She took responsibility for her own misery and began to work on it in the relationship.
and in this case, she was miserable because SHE (for a myriad of reasons) had chosen to become a doormat and surrender herself to his selfish desires. by learning to assert her inherent dignity and rights as a person created in God’s image, she was able to achieve freedom from the misery she had chosen for herself (and it is possible, if not probable, that becoming a doormat was a learned response to past trauma and abuse, which makes her effort all the more heroic). but we don’t always choose misery for ourselves.
