Wednesday Q&A: Is my boyfriend’s jealousy abuse?
QUESTION:
My boyfriend and I have been together for two years. I am 19. We started dating when I was a junior in high school and he was a sophomore in college. Now I am about to start college at a school three hours away. We love each other and decided to make our relationship work, even though it will be long distance. I moved to college three weeks ago for a summer orientation program. I am living in a co-ed dorm with 50 other students. I am shy, but I have made some friends in my hall, which makes me feel much less nervous about starting classes in a few weeks. My boyfriend and I talk every night. I thought he would be happy for me, because it usually takes me a while to come out of my shell. But he has gotten really angry. He accuses me of cheating on him, and always asks if there are guys in my room. He tells me that I never loved him and wants to know whether I cheated on him before I moved away. I have never given him any reason to feel this way (and honestly never cheated). My roommate overheard our conversation a couple of nights ago and asked what was going on. She told me that jealousy and control are signs of abuse. My boyfriend has never tried to hurt me, but he gets very jealous when guys look at me, and he always likes to do things for me that I would rather do for myself. These things never really bothered me until now, but I’m wondering are those warning signs, too? Now he is telling me I should transfer to his school even though it doesn’t offer my degree program. He said that he doesn’t think he can handle a long-distance relationship, that he’s not sure he can trust me being so far away, and says if I don’t come back he will hurt himself. I don’t know what to do.
ANSWER:
You deserve to feel safe and trusted in your relationship; you deserve to feel completely yourself when you are with your partner. Your relationship should be a place where you feel celebrated for being you. You deserve this.
When a relationship undergoes a major change (like one partner moving away or changing careers, for example), it can be natural for one or both partners to need a little reassurance that the basic parameters of the relationship haven’t changed, and that they can continue relying on the relationship for support. However, the situation you are describing is very, very different.
Your boyfriend’s behavior raises serious red flags. The roommate is right: Control and jealousy are two huge warning signs of dating violence and emotional abuse. It sounds like your boyfriend may regularly engage in controlling behaviors, and he has certainly exhibited unwarranted jealousy. In addition, he is threatening to harm himself as a way of manipulating you into doing what he wants. The use of threats – to your safety, the safety of others, or to himself – is another classic warning sign. These behaviors can escalate into more severe forms of abuse if left unchecked — including physical violence.
It sounds like your instincts are telling you that your boyfriend’s behavior is unhealthy and potentially dangerous. Your top priority should be keeping yourself safe. The following steps can help:
First, you can learn more about dating abuse. Here are a few places to start:
Second, you can consider talking with someone at your campus counseling center. Typically these services are free of charge and connect you with a trained professional who can help you identify ways to navigate your relationship safely and talk through your options. If your campus does not have a counseling center, you can call the National Teen Dating Violence Hotline at 1-866-331-9474 for support, information and problem-solving.
Third, you can continue building those friendships at school. Having a strong support system is a critical piece of any safety plan. Speaking of, you can learn more about safety planning, in the event your boyfriend’s abusive behaviors escalate or you continue to feel unsafe and uncertain.
Fourth, if you are sincerely worried your boyfriend may hurt himself, and if you feel comfortable doing so, you can share with him the phone number to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, if in the future you decide to break up with your boyfriend, make sure you put your safety first:
- If you’re in person, break up with your boyfriend in a public place.
- Tell other people in advance that you plan to break up with him. Let them know where you’ll be.
- Arrange to call a friend, family member or counselor after you talk with your boyfriend so you can debrief what happened.
And remember, you are not alone. Please consider talking with a trusted friend or another adult. You do not need to go through this by yourself.
Please exercise the same safe, supportive, non-judgmental restraint in the comment section of the Q&A as you do for survivors, as many of them are reading.
Our volunteer expert, Carrie K., is a trained advocate who has worked with survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as well as their families and friends. Her background includes hotline advocacy, community education, and awareness and prevention programming around issues of domestic violence and sexual assault. She currently works for a domestic violence intervention and prevention program in Wisconsin. She blogs at rageisgood.blogspot.com
If you have something you have always wanted to know about domestic violence and/or sexual assault, please email your question to carrie [at] violenceunsilenced [dot] com.
Flutter
My fiance dreams of finding me, in a bed drenched with my own blood. He dreams of running through the door to save me and being too late. My brother dreams of finding you and slicing you from ear to ear and watching you bleed. He dreams of finding me bleeding on that floor, just a little too late.
Too late to save me.
These are two more things you’ve stolen from me. To have the man I love think of me as someone whole and happy. To have my brother never have to think of the sex that ruined his sister. To them, I will always need protecting, I will always be bloody and just beyond help. They will always be too late.
Seventeen years is between us and our chance meeting. Where five minutes of your mania forever changed me. Where five minutes of your sickness made us inexorably tangled. Five minutes at the point of your knife, taking me from what I was and making me into what I am.
I am in a different city than the one who saw me innocent. But in the stifling heat of this new place, I still look for you. Your smell rising hot from black pavement as I walk to my car. I hold my head in haughty awareness, a frail armor for the scared victim that I am. My nerves always tingling when I am alone, waiting. Tense. Poised. My fight or flight forever enacted in memory of you.
In memory of you raping me.
In memory of you using your knife as an appendage and ripping me open from the inside, as I begged. My voice bounced off the tiled walls of the public restroom. The sound of my jagged voice, mixed with the mocking wheeze of your laugh. You laughed as I begged you not to destroy the dress that my mother had worked overtime to pay for. You laughed as I gasped with each thrusting jab of the knife. You laughed as I stopped crying and started to fade. You bit my lower lip, then dragged the knife across my cheek. To wipe across my face, blood from my womb. You spread your drunken breath across my face and asked if I believed in Jesus.
When I said yes, you told me to beg him for my life.
I did.
In the late December of my undoing, you held that same knife aloft and I saw your fingernails, caked in my blood. I wondered how many others had their protein under those nails, how many women were now smeared inside of me and over my exposed skin. You grunted in release when you replaced your knife with your body inside of me. You stole that from me, too. The possibility of fogged windows in summer, sharing my virgin body for love, or very least for lust. But either way, of my choosing. You took my choice with your odd, blunt fingers and your disturbing yellow eyes.
You made me tell you that I loved you, then called me your pathetic whore.
I was a whore before I had ever been a lover.
I believed that later, as I knelt in your absence in that same bathroom and scrubbed my blood from the tile floor, smelling your semen mixed with the flower of my veins, all around me as disparate twins. The springs of this unlikely coil, tightening among the industrial pink hand soap and paper towels I used to clean away my terror. The same paper towels I held between my legs to keep my blood from running down.
My pain is a scar, it rests in the entrance of me. Put there by your knife. Six weeks after you branded me, forever your conquest, that scar was revealed to a doctor as he aborted the child who somehow managed to nestle in my womb. Your child. A minor miracle, quickly extinguished by the terrified girl you bludgeoned. My first pregnancy, stopped short. My virginity, stolen. My life forever altered and you will never know my name.
I believed you when you told me you would find me if I told a soul. I believed you when you said you would finish the job. I didn’t sleep the night I told my story for the first time, in fear that you would come in through my window and make good on your promise. But I will not keep quiet now. I have survived this war and your shock and awe. You will never make me beg again.
***
Flutter blogs at Flutter: Dark and Divine.
Nic
“Drugged”
*****
I remember what I wore.
I still have the denim jacket.
I didn’t want the med examiner to put it with the rape kit and the rest of my clothes as evidence.
It’s designer.
I remember he was a friend of a friend.
A friend of a friend I once trusted.
I remember eating pizza at Mellow Mushroom.
I remember talking about friends we both knew from back home.
I remember enjoying myself.
*****
I remember getting in the bar underage because he worked there.
I remember sitting at a table against a dark wall.
I remember feeling “cool.”
I remember him ordering drinks. Not from a waitress but at the bar himself.
I remember waiting for the drinks.
I remember how many I drank.
I remember talking about my boyfriend (now my husband) and how they would get along well.
I remember saying, “I have to pee.”
I remember going to the bathroom, flushing, washing my hands, and then walking out of the restroom.
My legs went numb.
*****
I remember telling him, “I can’t feel my legs.”
I remember he said he would take me home.
I remember him lifting my arm over his shoulder to help me to his car.
I remember him opening the car door for me.
I remember getting in the car.
I remember buckling my seat belt.
That’s where I stop remembering… I think…
What’s in my mind after clicking the seat belt could be true or false… reality or imagination.
*****
I don’t know. I will never know. Truly. I cannot turn back the clock.
I remember wanting to turn back the clock.
*****
I remember saying “no.”
I think I remember saying “no” as he pinned my wrists and spread my legs.
It was a whisper.
My voice was hoarse.
I remember pain… physical and emotional.
But did I say, “no”?
*****
I remember waking up in his bed. He was on the floor. Naked.
I remember seeing the condom wrapper on the alarm clock.
I remember what time it was.
I remember searching his apartment for a bathroom and being violently ill.
I remember finding articles of my clothing scattered.
I remember not knowing where I was.
I remember getting dressed while he was still sleeping.
*****
I remember seeing that he had gone through my purse because my wallet was out, opened, invaded.
*****
Nothing had been stolen.
Everything had been stolen.
*****
I remember him waking up as I zipped my jeans.
I remember him asking why I was crying.
I remember him driving me to my dorm.
I remember the silence.
Deafening.
*****
I remember him putting his hand on my knee when I opened the car door to get out.
I remember wanting to vomit on his hand.
I remember him asking me if I wanted to go to church with him tomorrow.
I remember wanting to vomit on his hand.
I remember thinking “what the fuck?!”
I remember him asking me if I was ok.
I remember saying, “I don’t think so.”
I remember wanting to vomit on his hand that was on my knee.
*****
I remember showering in scalding water.
I remember burning my skin.
I remember using an entire bar of soap until it disintegrated.
I remember using a new, fresh towel when I got out of the shower.
I remember vomiting more and more and more…
Til there was nothing left inside of me.
*****
But it was all already gone.
Nothing was left.
*****
I remember driving myself to the ER.
I remember telling the triage nurse, “I think I was raped.”
I remember her glaring at me and asking, “you think?”
I remember having vials of blood drawn.
I remember the med examiner looking for evidence from my body.
Hairs, finger prints, scratches, skin under my finger nails.
They took what was left of me.
*****
I remember she was frustrated with me because I had already showered and peed.
“Very little evidence here,” she said while I laid with my legs spread open.
I remember being alone.
Entirely alone.
*****
I remember the exam, the doctor, the cop who sat in the corner.
The rape kit.
I remember the doctor saying, “the abundance of tearing of the tissue is sign of trauma to the area.”
I remember thinking “what the fuck does that mean?”
I remember crying while some stranger combed my pubic hair… for his strays.
I remember pictures were taken of bruises on my inner thighs, my breasts, my arms.
I remember a bruise under my right arm pit from him carrying me over his shoulder.
A bruise on my collar bone.
I remember someone saying, “it’ll be he said/she said…”
*****
I remember asking someone to call my mom.
I remember they left her a voicemail.
Who leaves a fucking voicemail?
I remember leaving the ER and going back to my dorm.
I had to be given clothes to wear home.
They were tossed in the garbage that same day.
I remember hating those clothes.
*****
I remember curling up in a ball on my twin-sized bed and bear-hugging myself until it hurt.
I remember wanting it to hurt.
I remember emailing my boyfriend (now husband) to “CALL ME.”
*****
I remember my dad having to get off a plane he had just boarded after receiving a phone call from my mom, saying what had happened to me.
I remember not speaking for an entire 24 hour period, once my parents arrived.
I remember sitting with my knees curled up to my chest for those 24 hours in the hotel room I stayed in with my parents.
I remember my mom on the phone with my brother.
I remember hearing him ask, “how is she?” and mom answering, “she’s quiet, very quiet.”
*****
I remember being questioned incessantly by the police…
I remember the district attorney was female.
I remember being grateful for that.
*****
But I didn’t know. I didn’t know everything they wanted me to know, to answer.
I remember the police finding the drug in his apartment.
I remember being told by the police officer “he and his roommate are in the next room,” as I gave my written statement… signed my written statement.
I remember wondering if his roommate was there that night.
Involved…
*****
I remember not remembering.
__________
Nic blogs at My Bottle’s Up.
Wednesday Q&A: Does Alcohol Cause Abuse?
QUESTION:
Many of the stories I’ve heard and read about (as well as the personal experiences of women I know) involve men who batter after drinking excessively. If alcohol abuse leads to partner abuse, it would make sense to focus on curbing alcoholism if we care about the lives and safety of women (not to mention their children). Is this off base? Does alcoholism cause domestic violence?
ANSWER:
The simple answer is “no.” Alcoholism does not cause abuse. Many people who abuse alcohol never abuse their partners. Likewise, many batterers have never had a drinking problem. In short, alcohol does not inspire violence from otherwise non-violent people.
That alcohol abuse leads to domestic violence is a common misconception, since they sometimes occur simultaneously. For example, the use of alcohol (and other drugs) can trigger an abusive episode from someone who is already prone to abusive behavior. In one study, abusive men who also suffered from alcoholism were 11 times more likely to assault their partners on days when the abusers had been drinking.
Alcohol also can increase the severity of a violent episode and, according to some studies, increase the likelihood that a victim will be killed. Domestic violence advocates often work with survivors to devise strategies for avoiding arguments or other conflicts when their abusers have been drinking, because the risk of escalated violence can be so much greater.
While alcohol abuse and domestic violence sometimes occur together, one does not cause the other. Unfortunately, many abusers rely on the popular belief that alcohol is the cause of their behavior. A common excuse many abusers use is that “the alcohol made me do it.” This is simply one more way abusers use to avoid taking responsibility for their actions.
Victims, too, can hold the belief that alcohol is somehow responsible (which can be a comforting thought, because no one wants to think their loved ones are capable of violence on their own). Many survivors tell us they hoped the abuse would stop once their abusers completed substance abuse treatment — but it almost never does. Batterers use this hope to their advantage; abusers who go through treatment and become sober often use this as a tool to exert further control over their partners, saying things like, “You can’t leave me – if you did, I would have to start using again, and it would be your fault.”
Effective treatment for alcoholic abusers focuses on both the alcoholism AND the partner abuse, as independent (if overlapping) problems. Addressing only the alcoholism will not end the abuse.
You can find more information about alcohol abuse and domestic violence here and here.
Thank you for asking this question — this is a common misunderstanding about what causes domestic violence, and I’m glad for the opportunity to address it!
Please exercise the same safe, supportive, non-judgmental restraint in the comment section of the Q&A as you do for survivors, as many of them are reading.
Our volunteer expert, Carrie K., is a trained advocate who has worked with survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as well as their families and friends. Her background includes hotline advocacy, community education, and awareness and prevention programming around issues of domestic violence and sexual assault. She currently works for a domestic violence intervention and prevention program in Wisconsin. She blogs at rageisgood.blogspot.com
If you have something you have always wanted to know about domestic violence and/or sexual assault, please email your question to carrie [at] violenceunsilenced [dot] com.
