Very true. A man who is violent physically has violent thinking also. When the victim he has so enjoyed abusing, slips out of his hands, this only serves to inspire more violence. Such a woman needs to remove herself and her children far from his physical presence. Even the act of divorcing will be an excuse for anger.

Most often a woman leaves when the children are younger because she senses that living with constant abuse is detrimental to the children’s own well being and relational development. During the separation the children, at the direction of the courts, continue to visit the father, by staying over weekends or alternating week about. Unless the woman has become incredibly embittered by the experience she will usually work hard at not speaking negatively about the children’s father around them. So in time the children forget the issues.

Add to this mix that the father, who saw no good thing in his spouse during the marriage, continues to berate and malign her in his access times with the children. If he is the religious type he lays on the children all the biblical reasons why he sees that it was wrong for their mother to leave him. As the children develop their own spiritual values they may well be attracted to the simplistic, legalistic outlook of their father, especially if they attend and are influenced by the hierarchical teaching of his church.

Meanwhile, with no hope of reconciliation in sight, the mother may find herself in a position where another man comes in to her life. Through much agonizing heart-searching and prayer she believes that God may be leading her into a new marriage relationship where mutuality and genuine caring for one another has an opportunity to grow. She is overwhelmed by God’s grace to her in her brokenness only to discover that the children, now teens or young adults, do not share her joy, and in fact become resentful and obstructive.

Take this a step further…. the disenfranchised father can fill the children’s minds with his belief that it is wrong for a divorced woman to contemplate remarriage and in fact if she does she will be living in adultery. Granted the teen years, communication wise, can be difficult anyway, but, if the mother is the primary carer, and the children in their inexperience, are consumed by this notion, a huge, additional wedge is driven between them.

This may cause the woman to end the prospective relationship, no matter how promising it appeared to be, or how much in love she felt herself becoming, in favor of reaching out to the children and preserving their relationship. Or, she may push on with a second marriage in the hope that by God’s grace, in time, the children will understand. It seems to me that, in either of these possible scenarios, the original abuse of the estranged husband, who I might add, sundered the marriage, continues to hound the woman in this new form and is in fact very likely energized by the resentful expressions of the children.

Perhaps there are some women out there who can share their experiences of how they managed situations like I’ve outlined above where there are children involved. It could be that you are going through something like this right now, or, you are just coming through it all onto the other side.

Maybe, by God’s grace, this is well and truly behind you but there are some valuable life lessons that you’ve learned along the way that you would like to share on this forum.

…Yet the things done to me, almost all of them in God’s name (thanks to complementarian/patriarchal theology that put him in the position of my prophet, priest and king), were abuse, plain and simple.