It’s sexual assault awareness week here at Berry. I’m sure everyone has seen the great job the the Women’s Studies department, EMPOWER, the Sexual Assault Center interns, and Peer Eds, and everyone else have done with drumming up support and awareness for physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.
In all the information we get about these causes, it’s almost the nature of the beast that most of it is hard numerical data. It makes a big impact, and that’s good. But to balance that perspective and really understand the gravity of the situation, I think it’s also good to hear stories of personal experience. Especially from people we know.
Understanding that things like this can and do happen to people we interact with daily makes us more aware of and more sensitive toward these experiences. It helps us understand where people are coming from. And it helps us confirm in our minds that these things are real, and that they are common, and that social barriers have little effect on their prevalence.
Relationship abuse can happen to anyone, and it happened to me.
I don’t mean to be misleading here. I’m not working up to a tale of rape and battering. I have never been afraid for my life or my safety because of someone I dated. I’ve never been intentionally physically injured by another person at all. I have been lucky, luckier than many people, and I know it and am thankful.
What I’m talking about is emotional abuse: the invisible attacker. Most people who experience emotional abuse and manipulation never label it as such until it begins to co-occur with physical or sexual abuse. Emotional abuse is not tangible, but it leaves a mark, and often that mark is all the more painful for its hiddenness; it’s hard to heal a pain you haven’t acknowledged, and it’s hard to acknowledge a pain you can’t identify. But it’s there, for so many people, and we need to know. We need to learn to recognize it, because that’s the only way to overcome it.
When I was in high school, there was a person I liked a lot, who showed interest in me, and we decided to pursue a romantic relationship. [I'm deliberately vague about the details of this relationship or the identity of the person with whom I pursued it, because my purpose here is not to indict or blame anyone but to inform people; if you recognize something or someone please refrain from referring to such in the comments.] I was both excited and nervous about this relationship, because I was young and not very experienced, and I wanted very much for things to go well.
Things did go well, for quite a while. I was enthusiastic, maybe a little more enthusiastic than I should have been. I spent a lot of time with this person, and with this person’s family and friends, and I felt very privileged and adult, getting to do all these things. I made it my business to take an interest in the things that interested my significant other, and to become involved in these things so that they would be experiences we could share together.
I had all kinds of creative ideas for gifts and experiences, and I threw myself into them. Sometimes I felt like they weren’t received with the enthusiasm I had hoped for, but I told myself that I was just with someone who had a very hard time expressing emotions. The excitement and gratitude were there, I was sure, and it was my job to help them find their way out.
I felt that it was my duty to tease out those hidden emotions and help my significant other express them. I was sure it was just shyness that had set up these mental barriers, and I have to admit that the mystery of it was attractive to me. I was in high school and very into the dark, brooding hero – you know, the one who only needs the love of a good woman to become healed from his mysterious emotional wounds. Yes sirree, I had myself a real Byronic hero, and I was going to be Woman, the great emotional savior.
The more I tried to be a good girlfriend and met with little response, though, the more worried I got. It seemed that I was, if anything, an annoyance. Many times I would work hard on a surprise to have it met with criticism – little things, like misidentifying a football player, seemed to be incredibly irksome. But I was good. I learned from my mistakes – when any opinion of mine elicited contempt, I backed down. It was tough at first to swallow my pride, but I knew self-sacrifice was an integral part of a good relationship. It got easier to keep quiet, especially since speaking up usually meant that I would be made fun of for my silly ideas. Every once in a while, usually when I knew the correct answer to a subject being debated among my significant other’s friends, it would cross my mind that maybe I ought to be more assertive – but it was easier to dismiss my thoughts than be put down in front of others.
There were more signs, things I missed along the way that I would immediately recognize now. My significant other was incredibly bothered that I was, by an inch, the taller half of the relationship. I put my platform flip-flops away and wore flats. Very little of our time together was spent around my friends or family. During our time alone, I never chose the movie or where it was watched. Certain acts were requested of me but never reciprocated. I internalized the unspoken rule that I was not to interfere when my significant other’s friends or video games beckoned.
Things escalated. My significant other thought it was funny to make me watch clips of violent films; during one party I spent an hour in the bathroom humming to drown out the noise of a Tarantino movie I had begged that we not watch. Occasionally my attempts to divert attention from first-person shooter games to myself resulted in harsh insults or having pillows thrown in my direction. They rarely hit and didn’t hurt, but the anger behind them brought me to tears. I did everything I could think of to fix whatever error of mine I believed to have led to each of these situations – and there was always a different problem in myself I could blame – but nothing seemed to work. Trying to talk about it made things worse – tempers flared and I would drive home late crying with no goodnight kiss.
I didn’t know how to fix whatever I had done wrong. I withdrew from spending time with my friends, wanting to make myself available on the off chance my significant other should call and want to see me. I slept a lot – I would come home from school and just curl up on the couch in the guest room until dinnertime. I was always cold and always catching whatever virus came around. I felt physically weak, cried easily, and didn’t eat much. I had a hard time concentrating at school – I told myself it was senioritis – and I felt less engaged in the classes I had previously enjoyed.
I knew, of course, that things weren’t going as they should have, but I was convinced it was my own fault. I needed to try harder and be a better girlfriend, and if I could do that I would once again have the affection and attention of the person whose approval I wanted so much. If I saw, on a subconscious level, that something deeper than my own failings was at play, I never acknowledged it. I was afraid, but the fear was for the possible end of the relationship, for the loss of someone I thought I needed, rather than because of the effect being with that someone was having on me.
The only time I remember being afraid for the right reasons, the flagpost experience I both hate to remember and hope I won’t forget anytime soon, came on a winter night when I was watching my significant other and one of the friends play video games. I had been sitting off to the side since the friend had showed up, hoping it would soon dawn on someone that I wasn’t included or having any fun, and occasionally trying to interject myself into the conversation but every time being rebuffed. A few times the friend would humor me and try to include me, but my statements were consistently shot down by my significant other. Eventually I became frustrated and began to cry. When angrily asked why I was crying, I managed, “Because you won’t listen to me!” I saw a hard look come across the face before a hand reached out to smack my arm with a discarded leather glove. It didn’t leave a mark, but for a flash I saw things clearly, recoiled, and gasped for breath between tears that were suddenly those of betrayal and fear. For just an instant before going back to my haunted existence I knew the depth of the wrong that was being done to me, was shocked that I had allowed things to get to this state – but at that point it only served to make me more sure that I was no longer the smart and competent girl I had thought I was. I was miserable.
I didn’t leave. I understand why, although the person I am now sometimes gets impatient with the person I was then. Not long after that, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and began treatment. Not long after that, I was dumped over the phone and came the closest I’ve ever been in my life to suicide, so hard was it to escape the captive mentality I had imprisoned myself in.
This story has a happy ending. My antidepressants worked. My friends were more than willing to let me pick up where I had left off with them after months of neglect. I channeled my energy into running with the dog and got fitter than I’ve ever been. I went to college and became a feminist. I fell in love with a guy who wanted to learn from me as much as I wanted to learn from him, and we built a relationship on the foundation of a friendship built around outdoor activities, hymns, and social justice. I chose a major I was good at, found a job I loved, and became involved in politics and religion. I took a public speaking class. I learned not to apologize for my thoughts or for my needs. I became happy.
I don’t tell this story to upset you. I don’t tell this story to make you feel bad for me. Although this story is a part of me, it is a part I accept and understand as a source of strength, of resistance. I have a civil acquaintance with my former significant other, whom I still see on occasion when I’m at home, and I don’t hold a grudge against an individual for being swept up in the societal problem of relationship abuse any more than I now blame myself for allowing it to happen.
I tell you this story because there is power in knowing. Know that it can happen. Don’t live in fear; live in awareness. You have the power to call the shots in your life; you also have the power to understand and to not condemn if you or someone you know calls them wrongly. You have the power to see things for what they are. You have the power to help and the power to heal.
