It’s not always easy to tell the story. I am like you. I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a daughter. I work. I sing. I go to church on Sundays. I like to cook. I love my friends and family. I am an abused woman. The sad part is that this was preventable. The control and the power issues were not new. They had been there in his previous marriage. There were people that knew. They didn’t tell me. Maybe they thought it “wasn’t that bad.” Maybe they thought “he will treat her differently”. Maybe “his first wife drove him to it”. I can tell you these were not the case. I can tell you for the first part of my marriage I lived in total chaos. He was a different man than the man I knew before the marriage. No, they were not subtle things, they were huge things. At first I couldn’t move into the house after the marriage. He said it would be better if I went back to my old home each morning to dress. Then I couldn’t shop (not even for groceries) without him. Then there were the public humiliations. He raged if I asked him to help with the housework. He is a professional. Educated at the Y. I caught him using the computer to access pornography, he said this had been going on for years. Before us. This from a High Priest holding a Temple Recommend. He has a good job, a good “cover”. It was all my fault. Until….. I took it to the church leaders. Someone used the word “abuse”. “Yes”, I said “it’s abusive, but I just thought he might be psychotic”. He’s not psychotic, he knows exactly what he’s doing. I never thought there was a term for what I was going through. I never thought that other women had also gone through this. I certainly never thought it was “abuse”. Abuse was something other people went through. Maybe poorer people. Maybe less educated people. People who called the police because their drunken husband got out of control. But not to people like me. For us, there was never a cycle of abuse. There was no honeymoon phase. Just total narcissistic abuse. It has only gotten better because I sought help. Maybe you need to, too. Chances are he won’t change. He doesn’t accept that he’s the problem. You don’t need to feel alone. It’s not your fault. You can again feel like your old self, the one you put away because he didn’t like her. The one that was able to be involved with her church, her friends and her family. The one that used to smile. Before. Whether you want to prevent your children from getting involved in abusive relationships or you are in the middle of a long and hard custody battle or you went through this years ago and the memories have been pushed so far back - join us for a soul healing journey. Help and be helped. What you read here may be most familiar to Latter-day Saint women. We are unique but very much like our other Christian sisters. Please join us no matter your religious background. We are stronger together than we are apart. Your privacy is very important. We will not give out your personal information.
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