You finally told someone.
Maybe it was your pastor. An elder and his wife. The women’s ministry leader who always said her door was open. You’d rehearsed it for weeks, maybe for years. You chose your words carefully so you wouldn’t sound bitter.
And somewhere in the conversation, it turned.
“Have you considered your part in this?” “There are two sides to every story.” “He’s been so faithful in the tech ministry.” “Have you been praying for him? Really praying?”
You walked out of that office feeling like the problem. You came in with the concern and left as the accused.
If that’s you, I want you to know two things before anything else. What happened in that room has a name. And it says far more about the room than it does about you.
What Happened in That Room
Clinicians call it secondary wounding (or secondary abuse): harm done by the people who respond to the harm. The first wound was what happened at home. The second is being disbelieved, minimized, or redirected by the people you went to for help.
For many women, the second wound goes deeper than the first. You expected it from him, maybe. You didn’t expect it from them.
And here’s what nobody in that office seemed to consider:
What does she gain by making up her story?
The overwhelming majority of women who speak up about what’s happening in their marriage stand to lose much: community, reputation, financial support, family, church, and a significant portion of their faith. Exposure of the emotional abuse in her marriage will alter everything she knows. Everything.
The only thing she seeks to gain? Safety.
Nobody walks into a pastor’s office and risks all of that for attention.
Why People Who Should Know Better Refuse to See It
It isn’t always malice. It’s usually something more ordinary, and more fixable. Here’s what I’ve watched happen, over and over, for more than a decade.
They’ve only met the public version of him. People can present very differently behind closed doors. The man they know from the greeting line, the small group, or the tech booth is real, but he’s not the whole man. The version of him everyone at church has met is often the most carefully maintained thing in your house.
They’ve never been shown what control looks like. Most pastors, and many counselors, were trained for conflict: two people, two perspectives, meet in the middle. Nobody taught them what control actually looks like in a marriage. So they see a disagreement where there’s a pattern.
They heard his version first. Often he got there before you did. Calm, reasonable, concerned about your state of mind. So by the time you arrived, they believed they were being neutral. They weren’t. They were holding his account and calling it balance.
Believing you costs them something. If you’re telling the truth, their judgment was wrong. Their church is less safe than they believed. And they may have to do something hard. Denial protects all of that. It’s easier to imagine you’re exaggerating than to imagine someone they know being that cruel.
Their theology has one goal: keep the marriage together. When the main focus is pressure to “stay married,” the behavior that has to change gets glossed over and minimized. The marriage becomes the patient, and you become the treatment.
None of this makes your experience less real. It explains why your reality keeps getting denied.
“You’re Not the Holy Spirit”
This is the one I want to take apart, because it does the most damage and sounds the most spiritual.
It’s too common in Christian environments to tell a woman that being a godly wife means enduring more, praying more, and waiting for God to convict her husband. She’s taught that since she isn’t the Holy Spirit, she isn’t to speak out against his sinful behavior. Move out of God’s way. Look at your own sin. Stop withholding. Quietly obey.
It sounds humble. It’s spiritual malpractice.
It implies marriage is exempt from the rules of engagement the Bible lays out for every other relationship. It isn’t. Believers are told plainly to name what’s wrong:
“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)
“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault.” (Matthew 18:15)
Nowhere does Scripture add “unless he’s your husband.” Nobody is asking you to be the Holy Spirit. You’re being asked to stop being his cover.
And “have you considered your part?” deserves an honest answer, too. Of course you have. You’ve probably considered it more than anyone else in the room. It’s the question you’ve been asking yourself for years. The problem was never that you refused to look at yourself. It’s that you were the only one being asked to.
What Actually Convicts Him?
Here’s the question underneath the “wait for God to convict him” advice.
What will convict him? He isn’t convicted by the damage or the pain he causes. More often than not, he continues because it gets him what he wants. Why would he be motivated to change? It works for him, and he doesn’t have to answer to anyone.
So when the advice is absorb it quietly and wait, notice what it actually does: it removes every consequence God might use to get his attention. That isn’t waiting on conviction. It’s insulating him from it.
The best chance for true heart change in a marriage is to eradicate destructive behavior, not to teach the spouse to endure more. And if someone has told you that you both have equal work to do here, that’s its own myth.
Consequences are not cruelty. A limit that lets him feel the weight of his own choices may be the most loving thing anyone has done for him in years. And if change comes, it will show up in behavior you can measure, not in a tearful conversation with the pastor. Here’s what real change looks like.
“God Hates Divorce”: The Rest of the List
You’ll probably hear this one delivered as a conversation-ender. So let’s continue the conversation.
Consider what else Scripture says God hates: pride, oppression, a lying tongue, a perverse mouth, hypocrisy, arrogance, stirring up strife, those who love violence. (Proverbs 6:16–19 alone lists seven.) In all cases of abuse, the perpetrator uses intimidation, humiliation, isolation and fear to diminish his victim’s sense of self and sanity, defying the image of God in her.
Even the verse most often quoted to keep you in the marriage, Malachi 2:16, is rendered in several modern translations as a rebuke of the husband who does violence to his wife.
Here’s how I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it:
It’s not the piece of paper from the court that God hates. It’s the abject, broken toxicity of the relationship itself.
The whole reason divorce was permitted in the first place was the hardness of men’s hearts, which defied God’s design for marriage. And God cares more about what a marriage says about Him than about a document signed by a judge.
For Better or Worse Was Never “For Abuse”
Better or worse does not mean that she must stay when he turns into a monster. God has a much better blueprint for what He called marriage to be.
Look at how Jesus actually related to people. He never enabled or condoned sin. He never exploited His power to control others. He never coerced anyone to stay in a relationship with Him. It was always an invitation.
That’s the whole point. Love ceases to be love when free will is removed. A marriage held together by fear, pressure and silence isn’t a picture of Christ and the church. It’s a counterfeit of it, and your church has been asked to bless the counterfeit.
Taking a stand against that isn’t rebellion against your faith. A boundary is not the opposite of your calling. Sometimes it is the calling.
If You’re the Pastor, Counselor or Friend Reading This
Maybe she sent you this. Maybe you found it on your own because something in her story wouldn’t leave you alone. Either way, thank you for reading this far. Here’s what helps.
Believe her first. Investigate second. The cost of believing a woman who turns out to be exaggerating is small. The cost of disbelieving a woman who is telling the truth can be her faith, her safety, sometimes her life.
Don’t hold his account and call it neutrality. If you heard from him first, name that to yourself. You aren’t starting from the middle.
Don’t put them in a room together. Couples counseling assumes two people with roughly equal power who both want to repair something. Most specialists in abuse strongly advise against it when one partner is controlling the other. It gives him a new stage and teaches her that telling the truth is dangerous.
Stop asking about her part first. She has already examined herself more than anyone you know. Ask what she needs to be safe.
Don’t make reconciliation the goal. Make safety the goal. If reconciliation ever becomes possible, it will come from real, sustained change on his part, not from pressure on hers.
Refer to someone trained in coercive control. Not every counselor is. It’s worth asking.
Remember what she’s risking by talking to you. Everything. For one thing: safety.
What to Do When They Don’t Believe You
And if you’re the woman who walked out of that office, here’s what I want you to hold onto.
Stop campaigning. The longing to be believed is completely legitimate. But the campaign to be believed is expensive, and it rarely works on people whose opinions have already been managed. You can be right without an audience. You already are.
Find one safe witness, not a jury. One person who knows the whole story, not the sanitized version. Someone who remembers what you told her in March when you can’t. That’s worth more than a room full of people you keep trying to convince.
Separate your faith from their verdict. The people who misapplied Scripture to you are not the final word on what Scripture says. Your faith can survive a church that failed you. It was used as leverage; it was never meant to be.
Stand in what you know. When the people around you insist on a different version of your life, you don’t have to hand them your ground. Stand firm in what you know. Question what you’re told.
Write it down. Dates, words, what happened. Not to build a case for them. To keep a record that nobody can quietly rewrite for you, including you on your hardest days.
So Here’s the Deal…
The people in that office may have denied the reality of what’s happening in your home. It happens far more than anyone admits.
But remember who Hagar met in the wilderness. She had no standing, no advocate, and nobody to take her side, in a situation she didn’t choose and couldn’t fix. And God met her there. She named Him El Roi: the God who sees me.
That’s the God you’re dealing with. He isn’t confused about what’s been happening in your house, and He doesn’t need a committee to confirm it. The church may deny the reality. The God of the wilderness named Himself after seeing it.
Our mission was never to endure abuse quietly. It’s to be light in the darkness, to stand up against sin, and to reflect the kind of love that actually leads people to God. You don’t have to wait for your church to catch up before you start.
Next Steps
- Tools for Healing: my guided journal for women healing from emotional and narcissistic abuse. Nine chapters and 36 questions, rooted in faith and written to be lived with slowly. Instant download.
- Identity Recovery Groups: a small group of women who will believe you the first time. Small on purpose.
- One-to-one coaching with me or Identity Recovery Coach Lauren Rose, when you want one person in your corner who holds the whole picture: booking portal.
Find yourself. Keep yourself.
Most of the women I work with are wives, so I’ve written this to her. Men can be on the receiving end too. Swap the pronouns as you need to.
About the author. Sharmen Elaine Kimbrough is an identity strategist and the founder of LiveFound, Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in professional counseling and spent more than ten years developing and leading the women’s programs at the Marriage Recovery Center. She writes for women recovering a self after emotional abuse, coercive control, and spiritual bypassing. More about Sharmen →
