In my last year of high school, a satirical newsletter was put out by the students finishing Year 12 that featured anecdotes from our final year at school. Included was a playlist of songs that was matched with various students.

The song matched to me was “Say a Little Prayer for Me” - this was early 1970s. An appropriate song as I was a regular churchgoer, the quintessential ‘good girl’. That’s how I’d been raised – to be polite, nice, obedient, sexually pure, compliant, no swearing, little alcohol, no smoking. This was normal for me, although I knew that many of peers lived very different lives.

These patterns of behaviour, while not ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’ in themselves, came with a variety of restrictions and unwritten codes to follow. And I followed them because this was ‘normal’ for me. I didn’t question them.

Until…years into my marriage when, despite much effort, tears, thought and turmoil, I decided to leave. I committed what I saw as the ‘cardinal sin’ – separation and divorce. After all, the only pre-marriage counselling given to my then-husband and I was “Don’t get divorced.”

Despite the pain and grief of leaving, I look back and see that divorce was one of the best things that happened to me. This huge life step was the catalyst for me to assess so much of what I’d been taught since childhood about how to behave, and what a woman should or could do. Because unsurprisingly, after divorcing, the earth still spun on its axis, the sky did not fall, and I continued to sense God guiding me.

Challenging the church’s commitment to marriage at all costs allowed me space to question other things, particularly around how people relate to each other. I came to see that passive-aggressive behaviour was rife in churches – their commitment to everyone being kind and nice meant that people often had no way of dealing with anger than to suppress it. And that passive-aggressive abuse is real – death by a thousand cuts I call it. So hard to see when it’s happening to you. No marks or bruises. Not even any yelling. But the damage done is immense and takes years to heal.

It takes courage to say goodbye to patterns of behaviour and relationships that have worked in the past but are no longer useful.

I had to unlearn ways of relating to people. I learnt to say what I wanted rather than ‘beating around the bush’ hoping people would pick up on subtle hints. I learnt to choose people to be in my life who were healthy for me – this took quite a while to learn and in some respects I’m still learning. I learnt that I don’t owe people an explanation for my choices, nor do I need to tell everyone what I’m doing – I need only be an ‘open book’ with those I trust and who are safe for me.

It takes courage to say goodbye to patterns of behaviour and relationships that have worked in the past but are no longer useful.

But it is necessary work.