Sitting in a Burning House: The Slow Murder of Staying

Apr 30

For many women in abusive marriages, the greatest fear is not the violence. It is being the first in their family to break tradition, go against the family belief system, or religion. I hear it all the time. “I wasn’t raised that way.” “I’d be the first one in my family to get divorced.” “I am a _____________, I cannot get divorced, it’s against our religion.” What they are really saying is that they were taught to preserve the image of marriage at any cost, even if that cost is their own life.

I have said for years that staying in an abusive relationship is like sitting in a burning house. At first, it is just smoke. You cough. You adjust. You tell yourself it is not that bad. You learn how to breathe in it. But fire does not negotiate. It does not care about tradition or religion or family expectations. If you stay, you burn. As my friend and colleague Laura Richards says, domestic violence is “murder in slow motion” and the house always goes up.

Abuse does not always look like what people expect. It is not always bruises and broken bones. It is control. Coercive control to be specific. It is isolation. It is humiliation. It is financial restriction. It is being told who you can talk to, where you can go, and what you are worth. It is questioning you about things that warrant no questions. It is emotional abuse. Name calling, belittling. Screaming and yelling and terrifying your partner. Those kinds of behaviors leave bruises you cannot see. But they’re deep. And they last. And they take a really long time to get over…if people get over them ever at all. Intimate partner violence is the slow dismantling of a person’s identity. Recently a person who left a long-term abusive relationship told me they didn’t know what their favorite color was or food was because their entire identity was being the intimtae partner of the abuser. Sometimes domestic violence escalates into homicide and ends with a coroner’s report. Sometimes it does not. But make no mistake, something is still being killed. The woman or man you were before the abuse does not survive intact.

The abuser does not need a weapon to kill. He or she does it by degrees. Piece by piece. Until the person in the mirror feels unfamiliar. Until the voice in your head is no longer your own. A house does not have to collapse in flames to be fatal. Smoke alone is enough. I have seen these patterns play out across cases again and again. Helen Brach had money, status, and influence, and none of it protected her from manipulation and control. When she threatened to expose fraud in the horse industry, she disappeared. What looked like business on the surface carried the same dynamics we see in abusive relationships. Control. Exploitation. Silencing. She was in a burning house long before she vanished.

In the case of Betty Neumar, a case I have now worked for 19 years, loyalty and image, “keeping up with the Jones” so to speak insulated a predator for years. Five husbands died under suspicious circumstances. Her fourth husband, Harold Gentry, was killed in a staged murder for hire. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Harold’s murder and it is time to shake the trees. The warning signs were there with Betty for decades, but tradition, trust, and social perception kept people from acting. That is what a burning house of domestic abuse looks like from the outside. People see smoke and convince themselves it is not fire. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, eyes open wide, mind open wider.

Stacey Castor’s case shows how deeply authority and trust can be weaponized. She poisoned her husband and nearly killed her own daughter to cover it up. Her daughter did not question her because she was raised not to. That is what happens inside these environments. You stop questioning what you should be questioning. You normalize what should never be normal. Then there are cases like Shelly Malone, where a death has been alleged to be a staged to look like an accident. A riding incident in fact. A tragedy. Something explainable. Still unsolved to this day. This is where people allege that intimate partner violence became especially dangerous in her case because it hidden behind narratives people are comfortable accepting. Is the fire there, but is it masked well enough that people call it something else?

Women who stay will often say they were not raised to leave. That belief does not come from nowhere. It is built through years of cultural messaging, religious pressure, and family expectations that equate endurance with virtue. To be the first woman in a family to divorce feels like stepping outside of everything you were taught to be. It feels like failure. It feels like betrayal. And in many cases, the very people who should be helping her out of the fire are the ones telling her to go back inside. This is one of the reasons I began studying domestic violence in relation to religious trauma during covid.

Staying is not weakness. It is survival logic shaped by conditioning. Women and men know that leaving is the most dangerous time. They know the risk of escalation is real. Many are financially dependent because that independence was intentionally stripped away. Many have been isolated to the point that they have nowhere to go. When you remove someone’s resources, their support system, and their sense of self, staying starts to feel like the only viable option.

But leaving is not just walking out a door. It can be walking out against generations of expectation. It can mean losing family, financial stability, community, a church family, and in some cases, physical safety. That is why especially women who do leave are not failures. They are the ones who break the pattern. They are the ones who refuse to sit in the fire any longer. Being the first in a family to leave is not something to be ashamed of. It is leadership. It is disruption of a cycle that should have been broken a long time ago. It is choosing life over appearance, truth over comfort, and safety over tradition.

Sitting in a burning house is not loyalty. It is not faith. It is not healthy religion of any kind of any denomination or from any country. It is not obedience. It is a slow death. When women and men are told to stay because that is how they were raised, what they are really being told is that their life is less important than the image of the family and their perception of their religious diety.

I agree with Laura Richards, domestic violence is murder in slow motion. The house will burn. Staying does not fight that fire. It only guarantees the outcome.

Leaving is the only way out.