Semi-anonymous blogger
I haven’t even told my own husband this story. He knows it happened, but he doesn’t know any details. I’m hoping that by writing it down, I can learn to forget it.
When I was a junior in college, I began dating a sophomore who had transferred in that year. He seemed very kind and oddly very normal. We started officially dating less than a week after meeting and our relationship blossomed quickly. At that point in my life, I was a devout Christian and was extremely serious about maintaining my virginity until marriage. He was a Quaker, and while I don’t know exactly what his religion has to say about pre-marital sex, he was apparently all for it.
After a few months of dating, he started drinking heavily. Sometimes I partook in the drinking with him, but never as much, never as quickly. Neither of us was 21 at the time, so it’s not as if it was legal to begin with, but then, on top of that, he would drive himself back to campus while drunk.
I probably should’ve realized he had problems then, but I guess I just thought I was in love with him. In retrospect, I think I was in love with the idea of him.
Over time he grew frustrated with my chastity goal and began to bring it up in every conversation, many ending in him yelling at me for being “an ignorant idiot” and not realizing that “no one waits” and it’s “totally not worth it.” Calling me a “whore” and reminding me that you didn’t have to have sex to be one of those. I think he yelled more often than he spoke in a reasonable voice.
But I kept waiting. And he kept drinking.
One night he came to the apartment my roommate and I shared. He drank a bottle of wine all by himself (even though no one else was drinking). He then led me to my bedroom and proceeded to try to undress me, which I resisted. He ripped all the buttons off my shirt in the struggle. He tossed me on to the bed and was able to pin me down to molest my breasts. The breasts I had never shown to anyone.
After what seemed like a lifetime of this molestation, he stopped, undid his pants, and exposed himself to me, made me do things that I’m still unwilling to write about here and then he warned me not to say a word and left, still very, very drunk.
I still didn’t end our relationship, even when he told that he would do the same thing to me every night until I volunteered to take my shirt off myself.
And he did.
And a few weeks after that, drunk again, he got my shirt and pants off before I found my voice and screamed. I screamed until my roommate opened her door and he was afraid she’d walk into my room.
That night, he dumped me over instant messenger because I was a “bitch” and a “whore” and he didn’t want to be with me anymore. He told me I wasn’t good enough for him.
Less than a week later, he was back at my door, begging for me to take him back. When I told him no, he promised I’d regret it. And while he tried to intimidate my friends and scare me, I never regretted it.
Looking back, the only things I regret are not trying to leave sooner, and not reporting what he did to anyone.
I thought he was too drunk to remember a lot of it, until a year ago when I received an email from him letting me know he was sorry for what he’d done and apparently in one of his alcoholic anonymous steps, wanted to make amends.
Maybe it was spiteful of me, but I never replied. I don’t want his apologies, I don’t want him to think he’s forgiven.
What I want is to not be afraid to be around drunk men, even my own husband, whom I love and trust with my whole heart. I want to not feel like I let myself be abused. I want to feel confident in my ability to protect myself. I want to live my life without those memories.
And maybe this is my first step to that.
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Today’s survivor blogs here. She would appreciate your comments left here, but not on her blog. Thanks for your help.
Somewhat anonymous
Post author information from here on out will appear at the bottom of the post rather than the top to further protect survivors (as Feed Readers pick up only the first few lines but hide the rest.)
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My story is not horrific, it’s not a terribly long story, but it’s my story nonetheless.
I am in hiding right now… staying in an undisclosed place, and I fear for my life.
On 1/28/09, my husband of two and a half years punched me in the chest and then threatened my life. I wasn’t sure I would make it out of the house alive. He had taken my keys and told me I wasn’t leaving. “Let’s end this right now” was the last thing I remember him screaming at me before he threw my keys at me and I was able to get away.
He was angry; angry at me, angry at my son, angry at himself. I was the easiest target. After I left the house, he had the locks changed. I have only been back once to get a few things. He is holding my things and my two sons’ things hostage. It’s how he works… he slowly sucked me in, taking control of all of the finances, canceling all my credit cards when we got married, and I handed over my paycheck and child support every month.
When I walked out the door he said, “You and your sons are FUCKED” because he thought that I couldn’t survive without him. The pain in my chest lasted a week and focusing on the pain enabled me to look forward and not look back.
I will not be a hostage to him because I have no money. I make enough to live… I have a college degree and I have one year left of law school. If I can pay my tuition, graduate and pass the bar, I will be able to help others like me. Even knowing my story, attorneys wanted money up front to help me… the one with no money, no place to live, locked out of my own house and kept from my belongings.
I will not become one of them.
As for others, there are people out there with hearts of gold, people who give everything they can to help because I won’t be one of those women who go back. I can’t go back. I refuse to go back. I don’t want to disappoint them. I know if I go back, he will kill me. I want to live.
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Today’s survivor blogs here. Please leave comments for her here rather than on her blog, which is monitored by her abuser.
Droolstreet Jen
Jen blogs at One Plus Two.
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Looking back, it’s easy and still impossible to see how I could have let it happen. I was fairly sheltered, a girl barely eighteen who fell in love for the first time. A somewhat secret love, he was a bit older and wilder, a boy who’d lived down the street from me forever and yet I always watched him from afar. Until that one day we actually met.
It started out as things always start. Full of excitement and anticipation, new experiences and a mad, mad love. And then one day and over a series of many days it grew dark until there was nothing left but a gaping hole filled with black.
It’s easy to simply say he was an asshole, but he was much more than that. He was controlling, violent, terribly cruel. It began slowly, verbally tearing me down during an argument, threatening to leave. As I grew more emotionally attached his behavior escalated, grabbing my wrist a bit too hard, screaming in my face. Then one day he tried to push me out of a moving car. And it didn’t stop there.
And yet I stayed.
There are a number of reasons for the staying, much of it tied into youth and inexperience and also a deep feeling of guilt. I knew better than to be treated this way and yet I persisted, making excuses for the staying and more importantly, for him. He had a rough childhood, he was under a lot of stress. It really wasn’t so bad. I loved him.
The mental and sometimes physical abuse continued to escalate as these things often do. There came a time when he began abusing me intimately, forcing me to do things I did not want to do, things that today I would call rape. The erosion of my esteem happened over time and by the time it finally was too much I’d suffered more than I care to remember, allowing myself to be demeaned and hurt more times than I can remember over the period of a year.
I told no one. I remember clearly feeling this was a weight I had to carry, a price for my choice. And then one night things were so bad, his abuse so unspeakable, that I knew I couldn’t take it any more. I was terrified walking up the stairs to the apartment, the living room dark with him seated in a chair. I can’t do this anymore I said and he replied but you’ve been doing it for so long and who would have you anyways? and crying, crying I grabbed as much as I could carry and ran back down those stairs and off into the night, running, running away from the abuse and the cruelty and the shame I felt for what I allowed to happen to myself. I never saw him again.
It took years and countless hours of therapy, changing my major to psychology and working in a domestic violence shelter to find myself again, and today and for many years before, I’ve remembered this time in my life with a mix of shock and awe. I still can’t believe I treated myself so poorly and put my life at risk but I did and it’s what I carry, and while it doesn’t hurt any longer and hasn’t for years it’s served as a reminder of how fragile young girls are, how silence is deadly, and how I had to learn to love myself as an adult and for the first time.
Misty
Misty blogs here.
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There was never a warning. I’d be walking by him and then be shoved so hard into a nearby wall, without warning, that I’d bounce off, and go down. Or suddenly be propelled so hard across the room as to go over the back of the sofa, knocking it over. We’d be driving and he’d hit me in the face or punch my arm. Sam would change in a flash to cold and angry. Afterward, I always got flowers.
One time I yelled for help, and the neighbors called management to complain about “the noise.” I’d never known anyone who was abused. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was 1984, and I was 19 years old. To this day his family denies it, or has once admitted something may have happened, because I was a bad wife.
Eventually, I decided to leave. We talked it out, but later when I came home from work, and entered the bedroom, I saw holes in the walls. Things were thrown around and furniture upended. When I turned to leave, he was standing in the doorway. Over the next few hours, he made me to take off my clothes and lay on the floor, while he alternatively begged and screamed and threatened me. I did everything he asked hoping he’d calm down and let me go. Then he wrapped his hands around my throat and started killing me.
I couldn’t loosen his grip. I remember kicking. Blackness filled in from the edges of my vision, and I knew that I was dying. I remember thinking my son would never know me. I wondered who would raise him. Then everything went black.
And then I could see. Sam was in the doorway. His best friend was there, looking at us, confused. When I could, I screamed, “Help me!” and then his friend, Butch, told Sam calmly he needed to go, and so he walked out the door like nothing had happened. I rented a U-Haul and went home to my parents, and filed for divorce.
Once after that, Sam asked me to come over, said that he’d gotten counseling. When I got there he hid my keys and said I could have them if I had sex with him or drove home naked. Afterward, I told my parents what happened. They took out a restraining order. Sam stalked me for about a year after that, and then committed suicide in November of 1986.
I found a family history of instability; Sam was sent to an orphanage when his mother killed herself with a knife. The first ten years after I escaped I put it out of my mind, and got on with the business of raising our child and the other children I had with my second husband.
Then Tammy Haas of Yankton and Nicole Simpson were both murdered. The Haas story got little press outside our area, but overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointed to her boyfriend, who was acquitted. Then OJ Simpson was acquitted. After that happened, I would find myself crying at work without knowing why. I became depressed, and finally got help at the student counseling center, where I was told I had signs of PTSD. I made myself deal with all of it. I told my family; they were uncomfortable hearing it, but it didn’t matter. I told for me, not for them.
Today, I am happily married, and a licensed Mental Health Therapist. Sometimes, when I see a man in a grocery store buying flowers, I often wonder who he’s saying “sorry” to. I disclose my abuse to patients if I feel it’s therapeutically useful for them, but it doesn’t define me. I bought Strange Piece of Paradise and communicated with the author, and thought more about what happened, and accepted some important truths:
It doesn’t matter whether I was a “good” wife.
It doesn’t matter if he was crazy, or confused, or troubled, or traumatized by his childhood.
It doesn’t matter why it happened.
All that matters is that every person has the right of to be safe from violence, and the right to stop whatever abusive treatment they are receiving.
