Real Life With Katie Marie

There is a version of healing that makes a beautiful story.

Something terrible happens.

You get out.

The danger ends.

You heal.

I wish I could tell my story that neatly.

I can’t.

I began healing while some of what I was healing from was still happening.

Leaving my marriage didn’t mean the abuse ended. In many ways, it simply changed form.

There were still accusations.

Conflict.

Fear.

Court battles.

Circumstances that kept me connected to a cycle I desperately wanted to be free from.

But little by little, I was healing anyway.

I began rebuilding my life.

I began finding pieces of myself that had been buried beneath years of survival.

And as I became more deeply connected to my church community, walked more closely with God, served, and rediscovered purpose, something in me began to change.

I wasn’t just surviving anymore.

I was becoming.

I began finding myself again

God began reminding me who I was outside of everything that had happened to me.

Through community, serving, counseling, and my relationship with Him, I began to see myself and my experiences differently.

I was learning who I was again—not simply as someone’s wife or ex-wife, not simply as a mother trying to hold everything together, and not simply as a woman defined by what she had survived.

But looking for God in the middle of hard things wasn’t new for me.

Long before my marriage ended—in fact, long before some of the worst years of it—I had learned to ask:

God, what are You going to do with this?

What are You teaching me?

Those questions had grown out of difficult things I experienced earlier in my life, and they followed me into my marriage.

Even when I didn’t understand what was happening, some part of me was still looking for God in it.

What changed as I healed was that I began to see more of the answers.

God had been teaching me all along

About boundaries.

About forgiveness.

About courage.

About the difference between rescuing someone and loving them.

About how easily keeping the peace can be mistaken for making peace.

About having compassion for someone’s brokenness without allowing that brokenness to continue hurting you.

And I learned something about forgiveness that would become incredibly important:

Forgiveness does not equal reconciliation.

I could forgive someone and still have boundaries.

I could release bitterness without restoring access.

I could pray for someone’s healing while accepting that I could not heal them.

Forgiveness was something I could choose before God.

Reconciliation required something from both of us.

Forgiveness didn’t require me to pretend something hadn’t happened.

It didn’t require me to call wrong things right.

It didn’t require me to trust someone who had repeatedly shown himself to be unsafe.

I could forgive and still tell the truth.

I could forgive and still protect myself and my children.

I could forgive and still say, this is not okay.

And I could forgive even when reconciliation never came.

Eventually, there was gratitude

Long before my ex-husband died, I had forgiven him.

And I had reached a place I once would have thought impossible:

gratitude.

Not gratitude for the abuse.

Not gratitude for the fear, the violence, or the things my children and I endured.

But gratitude for what God had taught me through it.

Gratitude that somehow, through some of the darkest years of my life, I had been drawn closer to Him.

I learned to depend on God in ways I don’t know that I ever would have otherwise.

I experienced His presence in places I never would have chosen to go.

I watched Him provide, sustain, protect, comfort, correct, and carry me when I didn’t have enough strength of my own.

I knew Him differently because of what I had walked through.

And I began to see that God wasn’t only healing what had been wounded.

He was using it.

The things that once made me feel isolated helped me sit beside someone who felt alone.

The things I had struggled to understand helped me recognize pain in other people.

The places where I had desperately needed someone to see me taught me to see others.

Even parts of my story I once wished I could erase were becoming places God could use to help someone else.

That changed the way I looked at what had happened to me.

I still wouldn’t choose it.

I still wouldn’t call what happened good.

But I could look back and recognize that God had been good in the middle of it.

What happened changed me.

But so did He.

And when I look at the woman I was before those years and the woman God has been forming through everything that followed, I can say something I never imagined I would be able to say:

I am grateful.

Not for what happened to me.

But for the God I came to know through it.

For the woman He has been shaping me into.

For the ways He has allowed even the hardest parts of my story to become something that can help someone else.

I wouldn’t choose what happened.

But I also wouldn’t give back what God taught me through it.

And I wouldn’t give back the ways I came to know Him because of it.

Healing didn’t require the story to be over

I think that’s one of the things I most want someone else to know.

You don’t necessarily have to wait until every consequence disappears before God begins rebuilding you.

My circumstances were not neatly resolved.

There were still battles I didn’t want to fight.

There were still things that hurt.

There were still moments when old wounds were reopened.

There were still consequences from choices that weren’t mine.

But those things didn’t get to stop God from doing something new in me.

Healing wasn’t pretending the past hadn’t happened.

It wasn’t pretending the present didn’t hurt.

It was learning that neither one got the final word.

I was finding myself again.

I was finding purpose.

I was learning to forgive without surrendering boundaries.

I was learning that compassion did not require self-destruction.

I was learning that I could tell the truth about what happened and still forgive the person who did it.

And I was discovering that God could take the very places where I had once asked,

Why?

and slowly begin showing me:

This is what I can do with it.

I thought that was a kind of freedom.

And it was.

I just didn’t yet know there was another kind coming.

Because eventually, the person whose actions had continued to cause pain long after our marriage ended would no longer be able to create another incident.

Another accusation.

Another battle.

Eventually, after almost two decades, I would finally be able to stop bracing.

And that would bring a different layer of healing.