When I turned to God the night my abusive husband attempted to kill me, I didn’t know what else to do. Clueless and desperate, I was frightened for my life. It seemed obvious that my 18-year marriage to Tom was going to end one way or another. Years of abuse taught me how hard it was finding faith while being abused but I had to believe this time God would listen. After years of handling the situations on my own, I gave up.
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Three years prior to Tom attempting to kill me, I had a plan to reach out to someone and tell them my pain. Looking back, it was an extremely dangerous plan but at the time, I thought my plan was solid. The problem was that someone, I am guessing God, interrupted my plan to talk. Here I was, courageous enough to tell someone, and my plan shattered into small pieces. For the next three years, I carried around resentment and anger; God’s love and security are obviously for someone else. If He really cared for me, He would have let me talk. If He truly loved me, He would have assisted in me getting out of this situation a long time ago.

​When I had the courage to separate from my abuser, I was a 100% atheist. I was a caregiver to my three-year-old daughter battling cancer, mother to two boys under the age of 12 while being abused daily. Surely a loving God wouldn’t have allowed such things to happen. Therefore I decided there must not be a God. Or even if there was a God, He obviously wasn’t concerned about a dysfunctional person like me.
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Something happened the night my abuser attempted to kill me; I dropped on the floor, on my knees, crying inconsolably for the first time in years, and begged God to allow me to stay alive. I promised that if He kept me alive today, I would do everything possible to remove my abuser from my world.

For many of us, it’s being brought to the brink of death that provides the strength for us to leave our abuser. For others, we remain in our situations, wishing for the happier days to return, until the children start sounding like our abuser’s and question why we are not doing what we are being told to do. Regardless of what our reason(s) are for leaving our abuser, the significance of the decision is monumental. It signifies that the door to our denial surrounding domestic violence is about to be opened, and the journey to domestic violence survivor has “officially” begun.
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With denial, I knew in my heart what was truly going on, yet in my head, I could suppress these horrible feelings and believe them not to be true. Denial allowed me to reject the truth of what was going on in my marriage.  My realization that my world was not going to change was a pivotal point in starting my recovery.  At these moments, I had to realize that whether I wanted to or not, I must now make drastic changes in my world.  I had to start accepting the reality that I could no longer remain in my current situation anymore. The changes had to start now or I would die.