Abuse is a multi-faced beast. It has so many different faces that sometimes it is difficult to put a name to one of them. I’ve experienced it personally with several different faces, and while each one ‘felt’ wrong, it was not a simple thing to put my finger on it. This is why abuse is so often shrouded in silence.
Silence is the abusers ally, as is shadow. If the victim has a voice and the power of the light, they become a survivor rather than a victim. If only it were easy to make that transition. Sometimes it takes years. Often it doesn’t happen until there is an intervention. Child Protective Services is an entire organization built around the intervention. Unfortunately, CPS and other organizations like it are not always enough.
Subtlety. Little things. Things that do not trigger an intervention but eat away at the victim hour after hour, day after day, until they believe. The victim begins to accept that they are powerless. Financial abuse is not about money. Sexual abuse is not about sex. Psychological abuse is just as damaging as physical abuse and neither is truly about the act. All of these abuses as well as the other faces I’ve not named here, are about power and control. The abuser wants power over the victim. Some are opportunists; others seek it intentionally.
In my case, one of faces was my ex. I’ll call him JL. Daily for almost ten years, I heard that I was fat. He’d buy clothes for me that were much too small so that I would have to lose significant amounts of weight to wear them. Badges of dishonor, they were eventually donated with the tags still on them.
He badgered me to quit school. He hated that I was trying to better myself, but he loved it when a loan check would come in. He always found new and interesting ways to relieve me of as much of it as he could and none of them had to do with education. I’m still paying for it.
He took credit cards from my purse and maxed them by purchasing subscriptions to pornography websites and buying extras and upgrades while he was on them. He and his father tricked me into selling a car to them. They told me it was broken beyond repair. When I sold it to them for parts, they replaced a $5 part and drove it away. Eventually, I had to declare bankruptcy.
I continuously heard how I would never find anyone else who would love me. JL tried to isolate me from my family and friends, driving them away by any means he could think of. Worthless. Stupid. Who would want me? Fat and plain. Dull and slow-witted. But it was always a joke. If I got upset, he didn’t really mean any of it. I really should lose weight, though, or he’d leave me and then I’d be all alone forever. If I left him, he said he would kill himself. Well, he’d kill me first, and then himself.
JL systematically stripped me of everything he could get a hold of: money, emotional stability, self-esteem. Bit by bit he worked on me and I had no idea how to stop it. I was trapped and depressed and he pushed me in a multitude of ways to keep me there. One evening he tried to rape me because I didn’t surrender, which was one of the reasons I was able to finally leave him, ironic though that sounds. Calling 911 was apparently not the way to cement our relationship.
I will admit that I lied… I told him the following poem was not in reference to him. I said it only because he had read it in the notebook he snatched from me and demanded to know why I had written it. He was ready for a fight and I was not. So I lied. Thankfully, I had already made a copy, so when he ripped it to shreds, I didn’t lose yet another piece of myself to his hand.
The Girl
The faithful silence
Dances overtop her tongue,
As the telltale violence
Which precedes his words is hung.
She doesn’t want to remember
The plans he’s made for her soul,
For where he sees a beautiful ember,
She sees a dying coal.
Her very being wants to hide away,
To save the life she’s made,
She doesn’t want to see his ways
Make all her life-dreams fade.
She cannot let true feelings show,
Lest they be torn apart,
So trapped in passionless limbo
To protect her fragile heart.