sarahbn

You know what? Forget it. I was hoping I'd find some spiritual support here in dealing with the consequences of abuse. Instead all I'm getting are armchair psychoanalyst picking me apart. You should rename this place ArmchairAnalysts.net.

That WAS the second counselor. Those words all describe how he portrays himself. I don't hate him. I hate what he did to me and to our kids. I pray for him every day. Inside his mind he is a poor abused child who cannot be held accountable for his actions. For the sake of our kids I hope he can change and heal. Emotional abuse is hard to describe. One thing that makes me angry (actually angry, not how you think I feel about my husband) is when people ask me to condense 20 years of abuse down into 2 minutes of a description of one incident, then say "well it was just that one incident! That's not so bad, you must not have been abused if you can sum it up in 2 minutes!" It's a pattern. He threatens harm to our kids, either emotional or physical harm, if I don't do what he wants. My kids have not been spectacularly physically harmed because of things I've done to make sure they weren't. People like you love to take that as evidence that there wasn't any abuse at all and I'm just making it up or something. I don't owe you or anybody else a 1000 page treatise on every incident of abuse. Even knowing about all the times I prayed for God to let me die rather than live another day in fear and degradation will not be enough to convince someone like you.

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Tumbledquartz, I'm in a similar situation except that I've already filed for divorce. If you're lonely, you can always talk to me.

Quin, that's just what happened with our counselor. My husband's MO is that he claims he was just too stupid to understand what he was doing and that because he did it in total ignorance, I have to forgive him (read: let him do whatever the heck he wants to me as many times as he feels like it). This works really well for him until you stop forgetting about all the previous times, at which point you realize that if he was actually that phenomenally stupid he wouldn't be able to take care of his own personal hygiene, let alone hold down a job. The counselor kept telling me that I had to stop being so critical of every little thing he does and be willing to allow him to make mistakes and not require him to be perfect all the time. When I tried to point out that there's no possible way they could all be mistakes, the counselor shut me down. My husband is either an abuser, or he's the world's unluckiest guy because everything he bumbles into is just coincidentally the same sort of stuff a controlling abuser would do. He's got everybody believing the latter. He has never gotten physical with me (yet...) and he's only physically abused the kids a few times because that's all it took to get me into line. I protected them whenever and however I could. But the kids are telling me stuff he's been doing on his visitation days and it sounds like he's just about reached his good-behavior limit and is about to snap. They're under strict instructions what to do if he does, hopefully it will not be bad enough to actually do damage to anyone.

Hi. After 20 years of abuse (the first 12 tolerable, the last 8 unbearable) I am finally getting a divorce. I have 4 kids and my husband and I were sealed in the temple. I have struggled so much with this. I have tried everything. And the answer I've been getting both inside and outside the temple is that there was nothing I could do to preserve the marriage, my husband had decided that it wasn't worth his while to put in the effort so it didn't matter how much I did. And boy, did I do much. We went to counseling, he got the counselor to support him in the abuse. I've been through any number of attitude adjustments. I sacrificed so much of myself to protect my kids from the worst of the abuse that I literally almost died. Even up until the day I filed I was reading self-help books on how to save abusive marriages. All of them said that the abuser needed to change too and there was little that the abusee could do to make them change if they didn't want to. And the truth is my husband had no reason to change. As long as he could still check that "married" box, he had what he wanted and it didn't matter to him how miserable his wife was, as long as he had me in his possession. I'm having trouble with my bishop, who doesn't seem to think that what my husband did was wrong enough that he ought to have to repent of it. He is also holding me responsible for the gossip others are spreading about the relationship. People are telling me that if I have a problem with my bishop and how he's handling it, it means I'm committing some kind of sin. I know that the bishop is a man with a calling, but he is just a man and is subject to all the same prejudices and blind spots that people in general have. But I still want to know if I'm overlooking something here. I had a blessing yesterday and it said I'm not under condemnation, but I don't want to leave any stone unturned in trying to root out any source of sin or rebellion. I used to be a really good woman. Now I'm what's left over after a good woman has been ground into the dirt. I'm not here to look for a relationship-- I'm so not ready for that right now. I guess I just want to know that the Lord loves me, that He wouldn't condone me being abused for all eternity, and that I'm not so badly damaged that the Lord can't make me into a woman worth taking to the temple, this time by a worthy man.