It should have been the highest moment of my life, being recognized as one of Idaho’s Women of the Year at the age of 34.

Instead, it was one of my lowest. 

Outwardly, I had achieved everything. I had helped lead the social media campaign that raised $12 million to save my college. I was married to a seemingly successful entrepreneur who had invented virtual reality technology that got us meetings with Disney, Samsung, Google, Intel. I had two beautiful children. 

I had outer success, external validation.

But inside? Inside I was a mess.

It had been a mere week or two since my aha moment where I had entertained the possibility that I was in an abusive marriage. After I had gotten home that day, I started keeping track of all of the bizarre goings on with my husband.

“I think I’m being emotionally abused,” I said to him, still unsure what to even call the last ten years of marriage. I thought if I told him that his behavior was abusive, he would change. Or I would fix him. My husband had a way of making you think he was incompetent instead of deliberately manipulative. And then we could go on pretending that everything was fine. I would still have to ignore the multiple Ashley Madison accounts and the emails I had found soliciting women on Craigslist. In my mind, those weren’t character problems. They were impulsive one-offs. At least that’s what I believed until that February day.

Bizarrely, my husband said in response, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy.” It seemed like an odd thing to say after your wife tells you they are concerned there is a decade of abuse to untangle. “You will be honest with me now” he added.

He then got down on one knee (which is more than he did when we got engaged, to be honest) and said “If I change, will you marry me in six months?” I think he was trying to distract me, turn my focus to planning a vow renewal. But I wasn’t interested in that, not this time. I was already starting to see that words weren’t enough. I’d have to see actual behavior changes.

Over the next week, he would say things like “I can sense people’s emotions so I know when you are lying to me” or “Everyone thinks you’re a bitch.” It was unnerving, at best.

What I started to notice were the ways I was being forced to stay in constant contact with him. If he sent me a text and I waited even ten or fifteen minutes to respond, he would accuse me of ignoring him or doing something deceptive to undermine him. Once we started talking, I would endure ongoing rants that could last for thirty minutes to an hour – or longer. It was exhausting.

On the night of the Women of the Year banquet, my mom, sister, husband, and the few friends I still managed to stay in touch with came to honor and celebrate me. I already knew that my husband hated that I was getting this award. He thought it should be him (even though he wasn’t a woman). He especially hated that a man nominated me for the award. All day long, he sulked about my being recognized. And then once we got there, he started acting like I was going to be given an even bigger award. I knew that I wasn’t. And I wondered if he was trying to set me up for disappointment.

It was finally time for all of the honorees to be called on stage and individually recognized for our contributions over the previous year. I stood in the dark behind the stage with my head down. I’m a fraud. I don’t deserve this. How can I accept an award when I can’t even stand up for myself?

It would be easy to blame X for those thoughts. He certainly made me feel small and undeserving. But these weren’t his thoughts – not anymore. These were mine.

I looked like I had it all from the outside. But no one could see the inner turmoil and struggle. If I was the strong woman they were about to celebrate on stage I would leave. But if I was the good girl, the pleaser, the fixer, the person I believed that the world truly wanted me to be, I would stay.

I held back my tears and plastered my fake smile across my face as they announced my name. Wife. Mother. Leader. Friend. Imposter.

As my world began to unravel, and I started to question everything that I believed about my family and the previous ten years of marriage, I started researching. The problem was that I was terrified of X. He seemed to know where I was, what I was doing, and who I was talking to AT ALL TIMES. How was I going to research my situation without him finding out (just as a PSA – if you are worried about how to google without enduring the wrath of your husband, I give you FULL permission to read that as a huge RED FLAG and get the hell out of there!).

I wasn’t sleeping much as it was, my anxiety about the situation growing. The problem with waking up to the reality of an abusive marriage is that once you are aware, you have to do something about it. You CAN stay, but even that becomes a choice once you are cognitively awake. X liked to stay up until the early hours of the morning before going to sleep. So I would wake up about 4 am, sneak downstairs, curl up on the couch, and hide under a blanket so he couldn’t see the websites I was visiting if he did wake up. I wasn’t certain whether there was a keylogger on my phone monitoring my web traffic – I considered it at least a high possibility. But I needed information, so I took the chance.

I don’t remember how I got to narcissism from my search terms. Despite growing up in a toxic and abusive family system, narcissism wasn’t a word I was particularly familiar with. Boundaries were definitely not a part of our vernacular! One of the websites I found was Out of the Fog, which helps those whose family members have personality disorders. I read a lot of personal stories there, which finally gave me the words to describe what was happening. It’s one of the reasons I share my story. Reading academic text is fine, but it’s others’ stories that truly connect us and help give us the strength to make different choices.

One Mom’s Battle

One early morning, I found Tina Swithin through One Mom’s Battle and her book Divorcing a Narcissist. While I was becoming aware that there was probably no way forward in my marriage, the One Mom’s Battle blog showed me what I would likely face if I decided to get a divorce. X had sent me something he called a Holographic Postnuptial Agreement that gave me full custody and all of our assets. But I didn’t trust anything he said anymore, and I didn’t know how the court would intervene even with that document. X also said on several occasions that if we got divorced, the kids and I would never see him again (spoiler alert: he lied).

I’m going to jump ahead a bit in my story, and I will go back in another post and fill in the gaps. After I asked for a divorce, I scheduled a call with Tina. I didn’t know what a divorce coach was. In 2016, I don’t think that’s what we were calling them. All I knew is that she had been there and that I needed validation. A LOT OF VALIDATION.

Some people use divorce coaches regularly. That wasn’t quite my strategy. I needed someone to hear how crazy things were, let me know that I wasn’t out of touch with reality or overbearing for wanting to protect my kids. I also found that Tina Swithin knew strategies and techniques (like asking for a nail test instead of just a hair follicle test for drugs).

When my ex-husband’s parental rights were terminated, one of the first phone calls I made was to Tina. I think I was a blubbery mess! I wanted her to know that I was free and that I couldn’t have done it without her.

Tina and One Mom’s Battle now train others to become high-conflict divorce coaches. I am certified through her program, the High-Conflict Divorce Coach Certification Program. Tina has taken the knowledge she has gotten from One Mom’s Battle, from Divorcing a Narcissist (Sociopath) and made it accessible to many more of us. I have the knowledge of my own divorce and family court battle, but I also have the collective knowledge from Tina and all of the other high-conflict divorce coaches who have been through the program.

I will forever be grateful to her for sharing her story, for finding her one early Spring morning, curled up under a blanket, not knowing where to turn.

Click here to read my Family Court nightmare from the beginning. (This series talks about domestic violence and abuse. Please take care in reading.)

The madness continued, especially because I wasn’t letting go of my concerns like I had for the past ten years. The first time I said I was going to leave, my older son was 2. I talked myself into courage, walked into the house, and told X I wanted to separate. Within an hour, he had spun the conversation so that he was the one leaving me and had me pleading with him to stay. Then there was the time that I discovered an email he had written to a corporate video game company asking for his account back after they kicked him off their platform – but the facts he presented were a giant lie. He had leveraged our home burning down and my getting sick but twisted the facts and even made up family members of mine who don’t exist. I thought I was done then. Instead, X agreed to get a brain scan and go to rehab (he was spending 10s of thousands of dollars on video games a month without my knowing).

I wasn’t so easily swayed this time. I wasn’t latching on to a new shiny solution or fix. I was collecting information, trying to untangle a decade of “love.”

A week after the Women of the Year banquet, we got into another round of circular conversations. By this point, I was keeping notes for myself on a Locked Notes app on my phone. I needed the proof for myself that things were as bad as I believed them to be. As we were talking, X would say things like “I’m not manipulating. You might think this is manipulative, but it is not.” [Oh yeah, sure Jan.] When I mentioned the abuse that I was still trying to figure out, he would say, “You have to stop living in the past.” What I wrote one night to myself was “I am afraid. Challenging X means fear, crazy-making, blame. Our whole relationship is built on him manipulating me for sex.”

I’m a little uncomfortable writing about the sexual abuse. What I will say for now is that it was very common for X to call sex with me “rape” as though it were a joke we were both in on. I spent hours, days, weeks of my life talking about X’s genitals and his related problems down there! This information matters because of what I did next.

I still didn’t quite believe that things were as awful as they actually were. I needed facts and data so that I could base my decision to leave (or stay) on sound logic and not some vague feeling that things were bad. So I woke up one morning and decided I would do an experiment to see how far X would take things (I’m not sure I recommend this strategy).

X was lying down next to me, groping me, saying things like “I know you like this. This is what you want.” I felt nauseated.

I agreed to have sex. And then I started apologizing (I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to see what would happen). I asked X how I could be the wife for him. X told me to get rid of all of the guys who want me. Look, that sounds flattering. But I was a size 16/18 married mother of two who was barely allowed to talk to friends. I didn’t exactly have a secret line of men waiting to f* me. But anyhow.

I kept telling him that I would get rid of men. I told him that I was going to lay in bed all day, every day and wait for him to be ready to have sex with me. In my mind, I was waiting for him to stop, to tell me he didn’t want me to be a sex doll. Instead, he started crying and told me that was the only thing he ever wanted from me. He was so happy. “[Therapist] is going to be so shocked that we figured out our relationship problems in a couple of weeks.” To him, our problem was that I was a living, breathing human with thoughts and feelings of my own.

I’m married to a psychopath. 

That’s what I wrote. In that moment, I knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t solvable by marriage counseling. And if he was a psychopath, I was likely in grave danger. And so were my kids.

We went to marriage counseling that day. While we were in the waiting room, I went to the bathroom. I wrote “help” on the back of an index card and slipped it under the door of our therapist. She came out and met me in a small powder room. Tucked in around the toilet, I lost it. I was crying and shaking.

“Are you being abused?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know. Abuse looked like being hit, bruises, choking, stuff you could hold onto, prove. This was… something else.

Later that afternoon I went to my individual counselor. Things felt so crazy and out of control that I started seeing her twice a week on top of weekly marriage counseling.

“I guess that’s what I’ll do,” I said to her. “Just lay in bed and wait for him until I figure out what else to do.”

Thankfully she cautioned me against this approach.

I once again steeled myself, pulled out the courage that was still inside me, just stuffed way way down, and I went home. I walked into my bedroom where X had been masturbating, waiting for me.

“Listen asshole. Either you learn to respect my boundaries and treat me like a woman who deserves love and respect or you get out of my house.”

I still didn’t leave.

They say “it” takes a village. Mostly I think they mean child-rearing, but I think it takes a village to leave, especially if you are in an emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise abusive relationship. Your world is distorted. You don’t know if you can trust yourself or your experiences. You minimize everything, not giving potentially dangerous circumstances the weight they truly deserve. You need people. And yet, people are often systematically removed from your life so that in that moment of despair, you have no one to turn to.

One of the first women who gave me hope that I might be able to leave, that divorce was a possibility, isn’t even really a friend. She was an acquaintance, a business relationship. And all she did was tell me she had gotten divorced. The world didn’t collapse. No one thought she was a failure. She was happy. I hadn’t yet had my epiphany that I was in an abusive relationship. But I knew I was unhappy, that something was wrong. And this woman, and all of the women who helped her make her decision, gave me hope.

Another woman I’ll call Amber I met one winter afternoon at a Country Club luncheon fundraiser. We happened to be seated next to each other, serendipitously. She would become my life line to resources and domestic violence advocacy. I reached out to her when things started to get crazy. She had shared parts of her own story on Facebook, and as I started questioning what was really happening, she was one of the only people I knew to ask. She may have been the person who first talked to me about narcissism.

Another friend I met through a work project met me for coffee. I needed to know that I could get a divorce, that I would be ok. She gave me one of the best pieces of advice I have maybe ever gotten. She asked me what percentage of the time I deserved to be happy in my marriage. “Everybody’s number is different. Mine was 80%.” I thought about it and agreed that 80% sounded like a solid number to aim for. It also made the process far more objective. I could take my heart out of the situation completely and focus only on this data point. I wasn’t happy 80% of the time. Not even close.

The other woman was my marriage counselor, who, by this point, had figured out that I wasn’t in a situation that could be helped by traditional psychotherapy. She was recommending antipsychotics for my ex-husband. I would find out months later that she had even reached out to my individual counselor to tell her she was afraid for my life and that I needed a safety plan. I’ve heard many people in the narcissistic abuse recovery groups talk about how unsuccessful marriage counseling is, how easily conned the therapist is. And I believe that is true for many people. But my marriage counselor got it. She saw through him. And eventually she told me the words I needed to hear to be able to leave. “He’s an abuser. This is what abusers do.”

I’d love to know about the women who helped you leave. Tell me more in the comments!