Behind Closed Doors: Living in an Abusive Relationship

Behind closed doors, there’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by it. UK police receive one call about it every minute, an estimated 1,300 calls a day or over 570,000 a year, though less than 40% of cases are reported. No other crime has a rate of repeat victimisation so high(1). I am talking, of course, of domestic violence.

Domestic violence can happen to anyone.

Imagine for one moment that it’s you that it’s happening to. You dealing with the carnage.

Until you look back, you don’t even identify it as domestic violence: that’s something that happens to other people, right? You don’t use words like ‘abuser’ or ‘beaten’ or ‘raped’. That sounds so serious! You use minimizing language, always. And you’re so confused: tired and scared and confused. Hell, the confusion! He’s so attentive to start with, so thoughtful to start with, you don’t even notice things, or at least nothing to put a finger on until it’s got Bad, by which time it’s too late. Then it gets Worse, and the language ends: you have no point of reference; you stop speaking.

It begins with the odd comment about what you’re wearing. A few snidey remarks about your friends. Then: jealousy. Full on. He says you’re flirting with other men and though God knows that’s the last thing on your mind, you feel confused. You don’t meet your friends to save the arguments so there’s no one about to question his behavior, to get an opinion from, to back you up. You think - maybe I am flirty though I don’t mean to be.

I’ll try harder.

There’s been a gradual chip, chip, chipping at your self esteem. You were always a little unsure of yourself and now that’s become a yawning chasm of lost-ness. He tells you he loves you but he criticizes you, he gets angry, he gets so angry these days but he says it’s your fault and maybe it is. The things he seemed to like about you to start with, your rebelliousness, your intelligence, now seem to annoy him. You drink more to help with the feelings. Sometimes when he’s shouting it doesn’t feel like you’re really there at all.

Then it gets physical.

This is when people will tell you you should have left. People are full of helpful advice like that after the fact. I’m sorry, did I say advice? I meant judgment. He tells you it’s your fault and these people, the people you used to think would help you, hospital staff, they say the same thing. Look at her going back to him! He told you people couldn’t be trusted and you know what, he’s right. At your lowest point people have exempted him and blamed you.

You feel like scum.

You feel like you’re going crazy, and you know the drink’s a problem, the drugs are a problem. Together with the self harm they were things that helped you to feel in control even if only a little, to make it a little less painful, the self inflicted damage a means to ease the suffering in your head. He tells you you’re fucking lucky to have him, and you believe him. You look crazy but he doesn’t, you sport the bruises from the last beating and end up hiding at home, ashamed to be seen, afraid to be judged. He goes where he likes when he likes, he sees other women, and he’ll tell you all about that and how much better they are than you when he gets home.

You’re afraid you’ll be sectioned.

He used to be so sorry and upset when he hit you, but it wears off. His anger fades quicker than the bruises but can be triggered in an instant. You feel yourself splitting, mind and body separating out during the beatings, during the violence.

You are so, so lonely. And scared. Everything that’s close to you is broken and destroyed, and at some point you realize you’ve lost even yourself.  You see it in the eyes, in your eyes: an emptiness that speaks of exhaustion and pain and fear and hurt almost above and beyond human endurance. You’re here in body but it’s less clear how present you really are in any meaningful sense.

Things are happening that you didn’t know went on. Sex-wise he’s opened your eyes to a whole load of stuff. Did I say it gets confusing? It gets a little confused. He’ll be nice then he’ll be nasty, taunting you for being frigid, for not doing what ‘real women’ do. He shows you magazines and dvds to teach you how it’s done, and you’re scared to say no. You used to say no, but the rows and the violence mean you don’t say too much these days, and it doesn’t stop him anyway. Anything you say can tick him off and make his fist itch. 

It’s painful and degrading but it'll get worse.

He breaks your boundaries one by one. He wants anal sex. He wants to use toys. He wants to take pictures. There are certain points where lines are crossed and power shifts to him. You both know it though it’s unspoken. After the pictures he has it in his power to humiliate you publicly.

Now he brings in other people.

These ‘friends’ of his, his dealer plus entourage, he wants you to ‘look after’ them, and you’ve learned what that means. Outsiders will say if it was that bad you would have left, but it’s not that simple. Just because you’re still here doesn’t mean you want to be. If you could walk away, you would, but the last time you tried that, you got caught and by the time he’d finished with you, you weren’t walking anywhere anytime soon. He tells you he’ll finish the job off if it ever happens again. He doesn’t let you leave the house. He has the money and the car keys. You have a serious addiction and you’re in trauma. You have PTSD and it makes you easy to manipulate. Sometimes you can’t move, sometimes you can’t speak, sometimes it’s like he’s shouting at you but there’s actually no one there.

Choices? Clear thinking? I might have said it before but it gets confused.

Memories are fractured and best forgotten. You can’t take tomorrow for granted. The mind is resilient, the body resilient, until it isn’t. Fainting. Chest pains, wrist pains, leg pains, abdo pains, heavy bleeding, sickness, gashes, bruises, eyes so swollen you can’t see for a while, will never see as well out of after. The vision returns, but it’s not the same. Head injuries. The drugs and drink help the forgetting, the head injuries help the forgetting. You don’t half bleed a lot from your head. You take care of the body as best you can, you lie awake some nights scared to sleep in case you don’t wake up, looking at the belt draped on the end of the bed, a dark reminder.

If he lets you eat, you eat. If you keep these men happy, maybe he won’t hit you. Maybe not tonight anyway. You hurt all the time, from the beatings, from the fucking. Words like ‘pimping’ won’t come into your vocabulary until much later, and even then they’re hard to say – too real, too painful. Instead you think in colours and numbers, in rhymes and letters. Anything not to let the reality in. You need safety, everybody needs safety, but no place is safe. You tell yourself: I’m not really here, it’s not really me, it’s just a body but I’m not that, I’m someplace else.

You develop different headspaces.

Time passes and then, miracle of miracles, you manage to escape.

A happy ending? Not quite, not yet. If you were looking for a movie ending, riding off into the sunset, you'd be disappointed.

This is just the beginning. You try to fit in, to act ‘normal’ but you don’t know how. Your recent experiences have geared you to survival rather than living, have left you with massive trauma that confuses everything, the past seems more real than the present at times with the PTSD, stuff triggers it all the time and you feel disorientated and lost. The loneliness continues, even in company. You begin piecing stuff together, trying to figure: what the fuck happened here? You’re scared to talk about it, afraid of more judgment, knowing from past experience that people will take it more as a reflection of you and your character than a reflection of him.

The pain and the realization of what went before, what you couldn’t let yourself know, it catches you up. Denial kept you alive and it’s fucking hard to give it up, especially now you’re off the drink and drugs. You get nightmares and flashbacks, wake up soaked in sweat, you throw up, you cry sometimes but more often you don’t. You have scars, you don’t trust, your body upsets you, constant reminder that it is of where you've been, of what they did. You start to see how it could have been, how it should have been, and the stark, painful contrast of how it actually was.

Feelings and images burned into your body and mind, replaying.

You’ve seen stuff you didn’t want to see, that no one should ever have to see, experienced stuff that makes vocabulary seem redundant, and you realize that scary as it is to talk about it, you’re gonna have to find someone, try and do it somehow, because it’s too much on your own. You can’t do it on your own anymore. Images you’ve tried to bury and forget forcing their way out. They make you sick, the words make you sick and the prospect of trusting someone with stuff so close to you that sometimes it feels as if it is you makes you sick. But what are the options?

That was me. That was how it was, how it is, for me. It was me but it could have been you. It’s an epidemic. 1 in 4 women will be affected by domestic violence. The stories vary but the themes are the same. Being raped, being pimped, pornography can happen to anyone. Don’t see this issue as something that doesn’t concern you because it does. My ignorance was bliss until suddenly it wasn’t. We’re all in this together. The abuser needs to be made visible. Blame shouldn’t fall on an already traumatised victim. Women shouldn’t be living in fear of being abused, whether that be inside or outside the home. Every time we blame a victim of domestic violence, we exonerate her abuser. Every time we shine the light of judgment on her, we let him continue to live in the shadows.

On average, two women a week are killed by a violent partner or ex-partner (2). People are dying and it needs to stop. And people are surviving and dealing with judgment and willful misunderstanding on a daily basis. That needs to change too.

It was me but it could have been you.

---

(1) See www.womensaid.org.uk for statistics

(2)  (Povey, (ed.), 2005; Home Office, 1999; Department of Health, 2005.)
Also thanks to Rebecca Mott for ending my writing block!

Silence Isn't Always Golden

I would sit in therapy, when things were starting to go wrong with my ex (later my pimp), in silence. An hour would pass by and I’d be still as a statue. It wasn’t stubbornness on my part. It was simply that I couldn’t put words to what was happening to me. My head was a tangled mess of unidentified, partially formed emotions and disjointed fact that rendered vocabulary useless. The images and sounds of the increasing violence in my life replayed in my head and body, knotting and weaving together into a great unfathomable web with me trapped in the centre. My body, so overloaded, froze, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

I continued to go to counselling though. I took comfort in the presence of this man. He was caring, he never shouted at me, and he was very, very patient. I wasn’t used to the gentleness and I needed it. So I’d sit for an hour with the stuffed bear he kept on the sofa held on my lap, mute but at least physically safe. It was my time, my hour, with somebody concerned with me. It contrasted sharply with my life outside of counselling, in which my partner's moods and fancies dictated everything from what I wore to what I ate to whether I got knocked about or 'made love to' (I use the term loosely - there was never any choice). In a world in which there were no rules to play by to stay safe and no consistency except insofar as my isolation and confusion increased, an hour with someone who gave a shit, who worked within boundaries, was a Godsend.

In early recovery I sat in therapy, a different town, a different therapist, and I found myself again too often in silence. I knew I needed to talk but found myself mute. Everything was still jumbled, everything still confused. Sobriety prevented the added confusion of daily blackouts but my past remained fragmented – images, sounds, smells, body memories – lacking in chronology and largely unspeakable. I still lacked the language. I didn’t know how I felt or what I thought and was trying to get my head around, to make sense of, what the hell had gone on. Fear and shame did little to aid my ability to articulate years of violence and degradation.

When something awful and traumatic happens, you go through phases: shock, numbness, sadness, anger, relief… When trauma occurs everyday, when you are subjected to daily violence, to daily taunts and threats, to being sold to man after man, reduced to scavenging for food, to crawling through, you don’t have the chance to process. There is no safety in which to process, in which to heal. To soften is to weaken, to acknowledge the pain is too much: it’s simply a case of survival, day by day, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. Alert to where the next danger is coming from, or else out on the other side of fear – detached, mind wandering nowhere in particular. You find yourself doing little things unconsciously – repeating mantras as a distraction, picking out the third letter of every word when he’s shouting in your face because you don’t want to hear what he’s saying: the words becoming simply a string of letters, something you observe. You try not to let things touch you – you don’t want things to touch you. You wouldn’t survive if you felt everything they said and did to you. The mind splits, to protect you, the mind detaches, the body takes the brunt of their actions. You exist in a nightmare because you have to, and this nightmare is your life.

Articulate in my everyday life, the seeming impossibility of voicing this stuff was simply terrifying. It ate away at me like a cancer. I feared I would remain trapped alone with the horror of the past, consigned to madness, forever unknown and misunderstood. This fear was fuelled by the fact that, from an outsider’s perspective, I was highly competent. People saw that I wasn’t moving forward but couldn’t understand it, and so they judged me. That judgment in turn made trust impossible and any attempt at communication laughable.

Now I sit in therapy, some years later, and still I find myself tonight sitting in silence. My mouth simply won't open: something triggers me and it locks shut. Not safe here! Let nothing in and nothing out. So many things affect my ability to talk! Years of abuse, of having unpleasant things forced into my mouth. And my ability to trust, fragile at the best of times, evaporates as I find my past re-playing, head full, body hurting. Old threats about what would happen if I ever told anyone (and they’ll never believe a fuck up like you, anyway), resurface. I find myself still grasping for language to try to convey stuff that goes beyond words. What is it like to be raped and beaten and threatened on a daily basis? You use words like ‘fear’ and ‘pain’ and ‘horrific’ but they seem inadequate, fall woefully short. Language is all I have at my disposal to convey in therapy what was done to me, what it was like to be me, is still like to be me re-experiencing all this stuff through PTSD. Sometimes even an approximation feels futile. The old powerlessness courses through me and I sit, trapped and alone, my past my present.

Things are changing, though, even if it feels to me frustratingly at times like they’re not. I’m not always silent in therapy – these days it’s the exception rather than the rule. We both acknowledge the inadequacy of language in talking about this stuff, and acknowledging that makes talking possible. It's a tentative process - it's just finding a way. If one thing doesn't work maybe another will. And in recovery, I have time. If I can’t talk today, I may be able to talk tomorrow. 90% of communication may be non verbal, but when that 10% has been out of my reach for so long, much as I struggle with words and with opening my mouth to say them, I appreciate them all the more. Inadequate as they may be at times, there is a power in words.

Is it Him or Is it Me?

I've been around a lot of anger of late. A lot. It's a tricky one. A very large part of me holds myself responsible when people treat me badly. I know somewhere, on some logical level, that that's not true, that when people act badly or abusively towards me, that's their stuff, their responsibility. But I don't feel it. I know it but I don't feel it.

Problem is, what's going on now gets confused by all the past shit it triggers off for me. My PTSD's in overdrive at the moment. Having been with someone who used to beat the shit out of me, and sold me to other men, and encountering more violence as I did when I prostituted myself, I find that anger - shouting, stony silences, aggressive body language, even sarcasm - all trigger that stuff off. I rapidly detach, or get faint and sick. It becomes unclear to me whether the raised voice I'm hearing belongs to the person in front of me, my ex or myself (yeah, I found in the end that his voice became my voice. Bastard.)

I went to IDAS (Independent Domestic Abuse Services) for a while since getting sober, and they really drummed it into me that no matter what, you can't make someone hit you. They are in control of their own fist. I know from my own experience of when I get really angry that I could be violent if I wanted: I just choose not to be. I passionately argue against those who tell victims of domestic violence, of rape, it was their fault. When I think about anyone else on the receiving end of such violence, I can see that idea for what it is: BS.

Yet when it comes to me, I'm uncertain. I guess it goes to show how much I internalised what my abusers told me: that I deserved it, I made it happen, that I should count myself lucky they were so generous towards me (some generosity, huh). Yet in with all the self loathing and the self destruction and the self harming, it stuck. It stuck in my head that I am the problem. I am a big fat fucking problem. I attract trouble, I cause trouble, I make bad decisions, boy do I make some bad fucking decisions. I give out the wrong signals and I make people hit me. I do it to myself.

The judgment I encountered from professionals in the course of the violence has stuck too. My fault! I should just leave him. I don't count anyway, I'm just a drunk. After another talk with the policewoman, I remember saying do you really think I want to go and stand in court and be ripped to shreds by his counsel because with my substance abuse issues, my mental health history and with the way our system deals with victims of rape and domestic violence, I don't stand a hope in hell out there. Even if he went down, at what cost? My shame and my weakness hung out for everyone to see and judge. They would've destroyed me.

And I remember the policewoman saying, what if he does it to someone else? And thinking there's no point even trying to respond to that crap. If he does it to someone else, that'll be his fault, not mine. I'm not some kind of co-abuser, jointly responsible for him somehow. Fuck, I can't stop what he does to me let alone try and step in to save someone else.

I thought then, as I think now, what a broken system. And what a damaging misperception. Yet here I am, four and a half years sober, and trying to work on self care, on not hating myself, trying to put my shattered person back together, and I find a voice in my head telling me that if this person here and now in 2011 abuses me, its my fault! A large part of me still despises myself, still blames myself. Slow progress. My different fragments, the fallout from splitting, detaching through trauma, tell me different things. The voice that happens to be there, the person I happen to be when the triggers occur, dictate my response. My fault - not my fault. He's the dick - I'm the dick. His stuff - my stuff. I deserve to be loved - I deserve to be hurt.

I'm not sleeping which never helps. I feel trapped in the past. And confused, so confused with the jumble of thoughts, with the fragments. Still, I remain clean and sober, so I guess that's progress. The mind / body shit's taking a little longer to shift.

To Trust or Not to Trust

I'm really struggling with trust at the moment. It's the kind of thing you don't notice in your everyday interactions with others until it's gone and you find the whole business of communicating with others, interacting with others, a maze and a nightmare. In recovery, through a huge conscious effort on my part, my ability to trust has grown a little. By the time I got into recovery, my trust was shot to shit. I didn't trust anyone, male or female. I felt sold out, betrayed, not simply by the men who abused me but by the whole system, the way our whole society's geared up to turn a blind eye to such abuse and classify it as fun. I felt angry at the middle class worldview in which I was brought up, which left me so totally unprepared for what happened to me that I didn't even have the vocabulary for it. Pimping. That was a word I came to only after 2 years of getting clean and sober. My ex pimped me. At the time, with the fear and through the haze of substances and head injuries I couldn't have said what was going on. In fact, I largely lost my ability to talk at all. Rape. That's another one. I think like many people I grew up believing that rape was something that only a stranger commits. The idea that a partner might rape me, and frequently, and a circle of others some of whom grew familiar to me was so far removed from my understanding that I couldn't understand it. It's a word I still can't say out loud. I could maybe now just about manage 'made me have sex'.

The professionals I encountered in the midst of this enforced this confusion, and multiplied my sense of shame. On the rare visits I made to hospital with injuries, it was made clear to me that this was my fault. I was treated with disbelief and palpable hostility - 'she's going back to him'. People spoke over me as if I was not there, and didn't even try to understand. He was in my house, and my money was tied up in my house, and I was scared and lost and struggling with an addiction beyond my control. I didn't understand why this was happening, I didn't know what to do. Brought up to trust in the medical profession, I didn't know where to turn.

When I got sober, I realised that to stay sober I was going to have to do things a bit different. I heard other people sharing about their feelings, and with the help of a few good people around me I began to make sense of what I was feeling. In early recovery, I just felt - bleugh - that was about as articulate as I could manage. Years of burying emotions, splitting off from myself, numbing myself out and detaching made it hard for me to handle any feelings at all. They threatened to overwhelm me. Identifying and labelling emotions - anger, fear, sadness - took time.

But there remained, even as I began to be more open and honest about how I was feeling, large swathes of my life about which I simply could not talk. The violence, the pimping, the filming of that abuse, stayed for me unspeakable. That was one of the reasons behind me starting this blog back in 2009: as I began to put a narrative to what had happened, as more stuff came back to me, I realised that this stuff had to go somewhere, or else I would go mad. Unable to say it aloud, and mistrustful of others on matters of this weight to me, I chose to write and just put it out there. I had a voice but without a face, I could be honest without dealing with another persons reaction to me, to this.

I have at times managed to speak a little about this stuff. I saw a therapist for a year and began to try to talk about some of it. It was incredibly raw, incredibly painful. There were long silences and I worried that I might pass out or throw up. And about his reaction. Because it was in my first year of recovery, I was still struggling for the vocab. Trying to open up a little to other people has been much less successful. I've found that even with decent people, people I count as friends, their worldview simply has no space for what I've experienced. In a society saturated by porn, which makes light of violence against women, and when a woman is raped or beaten tends to say 'well, she did go back to him / give the wrong signals / lead him on / have a drink / wind him up' it's hard to know where to go when you're struggling with the after effects of being abused. Women are in my experience often just as judgmental, and just as likely to take the side of the abuser.

This year, I've lost my last parent. That has made a big difference to my ability to trust. I've really gone backwards. Because we're not great at death in this country, I've had some negative reactions to my loss, a couple of friends have avoided me (their stuff, I know, but painful nonetheless), a few people have made comments along the lines of 'well you've just got to get on with life' (I know that! What do you think I'm fucking doing?) which translates as 'please don't talk about this' and it has reignited my total mistrust. I trust no one. My closest ally at the moment is my pet dog.

Which leaves me in a pickle because obviously this isn't going to work, I have to trust people to stay sober, but it's really hard. I am scared and lonely and so lost right now, I don't even trust myself to choose the right people to talk to. I've just begun therapy again, which is positive, and I'm having to fight against all my defensive instincts to actually let him help me. I want to be close to people, I want to love and be loved, but I'm not sure I know how to do that anymore, which makes me so sad I might cry if I only let myself. I guess I'll have to 'act as if' and just try being honest against all my instincts. In truth, I've managed on my own for too long in the past, battling on, and I'm tired, and I don't think I can do it any more.

I'm at a jumping off point. I just hope I land on terra firma, not in the shit.

Fucking Intimacy

I found in my former life that there was fucking, and then there was intimacy. Ne'er did the two meet! The concept of loving sex, in a partnership of equals, was completely alien to me. In the context of violence, choice is meaningless. I did what I had to do to stay safe, sometimes instigating sex even when I didn't want to in an attempt to avoid a beating. Or else I did what I was made to do, whether by physical constraint or threat of violence. I had no control over my body, what happened to it, who had access to it, who used and abused it. Treated like an animal, I became one - living on instinct, without dignity or respect. Rape and dignity, violence and dignity, pornography and dignity are not compatible.

Unable to remove myself physically from what was happening to me, I removed myself mentally: I numbed out. Even now, my memories remain scattered, a series of snapshots preserved in all their glorious technicolour, with huge gaping voids of time inbetween, lost. The things I do remember I'd perhaps rather not, but then the gaps disturb me too.

I can still struggle to link sex with intimacy. I can still feel very detached when I am touched, or very vulnerable. My default position is still one of wariness: of being hurt, of being used, of being humiliated again. I still cry occasionally in an intimate context. Awkward though that may be, I guess it's a good thing. Tears bring healing, and it's progress that I allow myself to feel, even if I sometimes wish I felt differently! Allowing myself to feel, to be fully present, in a sexual context is still something I'm learning. I've had to unlearn a lot of things about people and how to relate to them. Not all men are like the men I met in my previous life.

I believe that trust is earned. I don't give it away lightly. I do get scared about getting hurt again. A lot. But ultimately I know that I can't survive on my own, trusting no one. That way lies loneliness and addiction! It's not something I take for granted and it comes and goes at times, but it's just good to be alive and have a chance to do things differently, to be in my own skin, to state my own needs, or if I'm not sure what my needs are, simply to know that it's ok that I have them.

Know what I'm saying?

The Public Face of Angel

Just to say...

I shall be speaking at this year's annual Compass conference. This will be only the second time I've spoken in public about my experiences, and I've had butterflies ever since I agreed to speak there! I tend to get a lot of conflicting emotions whenever I speak out about this stuff, be it through my blog, through testimonies online or in public, face to face. I believe 100% it's so important that the message gets out there about what the sex industry really means for women, behind its feminist language. But I also find it incredibly painful to look at my past, and sometimes I have to back off for a while and take care of myself.

However, I'm putting in place some good safety measures for myself (being around friends afterwards, etc) and am speaking alongside a couple of women there who I'm lucky to be able to count as friends. I really have met the most amazing, strong and warm hearted people as I have got active in speaking out about prostitution and domestic violence. So I'm excited to be seeing them again, and also to have been given another opportunity to try to get the truth out there. Here's hoping some people turn up!

This year’s Compass conference is confirmed to take place on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Institute of Education, London, with this particular seminar being held at 11am. Details are to be found at www.compassonline.org.uk There are lots of interesting sounding seminars, so we've got serious competition!

If you or anyone you know may be interested in attending, do it! It would be great to meet some like minded people, and the feedback I've had on this blog has been much appreciated - it would be good to meet some of you.

Apologies to those of you who are not based round London - I get frustrated myself sometimes as a Northerner that I can't get more involved. UK Feminista is one of the organisations I'm part of which is aiming to do something about that, so perhaps soon we'll have something similar further up country.