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I want to say something to the Christian woman who has been told for years that she is the problem.
He told you that you were stupid. That you could not follow directions. That you were dramatic. That you were the narcissist. That his therapist agreed with him. That if you were not so flawed, he would not have to react the way he does. You believed him long enough that you cannot quite tell where his voice ends and yours begins.
I want to tell you what I told the woman I sat with this week, after I had watched her absorb years of that kind of language.
Your only problem was tolerance. That is it. That is the entire defect he could find in you.
Tolerance Is Not a Character Flaw
The Holy Spirit will sometimes name a thing in His own way, and when He does it is freeing in a way no human reframe could ever be. When I named this in our session, my client wept — not the painful kind, the relieved kind. The kind that comes when someone names what God has been trying to whisper for years.
Her only problem was that she kept giving him access. Not because she was weak. Not because she was foolish. Because she had been taught, by trauma and by his manipulation, that her access was the price of love.
Tolerance for the wrong things is not a character flaw. It is a wound. It is a thing that gets installed early — sometimes in childhood — and gets exploited later. It does not mean you are broken. It means you were trained.
The Gaslighting Will Make You Believe You Are the Problem
A man at this level of abuse is rarely subtle. He criticizes how you drive. He criticizes how you talk. He criticizes whether you repeat yourself. He asks if you are stupid. He calls you a narcissist. He makes hypersexualized comments and tells you you are overreacting when you object. Nothing is ever good enough. You walk on eggshells.
After enough years of that, the woman in the mirror is no longer sure what is true. She wonders if maybe she really is the issue. She wonders if all these things she is feeling are signs of her brokenness rather than signs of his.
I want to press something into you. He was projecting. The list of things he accused you of is not a description of you. It is a description of him, said in your direction so you would absorb the labels and let him off the hook.
What God Sees When He Looks at You
I want you to hear this from a Christian therapist who sits with women like you every week.
God does not see a broken woman.
He sees a daughter who was hurt by someone who refused to take responsibility for what he did. He sees a daughter whose tolerance was exploited. He sees a daughter who is covered in grace, whose imperfections are not the indictment her abuser made them out to be.
The Bible’s language for who you are is not the language he used. He called you stupid; God calls you the workmanship of His hands. He called you broken; God calls you fearfully and wonderfully made. He called you the narcissist; God calls you beloved. His words ran loud because he had access. God’s words are truer, and they are louder when you sit in His presence long enough to hear them.
The Authentic Self He Tried to Bury
The exhausting part of being with an abuser is not just the abuse. It is the constant performance. Trying to anticipate his moods. Trying to not set him off. Trying to be small enough to not threaten him and impressive enough to not bore him. That performance buried the real you under layers of self-monitoring she never asked for.
When the access ends, the performance can finally end too. Slowly, the authentic self comes back. She does not need to track his moods anymore. She does not need to apologize for taking up space. She does not need to be perfect to be safe.
And what comes up is not actually a broken woman. What comes up is the daughter God always saw. With imperfections, yes. But the imperfections are not what define her. Grace defines her.
What to Do With the Shame
The shame of having stayed is real, and I am not going to spiritually bypass it. You may feel humiliated that you tolerated what you tolerated. You may feel embarrassed about the messages, the sleepless nights, the times you went back.
Bring it to God. Not to fix it. To grieve it. The shame is not the truth about you, but the experience of the shame is real and it deserves to be honored.
He will meet you in that grief. He will not lecture you. He will hold you while you weep over the years you spent believing him. And as you weep, the shame will start to lift — because the One who holds you was never the one accusing you.
Frequently Asked Questions
If my only problem was tolerance, why do I feel so broken?
Because tolerance for abuse leaves marks. Nervous system damage, memory impairment, dissociation, shame. The marks are real. But the marks are not your identity. They are evidence of what happened to you, not evidence of who you are.
He told me his therapist agrees that I am the problem. How do I know what to believe?
Manipulators frequently weaponize the language of therapy. Real therapists do not diagnose people they have never met based only on what their partner says. No ethical therapist would coach a client to call their partner abusive names. What he reported is almost certainly not what his therapist actually said.
Was it spiritually wrong of me to stay so long?
No. You stayed because you were trained to tolerate, because fear kept you bound, because pride wanted him to still want you, because he manipulated you skillfully. None of that is a moral failure. It is a wound. God is not angry at you. He is grieving with you, and He is leading you out.
If You Are Ready to Hear What God Says About You
If something in you exhaled reading this — if you sensed the Holy Spirit say yes, that is the truth He has been trying to speak over me — I would love to walk this with you.
I offer a free 15-minute consultation for Christian women recovering from narcissistic and domestic abuse. No script. No rush. Just a place to begin hearing your true name.
Book your free 15-minute consultation here.
You are not the broken one. You were the tolerant one. He is the one who exploited that tolerance. God sees the difference, and so do I.
