Women who are feeling, “my husband is taking advantage of me,” may often be confused by the damaging advice they receive when they go for help. And what you know right now may only be the tip of the iceberg.
See If Your Husband is Taking Advantage of You: 3 Ways
1. IF HE USES YOUR TRUST TO HIDE WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING
Most women don’t enter marriage looking for problems. They enter it assuming he’s telling the truth and if something feels off, there must be a harmless reason. So when he’s distant or irritable, you might think he’s stressed or he’s had a bad day. But what if that’s not the reason he’s stressed?
Stay with me…You’ll see more about how this plays out in real time.
2. He’S LIED TO YOU ABOUT HOW HE SPENDS HIS TIME OR MONEY
If your husband is taking advantage of you in this way, you’re not going to know, but it’s definitely going to feel like he’s taking advantage of you because things are not gonna be adding up.
Even if you don’t have all the details, patterns of secrecy + financial behavior + outside relationships are enough.
3. HE’S TRYING TO GET YOU TO DOUBT YOUR OWN INTUITION
If he’s saying things like, you’re overreacting or you are imagining things, or he’s saying he didn’t say something that he definitely said, he’s trying to take advantage of that conversation to manipulate you.
If you relate and are thinking you might be experiencing emotional abuse, take my free emotional abuse test.
Transcript: MY HUSBAND IS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF ME
Anne: We have a member of our community on today’s episode. We’re gonna call her Misha. Welcome, Misha.
Misha: Hi. Thanks for having me. I have listened to the podcast. Hearing other people’s story has been the reason that I wanted to share my story and be a part of this community of very strong women who have experienced a lot of things, similar to what I’ve experienced. We were married six and a half years ,when I found out.
That he was cheating on me. Um, I was sitting on the couch with my two children and I was scrolling through my apps on my phone, and I found four NSA dating apps. If you don’t know what NSA is, it’s no strings attached.
Not just one, but four. And I didn’t know where they come from because they were seeing them on my phone, not his.
And then I realized that we have a family share plan that shows all of the apps. Within the family share plan, if you toggle at the top, it shows the other devices and they were on his device. That’s what triggered my story, but it is so much more explosive than that. The things that I found out after was horrifying.
WE WERE THE PERFECT FAMILY
Anne: So that was what some women called D-Day when you realized something was amiss. Can we go back a little bit? How did you feel about him and how your relationship was before you found those apps?
Misha: We were the perfect family. he was charming, well-liked in our community. He’s high ranking military. We had just adopted twins from birth. Who were two years old when I found out. It was just like Prince Charming and it was perfect. So I thought, looking back now, there were a lot of signs that it wasn’t.
Anne: And you couldn’t have known. I think this is the thing that people don’t understand. They might say You didn’t see the red flags, and I don’t think that’s the case. I think that you see them, you just interpret them through the lens that you have at the time. So if he’s grumpy, for example, you think, oh, he had a bad day.
You don’t think he is having an affair.
Misha: He was showing a lot of signs of stress. But anytime I approached him about it, he was stressed out from work. Work was overwhelming him, and he needed space because of the job. It was always, it’s not you or the kids, it’s just me, and it’s just work. So I tried to give him more space and make sure to take care of the house, kids and everything. So he. Come home and decompress or whatever he needed.
I FOUND A WHOLE NIGHTMARE
He couldn’t really talk to me about work, so I asked him if it was really affecting him that much, that he should find someone to talk to, that there are services for military. He decided to talk to the chaplain at one point, and then it was like everything magically was better.
He seemed happier and more engaged with the kids than I after that, so I thought we were gonna be fine. But that was right before I found the apps. He had downloaded them about the same time that he was feeling better. Once I found those apps, it triggered me too for more. Since he was deployed during that time, I couldn’t even talk to him when I found those apps
Anne: That’s kind of a blessing actually.
Misha: actually was,
Anne: Knowing what you know now, he couldn’t manipulate you more and lie to you more. You could just find more information that he couldn’t twist.
Misha: Twist and turn and I found a whole nightmare. I went into his bank account and was looking for strange transactions, thinking I would find some dating thing going on, but if they’re NSA apps, they’re probably not that happening. So I searched through the bank statements and I started finding thousands of dollars.
Wired out $31,000, wired out 15,000, wired out 3,500 a check for 20,000.
Anne: Whoa.
HE WAS BEING EXTORTED
Misha: ATM withdrawals for almost $17,000. It was a lot. I was a stay at home mom and he was. to be providing for us.
Some of those transactions went to a place called digital forensics.com. I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up and it was a digital. Forensics company that will basically cover up your digital tracks. I found emails from this digital forensics company. They were just some that were like screenshots of his WhatsApp, which I didn’t know he had WhatsApp, Then I scrolled through those emails and clicked on the attachment for one of them. And a brochure popped up, said Sextortion onboarding.
Anne: So is he being extorted for videos or pictures that are out there of him doing sexual things or is he the one doing the extorting?
What were you thinking at the time?
Misha: I had to Google it to be sure I was correct, thinking that he did something of a sexual nature that someone was using to blackmail him. And the emails confirmed he was the one being extorted. It was a lot of the same questions in my mind. Is it him? Is it somebody else? What’s going on here?
But I still don’t have those answers. I don’t know what he did to get himself extorted, obviously.
I CALLED A DIVORCE LAWYER
Anne: One of the things I talk about quite a bit is sometimes knowing the one thing. Is knowing everything, knowing that he was extorted for sexual videos that he had floating around there, or an affair or something. That’s all I need to know because it tells me everything, even though I don’t have all the details or all the information.
Misha: I didn’t wanna know from the start it was enough to, to see that he had done something of that nature that got him in this position, and I don’t need to know what it is. The amount of money that was gone, he obviously did something he was really guilty of doing. The amount of money he was spending to cover it up and to get rid of it, whatever it is, was enough.
After I found those emails, I called a divorce lawyer immediately. This was a matter of like three days.
Anne: Good for you.
Misha: Yeah, and then the bank statements to the emails was about three days, and I called the lawyer.
Anne: Wow. That is so brave. You really were smart about it. ’cause I did this and so many of us do that. We want to talk to them or try to work it out or something, and it just gets us in deeper, so that’s amazing. Had you guys ever done couple therapy or like pornography, addiction recovery or had you ever seen anything like that before you found those apps on the phone?
I CONFRONTED HIM
Misha: I had caught him with pornography before, only [00:09:00] twice in our marriage. There were times throughout the relationship that he had stuff on his phone that was kind of like pictures of himself being seductive in a mirror or something.
Anne: Like thirst traps sort of-ish.
Misha: Yes. I confronted him about those and he was like, I was gonna send you those pictures.
I just never got around to it. We just never were that way. He didn’t like me to send seductive pictures of myself to him. There was a time when I took my daughter one morning with me. He was supposed to take our son to a playground, have Father Sunday. I came back to the house ’cause I forgot something and he hadn’t left yet.
As I approached the house. The TV was blaring with cartoons, so I went in the front door and my son is sitting on the floor. He is about 18 months old by himself with the TV as loud as could be. My husband is nowhere around. So I darted back to our bedroom where I needed to get the thing I forgot, The door was cracked, and I could see him sitting on the end of the bed doing what you can only imagine.
I pushed the door open and confronted him about what he was doing. The door was open so my son could have walked in on him. I said, give me your phone, and he was like, it’s just porn. It’s just porn. I was very angry about it. He didn’t really spend much time with the children anyways, and instead of taking his son to the park, he chose to do that instead, but.
HE WAS VERY GOOD AT HIDING EVERYTHING
Misha: I would say for the most part, he was very good at hiding everything. He’s military. He has top secret security clearance. He knows how to hide things. He had a work cell phone that I couldn’t touch when I searched his emails. Nothing from those apps came up. You have to have an email in order to use those apps.
We didn’t live together because of him deploying back and forth. He lived where he was stationed and I lived back home in the Midwest. He would come visit us after deployment and then go back and forth.
Anne: Mm-hmm.
Misha: was visiting us this one time for a short weekend before he was deploying again, and he was behaving very strange.
He looked very disheveled, almost like a homeless person. It was very eerie when he was home, even my son was uncomfortable with him in the home. There was one night I was trying to put him to bed and he was just aggressively not going to sleep, and he wouldn’t go to sleep till almost three o’clock in the morning.
I never had those issues getting him to sleep. And so the next night after that, I asked my husband to leave and go to the gas station while I put them to bed, and it took me about 15 minutes to get him sleep. That timeframe when he was there is when he was withdrawing from the ATM that was two minutes from my house.
HE GAVE MONEY TO THE EXTORTIONER
It was like $200 transactions for those three days. Whatever the max withdrawal, you can withdraw for your limit. I totaled nearly $7,000 cash and he drove to visit us, so he had to be hiding the cash in my house and then drove halfway across the country with it to give it to whoever was extorting him.
I asked him later. Did you give cash to someone? And he said yes. It was confusing because after I filed for divorce, I talked to my mother about what was going on. She knew a military veteran. She told him a little bit about what was going on and he told her. That if I didn’t report him to the military, that I would be found complicit and that they could take my children from me.
So I called the commander’s wife and asked her to tell me who to call for this. And she was like, your husband? No, it has to be somebody else. Maybe it was one of his guys. He was helping with an extortion case. There’s no way. It’s your husband. He loves you. He talks about you all the time. And the kids, there’s no way.
And I said, it is him.
Anne: He couldn’t very well show his true self to his commander and his wife. The person that they would trust and that they would think is a good guy, would be a family man. So that’s the face he would show them.
HE GAVE TRAININGS ON THIS
Misha: Exactly. He made a good show for sure. She referred me to the command, and then the command referred me to NCIS. I gave NCIS all the information that I had, and I said, I just wanna know that myself and my kids are safe. At the end of his digital forensics investigation into his extortion, there was an encrypted file saying your case has been closed.
Obviously, I couldn’t see what was in the encrypted file, but I sent that to NCIS. They basically told me we were safe and there was no other information they could give me and that it was just an online scam. But I don’t see can give someone cash for an online scam.
Anne: Yeah, if it was a scam, he wouldn’t have been so scared by it,
Misha: Yeah, they just basically were like, yep, this happens all the time.
Anne: really.
Misha: I’m like, that’s horrible to hear, and why are you allowing it?
Anne: And also what, especially military, you would think that they would be worried about having officers extorted. They could be extorted by people from other countries.
Misha: exactly.
Anne: Really alarming.
Misha: He gave trainings himself on this and how not to be messing around to get extorted and blackmailed like my, who gave the trainings to his sailors on this
and he was being extorted. This happens all the time.
THEY SAID HE WAS THE VICTIM
Anne: Well, and then the military doesn’t think, wait a minute, he for sure knows we’ve gotta do something about this guy. He is probably pretty dangerous. They just are like, eh, whatever. Wow.
Misha: No, they said he is the victim.
Anne: Wow! Okay.
Misha: He’s the victim and I was like, oh, I think he is actually the perpetrator of his own extortion. I don’t think that he’s a victim of extortion if he did something that someone can use to extort him that’s not a victim. Especially if it was a sexual nature outside of your marriage.
Anne: There’s all kinds of victims in this story. Number one, you and your children, but then also perhaps the women he’s exploiting the women that he’s ha paying money to exploit that he’s coercing them with cash. We can imagine all of the other women who maybe he’s lying to them.
Misha: We don’t have to imagine it. I found it all. We had the same phone bill for six and a half years. I went back through the phone bills. This was going on way before we had children. It was going on our entire relationship. He was in contact with sex workers on a regular basis. I went through phone number after phone number.
He had hundreds and hundreds of text messages from all kinds of different numbers throughout the phone bill, and they led to porn sites and escort sites.
THEY WOULDN’T DO ANYTHING UNLESS HE WAS VIOLENT
Anne: Did you give the military that as well, and not that you should have? I’m just curious.
Misha: They didn’t care. I reported him for potential prostitution. I did an entire report on all of it, and they said
Anne: They didn’t
Misha: they wouldn’t do anything unless he was violent towards me.
Anne: Oh, that’s the insane thing about our current culture, I guess, is that he is, by all accounts, an abusive man on so many levels. Breaking the law because it’s illegal to coerce women with money. It’s often literal sex trafficking. ’cause the definition of sex trafficking is the exchange of money for sex, essentially.
This is serious stuff. It’s criminal, but even if it wasn’t criminal, it’s abusive, but they’re like, it’s no big deal. If the people tasked with protecting us don’t know what abuse is, that’s a problem.
Misha: Absolutely. I mean, the extent of information that I found is. Just appalling. It’s makes him a very deviant person in my mind. After I was in contact with the NCIS investigators and everything, and they were like, yeah, thanks. We don’t care. They brought him home within 24 hours of that phone call.
Anne: So then you’re not protected. That was scary too.
Misha: I said, can you not bring him on home, they said, no, you guys need to talk.
Anne: What?
HE CLAIMS ADDICTION
Misha: I don’t wanna talk to him yet. They made me talk to him.
Anne: But that only benefits him and not you.
Misha: Yeah. He needs to be able to explain himself to me. No, I don’t need an explanation. He lied to me more. He claims sex addiction. Immediately after he came home. He said something happened really bad.
I’ve reported myself. He didn’t know that I was the one that reported him.
Anne: Oh.
Misha: said, no, you are home because I reported you. And he goes, what? What do you mean you reported me? I reported you that is why they took you off the ship. I said, so you can stop lying now. I know everything. And then he just continued to lie.
Anne: Mm-hmm.
Misha: I know that he was using sex work. He did say that he never had sex with any other women, so he didn’t technically cheat.
Anne: But we know that’s not true.
Misha: He did confirm paying for erotic massage. He said No sex or masturbation during the massage.
Anne: didn’t you witness him doing that yourself? To porn.
Misha: Yeah.
Anne: Yeah, he’s just lying. Wow. Okay.
HE DIDN’T WANT TO GET A DIVORCE
Misha: Well, this is the thing I said, where did you find an erotic massage? Like, I wouldn’t even know where to find that. And he’s like, oh, it was an ad on a porn site.
Anne: Also, what is the point of an erotic massage? If you don’t have sex, just get a regular massage.
Misha: Yeah. I was like, you responded to an ad on a porn site. I said, where was it located? And he said, someone’s private apartment. He went to someone’s private apartment. Like, what are you doing? Going to a strange person’s apartment for that? And he did it more than once.
Anne: Well, and a lot of these places will video without the person’s consent and then upload it onto porn sites themselves. So then he’s got evidence of him by way of maybe porn, and those can be downloaded and uploaded repeatedly. So victims who are coerced or sex trafficked, they can never get the evidence of their sexual assault off the internet. In his case,He participated in it. That’s gonna be uploaded and downloaded. He already knew that if that’s the class he taught in the military.
Misha: Yeah, he knows he doesn’t care.
Anne: did he react to you filing for divorce?
Misha: He didn’t wanna get div, never get divorced, just stay separated. And I was like, absolutely not. I do not wanna be tied to you in any way. He drew out the divorce. It took almost two years to get it over with. I was trying to take the kids from him.
Anne: He couldn’t take care of ’cause he was always deployed like that’s crazy.
HE GOT A PROMOTION A MONTH AFTER
Misha: But he even told me, I’ll give you sole custody at one point. And I’m like, okay, thanks. Sign the papers. He wouldn’t do it. He told me that he had to give the exhorters, the money, because they were threatening his wife and kids. I wouldn’t let him see the kids until he had proof of therapy of some kind.
The military didn’t do anything. There was no punishment that I know of. He actually got a promotion a month after this to commander.
Anne: That happened with my ex too, like not with his job, but with our church, basically. I let them know and then like two weeks later, he had a promotion. I was like, what? What?
Misha: Doesn’t make sense. So he’s like, I’m not dating anyone. I’m not doing any of that anymore. I’m, I’m recovered. I’m in sa I went to therapy and my lawyers and I had agreed that he could have supervised visits with the children, and I had to supervise it. Because he wouldn’t pay for social worker, of course, he wanted to make me watch him play with their children.
it was very uncomfortable to supervise those visits. One of the worst ones was Christmas. He came in town and we decided to do Christmas at our house. His parents were gonna come over, we were gonna cook a small dinner and just try to have a good holiday for the kids. He was cooking in the kitchen, putting together green bean casserole, and the kids and I were in the living room [00:21:00] and he gets done with that and comes in the living room, and I got up and left and went in the kitchen.
Because I just couldn’t tolerate being in the same room as him, and I noticed that he left his phone on the counter open and unlocked, which had never happened before. His phone was always face down and locked and not out of his sight. And again, it’s. Hundreds of text messages, FaceTimes from other women, and their names are like Angelica Rose, Ruby Bee.
Names that sound like an alias. So I quickly scroll through a couple of them. There were three that I remember specifically. They were inappropriate adult conversations, but amongst those feeds, I found pictures of my children.
Anne: It’s inappropriate to be sending people who are involved in sex trafficking pictures of children.
Misha: Yes, and he also said their names that he couldn’t wait to go back to their location and see them for Christmas after he was blackmailed, extorted. He [00:22:00] is continuing to communicate with these people and he’s also sending pictures of my children, their location and where he will be. And when I took the phone and I shoved it in his face and I said, get out of my house.
Anne: Yeah.
Misha: And he’s like, we’re not together anymore. I can date whoever I want. And I said, I don’t give a who you date, do not ever send pictures of my children to anyone ever again. And his face dropped and he put his head down and he walked out the house. And I will never forgive this man for endangering my children.
Anne: Yeah.
Misha: And I reported it to the Navy and they said, as long as those pictures weren’t inappropriate, there’s nothing we’ll do.
Anne: Well, at the very least, not have custody.
Misha: Nope. The lawyer said that there’s nothing.
Anne: It doesn’t make a difference.
Misha: It doesn’t matter.
Anne: Why does everyone talk about how they hate child abuse, but they won’t stop abusers. But this guy, even though there’s all this evidence of emotional and psychological abuse, sexual abuse of other human beings, and I’m [00:23:00] talking about the women he’s exploiting by coercing them with cash, that’s who does the abusing.
This is who they are. And did he physically sexually abuse your kids? Who knows, or maybe you do know, but that’s the type of person who would, they’re not parent material.
Misha: Exactly what I was terrified of because they’re adopted and I know that people who do that don’t even care if they’re biologically related. So I was even more worried for my children. I lived near his family and I had to get away from there before the divorce was over. He gets one week and a month and some holidays, and then half the summer.
Anne: I have found that the living free workshop helps with everything, the message strategies you’ll see when you take it, but if they have nothing to get from you and your kids, the current working theory is they just end up leaving you alone forever and not taking the one weekend a month, or not taking the summer.
If there’s a woman out there listening who is wondering, is this really this serious? Or? [00:24:00] Is this podcast actually for me? I mean, he’s only looked at porn a few times or he, he only had that one affair or something like that. What would you share with her?
Misha: When all this happened, the only person I really speak to is my sister and. and. She called me immediately, said, I’m so sorry. And over those next two or three days as I was finding things, I was sharing them with her and she was telling her husband what was going on and he told her, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
She has to go. So it doesn’t matter how small it is, most of the time is just the tip of the iceberg. And there is so much more there that you may never even know and don’t wanna know. For me, I was ready to leave the moment I found the apps, but you don’t have to stay because you need more information or evidence.
You just can leave because you want to.
Anne: A lot of women, and I did this and so this makes sense, thought that when I had the information that would help him change, so in my [00:25:00] case, I knew something was wrong and. When he got arrested for spraining my fingers, I thought, now he’ll know, but proof doesn’t do anything to them. So you taking this to him and he did say, oh, I’ll get sex addiction therapy, but that is not how it would’ve turned out.
He would’ve just lied to you better. So even thinking that maybe somehow having the proof will help them make a change is also. Such a trap. I’m so grateful that your sister and brother-in-law helped you see through that, and that’s really great that you had such good support.
Misha: I am the kind of. Person that I have to know. So while he’s telling me he’s not doing those things anymore, but continuing to dig, continuing to find things was just more confirmation that he was never going to stop lying and that I should not allow him to convince me to even contemplate getting back together, stay separated, and I still catch him lying on about things.
Anne: I mean, why do they want to be married when [00:26:00] they don’t wanna be married?
Misha: Oh, that was my thing.
Anne: What do they think marriage is?
Misha: If this is what you wanna do with your life, why would you have a wife and children just be single? And I hate that you wanna participate in, you know, sex trafficking, but if you wanna be single and go no strings attached with everyone else, that’s your choice. But it wasn’t mine and I didn’t get a choice.
Anne: Exactly. Why not just be like, this is who I am, this is what I wanna do. Do you wanna be married to me under these circumstances? This is the whole point. If they weren’t abusive, they would say, oh no, I really like paying women for sex. I’m gonna keep doing it. And maybe no one would arrest them, but at least we could be like, oh, I don’t really wanna be married to a man who does that.
So goodbye. The lying is the problem. Not that I support pornography, I don’t support abusing women in any way. Like through coercing them or exploiting them. But at least you’d know what you were dealing with.
Misha: Exactly. It would give me a freedom of choice.
But [00:27:00] I didn’t have that. I still don’t have it ’cause he’s still lying. I just wish that he didn’t have custody of my children.
Anne: Yeah, hopefully I can check back in with you after you’ve learned the living free strategies and see how things are going in like six months to a year from now and see if it was helpful to you. Thank you so much for sharing today. I am so sorry that you’re going through this. Your story will help women.
I’m so grateful that you were willing to share.
Misha: Thank you for having me on.
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