I laughed and sang a new song…
The Office on Violence Against Women defines domestic abuse as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner.
Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship.
This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.
+ + +
My mental health provider lamented today, “You know, we have laws that address physical abuse, but not mental or emotional.” I shook my head. “Not in this country, no. Other countries do. They know the emotional can be more damaging than the physical.”
One of the many things I’ve learned during the last three months is that the most dangerous abusers are the ones who are careful to not leave marks. The ones who lie to you and about you. The ones who never take accountability for anything. These are the abusers who will kill you to protect their optics, because that’s all they are. Most of us contain a measure of substance, and conscience, and virtue, but the men lurking behind these masks contain absolutely nothing but an abyss of inadequacy.
Three months ago, my abuser dropped the mask, and I witnessed the wretch that crawled out. While my heart breaks with the knowledge that I cannot Be The Last - many women have been murdered since September - I can still be a light, and I can be a voice, and I can and will spend the rest of my living days combatting depravity in disguise. His brutality is no match for me; I’ll spend my life digging beauty from the bottom of my grave.
+ + +
The following was written approximately one month post-attack as I worked toward safety. There has been no safety, but some of the darkness has shifted into peace, clarity, and the next right steps: toward safety for others. I may not leave Harlan alive, but I will keep sending the money back to Granny. I’m filling my cup with something better, not bitter.
+ + +
I am a victim warrior working to survive domestic abuse and domestic violence intimate partner terrorism, and the trajectory of my relationship tracks so closely with the typical abusive relationship that it could be summed up in one word: “textbook”. I do not want to be trapped in this textbook any longer, and I do not want to join yet another statistical cohort of abused women, because in my case the only cohort that remains is homicide.
Although subtle at the onset, the tactics that my abuser employed grew louder with time, culminating in a phrase that he repeatedly roared at me three months ago: “I will put you in the ground!”
From early in the relationship, he began to rob me of emotional and physical safety, and cruelly stripped away or prohibited any protection I might seek. I hung on for dear life and was shattered over and over again by “the cycle” - a neatly condensed, colorful infographic in every “textbook”; a wheel of misfortune illustrating the phases of abuse.
"And you can call the cops if you like. That's your right. But it won't make things easier or better for you. Believe me, I know. I've seen it before." (April 11, 2024)
"I could beat your ass with a glass of ice tea and not spill a drop." (April 29, 2024)
“If I was weak, I’d beat your ass all those times you acted like a disrespectful cunt.” (May 27, 2024)
“Whatever I say, and whatever I decide will fucking happen.” (June 20, 2024)
“I will put you in the ground!” (September 1, 2024)
I moved myself and my children to a separate residence in May 2024, after the abuse reached an intolerable level. I will forever be grateful that I had the foresight and the courage to make that move, but I did not fully understand the danger of leaving without a pre-established safety plan. Studies show that abusers do not react well when they lose control over their victims. Now I know that the most dangerous time for a survivor is when they leave the abusive partner; 75% of domestic violence related homicides occur upon separation and there is a 75% increase of violence upon separation for at least two years.
Between May and September 2024, I experienced a marked escalation of emotional, verbal, sexual, digital, and physical abuse. As I coordinated after school care for my children, adopted a personal budget that I faithfully honored, read more books, visited more family, and enjoyed more peace, my abuser spun out of control. Our marital home became littered with garbage, expired and rotting food, dirty laundry, and alcohol. He created and actively used a dating profile (and created two more in the days following the attempt on my life), complete with pictures I had taken of him. He told me that he was “mourning the death” of his family, and the abuse was temporarily interrupted by periods of emotional and physical absence. Until it wasn’t.
I first considered filing an EPO in July 2024, after he inflicted a painful facial injury followed by 48 hours of intense devaluation and threats via text and email. In the days that followed I began, for the first time in my life, to exhibit symptoms of PTSD. As he shifted phases and the vile onslaught fermented into sickening-sweet attempts to reel me back in, I began having night terrors. As he sent unwanted motivational quotes and cruel attempts at humor, I sobbed in an exam room when an X-ray of my face showed no broken bones. I was grasping the importance of evidence, sagging under the burden of proof. I needed to be hurt badly enough to be believed.
As I grappled with confusion and fear, the abuse that felt ugly and unfair and at times even unconscionable was evolving. I watched in horror as the man I once believed was the love of my life entered his most lethal era.
What happened next was “textbook”.
He profusely apologized. He promised that he had seen the light, was going to change, and that he would do everything in his power to keep me safe. He admitted in writing and in person that he had abused me from the very beginning, assured me that he didn’t blame me at all for what he could now see was reasonable behavior from a woman who did not feel safe in her own home, and bombarded me with all manner of neatly wrapped and deadly traps.
In August 2024, he convinced me to move back in.
In September 2024, he strangled me.
I did not know, even as he gripped my throat and gritted his teeth, squeezing until my face contorted into a gutted panic, exactly what that meant.
Between September 1st and September 2nd 2024, he forcefully and intentionally strangled me no fewer than seven times, while simultaneously suffocating me by way of his knee on my stomach or chest. I am 5’2, and before the attack I was 135 pounds, eight heavier than I am now. He is 5’9 and weighs more than 200 pounds.
Like many women, I unintentionally minimized it into a detail, a footnote. I called it choking, and emphasized the other violent methods he employed: kneeling on my chest, dragging me by my hair, and landing a final open-handed blow to my head and face that left me dazed on the floor. It was the reason I called 911 from my watch. I assumed it was the reason I struggled to breathe and think and speak when the officers arrived. The reason they misread the situation, failed to recognize his wounds as defensive, and my lack of visible wounds as a chilling warning sign that I should be rushed to the hospital immediately. There was no lethality assessment, no thermal imaging, and no ambulance called; only handcuffs.
As I lay in a jail cell for 24 hours, crying because the heavy, rough smock cut into my swollen neck, and the not-a-bed jail bed hurt my bruised head, and the ceiling spun and my ears throbbed and my nausea swelled, and I consumed no food or water for nearly a day, I contributed my symptoms to a different traumatic brain injury: a concussion stemming from blunt force trauma.
For the next several days, I was dizzy. So dizzy I could feel my entire body being tugged at by an invisible force. So nauseated that I didn’t eat a real meal until midday on September 5th. So unsteady and sluggish, my thinking and speaking halting, thick, clumsy. A desperate, stunted zombie, at times sobbing and at times staring into space, my body twitching and my head floating strangely, as if my neck couldn’t balance it without bobbling about. My neck that bore a bruise of his thumbprint.
An ambulance ride to the ER.
A primary care follow-up.
A second ER visit.
No headache.
“What a strange concussion”, I thought.
On September 9th, in the wee hours of the morning, I learned why.
I realized that I wasn’t choked. Although a prevalent term that is widely recognized and evokes images of hands gripping throats, it is not the correct term.
I am a survivor of strangulation.
Repeated, forceful strangulation.
I may well have had a concussion, because I certainly sustained some heavy blows to the head, but my symptoms indicate post-strangulation brain injury due to brain cell death, a result of having my airway and blood supply so violently interrupted.
Strangulation is one of the most dangerous and deadly acts of violence that an abuser can use, and it is a powerful indicator that the abuser will go on to kill. The following is an excerpt from the article “A Dangerous Link: From Stranglers to Cop Killers”:
“The most dangerous domestic violence offenders strangle their victims. The most violent rapists strangle their victims. It used to be thought that all abusers were equal.
They are not.
Research has now made clear that when a man puts his hands around a woman’s neck, he has just raised his hand and said, “I’m a killer.” He is more likely to kill police officers, to kill children, and to later kill his partner. So, when you hear “He choked me,” now you know...you are at the edge of a homicide.”
The moment I moved out of the marital home and into a townhouse, I was in danger based on statistics alone, and four months later my abuser of four years put his hands around my neck and reintroduced himself as my future killer.
+ + +