healing from abuse

It was not for you that I mourned

While in in the shelter my case worker told me I needed to grieve.  That was the last think I wanted to do at that point in time.  I definitely felt an immense sense of loss, but it was overwhelmed by the freedom I felt.  I’m not sure I ever took time to mourn the loss of marriage.  Until last night.

 

I cried myself to sleep last night

I allowed myself to grieve

The space inside won the fight

That which was suppressed broke free

 

Do not find glee or joy from this fact

It was not for you that I mourned

But the loss of that onto which I held

For way to long

 

Any love once there died long ago

What it actually looked like

I don’t really know

 

But such a large part of my life

At one time even hopes and dreams

Were tangled up involving you

And that just doesn’t go away it seems

 

Your life moved on and yet here I sit

Not once having regretted my choice

For it was when I stepped out of your darkness

That I discovered my voice

 

When I awoke this morning

It seemed hope had bled through

I’m blessed and grateful for all I’ve been given

I need not shed another tear for you

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Physical Constraint

Merriam Webster gives three definitions for constraint:

  1. The checking on one’s true feelings and impulses when dealing with others.
  2. Something that limits one’s freedom of action or choice.
  3. The use of power to impose one’s will on another.

Any woman who has been in an abusive relationship knows firsthand at least one of these definitions if not all of them.

In the beginning when we would fight and things would start to get out of control, I would leave.  I would get in the car and just leave.  Having already moved 1000+ miles from home, I didn’t have anywhere to go.   I did not have anyone to turn to, so I would drive around for an hour, maybe two, before giving up and going back to the house.  I don’t remember what would push me over the edge to get in the car and leave, and I probably wasn’t always right in walking away when things got heated.  But I do remember being afraid of what he would do while I was gone, especially to my cat.  He would threaten to hurt her if I left her with him.  He would pick her up and throw her at me and yell at me to take her with me.  So I would pack her up in her carrier, and she and I would take refuge in the car.

Eventually, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house when things got too intense.  The days of driving around in the car with no place to go soon became a distance memory, a luxury of freedom I would long for.  If we were having an argument, no matter how heated it got, there was no walking away.  He considered my walking away to be extremely disrespectful, and it meant either I didn’t really love him, or that I was sleeping with someone else.  I remember the sheer frustration and anger it would generate, to be confined to a room when you wanted to leave.  I pushed, shoved, screamed; I didn’t go down without a fight.  The first time he restrained me in a doorway, when nothing else worked I pinched him when he wouldn’t let me through.  It was the first time he hit me.  He slapped me hard across the face and then just stepped aside.

In the rare event I actually made it out of the room before he could stop me, he would take the car keys or stand in front of the outside door so I couldn’t leave the house.  I would try and remove myself to the couch or the guest room.  But that was not permitted either.  If I didn’t return to the bedroom in a reasonable period of time, I would be physically brought back to the bedroom.  This meant being picked up and carried.

On one occasion, I managed to grab the car keys before he could stop me.  I barely made it outside and into the car before he bore down on me.  With the doors locked and him unable to get to me, he went berserk.  There was an old tire in the yard, and he used that to start attacking the car.  Terrified, I sat in the car too scared to even drive away, while he pounded and screamed and threw that tire at the car over and over.  Once he had worn himself out from throwing the tire or was sure I wouldn’t drive away, or both, he went inside and locked me out of the house.

Eventually my anger and frustration at being restrained started to fade, and as it faded, so did my attempts to fight back against the restraint.  The anger gave way to a feeling of defeat and worthlessness and ultimately to acceptance.  In the end, I quit trying to leave.  I’m not exactly sure of the point in which I crossed over from believing I couldn’t leave, to not even thinking about trying at all.  It was probably around the time I had my oldest son.  There was no way I was going to leave that house without him, and my husband made it clear there was no way I would leave the house WITH him.

By the time my youngest came, I honestly believed there was no option of my leaving.  It saw absolutely no way of being able to leave of my own accord.  Instead I would daydream of ways I would finally be free.  I would fantasize of my husband dying in a car crash.  I would dream of him having an affair and leaving me for another woman.  I would often tell him that some other woman would make him happier, that clearly I was the wrong woman for him.  Silently I prayed that he would somehow leave me.

They say the average woman in an abusive relationship tries to leave 10 times before she is successful.  After the first couple of years we were married, I never tried to physically leave, and I was so trapped mentally by his abuse that I never even imagined a scenario in which I left.  But I probably fantasized of him leaving me more than a 1000 times.

Years later, my now ex-husband still does not recognize his actions as abusive.  He even recounts events as humorous anecdotes to tell while with friends.   One particular story, of my cat sailing through the air and landing in a clothes basket continues to be a party favorite.  Once I even laughed along when he told this story, desensitized by his violent behavior.  But I am no longer in that dark place of acceptance.   The other night while laying in bed with my oldest son, he referenced a story daddy told him of throwing our cat.  I am grateful that I am now in a place where I can openly discuss this story with my son and demonstrate to him that violent behavior is not the way to solve his problems as he grows up.

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Sleep Deprivation

While we were married, my husband wanted to live 100% by the rule “don’t let the sun go down on your anger”.  If I begged him for sleep, he would accuse me of loving sleep more than him.  He found it as an attack on him if I asked to stop arguing so I could sleep.

Night time was absolutely the worst time of day.  I was terrified to go to bed.  In the end I would do almost everything I could to avoid entering the bedroom.  It always started with some expectation of sex or some sexual favor.  If he was not “satisfied” and sometimes even if he was, the torment would continue throughout the night.  On average, 2 nights a week he would keep me awake until the wee hours of the morning.

On nights I would fall asleep before him, he would wake me up.  He would slam his hand down on the bed, jarring me awake.  Some times he would accuse me of doing things to myself (think touching myself).  Other times he would accuse me of cheating on him, because he’d just dreamt that I had.  I learned to not move.  I learned to barely breathe.  I could lie like that for hours waiting to be sure he was truly asleep.

 He came home late from hanging out at the bar with his friends and was disgusted that I was reading a book.  He had clearly drunk more than usual and lashed out immediately.  Upon entering the bedroom he blurted out a very profane comment towards me, which in turn set off a whole chain of unpleasant events.  He lay down to go to sleep, but was soon unsatisfied with the situation and got back up.  He picked up the humidifier and threw it across the room, smashing it against the wall.  He then stormed out, slamming the door.  I didn’t move.  I barely even took a breath.  I continued to lie frozen in fear.

A while later he came back into the room and ripped the covers off of me, proceeding to throw them onto the floor to soak up the water from the humidifier he had smashed.  He left again.  Terrified I remained frozen.  Another block of time elapsed before he once again returned.  He laid my wedding rings on the bed next to me.  His special way of letting me know I had forgotten to put them on before bed.  Then he was gone again.

I have no idea how long I remained frozen, afraid to move even a muscle.  Eventually I found my courage and quietly slipped out of bed to make sure he was asleep.  I hung up the drenched duvet, got towels to mop up the rest of the water, found a blanket, and finally settled in to try and get some sleep.

In the morning it was as if nothing had ever happened.

 I was not even aware I was being abused by being kept awake at night.  It took me months of counseling before I ever understood that sleep deprivation was a form of abuse.  An often easily dismissed form of abuse, I now clearly see it as a very effective form of torture.  In fact in most states consider purposeful, repeated, and unnecessary sleep deprivation to be a form of physical abuse.  The United Nations defines sleep deprivation as torture.  “The forced deprivation of someone’s necessary amount of sleep has been used in the interrogation of terrorist suspects to make them more amenable to providing information or confessions.”1

The effects of consistent loss of sleep are severe and can make it harder for someone to free themselves from the cycle of abuse.  WebMD reports that the lack of sleep has 10 surprising effects2:

  1. It causes accidents.
  2. It impairs attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving.
  3. It can lead to serious health problems, such as heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes,
  4. It kills your sex drive.
  5. It can contribute to the symptoms of depression.
  6. It ages your skin.
  7. It makes you forgetful.
  8. It can make you gain weight.
  9. It may increase risk of death.
  10. It impairs judgment.

Yet as a society we find it much easier to protest the use of sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic by the US military, than to acknowledge the abuse happening in our own neighborhoods.  It’s time we opened our eyes to the reality that the same tactics we so readily abhor, when brought to light by the main stream media, are in fact being carried out in bedrooms across the world.

Sources:

  1. http://terrorism.about.com/od/s/g/SleepDeprive.htm
  2. http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/excessive-sleepiness-10/10-surprising-results

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Transforming

The first time he hit me was one month after we were married.  He didn’t hit me again for a year, but he did hit again, and then it got worse.

He was always sorry and would promise to never do it again.  But the apologies always felt insincere and there was an obvious lack of remorse.  In time, the abusive behavior always returned.

I learned to walk on eggshells; a hand slammed on the table, a fist through the wall, the car wheel yanked out of my hands at 70 mph.  Life was unpredictable.  We never made plans.  I grew further and further away from my family and friends.

Imprisoned by all the things I was scared to say and scared to do, I was afforded none of the same respect.  I had no expectation of privacy.  A closed door was unacceptable and a locked door was knocked down.

I made excuses for him.  I felt sorry for myself.  I never left and never even seriously tried to leave.  Where would I go?  I remember the rage.  I would shake with anger and lash out.  I would fantasize of beating him back.  I remember the shame.  How had I let this happen to me?  Who would believe me?  He wasn’t like one of those monsters on TV, so what was I complaining about?

Then came the numbness.  Any love I had once felt for him had disappeared. But I had chosen my lot in life.  Instead I would encourage him to leave me.  I clearly was not the girl for him.  Another girl could obviously make him so much happier.  I daydreamed about life after he died.

In one moment, if someone would have just asked the right question, I would have spilled everything.  In the next, I would flat out lie to my mother that he had never hit me.  I became so beaten down I was diagnosed as severely depressed and put on medication.

I felt like a failure.  I knew there was no life for me aside from him.  I dreaded that I was as bad as he was.  If I could just be what he wanted everything would be ok.  Severely depressed and medicated, living with physical abuse, he convinced me they would take my children away.

But I found an amazing psychologist.  She never told me I was abused.  She never told me to leave.  She gave me articles to read; she suggested books.  She taught me coping skills and helped me create a safety plan.  I discovered he was out of my control.  I could not fix him.  No magic change in me, nothing I could do was ever going to make him stop.  He wasn’t mentally ill; he wasn’t sick.  He honestly believed he was entitled to act the way he did.

A tremendous weight was lifted.  Some semblance of the girl I had once been slowly came back to life.  I left work in the middle of the day, packed mine and the children’s bags, picked them up from school and drove to a women’s shelter.  It was probably the hardest night of my life.  Thinking about it can still bring a tightening in my throat.  But I didn’t turn around.  I kept driving through the rain and the fear and the guilt.

I have never looked back since that night.  The guilt and the feeling of loss lasted a week or two.  But then life became filled with endless possibilities.  I make plans; I lock the bathroom door; and there is dancing and horseback riding and camouflage.  I have an amazing network of friends.  My family is indispensable, and I am once again present.

The wounds are still deep and will take time to heal. But they will heal.  I am starting to open up to the idea of forgiveness.  It will take time, but I will forgive him.  In the meantime, I will continue to share my story.

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