Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Today I wanna talk about the guilt. The guilt. So many mothers feel so much guilt when they’re contemplating divorce or when they’ve already made the decision to leave. There’s a difference between sadness, the sadness that comes and the grief with realizing that your marriage might be ending.

But I’m talking about the heavier story that you’re somehow destroying your family, that you’re breaking your vows, that you are doing this to your children. That because you’re the one who finally said the words, filed the paperwork, made the appointment with the attorney, or told your husband that you couldn’t keep living this way, the entire outcome now rests on your shoulders and your shoulders alone.

So many women [00:01:00] carry that guilt as though they woke up one morning, looked around at a perfectly healthy married, marriage and a perfectly happy family, and casually decided to just blow it all up. But that’s not what happened. And by the time most of you begin to seriously contemplate divorce, you’ve usually been trying to save the marriage for years.

You’ve asked for conversations. You’ve asked for counseling. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, changed therapists, tried new ways of communicating, explained your pain in every possible way. You’ve tried being softer, being clearer, or asking directly. You’ve tried saying nothing and hoping your husband would notice.

You’ve tried lowering your expectations. You’ve tried being more appreciative, giving him space, initiating more affection, asking for more affection. You have tried planning dates, protecting his feelings, managing his moods, carefully choosing the exact right moment to bring up a problem. And Lord knows if this relationship is abusive, you also have been trying to survive it.

You have been managing intimidation, contempt, volatility, coercion, financial control, sexual pressure, sexual abuse, emotional cruelty, stonewalling, blame, constant shifting of reality. And in those relationships, the question isn’t simply have I tried hard enough to save my marriage? The question more important perhaps might be, how much more of myself am I expected to sacrifice [00:02:00] in order to remain married?

And yet even after all of that, you might still feel as though you’re the one failing, that you’re the one breaking the vows. So I wanna begin there. I want to address these vows, because marriage vows carry enormous emotional and often spiritual weight. You may have stood in front of your family, your community, in your faith community, and promised that you would be together forever, till death do you part.

And you probably meant every word. And even if your husband has behaved in ways you never imagined when you made those promises, you may feel as though your integrity is now on the line. You promised, you made a commitment, and now you’re thinking about breaking it. But here’s the thing; marriage vows aren’t only a promise to remain legally attached to another person for the rest of your life.

They [00:04:00] are promises about how you will show up For that marriage. They’re promises to love, honor, cherish, protect, respect, care for each other. The exact language in your vows might have, they might differ across the board, but marriage vows generally assume mutuality. They assume that two people will continue showing up.

They assume care. They assume good faith. They assume that both partners are committed to the emotional, physical, and relational safety of the other. So when one person repeatedly refuses to participate in the marriage, refuses to address serious problems, refuses to seek help, or continually causes harm without accountability, something has already been broken.

When there’s abuse, the vows have already been violated. When there’s coercive control, intimidation, chronic betrayal, [00:05:00] degradation, or cruelty, the marital covenant has already been breached. And even outside of overt abuse, a marriage can be profoundly damaged by years of emotional abandonment. A spouse can be physically present while refusing to ever engage in any meaningful, full form of partnership.

They can live in the home and still leave you entirely alone. He can refuse to speak honestly, engage emotionally, share responsibility, offer affection, participate in therapy, or care about the impact his behavior has on you. And then you can’t single-handedly create a mutual marriage. You can’t love someone enough for both of you.

You can’t communicate well enough to compensate for someone who’s decided not to listen. You can’t attend enough therapy to create change in another adult who refuses to participate honestly. You can’t keep a marriage alive by [00:06:00] yourself while the other person stands on the sidelines and occasionally critiques your technique.

Come on. If you have spent years trying to repair something that your husband refuses to acknowledge is broken, finally saying, “I can’t do this anymore,” isn’t the moment the vows were broken. It might just be the moment that you stop pretending that they were still intact. You’re acknowledging what has already happened.

You’re naming the reality that has existed inside this marriage, sometimes for a very long time. You might be the one who ends the legal marriage. You might be the one who initiates the conversation, the one who files. But the person who finally responds to the breakdown doesn’t necessarily make you the person who caused it.

Sometimes the person who ends the marriage is just the person who can’t c- they can’t carry the full burden of keeping up this appearance. And, listening to this, you might [00:07:00] still be thinking, “But I made a promise. I made a promise to stay during and through difficult times.” And yeah, marriages go through difficult seasons.

People get ill, they lose jobs, they experience grief, they struggle with mental health, trauma, parenting, money, intimacy, you name it. No marriage is effortless, and no spouse shows up perfectly. But a difficult season is very different from a relationship in which one person is chronically harmed and the other refuses accountability.

Struggle might be part of marriage. Ongoing abuse doesn’t become acceptable simply because it’s happening inside of this container of vows. Emotional neglect doesn’t become less painful because you once made a promise. A vow doesn’t require you to disappear. It doesn’t require you to surrender your safety, your sanity, your dignity.

You didn’t vow– You didn’t make those vows. You didn’t vow to [00:09:00] surrender your safety or your sanity or your dignity or your entire sense of self. That’s not what you vowed. I feel like women are so often encouraged or mandated to focus on the pr- the vows that they made while ignoring the conditions under which that promise was supposed to be lived.

You promised to be a partner. You didn’t promise to be a permanent container for someone else’s rage or indifference or entitlement or refusal to grow. You didn’t promise that you would accept being punished for having needs. You did not promise to protect the marriage at any cost while your spouse was permitted to steadily destroy the other person inside of it.

And, the guilt that women feel about their children is really intense. Trust me, I know this. Women will say, “Look, I can deal with what he does to me. I just don’t wanna do this to my kids.” Th- there’s always this either I choose myself or I [00:10:00] choose my kids, and if I choose my kids, I’m gonna have to endure this, and for my children, I will do that.

And I get why that feels a choice, like something that you would want. Not want, but choose. You love your kids. You wanna protect them. You want them to have an intact family. You have envisioned birthdays and holidays and graduations and grandchildren with everyone still together. And you might be scared of sharing custody.

You might worry about how your children might cope with two homes. You might be grieving the daily rhythms that you might lose. Seeing your kids every day, that is one of the biggest things that women grieve is, “How will I survive not seeing my kids every day?” And that grief is really fucking real.

Grieving the idea that divorce will change your children’s lives in ways that they never asked for. And your children may feel sad, confused, [00:11:00] angry, or afraid. I don’t… I am not here to pretend that divorce has no impact on children, and staying also has an impact, and we have to look at that, too.

Because the relevant question isn’t just will your kids be affected? Yes. Yes, of course they will. But children are also affected by the emotional environment in which they live. I talk about this all the time. You’ve heard me talk about it ad nauseam. They’re affected by chronic tension and silence and contempt and fear, all of those things.

Essentially, the constant sense that something is wrong in the home, and no one is talking about it. Or if they are, they’re certainly not doing anything about it. And even when we think we’re hiding it, y’all, they feel it. Children are way more intuitive than we are as adults because it hasn’t the in…

their intuition hasn’t been socialized out of them yet. They don’t know the details, but they feel the weight of the atmosphere. They know who’s allowed to have [00:13:00] needs. They know who everyone is trying not to upset. They know who apologizes, who never does. They get it all. They see the entire world of it.

They may not understand the words coercive control or emotional abuse or neglect, but n- they are learning from the relationship every single day. They’re learning what marriage looks like, and they’re learning what love means. They’re learning what women are expected to tolerate. They’re learning who has power and whose feelings matter, and they’re developing their own nervous systems inside of that environment.

So when you say, “I don’t wanna do this to my kids. I am doing this. How can I be the one to do this to my children?” I just want you to slow down and look at the whole picture. Again, you may be the one making the final decision. You may be the one creating the immediate change. But what brought the family to this point?

What has been happening in your home? What have your kids already been living with? [00:14:00] He has been unwilling to take your concerns seriously. He has been unwilling to pursue meaningful change and sustained accountability, therapy. He left you with two choices, essentially. Continue accepting the situation or become the woman who has to end this, and that’s a shitty ass choice y- that you’ve been given.

It’s basically stay and lose more of yourself, or leave and your kids’ family structure completely changes. Stay, and the children continue living inside of whatever that your, whatever your version of this toxic mess is, or leave, and they have to experience this disruption. The truth is that there is no path that protects everyone from pain.

We’re not asking you to choose between pain and no pain. Which direction offers the greatest possibility for your children for [00:17:00] safety, stability? honesty, and healing. Again, the person who makes the final decision isn’t always the person who created the circumstances that made the decision necessary. Let me just paint a metaphorical picture for a moment in case you still need convincing or whatever.

Let’s say there’s a house, and the house has been deteriorating for years. There are cracks in the foundation. Water is coming in through the ceiling. The wiring is super dangerous. One person has repeatedly pointed out the damage and asked for repairs. She’s made the calls. She’s gotten the estimates.

She’s tried to patch the holes herself. She’s begged the other owner to take the danger seriously, but he keeps dismissing her, tells her she’s overreacting. Yeah, I’ll take care of it,” right? And then doesn’t do anything. He becomes angry when she brings it up repeatedly. Eventually she says, “Hey, we can’t keep living in this house.”

Did she destroy the house by finally acknowledging that it was unsafe? Did the house become unlivable the moment that she said it [00:18:00] was unlivable, or had the conditions been deteriorating for years? Your husband may claim that everything was fine until you mentioned divorce. Oh, he’s gonna insist that you blindsided him.

He is going to suddenly discover a passionate commitment to marriage, to therapy, after years of ignoring your pain. He’s gonna tell friends and family members that you walked away, that you did this to your children, that she broke her vows. He’s gonna frame the whole thing as an isolated act with no history before it.

You know the history. You know how many times you tried. You know how often you explained it. You know what happened when you cried and asked for help and said you couldn’t keep going. You know whether your concerns were met with compassion, curiosity, and action or with defensiveness, dismissal, blame, promises, temporary improvements that never last.

You know what it took you to get here, so do not allow the final chapter to [00:19:00] be tol- retold as though the rest of the book never happened. He will have his narrative. All right. You get to have yours, too. You get to own your story, and frankly, you get to tell it to whoever you want. Your children, let’s hope you’re not gonna tell them, whatever.

That’s a whole… That’s another podcast episode, which we’ve done before. But, friends, family, you get to own your truth. So there’s another thing that I want to a- I want you to ask yourself. Whenever the guilt gets overwhelming, when you’re saying like, “I’m breaking my marriage vows.

I am doing this to my children”- Whose voice is that? When you hear, “You’re breaking your vows,” who taught you to interpret your situation in that way? When you hear, “You are destroying the family,” whose language is that? When you hear, “A good mother would stay no matter what,” like, where did that come from? Is that your own deeply held value?

Is it a religious message you absorbed years ago? Is it a cultural expectation? Is that your mother’s voice [00:20:00] or your father’s, your community’s, or is it your husband’s? Because in abusive and controlling relationships, women often internalize the abuser’s voice. We hear his criticism when he’s not in the room.

You begin policing your own thoughts on his behalf. You tell yourself you’re selfish before he has a chance. You might dismiss your own pain because he has trained you to believe that your pain is dramatic, unreasonable, manipulative. You question your memory because he’s always questioning it for you.

And when you consider leaving, the inner critic may become incredibly loud. This is where we get our inner critic, by the way. It’s often external voices that we have internalized. When you consider leaving this inner critic gets really loud. You’re giving up. You’re selfish. You didn’t try hard enough.

You’re ruining your children’s lives. You only care about yourself. You’ll regret this. But that voice, that critic isn’t telling you the truth. [00:22:00] That’s not your truth. Is that your truth? I want you to ask, is that your truth? Because often that voice was installed by someone who benefited from you doubting yourself, from someone who needed you to believe that leaving was immoral so that he wouldn’t have to change.

Someone who knew that your devotion to your children could be exploited to keep you in place. Someone who understood that accusing you of breaking the family would keep attention away from what was actually happening inside the family. So when that voice appears, don’t argue with it. We’re not here to argue with it.

I want you to get curious about it. Whose words are those? Who benefits when you believe them? And what part of the story is this voice leaving out? What would you say to another woman, your best friend, your daughter, whose marriage looked exactly like yours? Would you tell her that she was selfish for thinking of leaving?

Would you tell her that she should sacrifice [00:23:00] more? Would you tell her that her children were better served by watching her disappear? I don’t think you would. I think you would understand why she had come to the conclusion that she had come to, that she’d reached the end of what she could carry.

Many of us, we treat guilt as evidence. We assume that because we feel guilty, I must be guilty. As they say in 12-step programs, feelings aren’t facts. Guilt can appear when you violate a role that you have been trained to perform. If you were taught to be the good wife, to absorb pain quietly choosing yourself is gonna feel wrong.

If you have been taught to keep a family together at any cost, acknowledging that the family is unhealthy will feel wrong. If you were trained to manage everyone’s emotions, allowing your husband to experience the consequences of his own behavior might actually feel cruel. This is where you have the guilt of “Oh my God, but his trauma.”

Your nervous system [00:25:00] may interpret you setting boundaries around these things as a threat, because boundaries haven’t really historically been safe for you. That doesn’t mean that the boundary is wrong. It means that your body has learned that protecting yourself comes with consequences, so that the guilt you feel may not be a moral verdict.

It might be grief. It might be fear. It might be conditioning. It might be heartbreak. All of these things that you can feel without concluding that you’re the villain, that you are guilty, right? You can feel guilt and not be guilty. In fact, it’s usually people who feel guilt who are the least guilty. So look, these things are complicated, and it’s never black and white.

I know you still love him. I know that you don’t want a divorce, ’cause nobody does by the way. You probably would’ve stayed if the marriage had become safe and reciprocal and emotionally honest. There are a lot of things that are, true at the same [00:27:00] time. It is true that you still love him, and you may not be able to stay in this relationship.

That’s the hardest thing. It’s I don’t want a divorce. I love him, or I love what I … who he was when I met him, or all of the things. I would’ve stayed if things had changed. I f- I feel devastated. I also feel relieved. I’m terrified of what this is gonna do to my children, and also equally terrified of what staying will teach them.

I made vows. That is the truth. I made vows, and also, those vows have already been profoundly violated. Also, you’re the one making this final decision because your husband might have made thousands of smaller decisions that brought you to have to make this big one, so your decision didn’t occur in a vacuum It has a history.

There’s a lot of room for grief without turning it into self-annihilation. You can grieve the family you wanted and the promises that you made and the home [00:28:00] that you may have to give up. The family, the traditions, the holidays. You’re gonna grieve the version of your husband that you just kept believing was still in there.

You’re gonna grieve the hope that one day he would finally understand. Let yourself grieve. Grief doesn’t mean that you made the wrong decision. Missing someone doesn’t mean the relationship was healthy, that you did the wrong thing. Feeling sadness about what your children are losing doesn’t mean that you failed them.

You can acknowledge the cost without taking responsibility for all the conditions that created it. You can say, “I hate that my children are going through this,” without saying, “I caused every part of this.” You can say, “I wish I could have kept the family together While also recognizing that one person can’t create a healthy family system alone.

And you can say, “I meant my vows,” while recognizing that remaining in a relationship where those vows have been repl- repeatedly violated doesn’t [00:30:00] restore them in any meaningful way. So when you’re caught in this guilt, I want you to ask yourself a few questions. What would staying require me to deny?

Would you have to deny your own pain? Would you have to deny the impact on your children? Would you have to deny the pattern because there are occasional good days? Would you have to deny what years of therapy and conversations and promises and learning and disappointments have shown you? Would you have to deny your own knowing?

I don’t believe that you are required to remain in a marriage simply so that no one can accuse you of being the one who ended it, and I don’t believe that your children are served by a mother who has been taught that love means abandoning herself. And I don’t believe that finally responding to years of harm, neglect, refusal, or betrayal makes you the person who broke everything.

So before you accept the story that you are breaking your vows or doing this to your children, I want you to step back and look at the whole picture. [00:31:00] Remember what happened before the final decision. Remember what you tried, what you asked for, what you were carrying, whose voice is accusing you. And then I want you to listen for the quieter voice underneath it, the voice that may have been telling you for years, “This is hurting me.

This is hurting us. I cannot keep living this way.” That voice is not selfish. That voice might just be the most honest voice that you have left, and I would love for you to consider what it would do to you to deny it. What would you be denying in yourself? What would staying in this relationship require you to deny?

And I also want you to remember that you deserve happiness. You deserve peace. You deserve love. You deserve to not be wrestling like this. All right, that’s it for today. I love you, and I adore you, and I’ll see you again next [00:32:00] week. Bye.