I Recognized Her Story Because I Almost Didn’t Make It Out of Mine

What Death of a Pastor’s Wife brought back to me about coercive control, financial abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, spiritual abuse, survival—and the God who never stopped having a plan for my life.

A note before reading: This post discusses sexual assault, coercive control, psychological and spiritual abuse, and fear for personal safety. Please take care of yourself while reading.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened to me when I watched Death of a Pastor’s Wife.

I knew it would be difficult to watch.

What I didn’t expect was to recognize so much of it.

Not because Mica’s story and mine are the same. They aren’t. I would never pretend to know everything another woman experienced, and I would never compare our endings.

What I recognized were the patterns.

A man whose public image could look very different from the person experienced behind closed doors.

A past other people didn’t necessarily know about.

The importance of protecting appearances.

The manipulation.

The rewriting of reality.

The gradual destruction of a woman’s ability to trust herself.

The fear.

And the more I watched, the more I found myself thinking about something I have spent years trying to understand.

There was a point in my own story when I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to make it out.

And I think I’m finally ready to talk about it.

The first warning came before we were even married.

Before I married my former husband, he told me something about a girlfriend who came before me.

He told me she had accused him of rape.

But the story he told made him the victim.

According to him, she had been a virgin. She regretted losing her virginity afterward and accused him of rape because she couldn’t deal with what she had done.

I believed him.

I didn’t understand then how important that conversation would eventually become.

Because later, it happened to me.

And I want to be very clear about what happened because the details matter.

I didn’t simply go out one night and happen to drink too much.

He dared me to.

We were drinking together, and he challenged me to see how many shots I could take.

He stopped after three or four.

But he continued daring me.

Telling me I couldn’t do more.

Challenging me to keep going.

So I did.

I eventually consumed more than 20 shots.

I was extraordinarily intoxicated.

And that night, he had sex with me.

I knew what had happened.

That’s important.

I didn’t need twenty years, therapy or a new understanding of consent to look backward and decide that something I once considered consensual was actually rape.

I knew then.

In fact, I told him.

You raped me.

What happened next would become one of the earliest examples of something that continued throughout our relationship.

He began dismantling my certainty about something I knew had happened to me.

He told me that if I hadn’t wanted sex, I could have stopped it.

He pointed to the fact that I hadn’t physically prevented him as evidence that I must have wanted it.

And when I connected what had happened to me with what he had previously told me about the girlfriend who accused him of rape, he turned that against me too.

He told me I was taking something deeply personal he had trusted me enough to share and using it to make him look like a bad person.

Think about what happened there.

I went from saying:

You raped me.

To feeling guilty because I had somehow hurt him by saying it.

There were more explanations.

More arguments.

More ways of turning the conversation around until somehow I was defending myself instead of questioning what he had done.

And eventually something happened that would become devastatingly familiar throughout our relationship:

I began doubting something I had known to be true.

I knew.

Then I was manipulated into questioning whether I knew.

There is an enormous difference between those two things.

Maybe I could have stopped him.

Maybe I had somehow communicated something I couldn’t remember.

Maybe I really was using his past against him.

Maybe calling it rape made me cruel.

Maybe I was making him into a bad person.

Maybe I was wrong.

Eventually, the certainty I had started with became buried beneath so many layers of guilt, confusion and self-doubt that I did something I would learn to do again and again.

I suppressed it.

I pushed it away.

I stopped allowing myself to think about it.

Because there was another reality standing in direct opposition to what I had experienced.

He was a Christian.

His family was deeply involved in church.

His father was an elder.

His mother was a counselor.

These were good Christian people.

And in my mind, those two realities couldn’t coexist.

How could the good Christian guy from the good Christian family be someone who raped me?

Surely those things couldn’t both be true.

So when reality didn’t fit the person I believed him to be, I found another explanation.

I made myself wrong instead.

Later, I discovered pieces of a past I hadn’t understood.

Over time, I found things he had kept.

I found journals he had written.

I found writings concerning the girlfriend who came before me where he clearly admitted to raping her, his best friend. There were other writings describing other deeply disturbing sexual behavior.

I also discovered old school disciplinary citations documenting repeated incidents involving inappropriate and sexual touching of girls.

I didn’t know these things when I chose him, but he did, and later I found out his parents did too.

Discovering them forced me to reconsider things I had previously been told and things I had spent years explaining away.

That is one reason the hidden-history aspect of Death of a Pastor’s Wife affected me so deeply.

I understand what it is like to discover that there were pieces of someone’s past that didn’t fit the person you believed you knew.

I understand what it is like to realize that the person everyone else sees may not be the person you experience privately.

And perhaps most importantly, I understand what it is like to know something is wrong and then be convinced not to trust yourself.

Somewhere along the way, his voice became mine.

This is something I desperately wish people understood when they ask why someone stays in an abusive relationship.

People imagine a woman objectively looking at everything happening to her and simply deciding:

I’m going to stay.

That wasn’t my experience.

My understanding of myself had been slowly dismantled.

I was told I was crazy.

Selfish.

Difficult.

Too emotional.

The problem.

And when you hear something often enough from the person closest to you, eventually they don’t even have to say it anymore.

Their voice becomes your voice.

Something would hurt me, and instead of asking why he had done it, I would ask whether I was being too sensitive.

Something would frighten me, and I would wonder whether I was overreacting.

Something wouldn’t make sense, and I would search for an explanation that made it my fault.

That’s one of the most insidious things I now understand about coercive control.

Sometimes the cage isn’t something another person physically puts around you.

Sometimes they teach you to build it inside yourself.

Eventually, you don’t trust yourself enough to walk out of it.

And then there was the church.

I was in church every Sunday.

Every Sunday.

And yet, looking back now, I don’t believe I actually had a relationship with God.

I knew church.

I knew Christian culture.

I knew what I had been taught a Christian wife was supposed to do.

Forgive.

Give grace.

Keep your family together.

Pray harder.

Don’t gossip.

Don’t dishonor your husband.

Don’t expose someone’s sin.

Believe people can change.

I knew how to sit in a pew.

But I didn’t yet know how to run directly to God.

And because the people surrounding my marriage were Christians, separating what was happening to me from what I believed about God became incredibly difficult.

How could someone behave this way and still present himself as a man of God?

How could his father be an elder?

How could his mother be a counselor?

How could people know about serious things that had happened and still, from my perspective, seem more concerned with protecting him and protecting the family’s image? I remember clearly the day I asked his father, “When did he change? When did he become this person I no longer recognize? His response blew my mind. “What if, he hasn’t changed. What if, he’s been this person all along and you just couldn’t see it.”

So, I asked for the elders to pray for him and our marriage because James 5:14-15 states the power of the elders praying over someone. His response was, “Having the elders pray is no different than anyone else praying, there’s no need to involve them.”

I wasn’t allowed to go to the elders and ask them to pray for what was happening in my marriage because his family was more concerned about their image and how that would look in the church if everyone found out who he really was.

Think about that.

I was sitting in church every Sunday desperately needing help, yet I believed I couldn’t even ask the spiritual leaders of my church to pray for me.

Eventually, I told our pastor about the affairs and how I was trying to save our marriage despite it all.

He wasn’t simply my pastor.

I thought he was my friend.

But when everything came apart, he stood with my former husband and his family and the lies they told to protect their image, their son’s image.

That hurt in a way I still struggle to describe.

Because when people who represent God appear to protect the person who hurt you, you can begin confusing their character with God’s character.

This is something that can turn people away from God, but I did the exact opposite and gave it all to Him, because I no longer knew what to do.

For almost two years, I thought God was telling me to stay to fix my marriage.

This may be the most complicated part of my testimony.

In the beginning of finding out the numerous affairs my ex had and realizing what he’d done to me, I was shown to stay. Do not leave the marriage.

Scripture kept appearing.

Wait.

Trust.

Persevere.

Have faith.

Don’t give up.

And I interpreted all of it through the only framework I understood:

God wants me to fix my marriage.

So I tried.

I prayed.

I stayed.

I went to therapy every single week.

And here’s the part that breaks my heart when I think about the woman I was then:

I originally went to therapy because I thought I needed to fix myself.

I believed that if I became better, maybe my husband would love me better.

If I weren’t so emotional.

If I weren’t so difficult.

If I could become less selfish.

If I could stop reacting.

If I could become whatever version of myself he needed me to be, maybe everything would finally be okay.

I was trying to become worthy of being loved by my own husband.

But therapy began doing something I hadn’t expected.

We started unpacking my life.

One experience.

Then another.

Things I had minimized.

Things I had rationalized.

Things I had blamed myself for.

Things I had pushed so far out of my mind that I had almost convinced myself they didn’t matter.

The rape. Because he hadn’t only raped me while we were dating, he had done it during our marriage and told me as his wife he was allowed to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.

The affairs.

The lies.

The manipulation.

The abuse.

The things that had been said to me.

The things I wasn’t supposed to talk about.

The experiences I had spent years explaining away because acknowledging them would have required me to reconsider everything I believed about my marriage.

And slowly, the question I was asking began to change.

I stopped asking:

What’s wrong with me?

And began asking:

What happened to me?

That question changed everything.

I had misunderstood what God was doing.

For almost two years, I thought God kept telling me to stay because He was working on my marriage.

Looking back now, I believe He was working on me.

He was growing me.

He was healing me.

He was strengthening me.

He was helping me remember things I had buried.

He was teaching me to recognize truth after years of being taught not to trust my own perception.

Because had I walked away immediately when I discovered the affairs, I believe I would have carried my husband’s version of me right out the door.

I would have left believing I was crazy.

Selfish.

Difficult.

Responsible for destroying my family.

I would have wondered whether I should have tried harder.

I might have escaped the marriage physically while remaining imprisoned by everything I had been taught to believe about myself.

Instead, over those two years, God began dismantling it.

Piece by piece.

Lie by lie.

Memory by memory.

Until eventually I could see something I had been unable to see before:

I wasn’t who I had been told I was.

And then God began showing me something else.

It was time to leave.

I didn’t listen, because he had told me to stay. I was definitely supposed to stay.

So He showed me again.

And I found another explanation.

So He showed me again.

And again.

Until finally I understood.

God hadn’t kept me there so I could fix my marriage.

I believe He had been preparing me to survive leaving it.

Near the end, my fear changed.

This is perhaps the part of Death of a Pastor’s Wife that has been hardest for me to sit with.

Toward the end of my marriage, my former husband accused me of breaking into his vehicle and stealing his gun.

I hadn’t.

Then the messages changed.

He began talking about sending police to perform a welfare check on me.

He told me not to harm myself.

He told me not to harm our children.

There were other messages along those same lines.

I remember staring at my phone thinking:

Why is he saying these things?

I wasn’t suicidal.

I wasn’t going to hurt my children.

Yet suddenly there were written communications in which he was expressing concern that I might do exactly those things.

Something inside me screamed that this was different.

And thankfully, by then, I had learned enough to stop immediately silencing that voice.

So I created a record.

I forwarded the messages to members of his family.

I sent them to my father.

I wanted other people to see exactly what was being said.

And I told them something I never imagined I would have to say about the man I married:

If something happens to me, it was him.

Even writing those words now makes my stomach turn.

Because I need people to understand something.

I’m not watching a documentary years later and creating fear that wasn’t there at the time.

I was afraid then.

Afraid enough to document what was happening.

Afraid enough to send it to other people.

Afraid enough that I wanted someone outside of the situation to have a record in case something happened to me.

Something else was happening around that time that added to my fear.

Several times after he had been at the house, I became sick after he’d leave.

At the time, I became frightened that something could have been put on my toothbrush or in my toothpaste; I knew something was not right. So one weekend, I hid them…and put out a “fake” toothbrush and toothpaste…and I didn’t get sick. That’s when he was no longer allowed in the house. I changed the locks, and that was the end of him being allowed inside.

I never proved he had done something to try and poison me.

I don’t know what caused me to become sick, but I don’t think it was a coincidence.

Either way, it made me even more afraid.

And that matters.

Because what had happened during all those years for me to reach a point where I genuinely feared that the man I had married might be capable of something like that? It was terrifying.

Watching Mica’s story forced me to confront a question I don’t like asking.

What if I hadn’t gotten out?

I don’t know the answer.

And I want to be very clear about that.

I cannot say my former husband would have killed me.

I cannot say he intended to make my death look like a suicide.

I cannot say my story would have ended like Mica’s.

Those are things I don’t know.

But I can say something I know with absolute certainty:

By the end of my marriage, I was afraid I might not be safe.

There had been an accusation involving a gun.

There were messages about suicide, welfare checks and harming my children when I wasn’t suicidal and had no intention of harming my children.

And my response wasn’t simply to think those messages were strange.

My response was to preserve them and tell other people:

If something happens to me, it was him.

That woman was me.

Watching Mica’s story made me look back at her.

And for perhaps the first time, I fully understood just how frightened she had become.

I don’t know how my story would have ended if I had stayed.

But I know what did happen.

I got out.

And that’s where my story stopped being only about abuse.

Because somewhere in the middle of everything falling apart, I actually found God.

Not church.

Not religion.

Not someone else’s interpretation of what God expected from a Christian wife.

God.

And the God I came to know wasn’t demanding that I become smaller so someone else could continue hurting me.

He wasn’t asking me to pretend something hadn’t happened in the name of forgiveness.

He wasn’t telling me that protecting someone’s image mattered more than acknowledging the truth.

God wasn’t the people who failed me.

God wasn’t the person who hurt me.

God wasn’t the elder.

God wasn’t the counselor.

God wasn’t the pastor who disappointed me.

God wasn’t church politics or appearances or anyone else’s interpretation of what I was supposed to endure.

God was still God.

People had failed me.

God hadn’t.

And once I finally separated the two, I began understanding something that changed my entire relationship with Him.

He had been there all along.

I just hadn’t always known how to find Him.

The abuse had distorted my understanding of Him.

It had interfered with my ability to hear Him underneath all the other voices.

But it had never made Him absent. I just had to learn to silence the chaos so I could truly hear him.

Jeremiah 29:11 means something entirely different to me now.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

For most of my life, I think I interpreted that verse as God promising to make the life I already had turn out the way I wanted.

Now I understand it differently.

There was a future for me when I couldn’t see one.

God could see beyond my marriage.

Beyond the affairs.

Beyond the fear.

Beyond the sexual abuse.

Beyond the manipulation.

Beyond the spiritual abuse.

Beyond the church hurt.

Beyond the woman who believed she was fundamentally flawed.

Beyond the woman who went to therapy because she thought becoming better might finally make her husband love her.

Beyond the woman staring at messages on her phone and thinking:

If something happens to me…

He could see this woman.

Me.

Here.

Alive.

Free.

Still healing.

Still learning.

Still occasionally uncovering things that hurt.

But knowing who I am in a way I never did before.

And knowing God in a way I never did simply sitting in church every Sunday.

Maybe this is why I’m finally ready to tell my story.

For a long time, I’ve wondered what I’m supposed to do with everything I’ve survived.

Because surely surviving can’t be the end of it.

Then I watched another woman’s story and recognized things I desperately wish no woman ever had to recognize.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who might be living some version of my story right now.

Maybe she’s sitting in church every Sunday.

Maybe everyone thinks her husband is wonderful.

Maybe she thinks her husband is wonderful—except for those things she keeps pushing out of her mind because they don’t fit the person she believes him to be.

Maybe something happened to her, and she knows it was wrong, but someone has spent months or years convincing her that what she knows isn’t true.

Maybe she’s been told she’s crazy so many times she doesn’t know whether she can trust herself anymore.

Maybe she’s in therapy, desperately trying to figure out what’s wrong with her.

Maybe she’s praying for God to change her so her husband will finally love her properly.

Maybe she’s reading Scripture about perseverance and assuming it means God requires her to endure whatever is happening behind closed doors.

Maybe people around her know pieces of what’s happening but are more comfortable protecting a marriage, a man, a family or an institution than confronting the truth.

Maybe she’s beginning to feel afraid.

And maybe every time that fear appears, she tells herself she’s overreacting.

I want to reach her.

I want her to know what I desperately needed someone to tell me.

You are allowed to pay attention to what is happening to you.

You are allowed to trust the alarm going off inside you.

You are allowed to tell someone.

You are allowed to document what is happening.

You are allowed to ask for help.

Being a Christian does not require pretending abuse isn’t abuse.

Forgiveness does not transform abusive behavior into acceptable behavior.

Protecting someone’s reputation is not more important than protecting a person.

A church leader failing you does not mean God has failed you.

And the person hurting you does not get to define God for you.

There is a future.

That’s ultimately why I’m writing this.

Not to make the rest of my life about the man who hurt me.

I spent enough years doing that.

This is about what came next.

It’s about a God who could see the woman I would become long before I could see her.

It’s about walking into therapy trying to fix myself and eventually discovering that I wasn’t the person I had been taught to believe I was.

It’s about learning the difference between attending church and actually knowing God.

It’s about discovering that spiritual abuse doesn’t get ownership of my faith.

It’s about realizing that surviving isn’t the end of healing.

And it’s about finally understanding Jeremiah 29:11.

God had a plan.

I couldn’t see it.

I didn’t understand it.

Sometimes I fought it.

Sometimes He had to show me the same thing again and again and again before I was willing to believe it.

But He had me.

He always had me.

I thought He was trying to save my marriage.

Looking back, I believe He was preparing to save me.

And now I believe part of what comes next is telling the story.

Not because I want people to know everything that was done to me.

But because I want another woman to recognize what’s being done to her.

I want the woman blaming herself to ask a different question.

Not:

What’s wrong with me?

But:

What happened to me?

I want the woman who has lost God somewhere inside the abuse to understand that He hasn’t lost her.

I want the woman who believes church people failed her because God failed her to understand that those are not the same thing.

And I want the woman who cannot imagine a life beyond the one she’s trapped inside right now to know:

There is one.

There is healing.

There is hope.

There is life after this.

There is a future you cannot see yet.

I know because I couldn’t see mine either.

I recognized Mica’s story because I almost didn’t make it out of my own.

But I did.

And I believe part of God’s plan for the life He gave me on the other side of it is to finally turn around and tell another woman:

There is a way out.

There is a way forward.

And there is still a plan for you.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord… “plans to give you hope and a future.” — Jeremiah 29:11

For most of my life, that was a Bible verse I knew.

Today, it’s a promise I understand.

God had me then.

He has me now.

And He had a future for me all along.

If something in my story feels familiar

If you are experiencing abuse or are afraid of someone in your life, you don’t have to wait until you are certain what to call it before reaching out for help.

If you are in immediate danger in the United States, call 911 when it is safe to do so.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline provides confidential support, safety planning and resources at 800-799-SAFE (7233). You can also text START to 88788 or use its online chat.

The RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline provides confidential sexual-assault support at 800-656-HOPE (4673)and through its online services.

If you believe your phone, browser, accounts or other devices may be monitored, consider accessing resources from a device the other person cannot access and speaking with an advocate about technology safety.

And if you’re a woman of faith struggling to reconcile what is happening to you with what you’ve been taught about marriage, forgiveness or God, please hear me:

Someone else’s abuse does not become holy because Scripture is used around it.

What another person does in God’s name does not define the character of God.

You deserve to be safe.

You deserve to be heard.

And there can still be hope and a future on the other side of something you cannot yet imagine escaping.