Rebecca Burnham has served in various roles in the Primary, Sunday School, Relief Society, and Young Women organizations and currently serves as a temple ordinance worker, family history consultant, and pianist. After her mission to Sao Paulo Brazil, she worked as a journalist until her first marriage, when she became a full-time homemaker. She is now a disability support worker by night and a community builder/entrepreneur/playwright and composer by day, who is launching Summit Stages, an initiative to build beloved community through the creation and promotion of musicals that lift and unite. She is passionate about building peace in an increasingly polarized world and writes and podcasts about gospel topics.
Enter Rebecca…
Last week I spent a couple of hours with a sister who has recently left an abusive marriage, is navigating a familial crisis, and is struggling in her relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She asked to meet with me because of my personal experience with abuse and my love for the Church. She wants to find her way back onto the covenant path, but without reopening the vulnerabilities that were placing her in harm’s way.
It became apparent as we talked that there is a disconnect in her communication with male family members and priesthood leaders. Like many women in similar circumstances, her situation is complicated by vulnerabilities that may not be easily apparent.
With deep appreciation for your consecrated offering of countless precious hours, often with little training and less thanks, I’m hoping I might be able to share some helpful perspective. Thank you for caring enough to read this.
Here are some thoughts about the complexity of leaving abuse, and approaches that can be very helpful to a woman’s recovery.
Of note: Both men and women may experience abuse in marriage, but I’m focusing my comments on women’s experience because it tends to activate some gender dynamics that can complicate priesthood support.
Abuse Can be Traced Better by Impact Than By Observation
“Abuse is the mistreatment or neglect of others… in a way that causes physical, emotional, or sexual harm.” (See “Abuse: Help for the Victim” at the Church website).
Notice, that’s not defined by a specific list of behaviors, but by the impact on the victim. Culturally, our understanding has evolved over generations, and behaviors that were once tolerated, even justified, are now recognized as profoundly harmful.
It is possible for sincere people who are trying, but hampered by personal trauma or cultural misunderstandings, to engage in abuse. It is also common for people who deliberately engage in abuse to carefully put on a good front for outsiders.
Either way, a woman’s experience of being controlled, demeaned, and systematically broken down, whether or not it involves physical violence, creates deep wounds and vulnerabilities that require sensitive support.
Allowing her to describe her experience and her needs, rather than defining for her whether or not she’s experienced abuse, is more likely to open the door to healing.
Abusive Marriages Are Spiritually Dangerous—Even Without Physical Violence
For many believing women, abuse includes a spiritual component:
- A husband may use priesthood language to manipulate or control.
- He may claim she is unworthy to receive revelation.
- He may pressure or manipulate her sexually, framed as “covenant keeping.”
- Family members may urge her to stay at her own peril, suggesting that’s what her covenants require.
- Constant criticism and verbal distortions may lead her to doubt her sanity, disconnect from her own feelings and needs, or believe her only value is meeting his needs.
This environment may undermine her relationship with God, distort her understanding of covenants, and disrupt her ability to protect herself and/or her children.
It can also make her vulnerable to emotional connections outside the marriage—not out of rebellion, but out of profound loneliness and spiritual starvation.
Spiritual Healing Is Not Linear
Even when endured patiently, abuse creates spiritual brokenness. Leaving can be an inspired act of courage, not covenant betrayal. Then the process of spiritual healing—turning from a broken way of being toward Christ—begins.
Healing from abuse is rarely tidy or sequential. Jacob 5 teaches that the Lord clears away “wild branches” slowly, only according to the strength of the good. Leaders unfamiliar with the journey may want women to fix visible sins quickly while encouraging them to rely on the judgment of priesthood leaders. However, healing depends on the development of their own judgment.
Reclaiming Agency Is Crucial
Abuse disconnects women from their own needs, desires, and sense of identity. Once they finally exit, they may temporarily behave like a young adult leaving a controlling home—trying things, stumbling, discovering themselves.
This is normal.
They don’t need to be “pulled back in line.” They need to be treated as agents learning to choose again.
Women Leaving Abuse Need the Lord’s Voice
Sometimes leaders tell women that their mistakes while exiting abuse disqualify them from revelation. The implication is: You must obey us before the Lord will speak to you.
Yet the Savior’s first recorded declaration of His Messiahship was to a woman who’d had five husbands and was now living with a man who was not her husband. Elder Peter M. Johnson reminds us she “felt of the Savior’s love and received a witness through the Spirit” despite all that. Her sins did not block revelation.
A woman climbing out of abuse likewise needs to feel the Savior’s love and guidance, as witnessed by the Spirit. She may need her leaders’ reassurance that the Lord is there for her and can guide her, despite her sins or missteps.
To Support Her, She Must Receive the Benefit of the Doubt
It isn’t possible to simultaneously give the benefit of the doubt to both an alleged abuser and the person seeking protection. Granting trust to one necessarily places doubt on the other.
Both need support—but from different people.
Giving a woman who is exiting abuse the benefit of the doubt does not have to mean trusting that you’re getting the entire story at this moment. Trauma can distort her narrative; it may very well sound tangled or incomplete.
It does mean believing her enough to take her need for support and protection seriously, and to work with her where she’s at.
She Needs Priesthood Support That Helps Her Find Strength in the Lord
If leaders tell her:
- “Your husband wasn’t abusive,”
- “God didn’t tell you to leave,”
- “You can’t hear the Spirit right now,”
- “You must follow your leaders because you are unworthy of revelation,”
…she will hear echoes of the same spiritual control she just escaped.
But if leaders instead:
- Listen deeply to understand,
- Affirm God’s ability to speak to her,
- Pray with her and plead for the Lord’s blessings upon her,
- Invite her to consider what questions she’d like the Lord to answer,
- Ask her about her needs and her children’s, physical, emotional and spiritual,
- Offer blessings of comfort rather than direction,
- Connect her to resources,
…then she will experience the Church as a healing refuge, not a threat. (Please see additional guidance from the Church for helping victims of abuse here.)
She Needs the Lord’s Guidance to Covenant Safety
In order to bless and protect her children in these circumstances, she needs miracles—the kind of miracles that covenant-keeping allows the Lord to pour out upon us. She needs covenant confidence. And when she hears the Spirit bear witness to her that her covenants offer the safety she seeks, she will learn to hold to them like her life, and her children’s lives, depend upon it.
