Stacey
There was a time in my life when I worked in the domestic violence department at a county courthouse. My job was to look up to see if the person coming in to file a restraining order had any other cases against the same abuser. If so, we made sure the same judge was assigned since, presumably, that judge knew the history. I would get so frustrated when the same women would come in to file restraining orders against the same men over and over and over again. I wanted to slap them myself and say, “Wake up! You deserve better! Why do you stay?” But I didn’t. I just processed the paperwork and moved on to the next one.
Then it happened to me. Anyone who knows me, and didn’t know me then finds it hard to believe that I was ever a victim of abuse. The relationship didn’t start out abusive. They never do. If abusers showed their true colors on the first date, no one would ever fall victim to them. He was charming. He was attractive. He was self-confident. He was chivalrous. And then he wasn’t.
It happened gradually at first. An unkind word here or there. An object thrown at the wall in anger in the heat of an argument. The profuse apologies and promises after the fact. You want so desperately to believe him. Because if you can’t, then it means you made a monumental error in judgment. Except you didn’t. But you can’t see that at this point. That comes later.
After the verbal abuse starts, the isolation starts. An abuser can’t be completely successful if you still have a support system. It starts with your friends. Gradually, he isolates them from you one by one. The phone calls lessen, the girls’ nights out stop. Then he moves onto isolating you from your family. Before you realize what is happening, your support system is virtually non-existent. Everyone can see what is happening but you.
Once he has you cut off from friends and family, the abuse ramps up in intensity. This is when he repeats to you every day for two years that nobody will ever love you. That you’re fat, lazy and lousy in bed. That no one will ever want you. Deep down, the person you used to be knows these things aren’t true. Hearing these hateful words everyday for two years from the person who is supposed to love you has taken its toll though. Part of you starts to believe it.
Then, when it starts getting really bad, the accusations start flying. He starts timing you when you go to the grocery store. If you’re gone too long, you must have been cheating on him. Never mind that he’s the only one cheating in this relationship with every female that looks in his direction and shows even a hint of interest. He has put the fear of God in you and you don’t dare do something as disobedient as sleeping with someone else. Even if you thought you could find someone who would want to sleep with your no-good, fat, lazy self-loathing self, you have no doubt that if you did and he found out, he will kill you.
At this point, your self esteem is gone. Completely. You are broken. A shell of your former self. There seems to be no way out. He controls everything; including the finances. Stuck. Desperate. Hopeless. You stay because you’re afraid of what will happen if you leave. Besides, where would you go? He’s alienated you from your friends and family.
Then one day he crosses the line. The verbal and emotional abuse turns physical. You have a baby. You know you have to get out. Things will never change. You reach out to past friends, but so many are just tired of dealing with the roller coaster that is your marriage. But there are a few who are still there. You get out. You call your mother and she helps.
The above is my story. I tell it because it’s important that others who are in this situation realize that being treated this way isn’t ok. Someone who has never been in an abusive relationship can’t fathom how anyone could stay in one. The abusers are masterful manipulators. They eat away at everything until you are completely dependent on them and too afraid to leave. You want to believe that they mean it when they apologize and promise it will never happen again. I didn’t want to believe that I had made such a monumental error in judgment with him.
Through therapy I learned several things. One of which is that it wasn’t so much an error in judgment on my part. He showed me who he wanted me to see. He knew I’d never fall for him if he was his true, abusive self. That’s what all abusers do. They have to lure women in somehow. They portray themselves as wonderful, caring men. You believe what is presented to you.
Anyone going or having gone through an abusive relationship absolutely should consider counseling. It saved my life. I truly don’t think I would have been able to overcome the emotional issues that relationship left me with. I do believe that everything happens for a reason. I believe having lived through that hell that I’m a better person because of it. It has taught me to never settle. I have forgiven him for what he did to me, but I will never forget. I don’t want to forget. Because of what I’ve gone through, I will never let myself be put in that situation again. I’ve reclaimed the power over my own life.
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Stacey writes at Sometimes Meaningful Ramblings.
Richard
I was a nine year old kid playing in the streets on the north side of Chicago. Bob was in his early fifties, a respected businessman and a generous member of our church. I knew nothing about matters sexual. He was a pedophile whom Illinois authorities knew of for 15 years, but could not stop. And like Mary Howitt’s spider enticing the fly into his web with promises of goodies and empty compliments, the accomplished pedophile used his long perfected skills to seduce me into a world of sex between men and boys. Beer, cigarettes, money, gifts, and a place to hang out led to blow jobs, anal sex, golden showers, and pornographic films and magazines, both viewed and filmed.
We spent long weekend days at his apartment, a group of boy toys recruited for Bob’s sexual pleasure. It ended almost a year later on a Thanksgiving night when I told my parents what had been happening. They contacted the police. Four years later I sat on the witness stand in the State of Illinois versus Robert M. Cleveland on the charge of taking indecent liberties with a child. Testifying was difficult and intimidating. One day I was on the playground with a bunch of kids whose only concern was scoring a touchdown in a pick-up game of football. The next day I was describing explicit sex acts in clear, clinical terms, in front of a packed court room. They are acts of which no 13-year-old boy should ever know. The day after that I was sent back to school as if nothing abnormal had happened. Everyone who knew of these events expected me to be normal.
I was anything but normal. As a teen I felt different from my peers. I felt dirty. I walked around knowing that I had an enormous, heavy secret that I could not tell anyone. I would have been ridiculed if I did. I would have been rejected. I didn’t really want to tell everyone, but I also knew that I wasn’t being entirely honest with anyone. It was isolating. Around my girlfriends I was a horny young man who knew all the right things to say to get them to have sex with me in one form or another. Why wouldn’t I? I learned from a man who knew how to convince people to have sex with him. So, I added to the normal pressures of teenage life the concerns and responsibilities of being sexually active. Would anyone be surprised to learn that I was a mediocre student?
In between my teen years and the onset of parenthood my life has been littered with some bad choices, although they have become much better since I met my wife. The details do not matter. Everyone has their horror stories. Mine are worse than some and not as bad as so many others. In regards to the abuse of my childhood, I told very few people what happened. With those I did tell, I laughed and joked as if it was no big deal. It was just something that happened.
Then I became a parent. I watched my oldest child grow. As he passed through the ages where I played in a stag film, where I sat on the stand during a competency hearing to determine whether or not I was a credible witness, where I sat in a crowded court room identifying stacks of pornography while feeling the beginnings of an erection and feeling dirty and guilty because of it, I felt a deep sense of the loss of my innocence. It was stolen from me by a grown man when I was nine. My sons are a reflection of everything I never had. I love them. I love their innocence.
And then I became very, very angry. I found myself angry without understanding why. I found myself irrationally angry and taking it out on my children. I never hit them. I did not abuse them. But there were days where I could not have been pleasant to be around. With the anger came pain, sorrow, disappointment, and shame. It wouldn’t go away. When I sat down with my wife to talk about what was bothering me, I inevitably worked my way around to my childhood. The molestation had become a minefield long hidden after the war was over. I kept stepping on landmines. It was a pattern that repeated itself many times over the years.
During the same time that I was experiencing this cycle of anger, I was also in the long, slow process of walking towards Christianity. This was no simple journey. My disdain for Christianity was deeply seeded. The walk started with a series of taped sermons on cassette about the Book of Romans sent to me by a pastor friend working in recovery ministries in California. I listened to them over and over again in the car on the way to work until I understood each message. It was during that time that I realized that it wasn’t Christ or Christianity that I had a particular problem with, but that Christians in general really pissed me off. That was an important distinction to understand. I started to read the Bible even though most of the time I didn’t quite understand what I was reading. I listened to radio broadcasts by Alistair Begg out of Cleveland, Ohio’s, Parkside Church, sometimes only retaining a phrase or a sentence and then slowly understanding more and more. And I read books. I read a lot of books, like Jeff Vanvonderen’s Families Where Grace is in Place, Cloud & Townsend’s How People Grow, and an amazing book titled TrueFaced, by Thrall, Lynch, and McNicol. I realized that I was broken. I came to understand that I couldn’t fix myself, but God could fix me. I finally realized that God understands what was done to me. He knows the poor choices that I’ve made in life that can be directly linked to that first sin committed against me. He’s been patiently waiting for me to realize all that He can do for me. I’ve been slowly growing closer to Him over the years. I’m ready to take Him up on His offer to help. It only took me eight years from the start of that first tape to figure out that I am not defined solely by the sins that I have committed or the sins committed against me. I have so much more to offer in this life.
I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to ignore the events of my childhood. I’ve kept it hidden. I’ve joked about it. I’ve pretended that it was no big deal. Now I won’t do those things anymore. I know that there are more men in this world who experienced the molestation that I did in my childhood. I know that there are women who experienced sexual abuse at all ages. I am going to speak up, speak out, and share my story, if for no other reason than to help others realize that they are not alone. There is such a thing as recovery. There is a better life. I frequently read the word “survival” used in relation to living with the experience of a sexual assault. I do not want to merely survive. I want to thrive. And I want that same thing for each and every one of you.
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Richard writes at Boarding in Bedlam.
Gwendomama
One time, I took Supergirl and her sleepover friend over to his office (the cabin next door) so he could sleep in while they played loudly.
Couple hours later, he woke up. As always, whenever the white noise was turned off, there was an automatic tensing and clenching in the house. Because then it would begin.
Why are there crumbs on the floor? (breakfast and lunch, which I fed them)
Why is there so much noise? (kids)
Why didn’t you start a fire? (hard to chop kindling with a toddler attached to me)
What is this on the table and why? (playdoh and because we were playing with it)
What mess are you going to make for me to clean up next? (what’s for dinner?)
Why are you going? When are you going? Where are you going? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? What is that for? Why did you do that? Who did this? Who did that?
Every day, all day, he snipped and sniped at anyone in his way. He parented when convenient. I even coined it ‘optional parenting’ and yes – I hurled those words in his direction whenever we fought.
He woke up at noon, spent all day in his office, coming out for lunch or to admonish someone. Took a daily sunset hike, occasionally returned for dinnertime, usually put the kids to bed (upon my insistence 2 years ago) and then disappeared again. Insisted he had to stay up til 2am and sleep until noon, because ‘that was when he worked.’ I never asked what he did between the other waking hours, but he wanted to know exactly where I would be and why I couldn’t do it myself if I even asked him to take Bubbles to one of his 3x weekly speech appointments.
I was reprimanded for not offering enough foods (never mind that he couldn’t feed anyone), berated for wasting too much food (that he never bought) ignored when in tears of overwhelm, and scoffed at whenever I had any physical illness or weakness.
Once he drove me to Planned Parenthood to get an abortion he insisted I get after he refused to get his promised vasectomy. I screamed at him the whole way there. He sat in stony silence, willing it to be over if he just ignored it. And me.
When we got there I took the keys and left him in the parking lot. I came back an hour later to pick him up and he yelled at me that I was a terrible mother because I wouldn’t get an abortion. I cried and sobbed and told him that, while I believe firmly in choice and I also believed another child would be very hard, I couldn’t do it after losing Elijah. That they were connected for me and I didn’t know how but they were and please stop please please please stop.
He sneered at me. “You are selfish. This just proves how selfish you are. If you cared at all about your children you would do this.”
Supporting me was only possible if I agreed with him.
I cried myself to sleep for weeks until the blessed event: the miscarriage. It was a late one – 11 weeks, I think. He had been exceptionally angry the night before. He wouldn’t talk to me, but would only growl insults at me. He grabbed me roughly and reminded me how selfish I was and he spat his disgust at me by stripping away any confidence I had as a parent – he knew the most deadly weapon available to him and he knew how to find my emotional jugular. When I went in for another ultrasound the next day there was no more heartbeat and I remember feeling relieved as I was prepped for the surgical removal of all this conflict wrapped up in a dead embryo.
I’ll never forget how he was so nice to me on the way to the OR. He held my hand, he hugged me, he was ‘so so sorry this had happened, Babe’ but I was ‘going to be strong and be just fine’ and he gave my hand a tender squeeze. I was speechless. But there was a whole audience now, so I just accepted it and was wheeled off to the OR and soon completely unconscious and unable to try and make sense out of that one.
When I stopped bleeding, we went to Hawaii, with hopes of amnesia I suppose.
The day that I took the kids next door to play so he could sleep in, I went back over to the cabin to grab my laptop after he got up and we had returned to the house. The moment I left the house, I heard my name being screamed. Again. Angrily. Shouted. Again. Really mad. I prepared for the worst and ran back over to the house. Apparently, Bubbles had just knocked over and broken a glass lamp.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU????” He screamed at me.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU?”
“I was…my….getting….I was getting my laptop WHAT HAPPENED?”
“HE COULD HAVE BEEN SEVERELY INJURED – WHERE WERE YOU??”
“Whaaaaat?? Where is he?? Where the hell were YOU? You were HERE! You can’t yell at me like some wayward nanny!”
“You’re no nanny. You are a pathetic excuse for a mother. You weren’t even HERE. A NANNY would have done a BETTER JOB!”
He insists there is no history of abuse, but I can’t stop my mind from trying to make sense out of his actions in April. I can’t stop thinking about it, and if I can make sense out of it, then something will….I don’t know. Fall into place? Make me understand the risk with more clarity? Prevent it from happening again?
And in some ways I can make myself make sense out of it. Like the first full nelson he put me in. He completely lost all impulse control. No filters, nothing to stop himself. But after he let go and I screamed back at him, after I reached for the phone, and
he
did
it
again
and this time with more purpose.
While screaming at me with purpose.
About how ‘someone’ should have ‘done this’ to me ‘along time ago’.
I just can’t make sense of that. Was it premeditated? Did he really just hate me that much?
Did he simply feel entitled to shut me up? Was it supposed to be forever?
Where did the filter kick in and why did he stop?
Did he realize when he dropped me onto the floor that this was some bad shit or did he just want to kick me on his way out?
I can’t make sense of all this and it physically hurts. I watch my kids try and make sense of it and I know why it’s so hard. It’s crazy making.
The exchanges we had which were so memorable and so hurtful, the experiences which carved the paths of our canyon come back to play themselves out again. As if they will reveal the answer.
I don’t know.
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Gwendomama writes at Gwendomama: Redefining Supermama.
