My Father Taught Me How to Love An Abuser
Now I need to teach myself how to be safe
Trigger Warning: This story contains material of a highly sensitive nature including child abuse, domestic violence, relationship abuse that may be triggering for some individuals.
I am either doing my homework or playing. Suddenly I hear the door to my sister’s room slamming. My father starts yelling, I don’t know what it is about. After some yelling back-and-forth, my father drags my sister to the living room, and I hear her tumbling to the ground. He is still yelling. I am frozen, but listening. Her voice is getting thinner and higher, trying to explain herself, and she says “Dad no, stop.” My heart starts racing, I feel like I should do something. Where is mom? Where is grandma? Then I hear their voices, they tell my dad to stop, but he tells them to stay out of it. He is hitting her in a way that I can hear it from the room across the apartment. My sister is crying, I am crying. I sneak out to her room to see if I can find her phone. But I’m not sure if I know what I’m doing.
After all, I’m just a kid.
We lived in a very small apartment where I could hear everything — including things a child shouldn’t be aware of. The fights started to get violent when my sister became an adolescent. Nobody in the family raised their hand to me, but I grew up thinking if it happened to my sister, it could happen to me any moment.
I had no idea how that exposure and fear would become deeply rooted in my unconscious mind. When I discovered, I had been in therapy for about four years. I expected it would get easier in time, but it revealed a lot of things about me I wasn’t aware of, and the deeper we went, the more painful it became. The conversation kept circling around my family environment and the abusive relationship I had when I was eighteen.
Fortunately, violence and abuse are not taboo words today. Now we all know better than to blame the victim; but I still can’t help but explain my reasons, which I never find good enough; denial, detachment from reality, having nowhere to go, believing escape is impossible… Surely I didn’t want to believe I’m weak enough to let a punch or two ruin my goals and dreams. Leaving didn’t cross my mind until I left.
There are many things we don’t talk about what goes in the mind of a relationship abuse victim. I’ll try to shed a light on it.
Over time, it hurts less, but the fear becomes bigger. Then your heart becomes filled with hopelessness, which transforms into acceptance, very slowly, but if you endure long enough, you don’t care anymore. Your mind and body connection gets cut off, your senses fade away — this is a protection mechanism of the brain. It takes you out of that scene, because the pain of being hurt by someone you love is unbearable. It hurts more emotionally than it hurts physically.
Sometimes waiting for him to be finished was the real torture. He would be angry about a made-up scenario in his head, or about the meal I prepared, or about the guy that looked at me while we were outside that day. Nothing would justify it anyway, and nothing I could say or do would make him stop until he satisfied his insecurities.
After a while, all I could feel was annoyance, like a fly buzzing in my ear. Once when he was done, I lifted my head and broke my silence. “Is this all you’ve got?” I asked.
I was genuinely wondering. Was that all, and no more, or would he go beyond this one day?
Another thing we don’t talk about a victim’s mindset: I started to wonder if I should make the final move before he does.
There it was, he had turned me into this. He had turned me into a person who thinks she is capable of violence, abuse, all the worst things she’d seen throughout her life. He had taken the love out of me, and put hate instead.
I was turning into him.
So there I was, escaped from one abusive family and fell in love with an abusive man who assured me I was his family.
And I believed him. I believed him because he lead me to believe so systematically.
First stage: Love bombing. He treated me like a princess. Breakfast in bed, compliments, expressions of adoration; I was on top of the world.
Second: Seemingly harmless criticism. He criticized small things “with all due respect”; how I dressed, how I talked, my cooking, my skill set, my friends, family. This phase usually aims to break self-confidence in the victim, and he was very successful, and in the meantime, he seemed to care greatly about my health, my studies, my daily struggles, my hopes and wants.
Third: Isolation. With low self-esteem and self-respect to move on, but trusting him, this phase was almost automatic. Mostly, he didn’t even have to contribute; I pulled away from everyone because I felt drained. I must have unconsciously decided that the relationship needed my full attention to keep the peace. In the end, I had only him as an emotional support system.
To be honest, it is a little fuzzy after that. There was lying, cheating, guilt tripping, gaslighting, coercion, silent treatment, passive-aggressive acts, projection, and probably many more. I believed we were getting out of each conflict stronger than we were as a couple because he would go back to love bombing again. I still believed we were a couple — but I was merely his test subject.
I never thought he would change. Some narratives claim that victims of domestic violence believe their partners would change. I knew very well - from my father - that he couldn’t, even if he wanted to.
The only change I could imagine was for the worse, so I was walking on eggshells, trying to stay on his good side. It seemed like that was my only choice back then. All alone in a foreign country, he would find me wherever I went, and I would never be free. I was keeping him close without bringing my guard down and building strategies to avoid angering him.
But that day, when I broke my silence, and asked him, “Is this all you’ve got?” I would later discover that I had heard the exact same question before. Years ago when I was shaking, crying silently, from my sister’s voice to my father.
It took my sister two suicide attempts until she decided to leave. She encouraged me to build a future on my own where I could feel safe. So I left when I was eighteen for university. To Europe. And I fell in love with a man who would beat me until I wondered if that was all he was capable of.
Apparently, once you experience or witness violence of any kind for a long period, your brain undergoes changes. It can’t differ fear of possible danger from real threats. It took me almost two years in therapy to even address it as trauma and a couple more years to understand its impact. In the end, I was able to spot a direct link between my childhood and relationship trauma.
By the time I got into an abusive relationship, my family had normalized violence for me. Initially, my abuser’s behavior didn’t even seem alarming; because I had wrong definitions of love, safety, support and care. I believed I had to earn those things by being a good girl, and at the times I didn’t get them, I was bad, undeserving and unworthy. When this is all I’ve known for all my life, I was very, very vulnerable to a partner who would endorse such beliefs as an eighteen-year-old girl all alone, without a trusted adult, in a foreign country.
I blamed myself more than I blamed my ex. I was corrupted, impure, had no sense of self — I thought, maybe he was right to treat me this way. Then I blamed my unwise or immoral decisions on him. I felt like I had turned into a monster; challenging him to test his strength, thinking of ways to get rid of him forever.
But he was not the reason, he was the result.
He was the result of the nights I spent listening through doors, finally falling asleep after making sure my sister was still alive.
He was the result of the school days I spent pretending everything was okay at home and pushing myself too hard to be successful so I could get out alive in time.
He was the result of the times I felt of no importance, undeserving of love and care, and protection.
He was the result of the unhealthy examples that led me to have a very poor judgment of character, very wrong definitions, and never a mechanism to protect myself.
Once I opened my eyes and saw the truth, I begged for another life that I would feel the right definition of being safe. A life that I wouldn’t feel familiar with danger, indifferent to violence.
I wished I didn’t lose my voice so early so I could shout from my lungs for him to stop hurting me.
One of the things that kept me going all these years was to spread the word about exploitation. We can’t choose the circumstances we grow up in, and sometimes we perceive that we choose our adult life, but it never ceases to amaze me how our childhood defines it. And I know first-hand that it seems like there is no way out.
But here I am, healing. I will forever be healing. I took that little kid in the depths of my mind, from the dark room she was hiding in, and told her it was going to be alright, that she was safe now.
I got her now.
This story is in response to the Read or Die Special Event: Family Stories of All Kind.
When I thought of which family story I’d like to write for this event, it was extremely hard for me to think of an uplifting one. Through sharing my story, I aim to provoke thought for families and young girls about the impact of childhood environment on an individual’s sense of safety and emotional well-being.
