I Hear You

I Hear You

A note before you begin: I wrote pieces of this during one of the darkest chapters of my life, while I was still in an abusive marriage. I'm sharing it now from safety and healing—I've since left, and I'm remarried to a gentle man who hears me. It touches on abuse, so please be tender with yourself as you read. And hear this first: if someone is hurting you, choosing to protect yourself is not a lack of faith. God never requires you to be crushed to prove your devotion. Ever.

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A shaved head. Thin grey and black clothes, worn day and night. A ball cap. A loose rain jacket that hung to my thighs and hid as much of me as it possibly could.

That feeling of wanting to disappear.

I sat with my arms folded tight across my middle and my legs crossed, closed off to everyone. I knew exactly what that body language meant. I just couldn't uncross any of it—being open felt too unsafe. Family, friends: I let no one in. Only my children got my whole, unguarded heart. Around them, I never had to fake a single smile.

My counselor once put words to it perfectly. He looked at my husband and said, "Your foot is no longer smashing her—but it's still raised, as if you might do it again." I nodded through my tears. Yes. That is exactly what it feels like.

The one I trusted most

Years earlier, I sat in my grandparents' home and finally told my grandfather—my favorite person alive—about the abuse. I needed him, of all people, to hear me.

He leaned forward and said, almost gently, "We are commanded to forgive."

It landed like a dagger. What part of everything I just told you did you not hear? I said nothing out loud. But in my heart I heard a different voice—quiet, and sure—say, I will talk to him.

The next morning, Granddaddy found me in the hallway with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped. "Steffi," he said, "I'm so sorry." He had prayed about our conversation the night before, and he told me the Lord had answered him plainly: "It is hard to forgive a horse if it is still standing on your foot." He said he was sorry, over and over, and asked me to forgive him.

I hugged him. I told him it was okay. And I meant it—but I didn't unlock the door I'd bolted shut the night before. Because I had just learned something that would take me years to unlearn: if the person I trusted most in the world couldn't hear me, then no one could.

That is why I shaved my head. Why I dressed to vanish. If no one was going to hear me, I would make myself impossible to see.

"I hear you"

Years later, I sat across a room from a counselor—grey clothes, arms folded—offering only the smallest pieces of my story. Just a taste, to see if he'd spit it back at me the way everyone else had.

He leaned forward, his whole body and his eyes and his voice all pointed straight at me, and he said:

"I hear you."

Then, leaning closer, louder: "I hear you."

I cannot remember words ever hitting me so hard. The dam I'd held back for years simply broke. No sound—just a silent flood of warm, salty tears I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to. All that isolation and abandonment and abuse, finally allowed to pour out, because for once someone had said the truest thing I needed to hear.

That is where healing begins. Not with advice. Not with a lecture on forgiveness. With being heard.

What real repair looks like

My counselor taught me something in that office I've never forgotten. My husband had complained that I "wouldn't let things go," that I kept bringing up the past. So the counselor drew him a picture.

"Imagine you accidentally hit your wife with your car," he said. "She's lying in the road, bleeding. You get out—and instead of stopping the bleeding or getting her to a hospital, you stand over her explaining why it happened. You give her your reasons. You ask her to understand you. And then you drive away and leave her there."

That, he explained, was what had been happening for years. Every conversation became about his excuses, his reasons, his need to be understood—never about tending my wound. "The reason she keeps bringing it up," he told my husband, "is that the healing never happened. The foot is still raised over her. She is still lying in the road."

He said one more thing that made a light go on for me: that depersonalizing the people you love is dangerous—that soldiers are trained to depersonalize an enemy precisely because it makes them easier to harm. To the whole world, my husband was the best man in the room, the first to lend a hand, the hero of every story. It was only at home, only with me, that the love I was starving for was the one thing withheld. In the version of us he told other people, I was the crazy one. There is a particular loneliness in being hurt by someone everyone else adores.

There's a saying horse trainers use when they're gentling a wild mustang: you slow down to get there faster. Trust can't be rushed, and neither can healing. But it can only begin once the person who caused the wound stops explaining and starts listening.

The voice that did hear me

Here's the thing, though. All those years when no human being seemed to hear me, Someone did.

One morning, folding laundry, I heard a voice—clear, as if a person were standing right beside me—say, "Burn your sheets." I brushed it off as my own strange thought. It came again. And a third time. I finally carried the bedding out to the fire pit and burned it, not understanding why. My husband came through the gate as the last of it smoldered and asked what I was doing. "Burning our sheets," I said.  When asked why, I replied, "God told me to." The color drained from his face, and he walked away without a word.

I understood later and he understood what God was saying to him. Sometimes God protects us before we even know what we're being protected from. Even when no one on earth was listening, Heaven was—and Heaven was trying to keep me safe.

I only wish I'd trusted that voice sooner. For a long time I believed the faithful thing was to stay, to try harder, to save it. There was even a terrible night—one week after we reconciled—when violence erupted in our home so frightening, walls and floors had to be cleaned, and my children still flinch at a raised voice to this day. No child should ever witness what mine did. And still I told myself that God wanted me to stay.

What I know now

He didn't.

God never asked me to be crushed to prove my faith. The quiet voice that finally grew loud enough to hear wasn't telling me to keep lying in the road while the foot hovered over me—it was telling me it was time to get up and walk out. And when I finally did, He carried me every step, exactly the way He had been trying to guide and protect me all along.

Today I am safe. I am still healing. I'm remarried to a gentle man who leans in and truly hears me. My children are healing—slowly, beautifully. And the whole long road back to myself began the moment someone leaned across a room and gave me three words I'd waited my entire life to hear.

So if you're the one in grey right now—arms folded, heart bolted shut, certain no one could possibly understand—let me lean in and say it to you:

I hear you.

And so does God. And it is not faithless to let someone help you up out of the road.

If someone you love is hurting you, please reach out—you don't have to carry it alone. In the U.S., the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (call or text), available any time, day or night. And if the darkness ever grows so heavy that you don't want to be here, please call or text 988 and let someone stay with you. You deserve to be heard, and you deserve to be safe.

I love you.

Namaste,

Steffi