Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And I am joined today by my husband, Keith.

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: We are on the road traveling.  We’re doing some speaking.  Well, actually, by the time this airs, we will have finished our speaking events at North Point Church in Woodstock, Georgia.  So that’s exciting for Valentine’s Day.  But, honey, you are talking to a bestselling Amazon author.     

Keith: Yes.  I’m so proud of you.  That’s great.

Sheila: I know.  Our Fixed It For You book launched last week.  30 Fixed It For Yous.  These memes that I do all over Instagram and I put them up on my blog, on Facebook where I take some outrageous quote that an evangelical pastor or author has said—a quote that is making people question God’s goodness, that is making people question whether God loves women, and I change it to be something in line with what Jesus believes.  And so I’ve got 30 of those in a book along with discussion questions and red flag recognition tools so that you can level up your discernment.  It’s just an awesome way to bring home some of the things that you are learning on the Bare Marriage podcast.  And it’s only $4.99.  We got to number one in Christian marriage right after it was released which is really exciting.  So it’s doing really well because I think people just are hungry for healthy, good advice that isn’t toxic.

Keith: Yeah.  I think one of the things that happen a lot is sometimes these teachers say these things.  And you say—in your heart you feel like that can’t be right, right?  But they’re a good Bible teacher.  So they must be right.  And you start to believe these things that are so toxic and, so often, anti women and so bad in so many different ways.  One of the great things about these books—I think is awesome—is it teaches people when they have that little, “This can’t be right,” to teach them why it’s not right so that they can see that in the future.  And they can avoid being deceived.

Sheila: Exactly.  So check out the Fixed It For You book.  You can use it as a discussion tool with your spouse.  Just read one a night.  Use it with your friends.  Even use it as a six-week small group curriculum, and we will put links in the podcast notes.  But speaking about how you may not recognize when something is wrong, we actually, on today’s podcast, have a really heavy story to share with you that came into the blog that I think is really, really important.  People need to hear this.  Pastors need to hear this.  It is heavy.  But boy, this is where the church is at.  And if there is ever anything that needs fixing, it is this.  So let me give you the background.  In November and December, we were writing a blog series.  I think October and November and December actually.  On the blog on how to recover when you were in a sexual pit.  So when everything is all messed up, how do you dig out of that pit?  And I wasn’t planning on it.  But I ended up writing so many articles about marital rape because I would write one thing and then—I would be flooded by emails where this is a real issue in someone’s marriage.  So I would have to clarify.  And I wrote more and more and more.  One of those emails I got was from the woman whose story we’re going to hear today.  And the reason—there’s two reasons that I want to share this story with you.  One is just so that you understand the level of abuse and how difficult some people’s marriages are even when they look great on the outside.  This woman looks amazing.  She is an amazing mom.  She has one of these picture perfect families.  You would look at it and you would look at everything she does, and you would think they’re amazing.  And this is what was going on behind closed doors.  So we need to know that.  But the more important reason that I want to tell her story specifically is how the church handled this.  Well, how the church mishandled this and how they ended up disciplining her despite the fact that she was a victim of marital rape, and they knew it.  And they knew it.  And this is why things need to change.  This is why we’re doing the Fixed It For You.  This is why we wrote The Great Sex Rescue.  This is why we’re writing She Deserves Better, which launches in April.  This can’t go on.  Now you met her with me.  We’d been traveling around.  And we went to her house.  

Keith: You recorded.

Sheila: I recorded with her.

Keith: And I went bird watching.

Sheila: You went bird watching.  But you had a chance to talk to her too.  And she’s just a lovely person despite everything she’s gone through.  And I really appreciate her sharing her time with us.  

Keith: That’s one of the things I’m always amazed by.  These women who have been put through the ringer and been abused in a church sanctioned way because, basically, these churches preach that if he wants it you need to give it to him.  There is no marital rape.  You’re married.  You consented.  And that is ridiculous.  And these women have gone through that, and they come out the other side.  And they still hold on to Jesus.  And they still want to believe in God.  I think that that’s a miracle.  And I’m so impressed by women who hold on to Jesus when everybody around them is telling them, “Jesus hates you.”  That’s what my heart is.  And that’s what I really want to get out there is we need to let women know that God doesn’t love men more than women.  And that’s the message that I see when we say things like, “Oh, well, maybe he’s a little harsh, but you need to love him more,” or those kind of things.  No.  You have a right to have a fulfilling, safe marriage as a woman.  You do.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And you certainly do not need to consent to abuse.  So what I would like to do is read a letter that she wrote to her church in her own words.  So I want to let her tell her story to you.  And then I’m going to bring her on the podcast.  We turned the camera off for that part, and I’m not going to say her name just for privacy reasons.  But I’m going to read the letter.  And I want you all to understand what was going on.  She was a really active member of this church.  She volunteered heavily.  She led several groups.  I won’t go into which ones because it doesn’t matter, and it’s identifying.  Her husband was not that active.  He was the adjunct person.  She was the central person.  She knew the pastor.  She knew the leadership.  And she had been telling them that she was having marriage problems.  They had been giving her really bad counsel.  And it finally got to be so much that she told them that she was going to divorce.  And she sent them this letter outlining why.  And then I’ll let you know what happened after that.  So here are her words.  I have changed her husband’s name to Richard.  That is not his real name.  But rather than saying, “My husband, my husband, my husband,” throughout this letter, I’m just going to call him Richard.  I’ve also shortened it a little bit.  But on the whole, this is 90% of what she wrote.  And, again, the context of this letter is she’s explaining to her pastor the story of her marriage and why she is now getting divorced.  So she starts.

Letter: There’s three big issues.  First, poor biblical foundation.  Richard and I have been taught by the church from a young age that women always need to have sex with their husbands when he wants.  Even if they aren’t in the mood, they do not have the right to say no. This teaching, and other similar and common teachings of evangelical churches, set us up for an unhealthy sex dynamic from the very beginning where we both believed that Richard’s sexual satisfaction was of paramount importance regardless of whether or not my needs were being met. 

Underlying neurological issues, I believe my husband is undiagnosed on the autism spectrum, so he struggles to see things from my perspective and is unresponsive to my needs. Conversely, I have felt a need to compensate for the areas where he struggles creating a caregiver relationship which does not promote a healthy marital bond. I have not heavily confronted him on this. He has always struggled with confidence, and I believed that encouraging him to explore this would emotionally devastate him.  So for the most part, I have just tried to adjust myself. When I did mention it recently, he was horribly offended and angered. 

Sexual abuse within the marriage—I’m now traumatized from forced physical intimacy over the course of about the last decade of our almost two decade marriage. Richard is angry with me and sees my lack of sexual desire as a “me problem” rather than something he has contributed to and bears responsibility for.  He once told me that I’m a “very determined person.  And when I decide to like sex again, I will,” a comment that absolves himself of any responsibility in helping me get there.

MY MARRIAGE STORY

I want to start by telling a story from my first year of marriage that really sums up the second point above.  Richard and I were sitting on the couch watching TV when I realized my dog was due for a walk. “Would you mind walking Rover?” “Sure,” he answered but then remained seated on the couch watching TV without getting up. After about 30 seconds to a minute, I ask, “Are you going to walk Rover?”  He says, “I told you I would. I’m just waiting for a commercial.” After a few more minutes, the show goes to commercial, but he just continues to sit there. He’s forgotten. At this point, I feel like a nag (and wives aren’t supposed to nag their husbands) asking a THIRD time for the dog to be walked, so I just get up and start leashing up the dog. At this point, he gets up and walks the dog.

Now imagine this sort of thing happening almost every time you ask for something to be done for almost two decades.  When I ask him to do something, I have to deal with the uncertainty and the anxiety of, “Will he follow through?” “Did he forget?” “Did he fall asleep?” “Will he run into an obstacle that makes him give up?” “If he drops the ball, how will I handle the fallout?” It is extremely anxiety producing for me and makes me feel like NOTHING is EVER off my plate.

For this reason, over the years, I started to rely on him less and less.  First, I started only asking him for things I couldn’t easily do myself. Then it became things I couldn’t do myself at all.  Over time, even that started to seem like too much for him, so I started hiring outside help or asking a friend.  Basically, my husband’s duty around the house became little more than go to his regular job and bring home a paycheck.  And if I relied on him for more than that, it was overwhelming to him and anxiety producing for me.

And this is how it affected our sex life.  I never want it. EVER.  But I was taught that a woman should not deprive her husband of sex. More than that, I was disobeying God and in sin if I didn’t have sex with him.  So out of my love for the Lord I continued to have sex with him when he initiated. He didn’t even seem to really mind at first that I was disinterested and just wanted to get it over as soon as possible.

Sheila: Okay.  Now, major trigger warning.  What follows in her letter is graphic descriptions of marital rape.  I have chosen to read them because I want to honor her story.  She does deserve to be heard.  And also I really want people to understand that her pastor and the leadership team knew all of this, and they still put her under church disciplines.  This is what we are dealing with in the evangelical church.  But this is really difficult to hear.  And some of you it’s probably wise that you don’t listen.  So Katie is going to tell you how far you should jump ahead if you’d rather not hear the details.  You can just hit pause right now and fast forward.  But if you want to listen, back to the letter.

Letter: He always wanted it doggie style. I would tell him that I didn’t enjoy it that way and try to encourage him to at least try missionary style, which was more intimate and pleasurable.  But he would inevitably flip me over.  If I tried to insist, he would usually lose his erection and become frustrated.  The last time we tried missionary and that happened he stormed into the bathroom and punched the vanity mirror making a mess of glass and blood. After that, I stopped trying to convince him to try missionary at all because that kind of a reaction wasn’t worth it. 

So this was what sex with my husband became like. I would enter the darkroom and get under the covers.  I would remove my pants and lay face down on the bed, often with a pillow over my head so I wouldn’t have to look at him. He would come in and straddle me from behind, masturbate for a bit to get hard, and then start jack hammering away while I tried to think of anything else—mentally be anywhere else—until it was over.  Sometimes I would cry under the pillow.  But I tried not to let him know so it wouldn’t ruin the experience for him.  Sometimes I would want to hit him, but would stifle it by gripping the sheets tightly.  When he was finished, he would go to the bathroom while I quickly got dressed and left the room before he returned. I would go downstairs to the other bathroom and rinse off partly because I felt guilty and partly because I couldn’t face him at that moment and I needed some time to pass. 

Looking back, I have no idea how I did this for about a decade.  I eventually did tell him during that time that I couldn’t handle it more than once per week, but he would ask like clockwork every week.  And that whole day I would be anxious and shorter with the children. The only thing I liked about sex days was it meant I had six whole days before it would happen again. 

When I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, I asked to go to counseling. This was about four to six years ago. He refused because he said that counselors “always tell men what they need to do differently but leave the women alone” so I decided to go alone. The counselor immediately told me that I needed to stop having sex until the marriage was back on track because it would never get any better if the sex continued as it was.  I asked my husband to give me a year to see the counselor and for us to work on our issues.  He agreed but never followed through on the homework the counselor gave me for us to work on.

After nine months, he confronted me that he wanted to start having sex again.  He approached it from a very spiritual perspective saying things like, “Married people are commanded to have sex,” and “We are living in sin by not having sex.”  

So, at that point, feeling like I had no other choice, I sheepishly agreed to go back to having sex.  It went on for about another year or two just as it was before. I tried to tell him what it was like for me. I got bolder using words like repulsive or disgusting.  

I again reached my breaking point and asked him again to go to counseling.  And again he refused, so again I went alone. This time I chose a male counselor in hopes it would entice him to come since he thought counselors were biased against men.  Same result. The counselor told me to shut off the sex. My husband never followed through on the homework the counselor would give him to do with me. Eventually, I got disheartened and gave up on counseling but still held to the “no sex” rule.

Sheila: Before I get to the next bit, just another trigger warning.  There is another description of marital rape coming up.

Letter: On January 3, 2021, it all came to a head. I was waking up one morning and started to feel vibes coming from his side of the bed.  I decided that I would try to just get up and go downstairs very quickly before he could try anything.  But when I jumped up, he grabbed my arm and pulled me back into bed and started kissing me.  I thought he might just kiss me and let me go.  So I tried to grin and bear it at first, but then he started trying to get on top of me.  And at that point, I realized he was naked.  My body went into fight or flight, and I shoved him off me with all the strength I could muster and yelled, “NO!” and started crying.

He immediately got up, got dressed and left the room.  I took a few moments to collect myself and then headed downstairs to talk to him but discovered he had taken the car and left the house.  He came back three hours later, and we did talk.  He said he would not continue to stay in a sexless marriage.  He even said the marriage had been sexless for over 10 years, which was incredibly hurtful to me because I had endured a lot emotionally, physically and mentally to keep the sex “on” at a very high personal cost. He basically gave me a one-year ultimatum to start liking sex or he would divorce me.   He was specific that he didn’t want to go back to the old way. He wanted me to actually enjoy it, which felt completely impossible for me to control under the circumstances of having a gun to my head that he was going to leave if it wasn’t fixed in a year.

I immediately went back to therapy. He again refused to go. This time I told the therapist to assume his complete noninvolvement. The therapist tried taking me through desensitization exercises to help me not react so strongly or negatively to his touch. I began to dread the daily homework. There were zero requirements on my husband, and I was going to therapy and doing very unpleasant desensitization exercises every day. After a couple of months, I quit.

In March 2021, Richard approached me again and told me that he didn’t think he would ever actually leave.  This was comforting to me and, for a time, made me think that maybe we could coexist peacefully in marriage, even if sex couldn’t be a part of the picture anymore.  But then in August 2021, he approached me again saying our marriage wouldn’t continue in its current state.

The emotional whiplash of will he/won’t he threw me into a constant state of emotional anxiety. I began to struggle heavily with guilt, anxiety, insomnia, migraines, and memory loss. I am seeing a doctor, and I am currently under care for anxiety. I struggle with racing thoughts about my marriage from the moment I wake until the moment I sleep. I have described it as feeling like I am in a concrete room with no windows and doors, and I spend the entire day mentally looking for the escape hatch that will make our entire family whole and happy. I have never found it. I honestly never would have considered divorcing him had he never threatened to divorce me.  But now that he’s thrown out ultimatums, I’m in a place of anxiety and instability all the time.  And I’m questioning if I can live in this uncertainty for the rest of my life.

I sought help from the church and spoke to a few friends and pastors’ wives. One of the wives told me I should not deny sex out of “revenge.” I was so hurt that she saw my withdrawal as a revenge move. If it was about revenge, I would have called off sex a decade before I did. Another just told me, “I really think you need to have sex with your husband.”   And another friend suggested I agree to sex once per month. To me it seemed as if she thought I would be okay with being sexually abused once per month! No one seemed to recognize that there was abuse happening. 

One pastor called Richard and tried to get him to come to counseling, but I asked Richard to cancel the session before it occurred due to my high anxiety level. I was afraid due to what the pastors’ wives had told me that it would come down to, once again, “you need to have sex with your husband or you’re in rebellion.” I did reiterate that I would be willing to go to counseling with a licensed professional counselor rather than a pastoral counselor, but it was let go at that point.

Since I was now experiencing physical symptoms from the stress, I decided to join some support groups—this time not for marriage but just for my own wellbeing. I joined one for spouses of people on the autism spectrum and another for people in “confusing marriages.”

When I joined the marriage group in January 2022, one of the first assignments was to write out a narrative of your marriage story.  Much of this letter is a copy/paste of that original post. This was the first time I had ever detailed what sexual encounters with my husband were actually like because I didn’t feel comfortable telling people in the church the gory details. That felt like “shaming” my husband which I was taught was wrong. I needed to respect him. 

The trauma counselor and other group members immediately began telling me that I had been sexually abused.  One described it as, “At best, this is coercion.  At worst, it’s sexual assault.” Now let me be clear, I don’t believe it has been Richard’s intention to sexually abuse me, but I believe that the messaging that we both received in our youth about sex within marriage groomed me to accept sexual abuse as my “wifely duty” and necessary to please God.  And it made Richard feel that sex was something he was owed and entitled to regardless of my experience.  And also that respect is an entitlement rather than something to be earned and maintained by consistency and honorableness.

Once I realized my marriage was sexually abusive and I had been traumatized by this dynamic within my marriage, it was both devastating and freeing. On the one hand, I knew that I could not stay in the marriage any longer. This trauma is too deep to ever overcome with the same man who has sexually abused me for over a decade. On the other hand, all of the things I had been telling myself I was suddenly free from. I was not crazy. I was not making a mountain out of a molehill. I was not broken or frigid. I was not displeasing to God and possibly hell bound. I wasn’t experiencing psychological problems (at least not in the way I thought). I was just traumatized, and Jesus had compassion.

So toward the end of January, I determined that I needed to make an escape plan. I told him, and he refused to allow for a peaceful divorce.  He told me if I continued to pursue divorce he would tell the children that, “I love Mommy, and I love you.  But Mommy is breaking up our family and making me leave.” I told him that makes me feel like he is taking away my agency and holding me hostage to the marriage.  And that just like I don’t feel like I have a choice about sex, I now felt like I didn’t have a choice about being married either. I offered to continue to share the home and co parent the children together, but he held his ground. I now feel completely trapped.

Sheila: Okay.  Now this is a separate section.  The sleep stuff.

Letter: This stuff seems pale in comparison to the sexual abuse, but I include it because it was a major point of contention for all of the years of our marriage.  Richard only comes to bed about 50% of the time. Even our very first year of marriage, I would wake up alone at 1 a.m. and go looking for him to find him sleeping on the couch.  When our first child was an infant, I noticed that Richard was sleeping in a lot and going into work late—sometimes not even getting out of bed until 10 a.m.  Meanwhile I was exhausted from doing the great majority of the night feedings with our son, and our son would wake up at 5:00 to 5:30 a.m. and be up or the day. I was okay with doing the night feedings because Richard did work long hours.  But it seemed unfair that he could sleep in to his heart‘s content where I had to get up and take care of the baby at the crack of dawn.  So I started occasionally waking him up around 6:00 and asking him if he would sit with the baby for an hour while I went back to bed.  Whenever I would ask him to help, he would instantly jump up and say, “I have to go to work,” which was true, but I knew full well from watching him over weeks and months that if I hadn’t woke him up he could’ve easily slept much longer.

When our son was seven months old, I even woke him up in tears one morning saying how he was a good husband and I couldn’t understand how as a good husband he could watch me struggling to sleep night after night and not ever offer to help. He got up that morning and sat with the baby, but then the same pattern returned after that.

Fast forward to when we had two children under three. On the weekends, we would be home as a family, and I would suddenly notice that I hadn’t seen Richard in a while. I would go hunting for him and find him fast asleep in our bed having left me with the two young kids. I was home with them every day, so I really wanted his help on the weekends.  But it was a pretty common practice for him to disappear for one to three hours napping while he left me in charge of the kids. I approached him and told him that I understood he naps, and I liked them too.  And I thought maybe we could work out a schedule so that we each had our own special naptime on the weekend.  But again he said he didn’t want to have a schedule, so the result was he napped whenever he wanted.  And I never napped.

The current situation is that he falls asleep very soon, often within an hour of arriving home from work.  If he gets home from work at 7:00, he’ll often be asleep before 8:00, which doesn’t allow us anytime to connect with each other, for him to help around the home, or for him to connect with his children. He also still regularly takes naps on Saturdays and Sundays. He even fell asleep at my father’s wake when just after burying him I had about 30 people back to my home for lunch. Richard sat on the couch hand passed out with all the people around him. It was so embarrassing to me and made me feel so alone that even on the day I buried my dad, I couldn’t count on him.

He tends to downplay the sleeping and the lack of help by saying things like, “Well yeah, I could’ve done a few more dishes,” or “I should try to be awake more.” But these are painted as small things. My refusal of sex is a major problem, and I am ungrateful for the work he does outside the home. He minimizes the financial contributions I make to the family, as I have earned money, in at least some capacity, for all but 1.5 years of our marriage.  And there have been seasons during the marriage when I have earned more than he has in addition to maintaining the home and childcare responsibilities.

I know Richard means well and is a good man at heart which is why I think it has taken me so long to act.  But it has become evident that there is no level of crisis I can reach that springs him into action. Even in the months when I provided 24-hour care to my mother, there was no uptick in his involvement with home management. In fact, on the day my mother died, I asked him to take the next day off.  He told me he couldn’t. I had to call around to family members while my mom was dying and find someone to be at my house to watch the kids the next morning. That was the moment I knew that I could never reach a level of need that would cause him to take action.

I do want to add the caveat that I do not absolve myself of any wrongdoing. I should have spoken up more and sooner. I remained quiet and stuffed things down far too much. I ignored Richard’s use of pornography and excused it because I was not providing sex for him. I have made Richard feel rejected, and he probably bears emotional trauma as well from that. This is simply the story from my perspective.

The goal is not to morally crucify Richard because I do believe he is a good person who wants to do the right thing.  But I want to fully illustrate that the marriage has become toxic, and this is not a situation of a wife not taking her vows seriously.  But one in which I believe that divorce is biblical in that the marriage covenant has been irreparably broken.

At this point, I feel I have been so traumatized by these experiences that I don’t believe I will be able to get back to a place of mutual trust and vulnerability hat would be necessary for a healthy marriage. I believe our only option is to divorce and work on lovingly and respectfully setting each other free to build a new relationship with one another in which we co parent our children as family and friends. I will always love him and support him as the father of my children, my friend, and my brother in Christ. I have never felt like Richard has fully understood what this dynamic did to me, how much I really did try to look out for him throughout the course of the marriage, or how his actions contributed to my hatred of sex. I hope one day he does fully get it because I do think it would greatly improve our relationship and help my healing even though I think it is extremely unlikely that the marriage can be saved.

Sheila: So here is the context.  She writes this letter.  And the reason that she writes it is because when she told her husband that she wanted to divorce him he, who wasn’t very active in the church, went to the pastor and asked that the session—so in their church tradition, there’s a leadership committee that gets to rule on these things.  And he asked that the session would rule on whether her divorce was biblical or not.  And so this is her reaching out to the pastor to say, “Hey, this is the story of what was happening in our marriage.”  And this is what she wrote to him in the email.

Email: I will tell you that from the moment we came to this church ten years ago, I have LOVED this it. At times throughout the last decade, coming to worship practice on Sunday morning and sitting under your teaching was the substitute for the connection that I longed for in my marriage but did not have.

I know it is only recently that you have become intimately aware of the struggles I faced behind closed doors. As I’ve told you before, I wish I had come forward much sooner, but at the time I felt I was disrespecting and shaming my husband if I revealed too much about our intimate life. Hindsight is 20/20.

I understand your desire for us to be discussed before the session next month, and I also understand your church polity; however, I would like you, for a moment, to consider what this would mean for me.

I, a woman who has been sexually traumatized, will be discussed by a room full of men, many of whom I do not know or barely know.  And they will consider the most intimate and hurtful events of my life, so that they can judge whether or not I have a right to be free from that.  And what if they decide I don’t? Worse, what if they decide Richard is the one with grounds?  Then I am being told that my needs don’t matter and that my feelings are illegitimate. I know this is not your intention, but it is sadly what my broken heart will hear.  And I will feel violated all over again.  

As much as I believe the men of our session to be loving people, you all were not there when in my early days as a mother I cared for a newborn, dealt with the emotional and practical weight of my toddler’s special needs diagnosis, and protected my epileptic husband from himself in his sleep with very little support even when I requested it again and again. You all were not in the bedroom when I acquiesced to my husband’s desires over and over for more than a decade while I tried to disassociate from what was happening to me just so I could get through it, and you can’t feel how the weight of those years eroded me. You all weren’t there when I repeatedly asked him to go counseling over many years, and went to three separate marriage counselors alone and then ultimately to an individual counselor as well.  You weren’t there in the days when I simultaneously was grieving my father, homeschooling four children in the time of COVID, and caring for my dying mother while my husband continued with business as usual and could not be bothered to take off work while I sat with her on her deathbed. And the session wasn’t there when he threatened to leave me four months after she passed.  And please keep in mind that there are more examples like these that I still haven’t discussed.

I’m not angry with Richard or anyone else. I’m brokenhearted. His family has already written me off.  My own family of origin are all already with the Lord, and now I’m feeling an increasing disapproval from my church family which hurts terribly.  

I am happy to talk with you more about this if you like, but I did want these things taken into consideration should the session choose to take up this discussion.  Love and prayers.

Sheila: Her pastor replied with this.

Response from Pastor: Please know that if this is discussed at the session meeting it will not be to make any kind of a decision on whether or not there are grounds for divorce or who is to blame for where you guys are at.  There won’t be any discussion of any details of a sensitive nature.  The confidential discussion will simply be that you guys are moving towards divorce, that there may or may not be biblical grounds for divorce.  That determination takes time, people, and a process.  What we’ve offered in terms of the process to make that determination and see if you guys can get to a place of flourishing and what, if anything, would be appropriate at this point, from our standpoint, going forward.  Make sense?  Please don’t imagine any more than that.  And this church also really loves you no matter what.  See you Sunday.

Sheila: At that meeting, the church session decided to put her under church discipline.  And so now I would like to welcome her onto this podcast so that we can hear more of her story in her own words and her own voice.  All right.  So that was a really heavy letter.  And I am actually sitting in that letter writer’s house right now.  Hello.

Woman: Hi, Sheila.

Sheila: I am so humbled and grateful that you sent me that.  And it just moved me so much.  It’s so horrific.  

Woman: Thank you so much for reaching out.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I know we were talking by email, and it turned out that I was going to be in a similar part of the world to where you are.  And so I’m actually visiting you in your lovely house, and there are dogs in the background.  So if people hear dogs as we are recording, that’s just life.  But I was hoping that you could continue the story.  So you sent that letter to your church explaining this is the history.  And this is a church where you had been really involved.  The pastors knew you.  You had been leading worship teams.  And then they get this.  And what was their response?  

Woman: Well, their first response was—I had different responses from different pastors because it’s a Presbyterian church, so there is a plurality of elders.  One of the pastors told me they didn’t really think it was that bad because he didn’t hold me down.

Sheila: Oh gosh.  

Woman: And that he had respected my no.  The lead pastor actually was somewhat sympathetic.  And at first, he sounded like he wanted to try to help me navigate their church polity.  But one of the stories that kept coming up over and over again was about another congregant who was allowed to get a divorce after she had shown that her husband had not earned a paycheck for 10 years.  And that kept coming back to me as like—more than one of the pastors told me that story.  And I kept thinking, “Well, if that is the standard, if that’s the bar that I have to meet in order for them to give me their permission to divorce my husband, that’s a really high bar.”  I have to show that my husband hasn’t earned a paycheck for 10 years.

Sheila: Well, I think it is also interesting.  So it’s worse for a husband not to earn a paycheck than it is for a husband to completely check out of any responsibilities emotionally with the family and to be coercing you into sex.  So they think it’s worse for a man not to provide than it is for a man to abuse.  

Woman: Right.  And I had also spoke with more than one of the pastors’ wives, and I got very similar type of instruction as what a lot of the books say.  Like one of them told me that it was wrong for me to deny sex out of revenge.  That was the word she used.  And I told her.  I said, “I’m not saying no out of revenge.  If this was about revenge, I would have stopped having sex with him more than a decade ago.  This is just about me kind of getting to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore.”  And it was like self protection at that moment.  And another one just told me, “Well, I think you just need to have sex with your husband.”  

Sheila: What do they think that’s going to do?   

Woman: I just don’t know.

Sheila: You’d been trying that.

Woman: Yeah.  Yeah.  How long do I have to just keep having sex before we say, “Okay.  This is not working.  We need to try something else?”  It seems endless.

Sheila: But maybe it’s because the definition of what is working is very different because to them what is working is what is keeping the marriage together and keeping him happy even if it’s at your expense.

Woman: Right.  Right.  And I said in the letter, he threatened to leave me a year prior.  He basically told me if I did not start enjoying sex—that was the word he used.  Enjoy.  If I don’t start enjoying sex within a year, that he would leave.  And at that time, I just wanted to save a marriage, so I was like, “I’ll go back to counseling.  I will make this work.”  But then when a year had come and gone—and at that point, I was even worse off than I was the year prior.  At that point, I told him.  I said, “I think we just need to call it.”  And then at that point, I was the bad guy even though he was the one that had initially said he wanted to leave.

Sheila: This is what I want people to understand too is that you were the one who was really involved in church.  You were the one who was reading all the Christian books.  You were the one who was battling in prayer for your marriage.  You were not leaving God.  You were desperately trying to hold everything together.  And you were leaning on God.  And because of that, you were really plugged into your church.  And the church community meant so much to you.  

Woman: Right.

Sheila: And so then when a marriage falls apart, it’s devastating for the one who is really involved in the church—who is really holding onto God when the church community then turns on them.

Woman: Yes.  Exactly.  And my family of origin they were already with the Lord.  So my church family was my family.  And so when they sided with my husband, it really felt like I was truly alone.  

Sheila: So how did you feel when you got that?  What your pastor wrote to you.

Woman: I knew that he was trying to, I guess, navigate the church polity, but I didn’t really feel like he was supporting me.  And that’s one of the things that came back.   Because once he had—once they ruled and the punishment that they agreed on was that I would have to step down from the worship team and that I would no longer be able to take from the Lord’s table for six months.  And that then after six months, they would revisit that.  And when that time was up, he actually took me out to lunch and sat down with me.  And I was able to ask him some questions.  And I told him that I felt like by ruling against me they had empowered my husband because now my husband felt like he had—that he was the one in the right.  The church had ruled that he was in the right.  And I said, “Why couldn’t you have just chosen to abstain?  Why couldn’t you have just not punished anyone?”  And what he kind of said was that once my husband had said he wanted us to be considered by the session and the session had been activated that the session had to rule.  

Sheila: So this is part of the Presbyterian—the way Presbyterian churches operate.  There’s a governing body.  And so I agree with you.  Why did they have to rule?  I find this so infuriating.  And please, pastors, listen to me even if you’re not Presbyterian.  This doesn’t only apply to Presbyterian.  You went through it in a Presbyterian church.  But you are not equipped to rule on whether or not a divorce is okay.  That isn’t your rule because you don’t know what’s going on.  And when we have these rigid ideas that divorce can only take place if there has been adultery for a long time or if there’s been—yeah.  No paycheck for 10 years.  Or when you think you get to decide what is abusive when you have not been trained in abuse which the vast majority of pastors have not, you are—I don’t want to say ruin because your life was not ruined.  In many ways, you have found yourself now. 

Woman: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: But you are traumatizing people.  This isn’t okay.  This is not okay.

Woman: And one of the things that came up was not long after the church had ruled against me, I continued to go to that church for quite awhile because I felt like it was the humble thing to do.  If I was humble and I was following God, I would humbly accept their punishment.  So I continued to go.  And shortly thereafter as we’re going through the divorce proceedings, I received a text from my husband saying that he was no longer going to cooperate with the mediation.  And that he would not be moving out of the house.  And he was also saying that if I pursued it that he would go to the children and he would tell the children, “I love you, and I love Mom.  But Mom is breaking up our family and making me leave.”  So I had this deep fear of being vilified in my children’s eyes.  And so I went to the pastor again.  And I provided the texts.  I let him see them for himself.  And I said, “Look.”  I told him, “I feel like he is holding me hostage to the marriage at this point.”  And I was told, “Well, we’ve already ruled against you, so our hands are tied.”  And I ran into that more than once throughout the divorce proceeding where I would go to them for help just wanting them to talk to him thinking maybe if another man came alongside and spoke to him that he would become more reasonable.  And they just told me again and again that their hands were tied because they had already ruled against me.  

Sheila: Yep.  And meanwhile, let’s just set the stage again.  For your marriage, you had been sexually abused.  You had been responsible for all of the care giving, all of the housework.  Everything.  So you were carrying all of the load of parenting.  You have a special needs child as well.  You were carrying all of that.  Your family of origin is gone.  And now you have to navigate a divorce, and your church isn’t there for you. 

Woman: Right.

Sheila: After you had been there for the church for years. 

Woman: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  We had been at that church for over a decade at that point.

Sheila: And you had been serving, and you’d been pouring yourself out.  And the church wasn’t there for you.  This needs to change, people.  This needs to change.  This cannot continue to be our story.  And I know in a lot of the abuse advocacy groups they are filled with women who had been so involved in church, and now they were left church homeless because the church turned on them when they said, “Yeah.  I’ve been abused.”  That can’t happen.  I just want to interject here and say that this woman’s story is not unique.  There was a huge article that broke on Christianity Today last week that I want to draw everyone’s attention to.  It’s look at John MacArthur’s church, Grace Community Church, and they interviewed eight women that the church counseled to return to abusive husbands even after these women were trying to get restraining orders, were in the hospital because of physical abuse, even when the women had documentation that their husbands were using their children to create pornography.  Please go read the article.  It is stunning.  This is not just this woman’s church.  This is happening all over evangelicalism because we do not understand and we do not value women’s safety.  Here is just one paragraph from that article.  “The woman said that she saw the Lord work sovereignly to lead her through the process eventually coming to see that the failure of the church doesn’t nullify the existence of God or the justice of God.  I need to fear God instead of man.  Just because someone quotes a verse to you and they’re in a position of authority doesn’t mean they’re doing it well.  When she challenged the pastor’s advice to return to and trust her husband, she said she was reminded of passages like, ‘Love believes all things,’ and that Jesus said to forgive 70 times 7.  According to her account, the trauma and warning signs weren’t enough.  The pastors wanted evidence of physical abuse, skin to skin adultery, or a conviction of child molestation before agreeing she had biblical grounds for divorce.  She couldn’t wait for that.”  What are these churches waiting for?  Do they want women to end up dead?  I will put a link to this really important Christianity Today article in the podcast notes.  Please look at it.  Please read it.  Please understand this is what is happening in the evangelical world today, and it needs to stop.  And now let’s return to this woman’s story.  Okay.  I want to switch gears.  And I know that there are listeners that are in the same situation that you were.  And they’re desperately trying to hold onto God.  They want to do the right thing, right?  They’re praying, “God, show me what to do.  Show me how to love more.  Show me how to give more.  Show me how to be like Christ in this situation.”  And I know you felt that way for years.  What changed for you?  When did you realize?  When did you say, “No.  This isn’t okay.  This isn’t okay”?    

Woman: I wouldn’t say it’s just one moment.  There were a few.  But I know one thing that happened for me was I had this image in my head.  It would keep coming back to me where it was like I was standing, and the foundation was just crumbling away beneath me.  And that was, to me, the foundation was like my marriage.  It was just crumbling away.  There was nothing there.  And yet, I was holding on to a rope over my head called doctrine.  And that rope was the only thing that was helping me keep my balance.  And I remember for so long feeling if I look away, if I loosen my grip at all, I’m going to lose Jesus.  And I really felt like if I looked away, if I allowed any kind of deviation from what I had been taught that I was going to be bound for hell.  I was going to be lost.  And instead what ended up happening was I finally did lose my grip on that doctrine.  And when I did, Jesus caught me.  And that was it for me.  It was like I expected to find condemnation.  And instead it was—finally, I felt like I had my Jesus back.  

Sheila: Oh wow.

Woman: And Sheila, you were one of the big ones that really made a huge difference in my life at that time.  I happened to find your podcast.  And I tell people I felt like I was the woman at the well because it was like you—it was as if you had been peeking in my bedroom window for the last 10 years.  And you were able to tell me exactly what I was experiencing, how I was feeling internally, and I couldn’t not listen because you were telling me, like the woman at the well, everything I had ever done.  So once that started to come into play, I got a good therapist, who finally—finally an individual therapist rather than a marriage therapist.  That was a big turning point for me as well.  And that therapist—she’s been amazing.  And one of the things I remember her asking me was, “When you are in the bedroom with your husband and Jesus is there watching, what do you think He’s doing?”  And my answer to her was, “I think He’s weeping.  And I think He’s mad.”  And when I started to embrace that, that Jesus was not okay with what was happening, that Jesus was not pleased, He didn’t see me as—He didn’t see me as, “Oh, very good.  She’s doing her duty as a wife.  I’m proud of her.”  He wasn’t putting His stamp of approval on that.  That was the turning point.

Sheila: Wow.  It’s been so distorted what Jesus thinks.  I remember there’s this one passage.  Emerson Eggerichs says it over and over again in his book about how when you are good to a harsh and unloving man a billion angels in heaven celebrate as if God is pleased when these harsh and unloving men act that way towards women.  And women take it.  Like that that is making God pleased.  And I don’t know where the empathy went.  Where is the compassion?  Where is the heart of Jesus?  It’s missing completely from this.  And I’m just so glad that that counselor helped you see that.  Let me just flesh this out a little bit more.  As many of our listeners may know, marriage counseling is not recommended in abusive situations.  When you go in for counseling, both of you, as a couple, and there is abuse in the relationship, what often happens is the counseling session becomes one of the ways that abuse is perpetuated.  And you can’t actually fix abuse because abuse is not a couple problem.  Did any of the marriage counselors ever see that?

Woman: I had a unique situation in that my husband actually never went.  The first time I asked him to go he refused.  And so I told him, “Well, I’m going to go by myself.”  And the first counselor I went to spoke about creating a new history.  And she did say that I had to stop having sex because she said that the sex was never going to get any better if I just allowed it to continue as it was.  So she suggested that I talk to my husband about taking a year to allow time for us to build that new history between us.  Oh, this is a fun story because it ties in to what I’ve learned from Love and Respect and Emerson Eggerichs.  I talked to my husband.  I asked him to give me a year.  And he agreed.  So that part was all right.  And about three or four months in, he had really not been doing anything that we had discussed.  It was all absolutely the same.  And one night we were up.  The kids had already gone to bed.  We were watching TV, and he says to me, “So,”—he goes, “It’s been a few months.  How do you feel like it’s going?  Do you feel like you’re being more supported?  Do you feel,”—and he’s talking to me like that.  And in my mind, I’m thinking, “What is he talking about?  He is not doing anything that we’ve discussed?”  But my mind goes back to where it says that you should praise your husband for doing the thing that you want him to do even if he’s not doing it.  

Sheila: Right.

Woman: And so I’m like, “I don’t want to discourage him.  I don’t want him to think I’m not grateful.”  So I said, “Well, yeah.  I can tell you’re trying.”  I said something like that.  I can tell you’re trying.  And he goes, “Oh, good because I didn’t think I was doing anything differently.”

Sheila: Oh my gosh.

Woman: And then at that point, I’m like, “Oh my gosh.  I’m such an idiot.”  And so it went on like that until about month nine.  And then at month nine, he decided he had had enough.  And he confronted me one night.  And he said, “Married people are commanded to have sex.  We’re living in sin right now by not having sex.”  And because I didn’t have the language at the time, I didn’t really understand that what was happening to me was actually abusive.  I didn’t feel like I had a choice.  I didn’t feel like I was allowed to say no if he wasn’t on board.  So I just said, “Okay.  Well, I guess we can go back to having sex.”  And things continued the way it was for another couple of years after that.  Then I asked him to go to counseling again.  And his ongoing complaint about counseling is he would always say that counselors are biased against men, and they always tell the men what they need to do differently.  And they leave the women alone.  That was what he would always say.  So the second counselor I went to was a man.  Again, I went by myself.  Again, he told me to shut off the sex, so I did that.  And this time I was more determined in shutting off the sex.  I did have it in my mind, “I am not going to have sex again unless my husband is behaving in such a way that makes me desire him.”  And then that—from that point on, that was where it went downhill really fast.  After that, once he realized that quoting the Bible to me and telling me that I was causing us to live in sin wasn’t going to change my mind this time that was when he started threatening to leave and the rest is history.

Sheila: Right.  I find this really interesting that people think that the biggest sin is not having sex because of that misunderstanding of 1 Corinthians 7.  That that is a worse sin than anything else.  And that sex should always look the same no matter what’s going on in your relationship.  So even if you feel alone, even if you’re unsupported, even if you’re emotionally distant, even if he’s being emotionally abusive, you still can’t deprive him of sex because the Bible even though that is a misunderstanding of that verse because sex is not merely intercourse biblically.  And I’ve talked about this so often on the podcast.  Sex is supposed to be something which is mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both.  And if it’s not intimate, you’re already being deprived.  And so those verses don’t even apply.  They don’t even apply.  I don’t even know why we’re looking at them.  But they keep getting thrown up.  And the so often when women do go to counseling to churches or whatever, they’re told, “Well, just have more sex.”  At least, your counselors didn’t say that, so that’s good.  I have heard many counselors who have said that.  And that’s just not okay.  It’s not okay.  The reason I really wanted to share your story was to show the kinds of situations where churches are intervening where they have no right to intervene and how much that hurts people.  So can you share where you’re at now?

Woman: Well, I ultimately decided that I needed to leave my previous church.  

Sheila: And good for you, by the way.

Woman: So I visited around to a few churches in the area.  And I think, at this point, I found a new church home, but I’ve only been there a few weeks at this point.  But one of the things that became very important to me was that I wanted a church that allowed women in leadership because my experience at my previous church—I would never have—I was one of the most conservative, traditional, evangelical women you could imagine.  I would have never dreamed of going to a church that had female pastors a year ago.  But my experience kind of showed me that I had—that I was at a decided disadvantage because there was no women in leadership.  The men of the session could empathize with my husband far better than they could empathize with me.  So that became something that was important to me in finding a church that made me feel safe.  Also just I felt like I needed to step away from some of the more rigid doctrines and just kind of get back to just loving Jesus and just saying—I think of Paul where it says, “I’m determined to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified.”  And that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

Sheila: Yeah.  I love that.  And I think that’s what’s missing.  That’s what’s missing, church.  Jesus is what’s missing.  If we could just get that picture, like you said, of Jesus weeping when we’re being abused.  Listen to what you’re saying, church.  If you think that Jesus is happy when people are abused, you don’t know Jesus.  You don’t.  And we’ve gotten so into parsing the letters of Paul which Paul never meant for them to be used that way, by the way—but we’re so into parsing the letters of Paul and getting all legalistic about this stuff.  And yet, just think about it.  If Jesus were in the room right now, what would He be doing?  He would be siding with the people who were being hurt.  And we’re not going to cure this.  We’re not going to fix this until we get Jesus back and put Him back in the center.  And I just love the way He showed up for you.

Woman: I do too.  

Sheila: I love that.  And that you haven’t lost Him because I know so many women feel like they have because everything they’ve been taught about Him makes Him sound like a monster.  Because quite frankly, someone who is happy because you’re letting someone use your body like that is a monster.  And that’s not God.  That’s not God.  Is there anything that you want to say if you could talk to you five years ago?  If that’s too difficult a question (cross talk)?

Woman: If I could talk to me five years ago?  I know I would tell myself don’t wait so long because I spent a lot of time and a lot of years afraid to rock the boat.  And I think when I think of my part in this and what I could have done differently, what I should have done differently, I was always so focused on trying to make sure that my husband was comfortable and satisfied in marriage that in some ways, I think, that that would be my sin is that I needed to speak up.  I needed to tell him.  When he told me that he didn’t want to go to counseling the first time, I wish that was the moment that I turned to my pastor, and I said, “We need help in our marriage, and my husband will not go to counseling.”  I wish I would have just stood up to him more and just said, “Look.  No.  This is not how we’re doing it.  We’re going to do it this way,” because I spent so many years just trying to pacify him rather than trying to fix the problem because I was afraid that trying to fix the problem would result in the end of the marriage.

Sheila: Right.  And God cares more about the people in the marriage than He does about the marriage.  Just like the story that Jesus tells about the woman—or—was it a woman or a man who was healed on the Sabbath?  There’s multiple (cross talk) that I remember.  He said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man.”  And in a similar way, we weren’t made for marriage.  Marriage was made for us.  And when marriage is hurting us, God cares.  

Woman: And more than that, it’s supposed to be a mirror of our relationship to Jesus.  So if our marriage is a mess, what does that say about our relationship to Christ?

Sheila: Exactly.  Exactly.  So today—I mean I’m in your house.  And I’ve been talking to you on email and seen you a couple times in person now.  And you seem lighter.  You seem like you’re okay.

Woman: I am.  I am okay.  It’s still a process.  Some of the hardest things is just—honestly coming—getting over feelings of guilt because I actually do feel guilty for leaving my husband.  But all in all, one of the things that the therapist would tell me a lot is whenever I would waver, she’d say, “If this wasn’t you, if this was one of your kids, what would you do?”  And whenever she would say that, I would always automatically say, “I’d tell them they need to leave.”  And so that’s something I always go back to is if this wasn’t you, if this was your kids, what would you do.

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s a good question that we should all ask if you’re in that position.  If this wasn’t you.  And as we’re wrapping up, I just want to say, again, if you’re a pastor, if you’re a friend, if someone is coming to you saying, “I’m in this terrible marriage.  I don’t know what to do.  I desperately need help,” please, please, it is not your place to judge whether or not what they’re going through qualifies as abuse.  Please, church, stop it and just learn how to love.  One of the greatest things about what I do is that sometimes I get to meet people in real life who have such incredible stories and who are so—just are really inspirational in how they clung to Jesus through terrible, terrible things.

Keith: Yeah.

Sheila: And that is her story.  And I was really humbled that she opened up her home and she shared this with us.  And I really hope that this touches you.  I know there are some people listening who are going to be in her situation, and they will have seen themselves in her story.  And I just want to tell you.  You don’t need your church’s permission to divorce.  And she wasn’t seeking that either.  I want to make that clear.  She tried to do everything the right way.  Everybody above board.  She knew she could leave without the church’s permission.  But they still put her under discipline.  And so I hope—one of the things—and we brought this up before on a podcast recently.  When a woman was asking, is this okay sexually to do?  Is God upset at this?  And I made the point.  If ever a woman, a friend, comes to you saying, “Is this okay to do,” they’re looking for permission to say no.  So often people are looking for just someone to say, “No.  That’s not right.”  

Keith: They could be, for sure.  And I think the big thing is validating that because I think in the church women’s needs just aren’t validated.  Horrific things like this happen.  And women are sent back to it.

Sheila: Yeah.  She went to pastors’ wives, and she told them this stuff.  And their reply was,” Are you having enough sex?  You need to have more sex.”  I just want to tell them, “You don’t know the whole story.  You don’t know.”  And so when someone finally has the courage to share even a little bit of their story, assume you are only seeing a little bit of it.  Because by the time she went to those pastors’ wives, she had already been being raped for years.  And so by the time someone comes to you, just assume that their story is 10 times worse than what you’re hearing.  And I didn’t do that.  I had a very close friend come to me with a similar story.  And I reacted a lot like those pastors’ wives.  This was a couple years ago.  And we’ve worked it out.  I’ve apologized to her, and we’re great and everything now.  But it was actually her journey that helped me in my journey and why I’m here right now.  And I realized she hadn’t told me everything because she was still trying to hold on to, “Is it okay to badmouth him?”  

Keith: Well, a lot of people who are being abused don’t realize they’re being abused.  That’s the whole problem.  So what we should be doing in the church is teaching people to recognize abuse.  And we should be teaching people this is not okay.  But every time you write a Fixed It For You that tries to identify abuse people get upset because you’re upending the whole idea that men need to be in charge.  That’s more important.  It’s more important that we hold to the biblical, quote unquote, truth that men are in charge than that we keep women safe.

Sheila: And that’s exactly what this church did because they were looking for letter of the law.  Is it okay for her to divorce?  Are there biblical grounds?  There is no adultery, they said, although he was using pornography, right?  So he is willing to stay married.  He hasn’t abandoned her.  He’s bringing home a paycheck, so there is no biblical grounds.  Doesn’t matter that he’s been raping her.  Doesn’t matter that he’s been completely non available and non present.  Doesn’t matter.  None of the abuse matters.  And that is so not of Jesus.  And this is why I am speaking up because churches need to change.  Pastors, this isn’t okay.  And I know there are pastors that are amazing at this.  And so I’m not talking to you.  But actually, no.  I am talking to you.  If you’re amazing—

Keith: Speak up.

Sheila: – police your fellow pastors.  Make sure that no one that you know would ever do this because this is unconscionable.  This grieves the Holy Spirit.  This breaks Jesus’s heart.  Whatever you do to the least of these, you did to Him.  When they disciplined her because she wanted to get free from abuse, they were doing that to Jesus.  So if you are in an abusive situation, I am going to put a link in the podcast notes to some domestic abuse hotlines.  Please know that you don’t need to stay there.  I will put a link to some wonderful advocates, Sarah McDougal, Gretchen Baskerville, Natalie at Flying Free Sisterhood, Leslie Vernick.  I will put some links to them so that you can get some help as well.  But just know that you are precious.  You matter.  No matter what your church is telling you.  You matter to Jesus.  And I pray that you will find people who will let you know that you matter too.  So thank you for joining us on this heavy Bare Marriage podcast.  Do check out our Fixed It For You book, please, because the more that we start talking about these issues the less likely it will be that toxic stuff like this actually happens in churches.  Ideas have consequences.  So let’s defeat those ideas so that this evil stops happening.  So thanks for listening, and we will see you again next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Bye-bye.