I got married when I was 19. My wife, Janet, was 18. At the time I was a student pastor for the United Methodist Church up in east Texas. The first time I became violent with her we had gone to a meeting, and I thought she was creating a public display, so once I got her alone, I slapped her to get her to quiet down. And she did. For many years after, she was living in fear of the next time.
I was following what I thought the Bible said about what a family should be, that the man should be the head of the house and be in control. That led to me directing what she did and where she went. We went on without physical violence, but I was shouting, balling up my fists and letting her know I was certainly willing to use violence.
The second time I hit Janet, I had become a landscape contractor in Houston and was working virtually around the clock. The business was not going well and tension was building up because I felt like a failure. Anything she said would trigger violence. But then I would apologize and cry and say I wasn’t going to do it again. Things would be great for a few days, then it would build right back up again. Not even her parents, who live just a few miles away, knew what was going on. I guess like a lot of other women, she didn’t want to admit her husband was abusing her.
We got into an argument one morning. I struck her across the throat and knocked her to the floor. I almost crushed her larynx. I did not go temporarily insane or become another person. I was there, and when I look back on it, I knew what I was doing. That’s when she finally insisted that I get help. We’d been married 18 or 19 years at that point, had three daughters. If I didn’t get help, then she was going to leave and take the kids with her. I agreed, but I felt like I was forced into it and didn’t really belong there. When I looked around, I thought, “These guys are violent. They’re wife-beaters. That’s not me.” Unfortunately, they were just like me.
We had a lot of false starts, and I quit a couple of times. About a year into therapy, we got into another argument. I got some soup spilled on me, and I knocked her into a wall. I almost broke her neck. The police came, but by that time she was very upset, and I was very nice, calm and cool. They ended up almost threatening to take her to jail instead of me. Knowing she would have to go to jail with her neck hurting and also leave the kids, she quieted down.
That was pretty much the turning point. I decided if I wasn’t going to kill my wife, I was going to have to shape up. My wife is just an exceptional person, stubborn enough to hang on and loving enough to forgive me. Now we’re doing great.
The kids saw us arguing constantly. They were hiding in the other room when the police came the second time. My 19-year-old still doesn’t date seriously, and my other girls are not interested in relationships. Hopefully, that will change. They are also going through family counseling.
The bad thing about it is that it never gets better without intervention. Every time I abused my wife, it got worse. Eventually, I would have killed her if I hadn’t gotten help. It wouldn’t matter if I had divorced her and gotten another wife – the same thing would have happened because the problem was within me.
