.  When you told me straight out that you would never wash dishes despite your prenuptial promises, I wept over the dishes as I washed them myself.  I bit my tongue in public and let you run conversations, I deferred to you and supported you even when I thought you were wrong.  When you got yourself into a conversational bind by making arguments you could not defend, I would jump to your defense and get you out of the fix by explaining what you meant, to make you look good.  Whenever I was reading a good book and you took it away to read it yourself, I let you.  I gave you a candlelight massage and when, a few days later, you refused to rub my painful feet to help me sleep, I cried myself to sleep but then later forced myself to give you another massage, to continue to love you unconditionally.  When you were sad I counseled and consoled; when you were angry I helped you talk through your anger even as you were lashing out at me.  When you were sick I served you hand and foot.  When you were in sin I prayed for you and read myriad books to try to figure out how best to help you out of it.  I braved your anger to challenge you when you were displeasing to God or destroying your own family with your indifference.  You punished me horribly for it every time, but for your sake I continued to bring it up with you, to help you repair those relationships before you lost them forever.  I left when I realized that there was nothing I could do to help you, that you would kill me before you would change, and that it was time for me to save myself.

You broke my heart into a million pieces.  I did not enter this marriage to fight for my way.  I never wanted to run the show.  I wanted to love you, to be a crown of glory on your head, to be wellness in your soul and in your bones.  I would have given you everything, and taken just enough to live on.  But you would not leave me half, or even a sliver.  You would take it all, by force, and you would fight me to the death to teach me never to ask for more than the crumbs you would throw me.  At my every request, no matter how gently I phrased them, you demonized me, until I would deny myself as much as possible unless I could not bear it.  I could not understand why you were willing to fight me for hours, to reduce your strong, beautiful wife to a miserable huddle of tears and pleas crouching on the ground, rather than concede a small point which would have cost you so little.  I could not understand why you could not accept my apologies but felt you had to punish me to the max and teach me a lesson each time so that I would never, ever cross you in that way again.  I could not understand why you would deny me things that would mean the world to me but cost you so little, and why you would say to me, "I was going to do it for you, but because you're asking me for it, now I won't."  I could not understand why you chose me for being smart and beautiful and strong, only to tell me I was ugly and repellant, that nobody liked me, and try to destroy every good thing in me.  I could not understand why when I was sick, or sad, or in despair, it would rev you up more to attack.  It was like a lion spotting a wounded gazelle on the plains -- my weakness inspiring your aggression.  And even towards the end, when I had the rope around my neck, you never stopped in sorrow and said, "Am I hurting you so much that you would rather be dead? I must stop."  If my death did not mean a negative change in your life -- the loss of your servant and reputation -- I am convinced you would have stood by and let it happen.  

Every compromise, every time you finally gave in to me, you only did it because you had to, because otherwise I would leave and your comfortable life of respect would crumble without me to sustain it.  I saw that.  From my right to have my own opinion in the vote, to stopping the fertility treatments that were destroying my health, to letting me watch TV, to opening the door of my freedom that took you five minutes to fix, to allowing me to use my computer on the bed, you wouldn't give me an inch until you saw that it would cost you dearly to not give in.  I saw so clearly that you never did it for me.  You never cared for the hours and nights and weeks I wept.  You only did it for yourself, you viewed it as losing in battle to a mortal enemy, and you punished me secretly for every battle you lost.  You would have sabotaged my career, my health, my heart, and for what?  For your whims.  Your happiness and well-being were my own goals.  They were never at risk.  I wanted you to be happy;  you didn't have to fight me for that.  But it was for absolute total dictatorial control that you destroyed me.  You destroyed me for the $15 a month it would have cost you to buy me milk and bottled water during my too-short pregnancy, for the 5 minutes it took you to open that door, for the two hours it took you to read the book you promised to read, for the right to drink soda in unlimited amounts and destroy your own health.  For the right to not call your family, for the right to avoid going to the doctor, for the plastic box that you didn't really want but did not want me to have.  I was mostly fighting for your health and happiness.  What were you fighting for?  Such petty little things.  The night I told you, "Can you be extra nice to me today? I'm feeling extra vulnerable right now," somehow you saw that as a battle cry, to assault me with one of the most vicious verbal attacks of our marriage, and to take the secrets of my heart and use them to destroy me.  I still don't know what I did that night to deserve it, the attack that only ended when I ran away into the night to a friend's house.  My last birthday in Tamaland...I don't know why you organized the extravagant birthday surprise for me during the day if you were going to punish me for all the work you did with seven hours of verbal abuse that night, raging at me with your accusations that I was "not grateful enough," until I was utterly broken and said I would kill myself if you didn't stop.  It was at first the happiest, and then the most shockingly heartbreaking, birthday of my life.  I wish you hadn't done anything for me at all and left me in peace.

I lived every day afraid of you, on edge, under stress.  I knew the look that meant it was coming, that I was in trouble.  I prayed day and night that you would change.  I punished myself emotionally for every time I lost control and screamed and wept, but I realized that I never had a chance, because you were pushing me to the edge on purpose.  You wanted me to lose control, and it was a battle during every fight, you pushing me to despair, and me fighting for self-control.  You were my adversary, never my lover.  I endured your touch and pretended happiness, but in my heart I was relieved when you turned away at night and left me in peace.  Towards the end, I began to think that death was the only way out, the only way I could escape from you.  At first I asked the Lord to take me.  I did not want to die, but I was like a tortured animal in a cage, wild for freedom from the pain that was closing in around me with no visible way out.  But when I saw that you would only give me just enough care to keep me bound to you, barely alive, barely sane, the unthinkable happened.  I thought it just once:  a prayer that God would take you instead.  I wished that you were dead and I were free.  And it terrified me so much that I knew that leaving you would be better than that evil in my heart.  Better to leave, better to divorce and commit the act that the church would never forgive me, than to commit murder in my heart.  

Maybe you are angry with me for divorcing you.  Certainly the church is angry.  But I'm angry with you too, that you left me no choice.  You caused this divorce.  I never wanted a divorce.  I would have done anything to make our marriage work.  I would have done anything to not be in the position I'm in right now.  You made it impossible for me to believe you -- all the lies, your repentance, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde act. You told me yourself that you lie, you retracted your apologies, you changed your story within months, days, minutes, you manipulated outsiders against me and sabotaged all the healing.  I forgave you a million times until I could not deny how obvious it was that you weren't sorry one bit and that you intended to continue your behavior til death did us part.  I never wanted this.  I wanted to believe you.  You sneered at my forgiveness, you spat on my grace, you said to me without an apology, "You know you have to forgive me because of Jesus."  Couldn't you have even lied more convincingly?  I would have stayed with you forever if you could have kept deceiving me that you were really sorry, that you really cared about me.  But you became such a bad liar, or maybe once the scales fell from my eyes there was no turning back to the ignorant, suffering hopefulness that had kept me going so long.  I could see you calculating, how far can I push her, how little can I give and still keep her here.  But you miscalculated, you pushed too far, gave too little, and I saw how petty and selfish your heart was, that you would never love me or want my good.

There was a scene from Shrek that stopped me dead when I saw it because I saw you in it.  The prince announces from the tower that he was going to send out knights to rescue the princess from the deadly dragon on his behalf.  He declares magnanimously, "Some of you will lose your lives in the process, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."  That's you.  You made that sacrifice of my life and well-being every day for your own pleasure.  I saw that I was not even a person to you; I was property and you were entitled to do with it as you liked.  I'm sorry you did not get your money's worth, that the property could not be perfectly controlled and it kept making demands of you.  That big screen TV you wanted, that you were going to force me to buy against my will, would have been a better investment for you.  I hope you have one now.

You could have been the happiest, luckiest man in the world.  I was ready to make it so.  I don't know why you didn't think we could share it.  Why you had to take it all for yourself.  Did you think that you would enjoy sex less if I did not suffer through it?  Did you think that washing a few dishes was not worth the gourmet meals I would gladly have cooked for you for the rest of your life?  Did you enjoy your video games more because I was banging my head against the wall in despair?  Did you have to have it all, did you have to leave me nothing, did you have to rob me in order to feel rich?  Did you have to see me cry in order to be happy yourself?  

A letter to the lady who confronted me in public

Another email I sent out recently.

Dear ----,

I realize that in order to forgive you, I need to tell you what you did to me.

When I saw you at the [public place] last week, it was very very difficult for me that you brought up my personal circumstance in such a public place and forced me to talk about something that I was not prepared to talk about at that time.  In my email in which I revealed the news, I asked people not to talk to me until they had read the book I had recommended.  You did not do that.  You came up to me and forced me to talk about things in public, to my great shame, as people around us could hear us.  You put me in a very difficult and painful position.  

It seems to me that you know very little about abuse.  You did not ask me about my side of the story before judging me and telling me what to do -- to go back to D, an abusive husband. You don't know what he did to me.  You don't know what his heart is like now and whether he's actually repentant, since he has a history of deceiving.  I felt judged and accused by you but I did not feel that you acknowledged the suffering I have gone through and the deep wrong that has been done to me.  You showed that you felt it was wrong for me to leave D -- yet you never said a word about the wrong D has done against me and how he has destroyed the marriage through abuse and force.  Many people have done what you did -- hold me responsible for the dissolution of my marriage without holding D responsible for what he has done to cause it.  If the church had stood up for me during my marriage, during the many times I appealed to it -- to leaders and Christian counselors -- to ask D to change, if they had recognized the injustice and held him accountable, maybe I would not be in this situation today.  But even now, when the truth is in the open, many people in the church refuse to call D's sin sin.  They only see what they think is my sin.  Like you, they come down hard on me and but dispense grace freely to D in his unchanged state.  Without them stating the words that name D's sin, it is difficult for me as a victim to listen to the church.

I appeal to your sense of justice.  You want me to make D change.  In an abusive situation, do you go to the victim and force the victim to try to make the abuser change? Imagine if it were a child being sexually abused by an adult.  Would you send that child back to the adult before the adult makes any changes, and tell the child that he/she must make it right?    Even if the adult said he's changed, the risk is too great to endanger that child. But somehow it's okay for a wife to be abused.  People have no qualms or hesitation in sending me back to abuse.  And that is what happened for six years.  Every time I left him, people pushed me back to him.  And I continued getting abused.  And nobody did anything to help me.  I was told to submit more and to not leave him.

If I could make D change, I would have done so by now.  We have been to counselor after counselor and program after program, me dragging him and begging him and him balking at every step and sabotaging every attempt to improve our marriage. I'm sure there are good programs out there but they will do no good if D is determined not to change.  The power to change D lies only with the Lord and with D himself, not with me or any program.  If you as part of the body of Christ feel responsible for my marriage, why not take it to D instead of me?  Have you contacted D and pushed him the way you did me?  If not, why put a double load of responsibility and grief on me when I have already suffered so much?  Why are you making me relive abuse by pushing me to do something I do not feel safe to do?  Why don't you get Dl to go and do that program and then let me know if he's changed, instead of putting responsibility in my hands, when I have never been able to make him do anything?  

I feel very upset with you for what you did to me in your ignorance and zeal.  You may think that you are doing what is right, but for me there was nothing Christlike about how you approached me.  I felt completely ripped apart at the end of it.  I cried all the way home and spent about an hour being consoled by my housemate at home.  You are one of the many people in my life that has judged me without even asking for my story, causing me to lose faith in the church's power to represent Jesus in both his loving and just nature, to stand up for the powerless and weak, the oppressed woman and child and stranger.   You were not there the nights I ran away from D and shivered in my car and spent the night in seedy motels just to feel safe.  You were not there when I fled to the airport and sat there for hours torn between leaving my marriage and everything that was dear to me and escaping to save myself, terrifed that D would follow and find me and make me come home.  You were not there the countless nights I wept at his cruelty, when I was unable to escape while we were in [ministry place].  Jesus was there and saw.  He rescued me.  

Please do not contact me again.  You did not respect my request to read the book on abuse before talking with me about my situation.  Now I am asking you to respect my request to not contact me any more. There are a few people in my life who still are able to show Christ's love to me, so please entrust me to them.  I ask you to prayerfully consider what I am saying to you, that you spoke too quickly and listened too little, and that you violated the boundary I had asked people to respect.  If you do care about me, you'll pray for me and leave me in peace.  Please understand that I am going through great pain, and I need time and space for healing.   There is no joy in the dissolution of my marriage -- this is never what I wanted.  I have lost almost everything I valued in my life -- my marriage, my reputation, my ministry, my dignity.  I would never have left D if there had been any other way to stay alive and sane.  I begged him on my knees, numerous times, to stop the abuse and he would not.  D has said himself that there was no other way for me, that he knew that his heart was set on never changing.  

Now that I've said my piece, I commit before Jesus to forgiving you for what you have done to me, regardless of whether or not you accept what I'm saying.  You are welcome to be angry with me, you are welcome to feel whatever you like, but please do not contact me. Thank you.

Crooked Talk

Towards the end of my relationship I began to realize exactly how manipulative my spouse was and started calling him on it.  He would not let me use the word "manipulative" though, so we settled on a term "crooked talk."  I said that if he used any crooked talk in talking with me I would call him on it and not let him use those tactics.  In one fight I remember him protesting that I was objecting to literally everything that he was saying.  He was saying that to argue that I was being unfair, but that was when it started to dawn on me that it was true.  Every single sentence he was saying was manipulative and not moving towards a healthy and fair resolution to our conflict.

My counselor would not believe me that my spouse was manipulative, so I made a list of all the tactics I'd noticed at the time.  It's not a complete list, but it's a pretty heavy start.  I include it here so people can see how damaging dialogue can be if both parties aren't really sincere in trying to move towards a mutually satisfying conclusion, but one party is just trying to win at any cost, even the destruction of the partner.

Crooked talk

• Saying he’s really angry about one thing when he’s angry about something else
• Changing what he’s really angry about, switching gears suddenly with no explanation, when I point out how I’m innocent of xyz (i.e. I didn’t do it, or he was the one who actually brought it up, etc. etc.)
• Saying untrue accusations about me (and later admitting they are false and were said just to hurt me)
• Attacking my motivations, saying I want to destroy / emasculate / control him / ruin his life, take away his happiness / identity, etc.  Repeating these things over many days
• Being cold and hostile while I’m weeping
• Saying “I’m just made this way” or “I can’t help it” when I ask for sympathy or compassion
• Avoiding conceding an obvious point by saying “I’m don’t know” or “Maybe” or “I’m confused”
• Not admitting he’s angry (this has gotten better) but instead saying that he’s some other mild emotion – “confused” or “frustrated”
• Getting really, really upset (fake upset?) about something that normally wouldn’t upset him and fixating on that to avoid the real topic (“I’m really angry that you didn’t appreciate me!”)
• Arguing that his rights outweigh my rights, his pain outweighs my pain, and my sins outweigh his sins.  Refusing even to make them equal.  Sometimes ridiculous (him hounding me for 3 days straight telling me I ruined his life, I’m destroying his dreams, etc., is not as hurtful as me saying one simple statement saying to him, “You’re actually the reason we’re staying home from [ministry place].”)
• Jekyll and Hyde – changing completely without explanation
•             He has told me in Jekyll mode that I should discount everything Hyde says
•             But in Hyde mode, he gets very angry that “you don’t believe me”
• When I can prove my point, he does not accept it but instead says angrily, “Fine, you’re right.  You’re always right.”  Then the argument breaks down even further.
• Turning around his own wrongs to be my fault (even if I didn’t do anything yet )
•             “I did this because I was afraid that you would get angry and I would get in trouble”
•             “I broke my promise because you forced me to make the promise in the first place”
•             “I was going to do [what you wanted], but now that you’re asking me to, I don’t want to because you’re controlling me.”
• Making deals and then backing out of his side of the deal, but still holding me to my side
• Wanting exceptions to all the rules for himself, but holding me to the letter of the law
• Being angry for not being praised, thanked, appreciated, empathized with
• Suddenly changing the subject when confronted on his own wrongs
• Untrue causality statements
• Punishing me verbally for the things I did wrong, even if I’ve apologized, often to “teach me” never to do it again
• Claiming that I NEVER apologize or give in, even though I do
• Claiming that I always get my way / control him, even though he mostly gets his way
• Lying that he’s sorry at the very moment that he is afraid to lose me, then retracting
• Suddenly changing his mind when he sees negative consequences
• Saying the only solution should have been that I never brought it up (basically angry that I brought it up and blaming the entire fight on me because I brought up the topic)
• Blaming me / being angry for the time lost in fighting, how long it's taking, or how late it is at night, and fighting about that
• Apologizing for something and telling me he’s changed and he agrees with me, but then later taking it back and reasserting his former statements
• Saying he needs a “long time and many chances to change” but demanding instant perfection from me
• Getting angry at me for my boundaries, and trying to take away my right to leave / be angry
• Bringing up random unrelated bad things I've done in the past to justify his current wrong
• Fixating and harping on one statement or one or two words out of context and using that as a strategy to evade the main point
• Saying things just to push my buttons and not trying to help me not lose my temper
• Egging me on to lose my temper, saying, “You hate me.  Say that you hate me!  You want a divorce. Say it!  Say it!”
• After pushing me to lose my temper and I lose it, suddenly rearranging the whole conversation to focus on the problem of my temper, because “your temper trumps all my sins”
• Trying to blame the fight on an innocuous thing I did early in the conversation and telling me “never to do that again” e.g. never bring up talking about his diet; never bring up anything remotely serious at night, before leaving to go somewhere, in the car, right when he comes home, etc. etc.
• Using verbal strategies not intended to bring the conversation to a solution, but just to score points and “win.”  Trying to push his agenda and not trying to get to the bottom of things.
• Claiming childhood trauma is the cause of everything, and then going into weepy counseling mode and wanting counseling from me – even if I was the one who was hurt in the first place. No matter why we start the conversation we end up with me consoling and counseling him for his pain and trauma.  Nothing is his fault – it’s how he was raised.
• Rejecting any negative emotion from me, demanding that I ONLY say encouraging positive things and never say anything negative – however, not following this policy himself
• Accusing me of “screaming and yelling, blowing up” when I’m talking in a normal voice, upset but still calm
• Accusing me of traumatizing him but not seeing how he hurts me
• Accusing me of things that he is also guilty of, without shame or conflict over his hypocrisy – “You ALWAYS hyperbolize!”
• Demanding that I always speak in a sweet tone of voice, but not watching his own tone of voice.  Refusing to accept things I say in a nonsweet tone.
• Demanding that I never move my hands when I talk. Refusing to accept things I say if I have moved my hands.
• Demanding grace even though he’s not apologizing -- “You are all law and no grace!”
• Immediately cheerful and happy after fights are over and wanting to have sex even though I don’t want to
• Forcing me to be physically affectionate when I don’t want to
• Forcing me to sit on his lap when I don’t want to
• Getting angry with me if I don’t want physical affection, and punishing me eventually
• Not showing guilty feelings about his own behavior except when there are negative consequences for him
• Not realizing he’s guilty about anything without my spelling it out for him, and proving it to him over many laborious hours
• Not accepting my no but bringing up requests over and over again
• Saying yes to my requests but not really listening or doing them.  Sometimes he says “okay” and then immediately does the opposite.  Then gets very, very angry when I react unhappily.   e.g. While he’s drinking from my water bottle, I say: “D, don’t throw away that water bottle when you’re done.  I want to keep it.”  D:  “Ok.”  (Throws bottle away literally five seconds after he’s said ok)
• Will never allow me to say, “I can’t take this any more.”
• Agreeing on something together and then deliberately pursuing something opposite (we agree on a townhouse, he starts looking at big houses, we agree on a price range, he starts looking outside that price range, we agree on a certain house and he rents a totally different house) – then protesting innocence (“Can’t I even look?”  “I wasn’t serious, just curious”) even though he’s done this often in the past and I know that at some point he’s going to start pushing for it for real
• Getting angry when I get upset at him for not listening, and then saying that he is actually physically incapable of remembering what I ask, and that he needs lots of repetition.  Not acknowledging that he’s not listening. 
• Ignoring my repeated requests until I blow up and then getting mad at me for blowing up
• Not recognizing what he’s really angry at and taking it out on me. 
• e.g. He broke a glass in the bathroom and made a mess.  He was upset and came to talk to me about it.  I asked him if he cleaned it up.  All of a sudden we are in a huge fight because he feels I was not empathetic enough and he is furious at me.  I immediately try to be empathetic but it’s not good enough.  A few hours later I am weeping my eyes out and wondering what I did to deserve this.  I believe he made me pay for his bad feelings at breaking the glass.   And I wasn’t even there when it happened!  He sought me out and then took it out on me. 
• e.g. We often had huge fights after working out at the gym.  Finally he admitted that he feels really angry with me for no reason because he feels aggressive and in a bad mood after he works out.  But during those fights he could always find some fake reason to be mad at me, and I wouldn’t be able to understand why he would blow up over such little things, often things I had been doing for a long time.
• Holding onto anger for a long time (up to a year) and then punishing me for them, to "teach me a lesson to never do that again"