When I was a teenager, I was groomed and eventually abused for years by an adult man. When I met him, I was at a time in my life that had left me as vulnerable as I had ever been. I felt like an inherently flawed person. I felt like I was beyond repair, that I did not deserve love, and that no one could ever accept me. So, after a year of almost total isolation, when I met a man in his twenties that seemed to care about me and had a strict set of ethics (or rather, claimed to) I felt like I had finally been saved. While the years that followed were some of the darkest of my life, the truth is that my outcome was lucky - I made it out alive.
For so many women, these exploitative relationships end in death. And once the physical abuse in my relationship progressed to the extent of him barring his arm across my throat, the chances of him eventually killing me, statistically, increased dramatically.
Leaving that situation and recognizing the truth about the nature of my relationship was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. It has left me with trauma to carry in my body, sensitive, angry, and so heartbroken about the number of women who know exactly what it feels like to have this heaviness in their bones. Which is part of the reason that it is so agonizing to watch some of the beautiful, talented women in my life make the same mistakes I did.
In the years since I left my abuser, I have seen so many of the women around me enter into these dangerous and terrible abusive relationships. I have recognized so much of that pain, confusion, and self-doubt. It is so hard to watch the people we love be unable to see their own worth.
This pattern makes me feel so stuck. How do I move forward when I am always looking back? I want to be so sure that no one else ever goes through what so many of us have. But no matter how much I want that reassurance, it can't be. In the process of healing from my abuse, the most difficult thing I have found is that there simply is no easy way to get victims out of their abusive relationships.
I wish all it took was us saying to our friends, "This isn't right. You don't have to live this way." But so much of the time those reassurances not only don't work, but can push your friend closer to their abuser, farther from you, and into more danger. Part of the insidious nature of abusers is their unbelievable ability to isolate and reprogram their partners responses. When I finally confided in my close friend about an incident in my relationship, my response was to defend my abuser when she correctly identified what he was doing to me. And in the times since that I have been on the other side, my friends I have tried to encourage to leave reacted that same way; defending the people who have made them feel like they are worthless.
So, our hope is to try and prevent these types of relationships before they ever begin. Maybe one of the ways to discourage abusive relationships is to recognize our worth and encourage our friends to do the same. Self-acceptance and love are so important, and so is building up the people around us. Talk to the women in your life about their positive qualities, tell your friends that you love them, and continually encourage yourself and the women around you to honor their bodies and minds.
It is so deeply entrenched for women to criticize and tear ourselves apart. We are trained to feel threatened by another woman's light, we are constantly told that we need to be the best in order to be worthwhile, that our accomplishments are only really accomplished if they are punctuated by our beauty first. The idea that as women we are competing against one another is part of the system that continues to perpetuate the type of abuse that kills so many of us.
The lack of love for ourselves is an epidemic. Let's try to do our bests to recognize our worth, our talents, and those of our friends, so that we can always hold with us our intrinsic value, and when someone tries to tell us that we are not good enough as we are, we'll know they're full of shit.
