Domestic Violence...a real story

I am going to start this post with a small disclosure statement.  I plan on being brutally honest in this post and it may be disturbing to some people to read.  Please feel free to pass on reading this.  It is not a nice story nor is it a story that will leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, but it is my story.  And if this is my husband...I guarantee that you will not want to read this.  The little that you have allowed me to share with you before it upsets you too much is nothing compared to what I am about to write.

That being said...this is my story.  It is about how a young girl ends up with the person that she thinks is the one and ends up in hell.  I am telling the whole story for the first time because I need too.  I finally feel that I am at a personal point in my life that will allow me to share what happened without it taking a toll on me mentally. I also have reached a point in my life where I am not ashamed or embarrassed to tell my story.  Please understand that my story is not about me being a victim...my story is about my demise and then my struggle to leave a bitter past behind me.

I met my ex when I was 22 in December of 1994.  As was most of my encounters then I did not give it much credit at first.  It was a physical thing.  My life was not one of pride then and I was one step away from being homeless and just barely keeping my head above water.  I had no sense of true confidence.  My ex paid more attention to me than anyone I had encountered in a long time.  In hind sight that is pretty much all I needed to be convinced that he was worth my time.  We were together on and off until 1996.  We moved in together somewhere around July of 96.  At this point we were both doing things that were not legally acceptable.  In retrospect I realize that I probably would not have been so influenced to do some of the things I was if it wasn't for him, but I have never and will never back down from my own accountability.  I was old enough to know better and could have made different decisions.  I made two very bad choices and in February 1997 I ended up in trouble and was gone for 2.5 years.  During that time he was there for me, so I thought.  The mentality of my 24 year old brain at the time was that I was a bad person, I had nothing going for me and yet here was someone willing to stick it out with me.  Again in hind sight I never looked at my relationship with him realistically. What happened between 94-97 was that he paid attention to me, made me feel special, and I felt a confidence that I hadn't had in years-maybe not ever.  I felt strength and I relied on that to get me through the time I was gone.  In that time he also got a house and started working a regular job processing home loans rather than working construction.  So when I came home in 1999 I had a whole fantasy life laid out in my head.  Here was this man who stuck by me all this time and he told me he got a house for us and he got a good day job.  I was ready for my new life to start.

The sad truth was that he lost that job exactly one month before I came back and it was because he had started doing drugs.  So when he picked me up in July 99 he looked horrible and I found out all about the drugs.  I felt completely obligated to him though.  I was also convinced that since I was back I would be able to change his life around.  I told myself that I was going to make things better.  I told myself that for 4 years.  During those 4 years I endured a hell that I wish on no one.  I chose to stay in this hell, for reasons I still question to this day.  I was just like the women you see that criticize other's for staying in bad relationships.I would see other people that stayed with jerks and actually say out loud, "I would never do that".  Well, never say never.  I chose this nightmare relationship over my son, over my family, and over bettering myself.  My son was with my parents and they wanted me to leave him.  I did leave him six times before I finally left for good in 2003.  Every time I left I allowed him to convince me to come back.  It wasn't him convincing me though, it was me either believing I can still change him or later on I felt so worthless that I believed this was the best that I was ever going to have-take it or leave it.  I felt that if I stayed with my son I would just taint him and that my parents were doing a better job of raising him than I could.  The largest shame I have and actually the only shame that I have kept with me over the years was the fact that I chose this POS degenerate over my son.  It is not something that is easily pushed aside.

In 1999 and 2000 I tried to maintain a balance between my family and my relationship.  It didn't last long and by 2000 I was completely immersed in the world of drugs that my ex surrounded himself in.  I tried to keep a job and couldn't.  His level of involvement with the drug community was rising and before long he was dealing drugs outright.  My mentality was not on the same level as these people and I spent most of my time in the bedroom when people were there.  I became a reclusive drug addict.  I wasn't like the people that came to the house or that associated with my ex.  I didn't have to leave my house to get drugs.  My ex had them all the time.  I lost touch with what a normal social life is and I had 0 real friends.  Any of my old friends I was to embarrassed and ashamed to seek out and all the other people that I was around were only there because of the drugs my ex had.  On top of the drugs was the fact that my ex had never been faithful or honest with me.  I gradually started to realize that I had been lying to myself about his fidelity.  And he wasn't just sleeping with other women he had multiple long term relationships with other women that began to materialize in front of me.  The realization that I stayed with someone who cheated on me and was abusive is so difficult for me to fathom now.  When I take myself back to the shell of a person that I was...it is very easy for me to fathom.

I could list a multitude of times when we fought, when he hit me, when I hit him, etc...but the abuse was so much deeper than that.  I was so weak minded at the time that I surrounded my entire life around what this man thought of me and my existence was to make him happy and to "change" him into a better person.  Any self-confidence that I had disappeared when I was honest with myself and in the deep recesses of my mind had to admit that I was throwing away my life by staying with a man who hit me, cheated on me, and manipulated every part of my life.  I knew this and still stayed.  I was so mentally fatigued and so down on myself that I didn't think I could do any better.  I also internalized all the guilt I felt over my son and convinced myself that this was what I deserved.  Instead of trying to better myself for my son, I took the weaker way out and just made myself a victim and felt sorry for myself.  The shame it makes me feel, just by typing that is indescribable.

(I must digress for a moment.  I wrote those last two paragraphs over 3 months ago.  Today is October 20, 2012.  I wrote those paragraphs in July and it has taken me this long to come back to continue writing this.  I was wrong when I stated that I could write this without it taking a toll on me mentally.  I have decided that it is more important to share my pain and shame from that time now and deal with whatever emotions it brings up.)

During all this I had many jobs - none of which I kept long.  My ex would get really mad because I couldn't keep a job, yet he was the one that would prevent me from making it to work on time or he would bother me at work.  Whenever I started a job that I was succeeding at he would sabotage it.  He would call and berate me at work.  One time I came home for lunch and he hit me so hard that I had to lie and tell my coworkers that I ran into that door frame when I returned to work.  Many times my co-workers knew I was being abused and would encourage me to leave and try to help me.  And so I would leave, but then I would go back home after a week or so and then I would be to embarrassed to return to the same job and tell the people that were trying to help me that I went back.  One of the ladies that I worked for was even on the Board of Trustees for one of the women's shelters in town.  That was just one of the backlashes from staying  in an abusive relationship.

Right before I turned 30 in July of 2002 I attempted suicide.  My ex would stay gone for days at a time and I knew that he was running around selling drugs and sleeping with other women.  He had been at the house for a couple of days and was getting ready to leave again.  This time before he left I overheard a conversation between him and one of his other girlfriends.  I sat down in the bedroom and it all hit me at once...the crazy amount of denial that I was living in just came crashing in around me all at once.  Even though I had confronted him before and had admitted to myself that I was unhappy...it was on this day that I brought it all back on myself.  I was the one who was choosing this over my son, my family, and my own happiness.  I was the one who had zero self esteem and I was the one who was responsible for my situation.  I was clinically depressed and very much in the midst of severe psychosis from the drugs and the abusive lifestyle I was living.  I didn't recognize that at the time though.  So when I dropped this bombshell of realization on myself, instead of being able to deal with it I tried to kill myself.

I waited until my ex left the house thinking that he would disappear for his usual week at a time.  I then proceeded to peel all the labels off of the anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medication in the house and took it all.  I have no memories of the next three days.  When I came to I was at TMC and had been unconscious for two days.  For reasons I still don't know to this day - my came back to the house after just a  couple of hours instead of his normal week.  He found me foaming at the mouth and gray on the bathroom floor with an empty bottle of peroxide next to me.  I do not remember drinking peroxide - I barely remember taking the pills.  He took me to the emergency room where he told me I flatlined once, but obviously they were able to save me.  He told me that a detective contacted him as well and informed him that if I died he was going to come after my ex.  I believe they knew he was dealing drugs and ofcourse they found illegal drugs in my system.  Unfortunately for me when I came too because of the fact that I had been on drugs and that I would not admit to the hospital staff that I had tried to kill myself they let me go one day after I woke up with nothing more than a paper with rehab information on it.

I returned home even more defeated than before.  I told my ex I hated him for saving me and started a huge fight with him.  Nothing had changed - we fought and he hit me and I was the same as before.  I just spiraled mentally after that.  I had a major psychotic break down filled with auditory hallucinations and five days after getting out of the hospital for trying to kill myself I was admitted to Palo Verde Psychiatric Hospital where I stayed for a week and was put on more medication.  I did actually admit to them that I had tried to kill myself.  The ironic part of all that is that I still never admitted that I was being abused.  I blamed all my psychosis on the drugs.  I was still covering for my ex.  And by this time I had become just as abusive as him.  I would provoke him because I was just so conditioned to fight with him.  After I started taking anti depressants the way they were actually prescribed I didn't start to feel better about myself, but my perspective on my situation changed.  I spent that last year that I was with my ex seeking revenge.  I didn't realize it at the time, but that is exactly what I spent August of 2002 - May 2003 doing.  I stayed at the house when he went running around, but then I started spying on him and calling all the people that we knew and finding out all about the things he was hiding behind my back.

It turned into an obsession.  I wanted to make him as miserable as he made me.  I was slowly starting to let a viscous hate seep out.  I would collect information about him and then as soon as he would walk in the door I would blow up at him and throw everything in his face.  This would ofcourse lead to horrendous fights, but I didn't care because now I was just as physically violent as him.  I would catch him off guard and hit him in the side of the jaw where he had major surgery and I knew it was a weak spot that stopped him in his tracks.  I would hit him with a baseball bat in the stomach and one time I hit him repeatedly as hard as I could over and over in his kidney...he told me he pissed blood the next day.  I was full of rage and hate at him and myself.  Don't get me wrong he was still hitting me as well.  It wasn't like I got violent and then he stopped.  I just reached a point where I was so numb to the physical violence that it just didn't phase me as much.  He would punch me in the back of the head so hard that I would pass out.  He always hit me in the back of the head because my hair covered all the bruising.  The back of my head and behind my ears would be almost black with bruises.  He would choke me til I passed out if I screamed and he would slam me onto the ground or into walls if I tried to leave the house.

He didn't just hit me he would go after the most sensitive parts of my life to hurt me.  He would hold my son over my head as a way to hurt me.  He was cruel about it - telling me he was better off without me anyway and that I was a disgusting example of a mother.  He would say or do whatever he knew would hurt me the most.  So eventually I did the same things to him.  I started confronting all the women he had been with or was with.  I hacked into his voicemail and changed his message so that everyone that called knew that I was well aware of everything my ex was doing behind my back.  The difference was that I wasn't saying things just to be cruel I was just being extremely truthful about everything and I started doing that when we fought.  Instead of insulting him, I just started being brutally honest with him.  And the truth hurt way more than any type of denial I had been in.  I realized that the amount of denial he lived in was 200x more than mine.

I started realizing that I was better than him and I wanted out.  I just didn't have to courage yet to get out.  I had left him 5 times previously and returned within a week every time.  Then I found out I was pregnant.

I should digress a bit.  In 2001 I had gotten pregnant and I let him convince me to get an abortion.  It was my choice also, but the bottom line is that I regretted that decision.  I was on drugs and it was very easy for me to follow his argument that I had been using before I knew I was pregnant and this was the best choice.  Not to get off the subject, but I am still VERY much pro-choice.  I felt cornered and pressured and I had no self esteem.  I let him convince me that this was the only option.  I regret not standing up for myself then, but I would never want anyone to not have a choice.  It works both ways you can be pushed to have a baby you don't want or you can be pushed to terminate a pregnancy you do want.  You shouldn't be pushed either way - all women should be able to make their own choice.  I have realized over the years that everything happens for a reason and I am the strong woman I am today because of all my trials and tribulations.

Back to 2003 - I found out I was about 2 months pregnant in Feb 2003 and this time I didn't listen to anything he told me.  He told me he didn't want me to keep the baby and I told him I was.  I wasn't using like I had been before and I had been standing up to him pretty regularly for a few months and even though that didn't make the situation any better, it did make me feel a little better about myself.  I wasn't going to do anything I didn't want too.  And then it happened...I found out he had gotten another girl pregnant a couple of months before I got pregnant.  By this time I was about 5 months along.  I confronted him and it turned into a huge fight and he went ballistic.  He was punching me in the head and I fell over and as I was falling he kicked me in the stomach and said, "You're not having this fucking baby!".  I freaked out and I hit him in the side of the ear with something and he started to bleed and he snapped out of it and just went into the room and passed out.  When I knew he was really not going to get up I grabbed a bag and left.

I spent the next week at a woman's shelter in Tucson and then I came down to the Forgach House in Sierra Vista.  I stayed at this shelter until after my daughter was born in September 2003.  I went back to Tucson for two months after my daughter was born to try and straighten up our house out in Tucson.  My ex was worse than ever with drugs but he didn't bother me and my daughter for that time period.  He was going to loose the house.  I tried to clean it up, but he had just let it all go.  He lost the house, but I was already set up with a new apartment in Sierra Vista.  My daughter was the catalyst it took for me to leave.  My son was with my parents and even though I had a great deal of shame for not being with him and choosing a horrible life over being his mom - I knew in my heart he was in a safe place living a stable life.  When my ex kicked me in the stomach the realization that I was the only person in the world who could protect my baby was very real and I had to leave.

My ex did not just disappear after I left him.  It still took another 2 1/2 years before he was out of my life.  Even though I moved I was still insecure and I was turning my life around and I thought maybe my ex could also.  But every time he visited he was abusive to me.  He was not abusive to my daughter, but ofcourse she couldn't talk back yet.  What was going to happen the first time she spoke out of turn?  I finally had him arrested on charges that stuck in 2006.  Amazingly it wasn't for domestic violence...no I had the police inform him that he was not allowed at my apartment and he came back the very next day and I had him arrested for criminal trespassing and they found counterfeit money in his wallet.  Since that time I have had him served with two orders of protection and won sole custody of my daughter.

Since I left my ex I have learned that he fathered at least 3 other children while he was with me and that he was abusive to every other girl that he was with.  There was nothing different about my situation than theirs.  He lied to them, they were all on drugs, he was cruel, and yet they all stayed with him longer than they should have.  It is true that abusers will blame the drugs or alcohol for their behavior, but the behavior is always there.  As I said earlier - I noticed it way before the drugs ever came into the relationship.  No one wants to admit that they are letting someone treat them like crap.  No one wants to tell other people that inside they don't feel like they deserve any better.

It is easy to judge other people's lives from the outside, but instead of judging you should be helping.  I am grateful for my family and the people who did go out of their way to help me - even when I didn't want it.  Even when I couldn't see that I needed it there were people that were telling me to leave.  I chose to stay for too long, but I did finally leave.  Women in abusive relationships statistically will leave their abuser 13 times and return before they leave for good or are seriously injured or killed.  I want people to remember that statistic when they are judging a friend who has left an abusive spouse or partner and returned to them.  Domestic Violence is a very common problem and is one that people turn their back on because they think the victim won't leave or they blame the victim.  It seems like it should be that easy - if someone is abusive you should leave.  But it isn't that easy.  Many abusers go out of their way to make sure their spouse or partner is completely dependent upon them.  The mental and emotional abuse that takes place is usually much more severe than even that physical abuse.

There is a reason it has taken me 3 months to write this, and I haven't even truly touched on the deep seated core of emotions that I went through.  October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month and I wanted to finish this before the month was over.  Unless you have been there I don't think one can understand the viscous cycle that is Domestic Violence, but you can educate yourself before passing judgement.  There is such a great deal of shame that is associated with being a victim of abuse and a great deal of sadness and anger.  I went into therapy after I left and the one thing I kept going to was that I didn't want to be angry anymore.  I didn't want to be bitter and jaded.  I had allowed myself to become vengeful and just as violent towards my ex as he was towards me.  I had to shed all of that and let it go.  I was so tired of hate and anger.  I feel blessed that I was able to free myself of that.

Today I just feel sorry for my ex.  I still dislike him a great deal, but he is just a pathetic shell of a person now.  He is still on drugs and even his family tried to help him after I left and he took that for granted and they have had to let him go again as well.  I have let my daughter learn on her own what kind of person her biological father is.  She has spent a very limited amount of time with him and in that short time even as a young child she recognizes that he is not someone she wants to be around.  I am very happily married and my husband is also a wonderful dad.  My daughter is growing up with a dad that she loves unconditionally and who is kind and loving.  I am grateful for the simple life that I have now.  There are still some nights when I can't sleep and am consumed by guilt and shame.  I have to allow myself that time so that I can then look around at my husband and beautiful son and daughter and remind myself that that is the past.

My son for obvious reasons hates my ex and I will never tell him that he should feel any different.  My son is grown now and we have a wonderful relationship in spite of my earlier decisions in life.  I have my parents to thank for that.  My son is the amazing person he is today because of my Mom and Dad.  Many people that are in situations like that don't have someone else to look after their children.  While it shames me that I was away from my son and that I exposed him to some of the horror of my relationship, I am grateful that he did not have to live through what some children do.

If you or anyone you know is a victim of Domestic Violence first and foremost know that you are not alone and that there is help.  It is not easy to leave and don't let anyone sugar coat it for you.  It is scary to start your life over, but it is amazing when you do!!!

Here are some links with information.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
http://www.ncadv.org/

This is a good site with good information and anyone can call this hotline.  If you are in a bad situation you can call even just to talk to someone.  They will not pressure you to do anything you don't want, but they will help support you even if that means just talking to someone who is understanding and not judgemental.
http://www.thehotline.org/