A lot of people say marriage is hard work. But what if it’s not? What if healthy marriage is easy and what you’re going through is something else?

What if Marriage is Only Hard When…

The so-called “hard work” of marriage may stem from unforeseen external circumstances, like health challenges, financial strain, or extended family issues for a short period. If your marriage is hard work, all of the time, it may be due to unseen harm inflicted by your husband through emotional, psychological, or spiritual abuse. It’s often difficult to see that his behavior is manipulative or coercive. Take our free emotional abuse quiz to find out.

And what’s worse, when we try to get help by going to couple therapy, or maybe clergy, or even friends and family, they don’t help. They often just say what everybody else does – “marriage is hard work.” If you need live support, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session today.

Because we’re kind and empathetic, of course, we’re going to give our husband the benefit of the doubt, reframing what’s going on. We may say, “he’s just stressed” or “having a bad day.”

We may also blame ourselves for not being able to make our relationship work (I know I did), not realizing that his exploitative character doomed the “relationship” from the start. So let’s find out if this is going on in your relationship.

Does the Hard Work of Marriage Involve these 6 things?

If the hard work you’re talking about involves these 6 things, it’s likely there’s something else going on:

1. Confusion
2. Going For Help (Over and Over)
3. The Wrong “Diagnosis” (Several Times)
4. Despair
5. Abuse Education
6. Making Your Way To Emotional Safety

Here’s how these 6 things will show up if what you’re going through isn’t just the “hard work” of marriage.

Transcript: If People Say Marriage is a Hard Work, Here’s What They Don’t Know

Anne: All the abuse I talk about in Betrayal Trauma Recovery is hidden.

The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Community is a community for women who trying to figure out how to improve their marriage.

1. Is Confusion Part of the Hard Work of Marriage?

[Women know when something is wrong. We often don’t know what the issue is if there are cycles of confusion.] We resist by trying to figure out what’s going on. Most victims blame themselves or believe marriage is hard work.

So, we try harder to improve our safety by learning to communicate better, believing the issue lies with us, especially if our husband says so. At first, we trust him without question. We believe that being a better wife or more patient will make things better. We convince ourselves that changing our behavior will fix the situation. Later, we realize the “hard work” involves trusting a man who doesn’t deserve our trust.

Because we lack education or terminology to describe what’s happening when we talk to our friends, our friends might say, “oh, did you hear about the personality types?” [They give us basic relationship advice, or even just healthy living advice, because they don’t see the patterns or understand the dynamics. Even if marriage is hard work, it shouldn’t involve ongoing patterns of confusion.]

2. IF Marriage is Hard Work, Does It Mean searching for expert Help Over and Over Again?

If your marriage is causing you to keep trying to find the right help, that’s not just “hard work”. Victims are smart. We can tell when we need help, and we can tell when we’re in over our heads.

So consider this analogy. Let’s pretend like you’re in a college writing class. You write what you think is an incredible paper. You turn it in and you get a C.

If you’re a smart person, you’re not afraid of hard work. So you say, “There’s apparently more for me to know. I’ll go get help from the expert, my writing professor.”

You’re willing to trust them more than yourself at this moment, because they’re the writing expert. In this situation, a smart person would say to themselves, “I understand that my perception of my own writing may not be accurate. I’m actually not an expert writer, and my professor is. Plus, I’m not afraid of hard work. I’m willing to put in the effort to learn what I did wrong and improve it.”

Analogy of the Writing Class

Contrast that with a student who gets a C on a paper and thinks, “my writing professor is dumb. I know more than her.” Their writing isn’t going to improve much, and people probably think they’re delusional. I was a writing teacher for a time, and I had those two different types of students.

Some students thought their writing was incredible. But it was just bad, and I was thinking, wow, their perception and reality are two different things. The smart students were like, “Oh, I can see what you’re saying. I will add some paragraphs and they would improve over time.”

[So when marriage is hard work, and we realize we’re in over their heads, we go to couple therapy, or clergy, or we talk to family and friends.] We think, “Even though this doesn’t feel right to me, maybe I’m not seeing it accurately.”

Who is Willing To learn and to do the hard work?

Victims of abuse are often willing to try it differently, or willing to accept that marriage is hard work, and do what the couple therapist says, hoping it will get easier. [When things get worse and worse, and they can’t figure out why, they’ll try another professional or method, hoping to resolve the issues in the marriage.]

The reason why things are getting worse is because when victims go for help to a couple therapist or clergy, or even addiction recovery programs, they’re not getting help from the abuse professor. In this case, it’s like getting writing help from an expert acrobat who knows nothing about writing. Sure, they’re an expert Acrobat, but you don’t need help with your acrobatics.

You need help with your writing skills. So in this case, you’re not delusional when you go to a therapist. They are like, “oh, well, do you understand his needs? Can you be safer with him? Because maybe he feels unsafe. So how could you make him feel safer?” Or maybe they suggest using explicit content because you’re not meeting his needs.

Because abuse victims are smart, capable, and resourced, they’re constantly asking who can help me figure this out. You did your part, you’re a victim of abuse. You went for help. The problem is, the professionals who were supposed to help don’t know about abuse.

They’re not abuse experts.

3. Do you need a “Diagnosis” if marriage is hard work?

[If your marriage is hard work and you’ve been searching for help, your search may have resulted in incorrect diagnosis after incorrect diagnosis of the problem. You may have been told your husband is an addict, or he has a personality disorder, or he’s struggling from his traumatic childhood.]

Maybe he has “anger management issues.”

So once you get this “diagnosis” from a therapist who is not an expert in abuse, you’re going to get treatment for that particular “diagnosis”.” Then, you may do a year or two of treatment, maybe it’s addiction treatment, or treatment for his traumatic childhood.

A year or two down the line, when things haven’t improved, you try a different therapist, and get a new diagnosis. And you’re like, “oh, that’s what it is”.” And then you get treatment for that for a few years.

Many women in our community have experienced this pattern. I did this for seven years. First it was anger management, from his traumatic childhood, and then, he was an addict. We saw CSAT therapists. Then, another therapist suggested he had bipolar disorder.

Marriage and Family Therapy Limitations

[One of the reasons we see this pattern so often is that marriage and family therapists’ professional code of conduct or ethics restricts them from taking a side.] The foundational theory for marriage and family therapy is family systems. In family systems, everybody has a part to play. Everyone has to shift a little bit to improve the situation. So it’s a it takes two to tango model.

It does not take two to ruin the tango. It only takes one person to ruin the tango. There’s also no official diagnosis of “abuser” in the DSM. So, if anybody goes into a therapist, they won’t get diagnosed as such. Many times the victims will be diagnosed, maybe as codependent.

They might even say, “Well, you’re abusive too, because you yelled at him and you shouldn’t have done that.”

Instead of saying, “Hey, you were trying to get to safety any way you could. Way to go. Resisting abuse is always good. How can I help you do it more effectively?”

They’re never going to do that in front of the abuser. They shouldn’t. But this creates a cocktail of problems.

If marriage is hard work – who is doing the work?

I have a master’s degree, and I tried so hard to figure out what was going on.

I was confused and knew I needed help. So I went for help. I wasn’t afraid to work hard for my marriage. And due to going for help, I got my ex to start addiction recovery therapy for seven years. I’d been trying to get help the entire time, and no one ever mentioned abuse, but so many other victims have the same experience.

I found myself for a long time, chasing down incorrect diagnosis after incorrect diagnosis. If your marriage is hard work, it should not include going to therapy for years and years, without change. It could be that you go to family and friends and they say, “Oh, he’s just really stressed.” And that’s the “diagnosis.”

So maybe if you reduce his stress, then he’d be doing better. It doesn’t have to necessarily be coming from therapy. I probably went to over seven therapists. Five or six bishops, which is the clergy in my faith.

It’s shocking that people can go for help, want help, and be perfectly willing to see the truth. Yet, they still can’t figure out what’s going on.

When Couple Therapy creates More Hard Work

So many women in our community have been in couple therapy for years, 5 years, 10 years, addiction recovery for years. Some other type of therapy and the word abuse never came up. That is a serious, serious problem. Instead, they have an incorrect diagnosis and started an incorrect treatment.

When I started podcasting, my goal was to help women avoid this. If I can get to them sooner and let them know. Then they won’t have to spend years and years in couple therapy or addiction recovery, they can just start making their way to safety right now.

But I often think I’m somehow split into two different people. I have my current self now, podcasting, and myself back then. If I found my own podcast back then, I might not have listened. I would be like, “Wow, that’s extreme. He’s not abusive.” This therapist tells me that he “just has an addiction” and “our marriage will be better than ever, if we do his treatment program”.

I’m not going to listen to her podcast, because that seems too extreme. Then I do a couple therapy, addiction recovery therapy, or whatever else for a few years. Before I came to the conclusion that I already came to, and then I’d be like, “That Anne at BTR.ORG knows what she’s talking about. If I’d only listened to her.”

Be Patient With Yourself As You Figure Out why your marriage is hard work

I just don’t think I could have circumvented seeking help and going through those incorrect diagnosis stages. I don’t know if anyone can, because other people offer an alternative, then, wouldn’t you want to try that first?

That’s what I thought back then. [Now I’m like, you’re going to go through a lot more pain if you don’t have good strategies, like the ones I teach in The Living Free Workshop here at BTR. The sooner women start using these strategies, the quicker things will change for them.]

Also, if he’s the type of abuser who responds to the strategy by realizing he needs to change, that’s the best case scenario. Some men have realized that. It’s the best bet for your safety.

But in terms of addiction recovery or couple therapy, it’s stunning to me that this entire industry asks abuse victims to calm down and work with an emotional and psychological abuser.

And that’s industry standard for a couple therapy. It’s an industry standard for addiction therapy. And it should never happen in an abuse situation. It’s unethical. And that they don’t see it for the actual abuse situation that it is, is shocking to me.

If you described these behaviors to any domestic violence shelter, they would say, “This is abuse.” And so the whole therapeutic process or treatment process ends up traumatizing the victim, and they’re way more traumatized than they would have been otherwise.

Suggesting A Victim Stays In Proximity To A Man Who is Hurting Her Is Unethical

Any therapist or clergy who suggests a victim needs to be in proximity to an abuser in order to heal is doing something unethical.

It happens a lot with addiction recovery therapy. It happens a lot in the faith-based community, where divorce is the worst case scenario. They don’t realize that a woman being abused is the worst case scenario.

Then also in couple therapy or addiction recovery, the abuser lies throughout the whole thing to gain sympathy to have a rapport with the therapist or clergy. So they can’t see him clearly either, because he manipulates the therapist, the clergy and people around him.

4. Does the Hard Work of Marriage Involve Despair?

[Many victims of this cycle feel trapped and like giving up, because their marriage is hard work even after they’ve tried and tried to get help.]

They think maybe it is me, maybe I am the terrible one, maybe I am too controlling or I don’t respect him. Or I expect too much from him. Despair sets in when they feel experts led them astray, and this is not their fault because they were smart and amazing. They went for help, because that’s what smart people do. They were resisting abuse the best way they can.

So this despair is like the dark before the dawn.

5. If marriage is hard work, should I educate Him about Abuse?

[If your marriage is hard work, and you’ve been learning about abuse, maybe from my podcast, or somewhere else, and you’re thinking about educating or confronting your husband, you’re not alone.]

[When women learn about abuse, they often resist by confronting their husbands and trying to educate him about it, hoping he’ll change because he doesn’t want to be abusive.]

The problem with Confronting Abusers

[The problem with confronting your husband or trying to educate him about abuse is that he already knows that the behavior works for him and he chooses to do it.] He’s perfectly capable of not acting like this, because you’ve seen [him do it with other people and when he’s grooming.]

He knows what he’s doing. [He loves is when you believe marriage is hard work, and you’re working so hard to save the marriage.] Because you don’t know what he’s doing, and the therapists don’t know what he’s doing, [it gives him time to learn how to manipulate you and them into continuing the work. For this reason,] I don’t recommend many men’s programs anymore, because I found the abuser uses all the words they learn to continue to manipulate.

So many men’s program therapists are manipulated by the abuser. Getting educated about abuse can be bittersweet.

The truth about why your marriage is hard work may set you free

You’re likely to be more traumatized when you’ve been doing the hard work for your marriage, and you’ve been thwarted every step of the way. It’s also more traumatizing when you’re like, now I know it’s abuse. Okay, I’m going to tell him it’s abuse, I’m going to tell the clergy it’s abuse. I’m going to tell the therapist it’s abuse. And you tell them, and then it doesn’t help either.

The good part about this: you finally know 100% in your heart and in your soul that it’s not you. Things really start to make sense. You can face reality head on because you can see it.

This happened to me. When the domestic violence shelter suggested I educate myself about abuse. I was like, I’m not going to read that book because I kinda don’t want to know. Because I was there, I assume many other women are there, because there’s no silver lining to abuse. It’s all bad. There’s no good news when it comes to abuse.

However, I feel confident that abuse education does not create abuse out of nowhere. [When your marriage is hard work, and you’re trying to improve things by getting educated, you’re not going to think he’s emotionally abusive, if he’s not.]

A few times where I said to a woman, “oh, that sounds like abuse. Read this book.” And she read it, and listens to the podcast, and she is like, “I didn’t relate to any of those stories. That’s not my experience.” I’m like, “congratulations, it’s not abuse.”

If You Are In A Safe Relationship, Learning About Hidden Abuse Won’t Create It

So just like getting your blood drawn is not going to give you cancer. If your situation doesn’t fit, it’s going to be obvious that it just doesn’t fit.

Reading a book or listening to a podcast, and educating yourself about abuse, is like getting lab work for cancer. If you don’t have it, great! Or, you know, you have it.

Abuse has clear and defining characteristics. Educate yourself about abuse, and you’ll know whether he is abusive, or not. I wish everyone whose marriage is hard work would start learning about abuse and identify it from the start.

Part of abuse education is coming to understand the intense harm we’ve suffered. It’s so painful to recognize. [Learning about his lies, deceit, and addiction was traumatizing, but it got really bad when I learned about abuse, and realized all the harm and suffering it was causing.]

The trauma was intense for a long time. Even though he was not around, he was still abusing me post divorce by manipulating and undermining the kids. So I do think we still cycled back through the belief that marriage is hard work and self-blame for a while.

6. When marriage is hard work, how do you get to Emotional Safety?

 I want to educate women about abuse, so they can make informed choices. The abuse education I teach here at Betrayal Trauma Recovery. All of our coaches use industry standard abuse education, so we have the best support for betrayal trauma.

[It’s important to know what strategies to use, and our BTR Coaches will guide you through the process.

You define what safety means and answer critical questions: What will I do now that I understand the situation? How will I create a peaceful, emotionally and psychologically safe home?

These are the questions we’re asking. And we’re making the shift from believing marriage is hard work to recognizing and healing from abuse.

Recognizing Coersion

I mentioned coercion. Coercion in marriage is invisible. It can happen in various ways. What I talk about on this podcast often is when a man uses pornography or has an affair. Or has a secret life. He obstructs his wife from having the knowledge she needs to have a mutual relationship. So he uses psychological abuse, emotional abuse, gas-lighting, lying deceit to purposefully obstruct his wife from finding out who he really is.

This is coercion, because if she knew who he was, the likelihood of her consenting to intercourse is extremely low, and he knows that he’s well aware. So he obstructs her from gaining that knowledge, so she will continue to either have it with him or continue to be in a relationship with him. If you have been betrayed you are not alone.

Here’s an example of abuse that the public wouldn’t necessarily recognize as the abuse. But once you’re educated about it, you can clearly see it’s abusive.

Discovering Financial Abuse

This one is under the category of financial abuse. Let’s say there’s a woman named Rose. She’s lived a seemingly ordinary suburban life. She’s married to Tom, a well-respected local entrepreneur. To the outside world. They’re the picture of success, nice cars, a beautiful home, frequent vacations.

To their family and friends, Tom meticulously crafted a narrative that paints Rose as financially irresponsible. Insisting that he needs to take full control of their finances to protect her from her own poor spending habits. This seems reasonable to Rose at first.

She’s thinking, “Since I don’t know a lot about our finances, maybe I’m spending too much, so yeah. Of course I’m willing to work hard for the sake of our marriage.” As the months turned into years, decisions about money evolved into a series of overpowering restrictions that Tom imposes on Rose. Because she’s “irresponsible”.”

Marriage is Hard Work when His Real Goal Is Control

The thing is she’s not, and she never has been. They had a ton of money, so she could have gone out to lunch with her friends. She could buy clothes online. It wasn’t the lack of money that was the problem. The problem for Tom was that he found Rose’s independence and happiness, and all her friends, to be very threatening.

If he controlled her finances, he could start shutting things down. So as Rose’s access to money became limited, and discussions about budgeting were often framed as her “lack of understanding of their financial goals.” Which he never laid out for her, because he didn’t give her all the financial information.

When he did say we have this much money, it was a lie. So whenever she would question the restrictions, he would gently remind her of all the times she’s failed to manage the money wisely. Which by the way, she wasn’t allowed to manage. Highlighting her mistakes, which weren’t actually mistakes.

In Rose’s case, she starts to think she’s stupid, and finds herself increasingly isolated and unable to make financial decisions.

Here’s another example.

Financial Abuse Example: Eliza and the Engineer

Eliza is a successful attorney targeted by a financial abuser for her money. He lies to her about being a successful engineer. He’s like, “Hey. I’m super successful, too. Awesome. We’d make a good pair.” He covers up the fact that he had a low wage job with mountains of credit debt.

Then once they get married, he tells her that he lost his job because of cuts. She doesn’t know that this job never existed. Then he begins opening up new joint credit cards without her knowledge, and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that Eliza is on the hook for.

No one else finds out that he lied about being a successful engineer. No one would approach this as financial abuse or fraud, since they’re married.

Psychological Abuse and Gaslighting

When it comes to psychological abuse, gaslighting and other tactics intended to alter a victim’s reality.

Psychological abusers are willing to lie and also deny truth to your face to purposely deceive you. Lying is emotionally abusive.

They want to live that double life, and their willingness to deconstruct their victim’s identity through lying and gaslighting is shocking. Emotional abuse is intended to exploit and manipulate a victim’s emotions for gain. Trying to make someone depressed, sad, feel bad about themselves undermines their self-confidence.

All forms of abuse, stem from an inability to have empathy for other people. Abusers have a core belief that other people were created for them to exploit.

learning from Sharing our Marriage Stories

I’m so grateful for women all over the world who are sharing their stories. They share how they unknowingly suffered from betrayal and emotional and psychological abuse.

If you’re interested in sharing your story, I would be honored to hear it. Email podcast@btr.org to set up an interview with me. At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we approach this as a domestic abuse issue.

I always use gender-segregated language because our services support women who are victims of male perpetrators. I acknowledge that some women engage in unhealthy behaviors. Some women are abusive, but I create podcasts specifically for women abused by men.

Because of misogyny, we see the serious added burden society puts on women to repair the relationship or keep things together. Women are under intense scrutiny and stress.

[Patterns of misogyny exist in therapy and religion, in the court system and other institutions like imbalanced medical treatment for women, which makes it even harder for us to identify and heal from abuse.]

Time and time again, [when women discover their husbands’ lies, betrayal, and deceit, often just after having a baby, during a holiday while hosting, or right after their children leave for college, their identities and bodies change drastically. And it continues throughout their lives as they navigate perimenopause symptoms.]

So, we focus on building a life of safety for ourselves, mentally and emotionally. That is when our healing can begin.

Strategies for healing from the belief that marriage is hard work

Part of that healing is learning strategies for interacting that are effective, that create an emotional and psychological safety barrier between you and the abuser. I know we can heal, I feel so much better now. But I still have good days and bad days, some days where things really hurt.

A bad day doesn’t mean you failed to “do the work” or need to forgive. It shows that an old injury feels sensitive today. Hidden abuse exists, causing emotional and psychological injuries. We can heal from them by using strategies and seeking the right kind of help.

I woudn’t call this the hard work of marriage, but I would call it the hard work of healing from emotional and psychological abuse.

Betrayal Trauma Recovery Support

At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we walk with you every step of the journey. So if any of this feels familiar, if you felt despair, if you sought help and didn’t receive it, if you try to figure out what’s going on and keep hitting dead ends, we are here for you.

The reason I started podcasting, the reason we started Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Sessions. The reason we started educating women about abuse on social media and through this podcast. It’s because we’ve been through it ourselves.