Why Rebuilding Isn’t Simple

I’d just finished a walk, looking at my step count, when a client sent me an adorable picture of her new tiny puppy.

I smiled as I read the text. This puppy was another piece of rebuilding and recovering and renewing life.

I was thrilled for her.

I thought about her puppy throughout the day, feeling thankful for my own puppy and the new life he’s brought into my life. Seriously, he’s hilarious.

Rebuilding life after stress, trauma, abuse, major life changes like divorce or transition, crisis, or loss is such a long, scary, daunting task. It’s lonely and feels like such a season of climbing uphill with no end in sight.

Yet, God is in this with me, with women in this situation. I know it. He’s been so faithful. I’ll write more about that later in this post.

Why is rebuilding so challenging? Why is it so complicated and layered?

To answer that question, I have to look back and understand years of misunderstanding, coercive control, manipulation, and harm. I have to go back over choices and decisions and being stuck in a system that was hurting me.

I’ll share some of my own story, mixed with things I hear in coaching with women in similar situations. I’ll share because it’s a silent, unseen battle for so many women in faith communities.

I spent 23 years in a marriage that wasn’t at all simple to leave, a marriage that I never wanted to leave and I did everything possible to save.

I worked in ministry, stateside and overseas, for 23 years and had little credit or counting of those years in any way that mattered for rebuilding life. I only had a few random seasons with a paycheck yet I had worked full time in parenting, homeschooling, teaching, administration, leading, writing, and speaking. It was all under someone else’s name.

So many women are in this predicament. It’s an injustice that many destructive husbands don’t acknowledge or rectify.

For women in ministry and missions, this is a double bind. The work is rarely recognized by the churches and organizations that allow women to engage full time for free. It’s an injustice that again, doesn’t get acknowledged or rectified. You can read more about that here. But I can say, I wasn’t taught this part in my college class for Pastor’s Wives. I was unprepared for this possibility. This sacrifice is not fully described or talked about in Bible College.

As the years went by, my mental and physical health was drastically declining and I had to get help. I couldn’t keep going as things were but the choices weren’t great. From the very first step of obedience, the first boundaries, prayers, and ways to remove myself from an abusive situation, I was met with a discouraging road forward with very little to show for years of hard work.

To start, although I have classes and licenses and certifications, most of it wasn’t accredited and none of it equaled a degree. In a marriage where your energy is going into another person’s life, possibly through coercion and manipulation, there’s no energy left for your own development. I tried over the years but my health, capacity, and ability was needed elsewhere. Finishing felt impossible.

Without a degree, I didn’t have many options to financially take care of myself and the girls. With encouragement from a friend, I got another certification for professional life coaching so I could build a flexible business around my health and my girls. But, starting a brand new business is daunting for anyone, let alone a woman who is leaving an abusive marriage and trying to figure out how to rebuild life from zero, a woman who now has “divorce” connected with her name.

Where would I live? How? Living with my parents wasn’t a long-term solution. I needed to find housing for myself and the girls. Rent is astronomical but I had to figure out how to pay it because you can’t get a mortgage as a self-employed person without two full years of tax returns. That meant paying rent until I could get approved. That also meant building a business to where it brought in an income that could allow me to afford a house. Another double bind.

There’s also utilities, groceries, medical expenses, household supplies, toiletries, and all the other little life expenses that add up for myself and the girls.

They work so hard and help as much as they can. {insert proud mom moment} They truly are amazing girls and we’re making it all happen with Jesus. Yet, with their own health challenges and neurodivergence, it’s a constant balancing act of work and energy and cost. If they work a full day, there’s not much left for helping with chores or any executive functioning. But if they can’t work more hours, they’re limited in how they can help with living expenses.

As a mom, I want to take care of them. I feel a responsibility to make sure they’re doing ok. Neurodivergent young adults need a lot of parenting, guidance, help, executive function, and care. Third Culture Kids need even more help and care.

I balance my own work hours, school time, and health to make sure I have enough of everything for them too. For example, almost every doctor’s appointment, means time off work for me. Not working means not earning income. Doctor’s appointments for three of us means a lot of hours driving and going and waiting, lots of hours not coaching or doing homework.

Single moms in this situation know that this is an easy choice – care for the kids and take off work – but it’s a choice with a high cost.

You might be asking, “Where is the financial help that should be there?” You might wonder what happened to making sure children are taken care of in housing or food as they navigate their first years adulting? In my situation, there was nothing legally stated or required for adult kids, so there’s nothing I can do to get that help. I see this again and again with women I work with. I could write a whole post about this and the courts or lawyers who enable it.

Adult kids must learn to own their own relationship with the other parent and that means their own individual time to process, heal, and decide how that will look.

To help in rebuilding life, I chose to go back to school {again}, starting online classes to work towards a degree in social work. Education is an expense that I can’t afford financially but one that I can’t afford to not have in the future.

Add in a heart and call for career ministry. It’s definitely part of coaching and I love it. But owning a business wasn’t ever in the plan so it feels far from where I thought I’d be in my adult life. It’s rebuilding in a way I never imagined.

Women are finding themselves on a page of their story that’s unexpected and foreign.

This breaking and building season has cost so much. It’s loss of friends, family, community, networks, and way of life. By saying stop, no more, this has to change… by requiring health, accountability, and ownership, I upended my life. People who I thought would be there, were not. I was on my own in many ways, healing from trauma responses and finding hope in the messy parts of life.

Along with all the challenges, there’s post-divorce abuse that so many women face. Someone who should be helping is working against you as you fight for safety, health, understanding, and rest. A person who carries responsibility is laying that responsibility, legally, financially, and relationally, at your feet. Systems that should protect from this, do not.

When you need help or dare to ask, they place blame on you, saying you’re the one who left, who broke trust, who ruined everything.

Someone who believes that by speaking up about abuse, by stopping the crazy cycle, by removing myself from harm’s way… somehow I’m the one who hurt them. This kind of DARVO is common in abusive situations. There is nothing women can do or say to change that mindset. No amount of justifying, arguing, defending, or explaining can make someone own or understand their harmful behavior.

With all of that, women have to create closure. They have to fight for inner strength to rebuild life in healthy ways without bitterness or anger. They have to grieve, mourn, and heal.

Creating closure from something so devastating and destructive means moving forward in forgiveness without apology, recognition, or repentance. It’s trusting God to handle it all in His way, His time.

For so many women, they’ve received fake apologies, abusive apologies, ownership of harm with caveats and projection. None of it meant real heart change or understanding of harm, even if the apologies come with tears and upset. By the abusive spouse’s own words, they said that the apologies were counseling homework, not an admittance of guilt. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong so there’s nothing to apologize for or own. The real apology will never come.

Rebuilding means letting that go. Release the fight, the right, the need for closure with another person.

It’s taking one step at a time, following God’s leading, while knowing you’ve been deeply unseen and misunderstood by so many people. You let that go too, setting it in the hands of Jesus.

Rebuilding isn’t simple because every situation, every divorce, every painful and harmful event is different. The path to healing is different. The timeline, the method, the recovery… all different. Yet so many of the emotions and heartbreaks and destruction are the same.

But God. I’m so thankful that He is with me and with you. He sees me. He sees you. He knows the whole story. He is my faithful provider and protector. I can rest knowing he’s carrying everyone and everything under his protective shade.

He provided new friends, new connections, new support, new opportunities. He stepped in and built a business I never imagined. God did it. He’s restoring ministry and allowing me to provide scholarships of supportive care to other women.

He brought people into my life to help and encourage.

Yes, God is using every page of this story for His Glory. I go to sleep knowing He will do the same thing tomorrow.

Where it’s going, I’m not sure. I’m just starting to dream with Jesus. For so many years, my hopes and dreams came second. Hope was drying up and dying in a season of stuck-ness that felt impossible to get out of. Hope deferred really was making me sick.

Now, hope is coming back to life with new dreams, fresh calling, and deep inner strength based on a God who loves and guides me. My health is coming back to life with energy and capacity for the work I’m doing each day. My desire is growing to fill a seat at the table, bringing healthy, needed change to unhealthy, broken systems and relationships.

While rebuilding isn’t simple, it’s actually a beautiful process of true restoration, healing, and abiding in Him.

We can rebuild because He is rebuilding and restoring and renewing.

Where are you at in the rebuilding?

What has made it far from simple?