Understanding Abuse
This was not supposed to happen to me. I am strong, independent and successful. I am intelligent and creative. I had a happy childhood with loving parents. In high school I ran a feminist organisation and trained martial arts. As a teenager, I learned to recognise master suppression techniques and how to stand up against them. Since the age of 16, I have been travelling alone and taken care of my own finances. I am outgoing, I have many friends and a supportive family. And yet. This happened to me. And it happened twice.
I got married when I was 26. A year into my marriage, my husband started to have very strong anger outbursts. These got stronger as he turned more and more to alcohol and the more I tried to say that I had a problem with what was happening. But I stayed, committed to be there for my husband and believing that he would recover. After 2.5 years of marriage, I realised that my husband would not recover and I left. It took me 1.5 years to get the divorce through, a period during which I lived under threat.
After my marriage, I went into a second relationship. Everyone I introduced him to were charmed and convinced that this time around, it was really the man of my life. Together we looked perfect. Very soon into the relationship, he started to have extreme jealous reactions. Then he started to have problems with me composing music for male contemporary dancers and me working as a model, which was how I made my living at that time. He also started to be angry when I went to certain neighbourhoods of the city, complained over my friends, the way I dressed and talked. When I finally left the relationship, I had sacrificed my professional network, my money, my friendships and I had distanced myself from my family in order to save the relationship.
My marriage contained both verbal and physical abuse. The abuse in my second relationship was of a different kind, more subtle and in combination with psychological manipulation slowly cutting me away from everything I loved, breaking down my confidence and making me believe that I was the cause of everything that went wrong.
Within a week after my second relationship ended, my grandmother asked me if it wasn’t actually me who was the problem. During the next few months, as I started telling people what had happened and I discovered that this reaction was common. My best friend asked me what it is in me that makes this happen to me. A lover couldn’t understand how I could allow anything like this into my life. The therapist I went to just to figure out the answer for all this, decided in the second session that it must be something in me, like a sort of deep darkness, that make men be like this towards me.
Slowly I started to unwind the subtle paths of abuse. It seemed like so many people where explaining what had happened to me with a vocabulary and reasoning very similar to those of the two men in question. They were looking for a reason why I had experience this, an explanation. Since I am strong and independent, it must be something else, especially since I experienced it twice. This reasoning was all frighteningly close to those the way the man of my second relationship repeatedly told me that he understood why my ex-husband was violent to me.
What I then recognised, is that this reasoning had implanted itself in my mind, too. I was, and I am still, thinking that it might just have been my fault. Even when writing this text, I need discipline to finish it. The thought of that maybe it was just all because of me, maybe I really did deserve to be treated like this, crosses my mind over and over again.
It is as if we have all adapted to the abuse, as if we are all somehow protecting it, even when it is over and I am safe. Abuse seems to be something participatory, something that infiltrates the extended circle around the couple. Just as any love relationship needs support from an extended circle to function, the abuse seems to live on the same nutrition.
So when asking why this could happen to me, the answer might be something completely different than expected. It happened to me because I fell in love. It happened to me because I dared to start an intimate, passionate relationship with what in the beginning of the relationships were normal men.
But because I loved them, assigning them with the word abuse is something very difficult to do once the violence started occurring. To be able to make someone a perpetrator, we have to in some way dehumanise the person, turn them into something ugly and grotesque. But I loved these men and that’s why I stayed. That’s why I kept on fighting for the love, why I didn’t just walk away at the first instance.
When I told my father that I am experiencing guilt of having had these situations in my life. After all, it was not supposed to happen to me. My father who met both men early into the relationships and was always close to the events of my life just listened. Then he said;
“Nothing is your fault, but you are strong.”
I asked him what he meant, and he continued:
“You got out.”
January 2016, Warsaw, Poland
