6 Things I Learned About Domestic Abuse

September 2012 I moved out of my ex-fiance’s house. It took me another 6 months to completely remove him from my life. We had been together since the summer of 2010. He was abuse months into the relationship, but because he never hit me I never recognized it as abuse. By the end, my friends and family knew something was wrong, but they had no idea how to help me and their efforts were unhelpful at best, cruel at worst. We don’t talk about emotional abuse often. It is invisible and misunderstood. Most people don’t know how to help a loved one in an abusive situation. Now I understand why it happened and why my friends and family were so unhelpful. I hope that people can use what I have learned to better support and protect their loved ones from going through the same thing.

1) Abusive partners are not horror movie villains.

They look like the boy next door with a beer belly and a sob story. My ex-fiance was a regular at the bar I used to DJ at. Everyone loved him. They were so happy for him when he finally found a girlfriend. We shot pool and drank beers and he told me my ass was perfect. Then he started to choose drinking over spending time with me. He started to choose being wasted over our relationship. The first time he told me he loved me was in the middle of a fight about his drinking habits. He was wasted. He said it to shut me up. I fought back for a little while. But its exhausting fighting with the man you love when your friends are telling you to chill out and eventually I stopped expecting better from him.

2) Abused women are not weak or pathetic.

They have been systematically emotionally harmed by someone they love. When I told my friends the things that bothered me about my ex, they told me I was crazy. By the time they started agreeing with me, it was too late and I was determined to fix him. I slept at a mutual friend’s house once instead of staying with him because of another drunken fight. He was angry that I had involved other people. I had forgotten that he had involved the whole bar when he started screaming at me, and I was ashamed that I had told others that we were having problems. I started keeping our problems to myself.

3) Not all abuse leaves bruises.

Emotional abuse can be just as harmful as physical abuse. Sometimes abusers stop just before crossing the line that causes their victim to leave. Sometimes, that line is physical violence. I think my ex knew that if he ever actually hit me, I would have left. I didn’t realize that he was abusing me. I didn’t use the word “abuse” until several months after I had left him completely. I had a fundraiser at a bar 3 miles from our house and he got drunk. I wouldn’t give him his keys and he wouldn’t get in the car, so I left him. I had finally had enough of his crazymaking. I went home and locked myself in the guest bedroom and tried to go to sleep. He kept texting me that I was a stupid c****. When he came home he thundered up the stairs. I hid in the bathroom off the guest bedroom. That door didn’t lock so I wedged myself between the sink and the tub to prevent him from getting in. He broke down the bedroom door. Then he banged into the bathroom door until he got an arm in. I screamed for help. Our townhouse was in the middle of the row but none of our neighbors reacted to the sounds. They mentioned a week later that we “were loud.” He finally stopped and I called a mutual friend to come get me. He kept screaming at me while I packed an overnight bag. I went back the next day. He cleaned up the mess and apologized and I was more worried that my parents were coming to visit the next week than that he could have killed me and none of my neighbors would have come to my rescue.

4) Women escape and heal from abuse at their own pace.

Well-meaning friends and family often do more harm than good by pressuring the victim into leaving, which causes them to stay. You intentions are never as important as your impact. Abusers take away their victim’s ability to make decisions by asserting control and making threats if the victim does not behave a certain way. My family and friends did the same thing, opposite, while trying to convince me to leave. I had to prove that I was making my own decisions, and I loved him, so my own decision was to stay. I couldn’t do something just because my parents wanted me to. I had a few friends who were actually supportive OF ME. Those are the friends I kept.

5) You don’t have to forgive your abuser to move on.

Not everyone deserves forgiveness but you do deserve to get past the experience. Forgiveness means to stop being mad about something. I’m allowed to be mad at my ex for the rest of my life, but I owe it to myself to move on to a better life. Anger is an appropriate, protective response to abuse. I never want to feel like that again.

6) Loved ones probably don’t know how to help you.

There is a lot of advice on the internet about how to help a woman leave a physically abuse partner. There isn’t a lot of information on how to help someone like me. Where it might be necessary to forcefully remove a woman from a physical abuser’s presence, especially if her life is in immanent danger, that approach would not and did not work on me. It drove me closer to my abuser. Think about it.

My abuser prevented me from making my own decisions by threatening and controlling me. My friends and family prevented me from making my own decisions by pressuring me into leaving. I loved the guy so the only way I could make my own choice was to stay with him. I am not saying that it is my friends and family’s fault that I stayed with him, but I am saying that they made it more difficult for me to leave.

So, what should they have done?

1. Respect the victim’s decisions.
2. Do not pressure the victim to leave.
3. Do not blame the victim.

As you are able, and dependent on what the victim will accept, contribute to or provide a way out without pressure. Provide options. The two things that helped me move out of my abuser’s house were money and a place, a new job, given freely without any expectations.

My mother gave me $2,000 after he left me in Wisconsin (after a road trip from Virginia). He threw some cash on the table for me to buy a plane ticket and drove off. I spent the next few days at my parents’ house wondering why I wasn’t worth fighting for. That was July 2012. While my father demanded the money back when I went back to Virginia and stayed with him, my mother told him it wasn’t his money to give and to leave me alone. I was very proud of her and very thankful for that. I didn’t use the money until September, but it allowed me to put a deposit down on my own place.

One of my best friends allowed me to stay at her place for a week after I moved out in September. She didn’t ask for anything in return and she didn’t judge me for still loving him. She didn’t judge me when I continued to see him for 6 months afterwards. She just supported me. She created a safe space for me to make my own decisions in—and I did. I am forever grateful for that.

If the victim doesn’t live with her abuser, you can provide other ways for her to spend her time. Girls night out, etc. Remind her that she is awesome and self-relient. And don’t judge her.

Women are abused because we live in a culture that protects the abuser

The Ray Rice incident painfully demonstrated what happens in America every day. Women are abused and people ask what she did instead of blaming the abuser. You may not be able to prevent everyone you love from ever being abused, but you can make a difference in your space by speaking out against people like Ray Rice. Cultural change starts with you.