Evangelical Therapy, Part 12 - The World Divides
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical.
Once Drew was out of the house, living in his own apartment, I started to feel a little better.
Rebecca, my therapist, explained to me more clearly than anyone else had done that the physical symptoms I’d been experiencing for the past few years were caused by my anxiety, and helped me see that indeed, I’d had good reasons for feeling anxious.
This wasn’t new information. I’d known my symptoms were “anxiety” for months, and the one medication I was taking had helped some, but not enough. Yet in the space of living in our house without Drew, things changed.
Now, when I felt like I couldn’t breathe or like the floor was tipping the wrong way, or that nothing looked right in the grocery store, for the first time l was able to tell myself – it’s just anxiety. I’m not dying. I don’t have a fatal illness. I felt safe enough to switch my attention to something else instead of focusing on the distressing symptoms, and slowly, over a period of weeks and months – hallelujah – the anxiety gained less power over me and my symptoms began decreasing.
And if I did start feeling short of breath, or something else, I could ask myself—why am I feeling anxious right now?—and identify the reason. So instead of repressing those thoughts (which had previously felt too dangerous to let into my conscious mind), I was now acknowledging them, a major milestone for me.
This was encouraging but very slow work, in the midst of struggling to decide what to do about my marriage.
I can imagine that to those on the outside of this evangelical community, the answer would have seemed obvious, but it still wasn’t to me, long conditioned to believe I should maintain my marriage at any cost.
Drew didn’t spend much time with the girls in those weeks just after we separated, but he came over on Christmas Eve, so we could have a family holiday together, while the girls opened their presents.
He slumped back in a chair, knees spread, arms crossed, and wearing a down coat that, in my memory, he never took off.
Earlier that week after the girls were in bed, we’d had a whispered argument over the phone about what I’d told his mother Judy when she’d called a few days prior. This was the first time she and I had spoken since Drew moved out, and in a bristling tone, a departure from her usual cheerful voice, she’d demanded to know what was going on.
I tried to think how to sum up my distress about being married to her son. Rebecca had explained to me in one of our therapy sessions the definition of an emotionally abusive marriage, and I could readily see that mine fell into that category.
You feel pressured to participate in sexual activities you don’t want.
You feel controlled, like you can’t make your own decisions.
Your thoughts, values, and opinions are dismissed as unimportant.
Your emotional needs are neglected.
Your partner punishes you with the silent treatment or other tactics.
You notice changes in your sleeping, eating, and weight patterns, and you experience mental health conditions such as depression.
A fact Rebecca didn’t say that I can now identify as well: my religion alone made me feel some of these same ways. My religion, in its practice of robbing women of their agency, dismissing our voices and opinions, and advocating the idea that men have ultimate authority, reinforced my husband’s abuse.
“He forced himself on me,” I finally said to Judy.
She sounded befuddled. “What? When? Before you were married?”
I’d known she wouldn’t understand. “It happened more than once. And Tom …” My voice trailed off, unsure why I was bringing him into it, but maybe because both Drew’s and Tom’s actions had seemed bundled up as part of the whole picture in which I was treated as an object to service their desires.
Judy had stopped talking altogether, then murmured something about praying for me and hung up.
But she must have repeated what I’d said to Drew, and he was angry. “You can’t tell people stuff like that. Who else did you tell? You’re making it sound like I did something—really wrong,” he said into the phone.
“My therapist said you did,” I replied, but of course there was no convincing him to agree with this assessment of his actions, and by the end of the conversation it was clear that what was bothering him was not that he might have violated my boundaries, or refused to allow me to say no, or penetrated me without my consent, but the idea that someone might find out.
As soon as the girls had opened all their presents, he left, and it was relief to see him go.
But in therapy I went back and forth, unable to make up my mind. I’d gone to the public library and checked out a book about divorce and was upset to see the statistics showing that children of divorced parents may have an increased risk of depression, relationship difficulties, substance abuse problems, and even health problems in adulthood. (Not always the case, of course, but my mind leaped to the worst case scenario.)
Besides all this, I could hardly bear the thought that my girls would have to spend days and nights at Drew’s place without me (a problem I don’t think gets talked about enough when we encourage women to divorce an abusive spouse, and which, in my experience, frighteningly, courts mostly ignore as well).
Finally, after some weeks of hearing me vacillate, Rebecca gave me an assignment. “Make a pros and cons list. Try to make a decision.”
“Do think there’s any way I could be okay if I stayed in this relationship?” I asked. “If we got more therapy?”
“If you took a lot of psych meds,” she said. “I genuinely think you’d have to numb yourself out. It’s never going to be all the chocolate.”
This advice seems quite directive to me now, for a therapist to give a client, but I had asked, and she gave me her honest answer.
“Listen,” she said. “Come to my workshop next weekend. It’s a combination of group therapy and self-defense. We’re going to learn some skills for protecting ourselves.”
I was terrified at the thought of this, but I agreed. She’d been able to zero in on the truth about my relationship better than anyone I’d talked to, and I trusted her.
++
We wore exercise pants and sat in a circle on the floor, the eight of us, along with Rebecca and another woman who was helping her run the workshop. We shared issues from our childhoods and current lives, but I remember the physical part most clearly. The first day we learned specific self-defense moves that could disable an attacker. And she taught us to be proactive. She said, if someone walking behind you on a sidewalk or some area where you can’t get away feels dangerous or threatening, don’t take chances. Trust your instincts. We practiced turning around, throwing an arm out and saying “STOP,” in our most commanding voices.
We had to practice until we could say it convincingly, even angrily. “Louder,” she’d say. “This person wants to hurt you. Use the strength and fierceness of your whole body.”
Just thinking about it now, my throat tightens and my eyes tear up. There’s something about making it physical, learning to use your arms and legs and voice to protect yourself that brings up all the emotions of knowing how afraid you’ve been, how dismissed and undervalued you’ve felt, how much you’ve felt you don’t matter, for years. Your body knows, on a cellular level, exactly what has happened to you.
I almost didn’t come back for the second day of the workshop on Sunday morning. The plan for that day was for us to put the skills we’d learned to practice. Rebecca’s therapist husband and a friend of his, also a therapist, two decently burly men, had agreed to be part of this experience. The idea was that one at a time, we would go to the front of the room and one of the men, when we weren’t expecting it, would approach from behind, grab us and try to throw us to the ground, and the goal was to fight them off using our new skills.
For someone with experience this might not have been a big deal (I’m thinking of high school wrestlers!) but it was a big deal for all of us there, who had never done such a thing.
I was the last person to go. I was taller than the other women, close to the same height as my “attacker,” although he weighed probably fifty pounds more. The men were wearing body pads and protective gear, even mouth guards, and we were told not to worry we would hurt them. Several of the women managed to disable the man quite quickly, but my attacker pulled me down onto the padded ground. His neck was slick with sweat and my legs thrashed as I tried to get a leg over his or a knee into his groin. The minutes ticked by as we wrangled on the floor, my heart thudding in my chest.
Finally, I did it, an elbow jammed under his jaw. Everyone clapped as he rolled away, and I got up and sagged onto the bench with the other women. I was afraid the man had given it to me at the end, stopped trying as hard and let me win, and I said as much. He declared he had not, but I wasn’t sure. We also talked about the fact that if the attacker had a gun, the techniques would be different (and the situation far riskier).
Still, I left that workshop with a more confident mindset. When I walked through the grocery store afterwards, I had the distinct thought—if a man tries to do something to me, I will know what to do, and in that moment, I felt bolder and freer, a revelation to a woman raised to be compliant.
I wondered—is this how men feel all the time? Like the world is a free place in which to walk around? That was definitely not how I’d ever felt, with my habit of crossing the street if I saw a man approaching me on the sidewalk, and in parking lots, clutching my car keys with the ends pointing out between my fingers, at the ready. My thought about men was an over-generalization, for sure, as certainly not every man feels safe, not by a long shot, but back then my world was strictly gendered and non-diverse, male and female, mostly white, and in my experience that’s how the world was divided.
But in that workshop, my body had learned something new. My body had been the messenger that I was ill and anxious in the first place, and now my body, together with my mind, was leading me out.
++
In late January, Drew announced to me that this whole thing had been a mistake. He said he should have never left the house, that he’d had enough of our separation and was moving back in.
I noted the panic I felt and said no, that I needed more time, and I must have been able to put some fierceness into my voice because after a day or two he decided to stay put in his apartment, and instead, started paying child support, an amount he’d come up with on his own, which I did not feel free to question.
One of the hard parts of this situation for me was that even my family could hardly understand why I didn’t want to stay married. My parents thought it was convenient that Drew was an attorney, and that if our relationship did end in divorce, he could handle the legal part himself. They assumed he’d treat me fairly, and no one suggested the possibility I’d need legal help of my own. Can a person be an abusive husband and also a terrific, ethical lawyer? I suppose it’s possible. My family all seemed to think so. I probably thought so, too, for a while. Drew had handled my dad’s money affairs and continued to for years, after we divorced, even later when it came out that Drew had, without telling anyone, withdrawn all the money from my daughters’ college funds to buy his new fiancé a diamond ring and start their new life together.
People want to do the right thing and get along. People don’t want unnecessary rifts, and Drew was the father of my children. And my dad was endlessly generous and helpful to me as I started my life as a single mom. He was my bedrock. He was kind and honest in his work as a physicist and teacher and as a human being. But finding a new lawyer took him a long time, probably because he was busy and distracted with other things. Still, it hurt me. Eventually I told him so, and he listened and finally disassociated himself from Drew as well.
++
Two weeks after I received my first child support check, I met “Owen.” I don’t know why I felt free to pursue something with him, since Drew and I were only separated, not divorced, and no firm decision had been made.
But I must have needed (or wanted) to know that there would be more opportunities for me, some sort of life ahead, which to me at that time meant a man and finding new love. Owen was very sweet and maybe most importantly, he wasn’t Drew.
He was seven years younger than I was and a bit on the wild side, like a shaggy-haired adorable labradoodle (sorry, Owen), who seemed somewhat out of place in Nampa, Idaho. He had grown up in the church like I had, but his parents were more liberal than mine, and he’d cast off Christianity a while before this and considered himself an agnostic. He’d had some rough years with a major illness but was doing better, had graduated from college and was looking for a job with his good numbers brain. I met him at a gas station where he was working in the meantime—I recognized him—he’d been a student of my dad’s at NNU. In fact, I bought what I needed (cough drops, maybe? red licorice?), then made up a reason to tromp back in over the crunchy snow in the parking lot to buy another bag and worked up my nerve to say hi.
l find it remarkable the roles we play in each other’s lives. I had actually written Owen a letter of encouragement a couple years before, when my dad told me he was sick. At the time I felt strongly I was supposed to do that, write a letter to a stranger. I’d hardly ever felt strong direction from God. People in our church commonly talked about hearing God’s voice, but I never had, not so clearly, except for when it came to writing a letter to Owen.
That connection gave me the courage to introduce myself when I ran into him that day, but I couldn’t figure it out, because why would God have wanted me to write a letter to Owen and then date him before I even got divorced? The dating part was our idea, but still, it seemed odd. If there was a plan there, something to do with God’s will, I didn’t understand it. And Owen didn’t even believe in God.
But hanging out with him was mostly easy and fun. We went to the Red Steer and walked around at the park in the freezing cold. Owen told me how his parents had met at the Rollerdrome in Nampa, a detail I loved. Skating had been one of my favorite activities as a kid, and I could imagine Owen, with his playful nature, being willing to accompany me to the Rollerdrome still.
He came with me to one of my appointments with Rebecca and sat in the waiting room while I talked to her. He was wearing one of his Rolling Stones t-shirts with their signature tongue and lips logo, his blond hair hanging over his shoulders. She’d gotten a glimpse of him and seemed unsure. “I know you want someone different than Drew, but I wonder if you’ve gone too far the other direction,” she said. She didn’t seem to see us as a match.
Looking back on it, I’m sure I was trying to give myself another reason to decide on divorce, a rope to grab onto, a lifeline to get me out of the pool in which I was drowning. One day Owen came over while the girls were at school. We sat in my living room and talked, and after a while, he asked me when I was going to take him upstairs. I wasn’t ready for that and not yet officially divorced, but because I liked him and was just barely (not very successfully yet) learning to protect myself better, I complied.
In bed, I traced my finger over a scar on his chest from the surgery he’d had.
We didn’t have to worry about birth control, because he’d had chemotherapy that had made him sterile, which seemed sad to me, but also a relief.
He was gentle and warm, and for the first time in my adult life, sex didn’t hurt.
++
In the weeks following the self-defense class, I continued to agonize about my daughters, and the effect of a divorce, but ultimately, I couldn’t escape the feeling that a window had opened up for me, and that if I let it close, let Drew back into the house, his old ways of treating me would resume, and I’d never get another chance. Getting to the point of getting him out had been such an enormous effort, I was quite sure I could never do it again. Somehow it felt like now or never. That sounds dramatic, but I felt it in my gut as true.
Drew and I went somewhere to talk—we sat in his car, near a park, and got in an argument about religion. For the first time in my life, I had begun to question it, had begun to see some cracks in what had been presented to me as truths, what in fact I now saw as actual lies (like the idea that all nonbelievers were frightening and bad). Drew seemed strongly invested in convincing me otherwise. But as we talked, my ears plugged up, as if I were descending from a great height, and his voice sounded echoey and far away. All I could think about was the discomfort in my ears, as my anxiety ramped up. (Now that part seems almost funny to me—my body so desperate to disconnect from him, my brain managed to temporarily turn off my hearing.)
Later that day, I called Drew and told him I’d made up my mind about the divorce.
He was silent on the other end of the phone line, and I could imagine his jaw shifting. “My law firm is going to do the paperwork then. And you can go to court by yourself. Because none of this is my doing. This wasn’t my decision and legally, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Fine,” I said, because there seemed nothing else to say.
Without any representation of my own, I agreed to the terms of the custody arrangement and the child support and the division of our assets, and the divorce went forward. I got the house, and the mortgage payments that went with it, and he got his partnership in the law firm. l wouldn’t find out till years later that the amount of child support he gave me was significantly lower than it should have been.
And I did go to court by myself for the hearing on March 31st, which Drew had arranged to be held in a small courthouse in Owyhee County, thirty miles south of Nampa. He never explained why he’d filed the papers there and not in Canyon County where we lived or Ada County where he worked. l don’t know why this was even legal. (Perhaps he wanted to avoid his own divorce case being noticed in courts where he sometimes had to appear for work?)
The bailiff was a girl I’d known since childhood who’d lived across the street from me for years. She was over six feet tall, a rarity in the Treasure Valley. She pretended not to know me.
The judge questioned me in a gruff tone about whether everything possible had been done to work things out in our marriage. I said yes.
“The differences are truly and genuinely irreconcilable,” he said.
“Yes,” I repeated.
Afterwards, I drove home, trying to absorb the idea that I was a divorced woman, the last thing in the world I’d ever imagined I’d be.
++
By May, I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t afford our beautiful white and brick house, not on my own.
I knew I was likely to have a teaching job by the next fall, but even so, the expense of caring for and maintaining the pool and keeping up the house and the yard and the mortgage payments felt like more than I could do.
I traded our mini-van in for a cute red Honda Civic with spoiler on the back—there were only four of us now, without Drew, so it was roomy enough, and it used less gas—and reluctantly decided to sell the house. I tried to be excited that the girls and I could rent a cute place in Nampa and save hundreds each month.
I cleaned the house like a demon and got a real estate agent to help me put it up for sale.
The first day we advertised it, I got an offer.
I wasn’t expecting it to happen so fast. I was overwhelmed by all the changes in my life, the new custody schedule (sending my girls over to Drew’s place every other weekend and some mid-weekdays, too, was hard) and I was feeling stressed about the move. I didn’t really want to give up our house. The master bedroom was full of boxes that I’d started packing up, and I was sitting on the floor of my carpeted walk-in closet sorting through some papers, when a wave of familiar nausea washed over me.
I ran to the bathroom and vomited. After I rinsed my mouth, I stared at myself in the mirror above the sink and realized I was crying. Something inside me just knew.
“Val,” I said, calling my sister on the phone. “Can you come over? And can you bring a pregnancy test?”
“Oh, Con,” she said. “Oh, no.”
I continue to benefit immensely from your courageous openness. Your unfolding story underscores for me the stunning power of isolation and silence to perpetuate patriarchal control. “Don’t talk” is an unspoken, but widely understood rule of that culture, which prevents us from comparing notes and getting perspective. Being willing to break that rule now is such a gift to our liberation. Thank you.
There are too many wonderful moments to do justice to. Drew keeping his coat on. “Is this how men feel?” - something I think about often. Your body as messenger and guide. So much more! And the ending!!