One of the most frequent questions women ask is, “How to tell if your emotionally abusive husband will change?” Whether from secret pornography use, infidelity, emotional abuse, or other devastating forms of relational abuse, women want to know if there’s a reason to keep holding out.

The answer is yes, your husband can change. Will he? That is up to him. To discover if you’re currently being emotionally abused, take this free emotional abuse quiz.

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Do you have to wait around and be abused while he figures out if he wants to join you and your children? No. And you shouldn’t. Betrayal Trauma Recovery doesn’t advocate divorce or staying in the marriage: we advocate for safety.

Whether victims stay married, separate from, or divorce the abuser, boundaries are absolutely essential in protecting women and their children from further abuse. Boundaries are not statements, requests, or ultimatums. They are courageous actions that women take to separate themselves and their children from abusive behavior.

BTR.ORG Supports Victims Of Emotionally Abusive Husbands

For women who choose to stay married, but courageously separate themselves from abusive behavior, the question remains: How to tell if your emotionally abusive husband will change? Anne Blythe has outlined 9 Signs of Change that can help victims gauge whether their husband is safe or becoming safe.

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We believe that as women educate themselves about trauma and abuse, they are better equipped to make informed decisions and become empowered to begin their journeys to healing. Tune in to The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Podcast to learn more about emotional abuse and how to navigate your journey to emotional safety. And how to tell if your emotionally abusive husband will change.

Our Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Sessions meet daily in every time zone. Join women all over the world for validation, community, and support as you process your trauma and begin healing.

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Transcript: Here’s How To Tell If Your Emotionally Abusive Husband Will Change

Anne: Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery, BTR.ORG. This is Anne. I have a member of our community on today’s episode. Cece is here to share her story about how to tell if your emotionally abusive husband will change. Welcome Cece.

Cece: Hi Anne, thanks for having me on.

Anne: I’m so grateful for women who share their stories. I’m so honored to talk to you about how to tell if your emotionally abusive husband will change. So Cece, you’re divorced now, but let’s start at the beginning when you met your husband. Can you talk about how you felt at first?

Cece: So I went to a Christian college, and there was a lot of the purity culture stuff going on there. I had grown up with an alcoholic dad and was kind of a scapegoat in my family of origin. So my self-esteem was at the bottom of the barrel, unfortunately.

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But he and I were friends, and we got to be friends the first week of my sophomore year in college. He was a freshman. He was actually studying to become a youth pastor. So when I met him, I thought, oh, he’s this nice Christian guy. He had a girlfriend at the time, and I was not interested in him like that. We really did hit it off as friends.

Was He Abused By His Girlfriend? Or Was She Just Protecting Herself?

Cece: And I didn’t see any red flags at that point in his character. Interestingly enough, he was dating a girl in my hall. It was actually an abusive relationship where she was abusing him. Which made me think he could never be that way towards someone else.

Anne: Really quick, what made you think she was abusing him as you’re observing this?

Cece: I would see the way she would talk to him, and she actually hit him a couple of times. So it was very serious. And other people were witnesses to those things even when I wasn’t, so…

Anne: The reason why I ask that is that we don’t know what he was doing to her.

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Cece: Right.

Anne: A lot of times when you see a woman doing that. It could be that she’s resisting abuse, and you don’t know what happened before that.

Cece: That is possible, but just from what I observed, it seemed like he was just a people pleaser. And he was always just bowing down to her every whim. That’s what is looked like from the outside.

Once they broke up, he actually pursued me. And I just was caught off guard at that point. And thought, oh, he’s one of my best friends, let me just think about this. But he waited a long time for me, respectful of all my boundaries. Especially the physical boundaries were really important to me.

Because I knew I wanted to wait, even for engagement. Because I had some bad experiences in the past in High School. where guys pushed boundaries. And he didn’t do that. So I thought, oh, that’s a green flag.

Cece’s Early Relationship & Red Flags

Cece: I guess a couple of the red flags I saw before we were married were emotional immaturity. Which I didn’t know at the time. I think just because I couldn’t even spot the red flags having grown up in an abusive home. I thought, oh, this is how guys are. And at one point he called me out of the blue and was like, “Hey, I don’t have any food. I need you to take me to the store.”

I said, “Oh, well I have something going on today or I have to study or something.”

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