But this week, the Dunedin mother of two and survivor of extreme domestic violence at the hands of her husband, had a message for other women who might be feeling the same way: "I was not the crazy one. It was him."
Her family immediately identified Anna's new husband as a "conman".
Even she knew "right from the start" something was not right, but she moved from her home country to Dunedin with him anyway, convinced she could change him for the better.
Isolated from her large family, used to being looked after, she spent the next decade "just trying to keep the peace", she said.
"My first Christmas here, I had nothing on the table. There was only his booze and drugs in the house. I had a plate of rice and green peas. That was all I had to eat on Christmas Day. I had a 3-month-old baby."
Even the beatings, some while she was pregnant, were her fault, he told her.
She worked two jobs, but never saw the money. It went into an account he controlled, but buying food with it was not a priority.
Most of the money was spent on drugs and alcohol.
Her two children wore the same three sets of clothes for a year.
When she cooked food he did not like, he would throw it out the window.
He would secretly film her and record her telephone conversations with her family, who she was not allowed to talk to for three years, at one time.
Her family would send money, but she would never see it.
Friends were not allowed to visit or call. He told people he knew she would sleep with them for money.
Once, when she came home from a visit to her family overseas, he nearly killed her in a beating. He spent two months in prison for that.
In reality, of course, her story is worse than all of that.
But through it all her desire to be a "good family", was stronger than her survival instinct.
"I thought I was the crazy one.
I used to sit and think it was all my fault. And I thought about ending it. I thought about taking the kids and ending it for all of us.
There was hardly a night when my pillow was dry. But in the end I thought of my kids and I thought, I have to be strong."
For a year, she worked out a plan. Her friends at work helped.
For 10 minutes once a week, at lunchtime, her colleagues would teach her to drive, until six months later, she sat a driving test.
Her family told her to set up a secret account her husband did not know about and sent her some money for a car.
She parked it around the block, and during a week squirrelled clothes and other things she and the children would need into the car. Her workmates found her a place to rent, they gave her sleeping bags, and took up a collection for her.
This was it. She was taking the children on Saturday and beginning a new life. But on the Friday, she had enough. When he threatened to smash her in the face in a supermarket car park, she ran with the children to the store, and called 111.
For a while things were better.
"After two months, I went back to him, because he kept saying he had changed. I went back. I thought: `he must realise what he has done'."
She stayed three weeks.
Police officers and her marriage counsellor had both suggested she use the Dunedin Women's Refuge, and one day she lied so he would let her out of the house, and drove straight to the Women's Refuge office.
"And it was the end of it. I was at the safe house for six months."
While there, she and the children completed a series of programmes for victims of abuse, and grew stonger from the support they were given until they were eventually brave enough to start new lives on their own.
"I had nothing [when I left him]. I'm still paying for furniture he has. I'm still on the benefit, but I'm surviving."
*Not her real name.
