Posted by:
Breeze
(
)
Date: May 21, 2015 01:53PM
Part of cult brainwashing is to make members feel that there is no way out!
I was married in the temple to a man who had conned me into it, for my money, and for my ability to work and put him through graduate school. He beat me almost daily, and I went to the hospital several times. He strangled me until I passed out--and I was thinking it was my last breath on this earth. This did something to me. He quoted D&C132 while he threw me around the room. I was brainwashed into thinking that a temple marriage could never be reversed, and I kept being commanded by the priesthood to "endure to the end." I used every kind of birth control available--simultaneously--explaining that if I got pregnant I might get sick and not be able to work. I would not have a child for him to brutalize. I
I felt like Ificouldhietokolob--I would lose my family and friends and my church status, if I got a divorce. Yet, if I stayed in the marriage, I refused to have children. Either way, I was doomed. Seeing no way out, I tried to kill myself, after a beating, to make the pain stop. At that moment of death, I suddenly realized that there was a way out! I wanted to live. What was my life worth? Worth humiliation, accusations, shunning, worth living the rest of my life without a husband--yes.
I escaped from the marriage, and, out of fear, changed my name, and started over in a large city, far away. Every day, I woke up and said to myself, "I'm alive!" The only guilt I had was leaving my parents and siblings unprotected, and the thug of an ex-husband did give them a hard time--crying, threatening suicide, begging for money--until he latched onto another Mormon girl as to con as I was. My parents had never even met his parents, or any of his siblings. His family was overseas on a mission, so we never went to their house, never talked with the neighbors, never met anyone who had known him as a child or in high school, even. He was the "perfect", smiling, Mormon RM, that they wanted me to marry. I stopped feeling guilty very fast.
Never feel guilty for saving your own life.
When you are "enduring to the end," that's the time to LEAVE!