Domestic Violence Awareness Month

As Domestic Violence Awareness Month comes to a close I wanted to make a post. The thing is while I think this is an important topic, it’s not one I have much personal experience with. I’ve debated how exactly to approach this post.

For me, if a man hits me once it will be the last time. I have always promised myself once is enough. And the reason is because I know how it works, I know that they escalate, I know that it doesn’t start with a man punching me in the face, and I know it doesn’t end there either.

Did you know that a person that is choked/strangled by their partner is 750% more likely to die by their partner within the next year?

I made that promise to myself so that I didn’t fall into the hole a lot of abuse victims do. That it was just once. It won’t happen again. And if it does happen again, maybe I deserve it. It’s not that bad. They only do it because they love me. You know, all that stuff. I wanted to draw a definitive line to know when I needed to leave.

Most of the physical abuse I’ve experienced was from my father. And that sounds very sad but I had a decent childhood. I love my dad and he loves me. He's a good guy. Nothing was really that bad… but you see why I had to draw a definitive line? If I say all of that about the person that has abused me the most?

The main thing is that my father would grab the back of my neck. Almost like a mother dog when picking up her pups. He would grab my neck and squeeze it a bit. It didn’t hurt, but it was uncomfortable. Sometimes he would guide where I walked like this. Sometimes we would just stand there while he reprimanded me for something dumb. I was a good kid, I don’t really know why I was in trouble all the time.

Well, I told my high school boyfriend this. He acted concerned. Sad for me. Until he started doing it too. We started good but our relationship became pretty toxic, on both ends, and when we started fighting a lot he started grabbing my neck too. I hated it. He only did it a few times before we broke up. That’s not even why we broke up though. He became incredibly controlling and jealous. To the point he started hacking my snapchat to read my messages.

That’s the extent of abuse I have faced. I’m grateful I have chosen men that are kind to me. But the last two years have given me a front row seat to what real abuse looks like. I desperately tried to save a close friend of mine. He experienced physical abuse that he downplayed because he was a tall, strong man and his wife was short and weak. I told him that it still didn’t make it okay but I could tell he didn’t believe me. It was just something he had to accept.

I found that out early on. That was before I knew a lot of the other abuse he experienced. I can’t say I was surprised by the rest though. She was verbally abusive to him in front of essentially complete strangers. I could only imagine what she said to him behind closed doors. And how immaturely she handled even the smallest of disagreements meant her putting her hands on him was zero percent shocking to me.

Other abuse included gaslighting, love bombing, invading his privacy, breaking his things, and fucking with his sleep. Her continually keeping him up late before he had to work early is why Dakota allowed him to start staying in our guest room sometimes. Now, I didn’t realize how common of a tactic it is to fuck with your partner’s sleep. But me googling terms like gaslighting or love bombing (to send him the definitions and show him what he was going through is fully and universally recognized as abuse and not normal) has made my algorithms now feed me tons of divorce content and narcissistic abuser content. And it turns out sleep deprivation is a common abuse tactic. I’m not entirely sure if the purpose is to keep you too tired to fight, or to make you cranky enough to fight so they can play the victim.

What I do know is when I was a few months postpartum I had a period. This was the first time I had a period naturally, not due to birth control or fertility treatments, in ten years. And obviously add in the normal postpartum hormones… Ugh. This coincided with my friend working crazy overtime to avoid being at home with said abusive wife and save up to move out. I don’t remember what our almost-fight was about, but I remember saying, “You’re on 10 hours of sleep in the last three days and I’m on my first unmedicated period in a decade. Let’s come back to this tomorrow.”

I could read the relief in his response. And I could tell that wasn’t something he was used to. A large portion of his job is diffusing tension, and yet the idea that could happen in his personal life too seemed foreign. But abusers reset what your expectation of normal is. That’s how it works.

Shocking to no one, this person was physically violent to others, including previous partners. And me.

October is also Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. This isn’t really the blog for that type of thing, but it’s worth a small paragraph considering my friend’s abuser also killed my unborn child. I was supposed to give birth within two weeks of my best friend. I was so excited to go through this journey with her. But someone else’s abuser killed my child because I tried to help them escape the abuse. She killed my son. He had a due date. He had a name.

I hope anyone that is in an abusive relationship recognizes it. That’s the first step, and often the hardest. Even realizing what they’re facing is abuse. Then I hope they get the courage to leave. I hope they can find a support system to help them. And I sincerely hope they make it out alive. For my friend, and for men in general, that’s easier to do than it is for women. Not to downplay what they go through, but men tend to make it out alive. Broken, beaten, hopeless…maybe. But alive. So many women die at the hands of their abusers when they try to leave. From the bottom of my heart I hope they are divinely protected.