How Things Went From Wonderful to Terrifying...

"I'm not scared of you." I told Wade but I was really speaking to the demon or demons I thought possibly lurked inside my husband. I knew I had to leave but I felt it important to show him no fear, I thought that would help me even though it was one of the biggest lies I'd ever told. In truth, I was petrified. The days leading up to mine and my two birth children's moving out of our home was frantic and absolutely terrifying. I called an attorney for advice along with asking the attorneys I worked with for advice, I put a plan in place with my father to come and pack a few things quickly in the early morning which would allow us to get out of the house before Wade got home from work and I packed a "go bag" in case we needed to leave in the middle of the night which consisted of mine and my children's birth certificates and social security cards. I had tried everything I could think of to not let it get to this point. After I saw the black eyes I begged Wade to go to therapy with me. He argued with me and argued saying that therapy wasn't what we needed and we were fine. He was fine. I told him I wasn't fine and that if he couldn't do this for me then I didn't see us making it. He told me not to threaten him and how dare I make ultimatums to him?! Reluctantly though he agreed but with stipulations; it could not be a pastor, he didn't want a male therapist and it had to work with his schedule. For a whole month, myself and a local therapist tried to work with his schedule as we made appointment after appointment that would hopefully accommodate him but he kept making excuses as to why he couldn't come to the appointments. Finally, she looked at me and said, "You are more than welcome to keep coming and working on you but we can't work on your marriage without your partner. Now, you can either just tolerate this decision he's made and making or walk away if your not okay with this." I called my father. I knew what I was leaving behind and risking and it killed me. I was leaving my step children who I'd helped raise the past 6 years, my home which I could very well lose due to my abandonment of the home and I'd worked my whole adult life to get that home and possibly the majority of our possessions if Wade chose to take possession of the home. However, I knew that I would have myself and my children in a safe environment and that was what mattered the most. I was so scared at that time that it seemed like if I didn't get away right then and there someone might die. We pulled it off early one morning, I grabbed bare essentials and we left. As we left, LJ, my little buddy caught me going out the door and said "It's all gonna be okay." I hugged him and said, "Yeah..." and left crying my eyes out. While we resided at my father's it was both peaceful and full of stress. I was still being verbally abused by Wade on an almost daily basis. We were trying to work things out and finding a way to do that was not easy. He would text me and call me all hours of the day and night berating and belittling me. I was a piece of shit for leaving him and the boys, what sort of mother and/or wife does that, now he has all the bills to pay by himself although I did try to discuss at one point what each of us should pay, I had abandoned them and now he would never take me back....etc. He would get furious over the smallest of things and I wouldn't hear the end of it for hours. I learned after a while not to text back but that was so hard to do. I felt I needed to not only defend myself but calm him down if I could, if it was at all possible. I felt it was my responsibility to do so. I remember one day the power had went out at the house so Wade and the boys came to my father's to wash some clothes and I had researched a treatment center for addicts. I asked Wade if he'd call them. He flew off the handle at me because how dare I ask such a thing when they'd been without power all night and he was exhausted?! I was able to learn while living at my daddy's how to enforce better boundaries when it came to him and that day I told him he needed to leave. He did and claimed that we were through for good. We filed for divorce but there was still that trauma bond hanging on and Wade knew he still had his talons in me. I still cared what he thought, still did not want to make him upset, still longed for him, still spent every waking moment thinking of him and what I could do to help him. We eventually started getting intimate again and that's when he had me. I moved back to our family home in March of 2022 for one last try to our marriage. We had spent 5 months with my father and I was honestly dreading moving back in with Wade in some ways as were the children but he had promised to start going to see my pastor with me for marriage counseling as he did not like the previous therapist as he found her pushy and was convinced she had told me to leave him. For a time, things got slightly better. Wade tried to work on the things my pastor suggested we both work on and together we were becoming stronger and better but although we had a good foundation laid down to us by my then pastor that's hard to follow when you don't actually see anything wrong with your actions. Wade tried to put on a good show though. He even got baptized but the night before his baptism we got into an argument because he wanted to back out stating he was too tired to go to church. I tried to explain that the pastor would be getting the baptistry pool ready and he would need to tell him if that was the case and not just flake out the morning of and he got angry and stated that he would go through with it so we could appear "perfect and happy" just like I wanted. I told him that's not what I wanted, if he didn't feel the baptism in his heart then he didn't need to do it but he just needed to let the pastor know. He kept going on and on about things needing to look "perfect" for me. So, the next day, in front of our family and the congregation he got baptized. It was hard but I was trying so hard to make it work and we even dismissed our order for divorce. Then, the cloud of darkness got darker and suddenly the mask was off and the demons had come out to play and they weren't holding back this time.