How God Delivered Me from a Narcissistic Marriage

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I didn’t even realize he was a narcissist until after we were divorced.

I felt like a fool for not seeing it, embarrassed because it took me that long to put a label on it.

But the truth is, it didn’t need a label. I knew something was wrong six days after we returned from our honeymoon.

I stood at the kitchen counter opening the mail. As I scanned the unusually high cable bill, I saw one pornographic movie after another. It felt like someone just sucked all of the air out of the room. He was sitting right there and saw my face. I was never one to cower in fear, so I pounced like a puma.

I challenged him, and his response was the beginning of what I could see was a dream turned nightmare.

He said, “Well, since you didn’t put out, what did you expect me to do?””

Amazing how it was MY FAULT. Don’t think for a second that I assumed that responsibility.

Still, I didn’t know what to do. It was early enough to bail, but I stayed. I decided to be a loving, understanding wife who wins her husband to Christ.

But two months in, he came to me and said, “You know that whole church thing we’ve been doing? You can go, but I just don’t think it’s for me anymore.”

Again, I felt bamboozled. He fooled me into thinking he had come to Christ and wanted a Christian marriage.

Needless to say, the marriage was strained at that point. I realized that his man wanted to be married in title only.

It started to dawn on me that he was proud to brag to his colleagues about his young wife, but he lived his life like he was a bachelor.

At the beginning of our marriage, he said he would like to wait three years before we had kids.

Three years came and he said, “I never said that. I said, after three years we could talk about it and see if that’s what we want. And I’ve thought about it and I just don’t think that’s something ‘we’ want.”

I may not have known then that he was a narcissist, but after this, there was no doubt that he was a lying, self centered control freak that was using me for everything.

That’s when I entered phase two of the marriage, which was, “God get me out of here.”

Love was not driving this ship anymore. I confess—I hated him. I hated who he was and what he had done to my dreams. And worst of all, I hated that the beautiful Christian marriage I had longed for turned out to be a scam.

Once he knew that I was on to him, it went from bad to worse.

There was no way I was staying in that toxic house with that lying manipulator. I prayed, “God I love you, but I’m not staying here another minute. Do what you have to do to me, but I’m out.”

Then a counselor I was working with calmed me down and said, “Are you willing to trust God to either change him or deliver you?”

I was definitely praying that God would change him, but the thought of deliverance had never occurred to me. A sudden peace came over me, knowing that it wasn’t my responsibility to change him and I wasn’t trapped. I could trust God to be God.

Then I entered phase three: “God I’ll trust you.”

I’ve made more impulsive decisions to try to take the bull by the horns than I care to admit. Although now there was a little voice in me that kept saying “trust me,” my flesh had it’s running shoes on.

I knew my decision would be a pivotal moment in my walk with God. “Am I going to keep doing things my way? Or will I follow Him, even though I have NO idea what this will look like?”

I won’t lie, my prayers were more for my deliverance than it was for God to change my husband. But the more I trusted God with whatever the outcome would be, the more I grew in maturity.

I spent SOO much time with God. It was glorious. I even reached a point where I prayed, “God, if delivering me from this means