In the days after leaving your abuser, you often feel as though you had made a mistake.
I see it all of the time. I am in so many social media groups for victims of domestic violence, and so often, these women post talking about how they feel as though they did the wrong thing by leaving. So many of them want to go back within the first 48 hours. And more often than not, we do go back. It is a phenomenon worth exploring. If we can figure out what these women need in this critical period, in the weeks after leaving an abuser, we can greatly increase the odds of them not returning.
I left my abuser more times than I can count. Many of those times were before he tried to kill me, so had I left, had I had the resources, I could have avoided that entire experience. I want to explore some of the reasons I kept going back, because it was not always for the same reason.
The first time we broke up was not long after we started living together. Leave it to an abuser to get you in a situation where you are paying for a place for both of you to stay just to leave you there alone. At the time, I was trying to escape a home life I had had enough of. I was just 20 years old, barely, and ready to move out the first chance I got. I was also ready to take any form of love or acceptance I could get. So here we are, me finally out of my house, in my first "real" relationship, in our own home, and he wants to just be friends. All I could think was, "I do not want to go back home." He had not hit me at this point, and not shown any signs of abuse. But there were definitely red flags from day one. He was aggressive from the start. When he didn't get his way he would hit things, break windshields, yell. He told me that summer that he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and then proceeded to prove it by having a full blown manic episode. But I grew up in violence. So when he got mad and punched the wall, it was bad, but I had seen worse, and after all, he felt bad immediately after, so clearly it was ok, right?
So, here we are, broken up, and I am so desperate for approval and somewhere to be that I beg him to stay and be my roommate. Which eventually leads to us being back together. Round one complete.
I cannot list the times I left him in their respective order. There are too many, even with a functioning memory to recall. I did leave a few times to live with my parents. Even after I had my daughter, I would leave, and then go back. There were times I would go back because my daughter had more space, and more of a life at his home, around his family. I would go back because at my parents, where my Dad was back to drinking and my Mom was absent, it was dirty, lonely, and unbearable. I would go back because I had no friends, and no job, and no car so I could not get a job, and being a single mom living with your parents is hard.
I would go back because when I was gone he was amazing. He turned into a different person, and was everything I wanted him to be. In hindsight, this should have been the biggest, reddest flag ever. He clearly knew how to behave. He knew what was appropriate, and how to be nice, and charming, and reliable, and everything he really was not. And when you want to believe something, you will find every reason in the world to believe it.
So I went back, over and over, and over and over. And every time was the last time I swear. Every time, I had hit my wall, and could not take anymore. Every single time. And the more you do that, the more isolated you become. The people you told how done you were cannot stand to be around you because you are around him and they now know exactly what a shit bag he is. They want to believe you when you call and say you are done again, but how can they? And you see it in their faces and hear it in their replies so eventually, when you want to leave, you stop reaching out because you feel like an idiot for being here again.
Being with an abuser feels safe.
Yeah, I said it.
It clearly isn't. But I did not say being with an abuser is safe.
Being with an abuser FEELS safe.
You feel safe because your abuser has isolated you from any support system, so they become all you know.
You feel safe because your abuser has financially controlled you, and you depend on them for basic survival. Without your abuser, you do not know what the future holds. With them, is a sense of security in the most basic areas of dependency.
You feel safe because you have learned how to live with your abuser. You have learned their triggers. You know what to do to make them happy, and more importantly, you know what not to do to piss them off.
You feel safe because you have been gas-lighted. This one is sick. Abusers will do things like blame you for things that are not your fault. They will tell you something is happening at a specific time, say 6pm, then yell at you for not being ready by 5 because "they said 5". They will tell you that you did things that you did not do, and you will believe them, because why would they make that up?? When you catch them cheating, they yell at you for having found out, questioning how you know, and questioning your character for even questioning theirs. They will twist every situation to make you depend on their validation. Abusers will make you question your own judgement so often, you no longer know how to make a choice without them.
When all of this "safety" suddenly vanishes, and we are left to our own devices, we have no idea what to do. We are so used to someone guiding our every choice and thought, that the idea of just doing life seems overwhelming. Especially when "doing life" includes starting from scratch. The resources required to leave are many. Often times, women need a place to stay while finding a job, and saving money for a place of their own. As well meaning as friends are, it is more often than not just unrealistic to expect someone to open their home to you as you get on your feet. Think about it in this moment, in your situation. If someone you are friends with truly needed a couch, or room for a month, or maybe two, would you honestly be able to provide that? For most of us, the answer is no. And for no other reason than that we just cannot feasibly afford to do that. We either do not have the space, the resources, or the environment that would allow it. And there is no guilt to be felt in that. It is understandable. The point I am making with it, is that we have to understand that because it is so often not an option, victims are left looking for other ways to start over, or left to go back to the only safety they know.
It is important that those of us who know someone who is living in DV understand them on this level. It is important that we know what is happening and why. Misconceptions stand in the way of progress. They create stigma, and validate the abuser. We need to be able to provide understanding and support to these women. This is not a small issue. This is not a problem that can continue to be swept under the rug. Women are dying. Women are dying and being assaulted in staggering numbers. Women are dying because the system is failing them on every single level. Domestic abuse is going unreported. Abusers are being coddled by a system that is paving the way for them to do what they do best. A blind eye is being turned on abuse and assault in cases of the people who should be held to the highest of standards. The Lautenberg Amendment was created to get guns out of the homes of people who have been charged with even misdemeanor DV. This could save hundreds of lives. However, judges have been noted to dismiss cases against law enforcement when charges would lead to inability to preform duties due to inability to own a fire arm. So, rather than be found guilty as they are, the case is dismissed in the interest of the abuser.
How can we expect women to ask for help from a system they can clearly see is not set up to help them? How can we blame these women for being scared to death of the unknown? Did you know that domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women in the united states? (See Domestic Violence Fact Page, Link on Main Page) How can we ask these women to take this jump, this leap of faith, into what could be homelessness?
The fact that women are staying in relationships that are killing them screams for reform. Clearly, there is no solution to this problem. Clearly, what we have in place is not working. The numbers do not lie. The amount of women dying, and being assaulted by an intimate partner is astonishing, and deserves immediate attention. We need to educate our society regarding the dangers of violence. We need to create a societal standard where victims are embraced, and abusers are properly rehabilitated. We need to not only change the way we support those who need to escape DV, but we need to emphasize the gravity of the need to reform abusers. Repeat offenses cannot be tolerated. With the amount of deaths caused by domestic disputes, any violence against an intimate partner should be looked at as the first step toward that possibility. Only when we accept, as a society, how broken our system is, and how desperately insight and reform is needed, can we begin to solve what is becoming a national crisis. And only by speaking out, and sharing what we know of DV, can we start the conversation that is so desperately needed.