How I Realized My Abuser Would Never Change – Survivor Wisdom Series, Part Three
I love sharing the hard-earned wisdom from other survivors.
This is Part Three of the Survivor Wisdom Series. Here are the other articles in the series.
Part One: What I Wish I’d Done Differently During My Marriage
Part Two: What I Wish I’d Done Differently During My Divorce and Dealing with Others
Part Four: Tips if You are Still Wondering if You’re Abuser Will Change
Part Five: How I Realized His Abuse Was Intentional
Part Six: Why I Stayed
Part Seven: How I Knew it was Time to Separate
Part Eight: How God Guided Me to Divorce
Part Nine: How Divorce Made My Life Better
Part Ten: Seeing Spiritual Abuse
Part Eleven: How Your Church Should Respond When You Disclose Abuse
I recently asked the women in my Confusion to Clarity Facebook Community this question:
When you were still hoping he’d change, how did you finally come to realize that he wasn’t going to change? What opened your eyes?
Here are their answers:
After several in-house separations and full separations, I still held out hope. We’d been through many cycles of him admitting his abuse and promising to stop, then going back to it again. When I did Neurofeedback for anxiety and depression, that helped my traumatized and confused brain enough that I started to see the severity of the covert abuse.
When I finally separated the last time, I knew in my heart that it was the end. But hope springs eternal and I thought that the prospect of him losing his family would be enough to motivate him because he had pretended that his family was the most important in thing in his life during our whole marriage. I was still very naïve and uneducated about how abusers think and that they lie about everything. I read “In Sheep’s Clothing” by George Simon, and I started to understand what I was really dealing with. It was a slow dawning over time because I was still hoping in a miracle. It takes a long time to let a dream die and to face the truth of free will.
When we separated the final time, he again admitted his abuse and promised to get counseling, but in a few weeks he changed his story, made everything my fault once again, and started turning our friends against me. God told me to divorce him and I began my long journey to freedom.
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I wish I had a specific answer. I simply looked at his cold behavior toward me and my daughter after years of all types of abuse. He settled mostly on psychological abuse– it’s his favorite weapon. My daughter is now twelve and seeing her start to shrink in his presence and be mad at me just made me snap out of my delusion that someday he’d stop the insanity. It’s never, ever going to happen.
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The simple answer is I finally saw the truth. Not the whole truth, that took several more years after I left him, but just enough truth through two rounds of separation, what led up to those separations, and yet, here I was again, dealing with the same person he would morph into.
Little did I know that person I saw was the true him. There were times he just couldn't hide the true evil that exists in him. Over and over again, I was left wondering where the “nice” him went to. He was unreachable, smug, acted like he could care less if I left him. He was treating me like I was nothing.
It was when he had the attitude that he could care less about us getting divorced that did me in though. I remember sitting there and thinking: I am being a good wife. Holding you accountable, for your sake even more than for mine. I'm patient, respectful, still choose to do the right thing no matter what you do or don't do, and YOU don't care about me leaving???
I could see that he really wasn't ever the man he said he was, and that I was absolutely wasting my life being with him. It took several more years after I left him before I understood that this man was evil. But once that lightbulb goes on no darkness will shadow that kind of truth.
I used to dream of living a quiet and peaceful life free of toxic people and abuse. I'm living my dream. Several disabilities have not robbed me of my joy nor my gratitude for freedom from a conscience-free husband. God is so good!
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I looked for him to repeat his behavior– it takes time since anyone can pretend for a bit– if the pattern is there, no hope of repentance. Also, accepting that him repenting is not contingent upon you staying with him. If he is truly repentant, he will put in the work to get healthy regardless.
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Through a period of prayer and fasting, God revealed to me that the divorce was His protection. God was telling me I had enough and He was removing me from a toxic relationship that was destroying me. I realized I could not fix him, I could only change me with God’s help.
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I slowly realized he wasn't going to change. It took months and years for me to really face it. But I found an article on A Cry Out for Justice website about how change occurs and the real likelihood of it, and another on true repentance/vs unrepentance.
I slowly started to watch for signs of repentance vs. entitlement. Everything about him screamed entitlement. He'd write nice letters and texts, but in person it just could never match up. And he refused to really look at his actions and behaviors. He'd say, "that's too negative, I want to focus on positive things." Which boiled down to, "I don't want to be accountable for how I treated you (which hurt you.)" He blamed all of the problems on me pulling away, not on what caused me to pull away. So, I was his obstacle, not his own behaviors and attitudes.
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His eyes darkened when he spoke to me. We still attended church as a family but he put a child in between our chairs, he got physically intimidating by following me around the house and demanding I talk to him, he then treated me like a ghost.
The initial few months of pastoral counseling, I was told to change my perspective. A Christian friend told me that I should suffer as Christ did, so I allowed my then husband to spend one afternoon, cutting into me, insulting and demeaning me and using my deepest childhood pain against me. It was a long process.
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When I learned he treated his first family the same way. And when he was love bombing me when he thought I was leaving, he blamed everything on me to his son.
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When I filed for divorce, the threat of divorce was the catalyst to make him start looking at the abuse I had been citing for years, and he asked for a chance to change so he could keep his family. He read a book about abuse and called me over to show me that his eyes were opened and he was now seeing all the ways he had been abusive. He listed them for me. I thought there could be some hope. I agreed to put things on hold for a few months while he sought help. He moved out.
He started counseling and I agreed to go to a session to help shed light on the things he couldn’t see about how he was abusive to the kids and me. The counselor told him straight up that he really needed to listen to us and take it seriously or that he would likely lose these relationships.
A couple weeks later he told me yet again that I had “never even given him examples of how he was abusive.” I reminded him all the things that he had admitted to a couple months before, and he told me that he had never done those things. I knew it was hopeless at that point and decided to move forward with the proceedings.
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As I got educated about narcissism I realized change wasn't going to happen.
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It wasn’t until I started seeing this one therapist and began attending a support group for women that had been betrayed maritally that I began hearing truth. 2 Cor 7:10-11 helped me as well as Patrick Doyle’s YouTube video on reconciliation. I read and watched those two things over and over as well as listening to the women around me (my therapist and my support group).
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The day he told me outright that he would not change after I’ve done everything I could for 15 years
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I started writing down my abuser’s behavior and words, and noticing how they did not match up (this took a long time to do – 2.5 years, to be exact). He would tell me one thing and do another. He would say he loved me but then gaslight me again. He would say he had changed but then I found texts and emails to the contrary. I had been going through a significant learning process, where I was reading everything I could about narcissism, abuse, TRUE repentance and reconciliation. He just exhibited classic signs of love bombing, trying to control me and the situation and maintain his influence over me. Breaking free was scary but so freeing!
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Despite the fact that he fostered “soloness” (taking vacations by himself, solo activities/hobbies by himself), what hit me square between the eyes was learning about his affairs. Until then I had always held out a spark of hope.
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For me it took outside messages, my own growth, and some spiritual. One counselor reminded me I was in the same place over and over again. As I got healthy, I was able to see the toxic environment more clearly. I prayed for God to show me when and how. Doors opened, opportunities appeared. I had to be healthy myself to see them.
First I started to pray he would change, I did that for years! When I only saw him get worse, I began to pray for God to help me just survive, I did that for about 16 months. Then I began to pray God would take my husband’s life, I did this for two and a half years. I was terrified of him and severely depressed. I was also paralyzed by the words of the church that I could not divorce.
What opened my eyes was God clearly guiding me. I also had a sister-in-law that had come out of an abusive marriage and saw some of what was going on. She and my brother really helped me out.
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After I confronted him about an affair, at least he had the honesty to say he had no intention of giving her up, or working to repair our marriage. I don't know why he was so shocked and angry that I filed for divorce, and accused ME of betraying HIM by filing, and stabbing him in the back.
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My whole journey was such a slow process. Here’s the first time I clearly remember my brain thinking, "This will never end." My h was being ugly because he was mad at me for something that I didn't even know what, on the way to church. After church, we went to eat. There were a lot of "little things" during the meal (you know they can crazy for quite a stretch at a time). As we were getting ready to leave he starts yelling at me. My sons were off to the side while dad berated me and everyone was looking at us and I remember looking at him and thinking "This will never end." And this was him being given a chance to show me his "change" that he promised after I moved into the other room for the 5th time. Obviously still an entitlement mentality and he was just ACTING to get me back. Anyway, I hadn't learned all that yet so it was another 2 years before I moved out.
There was a "straw" that made me move out and there was a "straw" that made me file, but this was the first time I remember clearly thinking it, and dreading it because my false hope was gone.
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The fact that he didn't take responsibility for his toxic behavior made me realize that he will never change!
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I realized after having multiple nervous breakdowns. He liked me in that situation because it made me dependent on him. (That really opened my eyes to how selfish he really was). I realized that I would physically die if I didn’t get out. Whether that was by killing myself or by my body literally shutting down. I have had many autoimmune issues over the last few years (married 21) and believe all of them were from the constant abuse.
I tried to leave once and filed after we had been married 2 years but then we reconciled. That only entrenched me deeper in the teaching of the church and believing that I was the problem and the solution. I spent 19 more years coming to the conclusion that my initial instinct to leave was right.
Getting out has been one of the hardest things I have ever done and I’m realizing just how deeply I was programmed to think everything was my responsibility.
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Throughout our marriage, I thought it was somewhat normal. He was entitled and my interests were a complete waste of time. He would never take "no" for an answer. He would keep asking until I gave him the answer that he wanted. And then when I got cancer 11 years ago his first thought was about how it's going to affect his sex life. Things started worsening a lot faster after that.
Then, a few years ago things came to a head. He found out I had bought a domain for my blog which led him to make a statement that I could never be successful or make any money from it. That hurt. I realized then that he was never going to appreciate any of my interests or anything I do. That's when I started thinking about other things that had happened during the years and I started researching on the web and realized that this entire time I was being abused: physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, financially, psychologically, etc.
Then I learned about the word narcissist and, as I read what a narcissist is like, it was like I was reading about him. I kept researching and learning things and one day it seemed like God told me that I was probably going to leave him, but it was a couple of years until I actually saw that through.
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In my 15 year relationship, truly acknowledging the years-long pervasive and persistent patterns, recognizing the cycle of abuse on repeat loop, seeing an escalation of unhealthy and toxic behaviours, feeling like the relationship was making me sick - so truly listening to my body and mind. The help of a therapist. Researching narcissistic abuse.
When the final reality hit that there would be no change was during a period of separation, when his agendas were not met for an immediate reconciliation on his terms, his behaviours repeated in the exact same cycle of abuse - this was the catalyst.
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What opened my eyes was when I had caught him searching for porn on his phone and when I confronted him about it he didn't care how I felt.
What’s your story of how you realized he would never change? Feel free to share below- it may help another suffering woman!
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