He Never Hit Me
Ending Her Silence, A Medium Editor Shares Her Story of Domestic Abuse
Ed. Note: Domestic Violence rates went up significantly during, because of, and after the pandemic. No part of the globe was spared. Even before COVID-19 struck, abuse could be found in all sectors and strata of American culture. County Democrat Reader Copy Editor and Writer Angela Carhart shares her harrowing story of abuse with us here, doing her part to encourage all of us to End The Silence of Domestic Abuse. As we learn from Angela’s story, not all abuse is physical.
He never hit me.
He shoved me. He screamed in my face. He threw a hard, heavy pillow at my abdomen when I was pregnant with our first child.
But he never hit me.
My exposure to domestic violence as a child was heavy on the violence. At age six: My dad, bashing the door to my parents’ bedroom, trying to get at my mom. Age nine: My mom, smashing the guitar of step father #1 at the culmination of a violent argument. Age 14; Step father #2, systematically shattering every dish in the kitchen, punching and slapping my mother, standing over her with a raised hatchet. I swore to myself, No one would EVER do those things to me.
And no one ever did.
The Blissful Courtship
I was deeply unhappy in my marriage from the very beginning. We’d been together for two years before the wedding.
It had started off so beautifully, from my perspective. He was charming, funny, quick witted, extremely generous. When we were together, he was laser-focused, pulling out all the stops to make me feel wanted. He was an amazing listener, wanted to know everything about me. He bought me thoughtful little gifts. He worked very hard to win me over when I felt that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with a political conservative. He studied me, in some ways getting to know me better than I knew myself.
The Gradual Shift
When things started to change, it happened so gradually that I didn’t really notice. He’d suddenly tell me he didn’t like a new dress I was excited about. He’d agree to do a grocery run, then bring home one or two items different than what I’d specified, for no good reason. There was the argument over whether it was possible to maintain friendly contact with former boyfriends; I capitulated and lost track of two really lovely people.
Acceleration
After awhile the process accelerated, both in intensity and in frequency. He screamed across the room at me for “tossing around human waste” as I clipped my toenails. Once on Thanksgiving Day, at a restaurant with his parents, he suddenly announced that we weren’t leaving as we’d planned, so I was just going to have to live with missing dinner with my family. He made endless broken and re-broken promises to quit then-illegal weed, to ease back on the excessive drinking.
Implied Threat
He regularly repeated the story of when, as a young adult, he was so angry with his parents one afternoon that he hurled an axe at his sister in an upstairs window. That created quite the little pocket of fear, of doubt, and wondering what he might be capable of, if I ever made him angry enough. He began to run me in circles — about anything, the topic wasn’t important — until I was a sobbing, incoherent mess, and then he would pull me in and tell me how much he loved me, and then always, “But why do you have to make everything into an argument?”
The Biological Clock vs. Being Off Balance
By then he had me so off balance that I wasn’t always sure I knew which way was up. Part of me was miserable, sick of it, and wanted to leave. Another part knew very well that I had no healthy place to go. Yet another part keenly felt the biological clock ticking, the anxiety over wanting a family pressing down. Momentary self-preservation and hope for the future won out, and I agreed to marry him.
Evangelical Christianity Reinforces Abuse
We both converted to Evangelical Christianity a few years later. He’d grown up in a cult until he was thirteen, when he was allowed to stop going to church and hang out with his non-religious dad. His mom had a huge impact on my decision to become a Christian. She always showed me a great deal of affection and care, although I learned in later years that she also spoke badly about me when I wasn’t present. At the time though, I felt loved and accepted and safe, and as if a large hole was being filled in for a life scarred by childhood trauma.
By the time our three kids were born, I’d been thoroughly indoctrinated by those who elevate marriage to the idol of idols, chanting “God hates divorce!” like a mantra. The church gave my husband all the authoritarian tools he needed to dominate the home, while feeding me a steady diet of “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.” Now it wasn’t just my childhood trauma patterns keeping me in the relationship, it was Almighty God. It was suffocating being taught that I was inherently a second class citizen because of my reproductive organs, but at the time, my need for safety and acceptance was stronger than my desire for autonomy.
During these years, the crazy-making continued, but now it involved my kids. He’d tell me one thing, tell my kids the opposite. He subtly worked to convince them he was their ally, not mom, that I was a little mentally unbalanced, that I lied while he told the truth. He tried to gaslight them the way he had done with me, trying to get them to doubt themselves, but none of them ever fell for it. He was also doing a great deal of drinking.
Drug and Alcohol Abuse Intensify
I’ve actually lost track of the number of times I caught him. I’d find big piles of empty vodka bottles in the garage. I’d hear the telltale rattle in the backseat of his car when I went out to grab something and uncover dozens of beer bottles. I’d smell it on his breath when he got a little too careless. Every time, I was expected to forgive (which in Christianese means, “pretend it never happened”) and submit some more. And every time I had to suck it up and forgive him again, I got a little angrier and a little less tethered to “biblical” gender doctrine. Finally, when I realized one afternoon that he was driving drunk with the kids and me in the car, I promised myself that if it ever happened again, I’d have to leave, no matter what God thought.
A Turning Point
The last time, I started noticing signs in late fall. I specifically chose not to sniff his breath while he was passed out on the couch until after the holidays. I wanted to enjoy them with my kids, tuning him out from my mind as much as possible. I made sure the kids only ever rode in the car with me, and they and I had a nice Thanksgiving and Christmas.
One night in January, though, the smell of alcohol on his breath as he lay passed out on the couch for the night was unmistakeable. I thought I would vomit. It felt like the room was tilting, because I knew what this meant: I either had to ask him to move out and initiate a separation — and keep my integrity and rebuild my sanity — or I’d become a permanent accomplice to his abuse. I’d have sold my kids’ birthright for the pretense of peace and security. My world was falling out from under me. The vertigo felt like spinning free-fall, without a parachute. I felt like I was dying…
every day…
…and night
and I could barely breathe.
But if I hadn’t the strength to fight for myself, I did have it to protect my kids. I asked him to leave, and filed for divorce after a few months of good therapy. One of the first things my therapist taught me was that my husband was abusive.
Domestic Abuse Isn’t Just Physical
When I used to hear the term “domestic abuse,” I envisioned bruises. Domestic abuse is very often not about physical violence though, it’s about control. Skilled manipulators don’t need to resort to hitting or shoving, because they can make their partner feel like the crazy one. Or they can imply violence without actually having to employ it. They tear their partners down and partially rebuild them in their own image, amused to play puppet master. They each have their own preferences for how they play the game, but the rules are surprisingly universal, and the end is always the same: domination, power, and control. One of those universals, the Cycle of Abuse, is what finally pierced my brain fog and let me see that I’d been living with an abusive man for twenty years.
A favorite quote of mine comes from the excellent book, Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, by Lundy Bancroft: “In some ways manipulation is worse than overt abuse, especially when the two are mixed together. When a woman gets called ‘bitch,’ or gets shoved or slapped, she at least knows what her partner did to her. But after a manipulative interaction she may have little idea what went wrong; she just knows that she feels terrible, or crazy, and that somehow it seems to be her own fault.”
But he never hit me…
Cycle of Abuse graphic (https://www.asafeplace.ca/learn/about-abuse/cycle-of-abuse/)
Power & Control Wheel graphic (https://www.speakyourtruth.today/abuse)
