That Is What I Wanted To Hear
Truth. Honesty.
A note before you begin: I'm writing this from the safe shore. I lived through an abusive marriage, I've since left it, and I'm remarried now to a gentle, honest man. I share this because there's a particular wound almost no one talks about—and a truth that, when I finally heard it, began to set me free. This touches on abuse, so be gentle with yourself. And hear me first: if someone is hurting you, none of what happened is your fault, and there's help at the very end of this page.
Everyone assumes the worst part of abuse is the physical pain.
It isn't. Not for me.
The deepest wound wasn't the moments of harm. It was the lie that came after—the slow, deliberate rewriting of the story, where somehow I became the unstable one, the crazy one, the problem, while the person who hurt me got to play the hero who was only "trying to protect everyone" from me.
There's even a name for that pattern. It's called DARVO—deny, attack, and reverse the roles of victim and offender. And it is dizzying. From the inside, you start to lose your grip on what's even real. You defend yourself and it gets used as proof you're hysterical. You go quiet and it gets used as proof you're guilty. You begin to wonder if maybe you are the villain everyone's been told you are.
The pull toward becoming the villain
All my life, I wanted to be the good one. The kind queen. The one everyone liked, the one who saved the day.
But after years of being lied about, I understood the villains for the first time. I understood Maleficent, whose great love cut off her beautiful, powerful wings. I understood the raging queen who just wanted the truth and couldn't get it. When you've been betrayed that deeply, there is a real temptation to let the pain curdle into bitterness—to become hard, and cold, and vengeful. To let it change who you are.
I felt that pull. I won't pretend I didn't. And choosing not to give in to it was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
What I actually wanted
Here's the thing, though: I never wanted revenge. I only ever wanted one thing.
The truth.
There's a moment in Alice Through the Looking Glass that undoes me every time—when one sister finally admits that she was the one who lied, all those years ago, and says she's sorry. And the other sister, the furious one, softens completely and says that a confession is all she ever wanted. The anger simply drains away. The truth was the whole thing.
For six years, everything I heard was "you." You made me. You provoked it. If you were different, none of it would have happened. You, you, you.
And then one night, through many tears, I finally heard a different word. "I."
I made a terrible mistake. I was wrong. I didn't want people to think I'd meant to hurt you—so I lied.
I asked, "So you lied?" And the answer, at last, was yes.
I cannot describe how much that single, honest "I" healed in me. Not because it fixed everything—it didn't, and I ultimately chose to build a safe life elsewhere—but because being believed, being told the truth after so long, is its own kind of medicine. It gave me back my grip on reality. It told me the thing I had needed to hear for years, but that truth was NEVER admitted to anyone else.
You were never crazy
If someone hurt you and then convinced the world you were the problem—please, hear me say this as clearly as I can:
You are not crazy. You were never crazy. And the lie was never yours to carry.
Maybe you do struggle with something—anxiety, depression, big emotions, a diagnosis, a chronic illness, a really hard season. I did; I was quietly, seriously ill for years with something no one had yet named. But hear this and let it go all the way down: none of that ever makes abuse your fault. Not a bad day, not a raised voice, not a diagnosis, not anything. There is no version of you that "deserved" it. The problem was never your struggle. The problem was that someone chose to hurt you and then chose to hide it behind a story about you.
Forgiving—without going back
My grandfather once told me, gently, that I simply needed to forgive. And in that very moment, I heard the quietest, kindest voice inside me say, I will talk to him.
The next morning, Granddaddy came to me with his head bowed. He'd prayed about it overnight, and he told me the Lord had answered him plainly: "It's hard to forgive a horse if it's still standing on your foot." He said he was sorry for the advice he'd given me. I hugged him.
That line has become one of the truest things I know. Yes—forgiveness matters, and I've done the long work of it. But forgiveness does not mean you have to stay under the weight. You do not have to forgive with a hug. Sometimes you forgive with a handshake, and then you turn and walk toward a better life. Forgiving someone and returning to them are not the same thing, and no one—no pastor, no relative, no well-meaning friend—gets to hand you back to the horse still standing on your foot.
My wings are growing back
So I've made my choice. I'm not going to let what happened harden me into a villain. I'm handing the pain, the anger, and the fear over to God, one honest day at a time.
I wanted the truth, and eventually I got enough of it to heal. I wanted to stop being the crazy one in someone else's story, and now I get to be the author of my own. My wings—my sense of worth, my strength, my softness—were clipped for a long time. But here on the safe shore, with honesty around me and God beneath me, I can feel them growing back.
Truth. Honesty. That's all I ever really wanted. And step by careful step, it's what's bringing me home to myself.
May God be with you as you take each of your own steps. And if you're still standing under the weight—please know your wings can grow back, too.
If someone is hurting you, please reach out—you don't have to carry it in silence. In the U.S., the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (call or text), any time, day or night. And if the pain ever grows so heavy you don't want to be here, please call or text 988 and let someone stay with you. If you're outside the U.S., please reach out to a local support line. You deserve safety, and you deserve to be believed.
With much love,
Steffanie
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