When You Suspect Your Friend Is in an Abusive Relationship

She needs you to have the courage to risk your friendship for her freedom.

Domestic violence hollows out your very soul. If you listen to how stupid and worthless you are for long enough, you will eventually believe it. Be held down and violated, or forced to replicate the porn he watches for long enough and you start to wonder why anyone would ever want to have sex.

Watch your husband throw enough furniture or punch enough walls and you start to live like the next one might land on you. When it doesn’t you start to doubt your recollection of events, question your very sanity.

Nothing you achieve in your career, parenting or other areas of life, will dampen the deep sense of worthlessness that has embedded itself into the crevices of your soul. You desperately crave one thing yet don’t believe it could ever be yours — freedom.

I spent 24 years, 18 of those married, in the prison that is domestic violence.

I grieve the lost years yet I am so grateful to finally be free.

Healing is a slow process.

For me the pain has come to the surface bit by bit, as I’ve had the capacity to process it. The first year or so of my freedom didn’t involve a lot of reflection. I went to counseling for six weeks and honestly felt I was okay.

I was much more interested in decking out my new apartment, making new friends, looking after my son during my week with him and living life as an adult for the first time in my life.

Almost 5 years later, the brutal reality of what I have been through, and what I have survived, is bubbling to the surface.

As I process, I write. I write in the hope that someone who needs to hear it will read it; that she too will get out and start the process of recovery. Hopefully sooner than I did.

On reflection.

After a few attempts, I finally ended my marriage on 11 May 2015. I had followed the excellent advice of a close friend and kept my circle small during those initial few weeks. When I did start telling people, I was blown away by the consistent responses.

Not one person expressed surprise.

Here I was ready to justify my decision to all and sundry and not one person asked me to. Instead, they said things like:

“I never understood what you saw in him”

“We wondered why you stayed with how terribly he spoke to you”

“You can do so much better”

and the clincher:

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t leave sooner”

You and me both.

The gift of a strong woman.

Virgina and I worked together packing shelves in the evenings at our local grocery store. I was a law graduate with a severely disabled child. At 35 I had not yet had an opportunity to start my career. I packed shelves under the guise of earning extra money, but honestly, it got me out of the house and away from my husband for a few hours.

I would have done it for free.

Virgina worked 2 jobs and struggled to support her 2 girls with her husband often out of work. Our lives were worlds apart. Virginia was not someone I would normally have connected with, but there was something different about her.

She saw me.

She also heard me. Her antenna was up. She picked up that I couldn’t easily meet for coffee or go for drinks. That I would have to bring my husband to the Christmas gathering because I was not allowed to go to any social events alone.

She noticed when he brought my son into the store at 10 pm in his pajamas, when he should have been asleep, to make sure I was actually there.

She told me exactly what she thought, that my husband was intensely controlling and that him constantly checking up on my whereabouts was not normal.

And she hadn’t even seen the tip of the iceberg.

My ex had a radar for women that he perceived to be a threat to his control over my life. He took an immediate dislike to Virginia. He ranted and raved about her, that women like her ruin good marriages, that she was a slut. Shortly after he made me leave the job I enjoyed, to get me away from her.

I didn’t try to keep in touch with Virginia. Instead, to keep the peace, I just agreed with what he said about her and cut ties.

In abusive relationships you learn to take the path of least resistance.

Isolation.

Perpetrators of domestic abuse gradually isolate the victim from their sources of outside support with the objective of making them entirely dependent on the abuser. I became distant from my family and friends. He would call my friends and express his concern about my mental health. His tendency to ‘get in first’ further depleted my capacity to speak to anyone about what was really going on. He did it to further destabilize me.

If any of my friends didn’t respond well to his contact with them, he would start working on me to cut ties with them. It got to a point where I would do anything to stop his constant ranting and raving.

Isolation is a very common tool used by the abuser to establish and maintain control. Like most of their behavior, it is very difficult to see from the inside when you are in the thick of it.

If you suspect a woman you care about is being abused by her partner, and she pulls away from you, this is why.

Be persistent, and slow to take offence, for her sake.

Tell her straight, but do it with love.

From time to time, a friend or family member would make an off-hand comment about him. That he wasn’t good at listening to other points of view, or questioning the way he spoke to me in front of other people.

But even those who saw the abuse with their own eyes didn’t tell me straight. To be fair I didn’t make it easy. Like most women in this situation, I was the star actress in my own facade. I did everything I could to make sure we looked like the perfect couple — the perfect family.

I was shocked after I finally got out that most people close to me knew that my ex was intensely controlling. Many suspected that I was in an abusive relationship.

Yet I didn’t even fully realize that myself until after I got away. I wish someone had told me straight. I needed to know that his behavior is not normal or acceptable. That I had done nothing to deserve it.

It could have been something like this:

“If you are afraid of him, ever, then something is very very wrong”.

Be gentle, supportive and encouraging. Let her know that you love her and are there, that she can talk to you. That she can trust you not to tell a soul about your conversation.

Then don’t tell a soul.

She may deny it or defend him.

I did both.

I encourage you to hear her out but remain firm in your position. If she thinks you have changed her view of him then that will fuel her continued lack of faith in her own instincts.

Instead, be loving but firm.

Be a safe place for her.

Let her know that you will be there for her whatever happens.

If she does decide to leave then most likely it will take more than one attempt. Abusive relationships are very confusing places and your friend probably spends most of her time functioning in survival mode.

There is a risk.

She may tell him what you said, especially if you catch her in a ‘honeymoon period’ when she has been once again deceived into believing that the abuse will never happen again. If that happens, he will do anything he can to isolate her from you. She may even do it herself like I did with Virginia.

If that happens, make sure she knows that you are not going anywhere, that you will be there for her.

We need our sisters

However she responds, remember she is in prison. He is most likely controlling most aspects of her life.

But there is one place he can’t infiltrate; she still has privacy in her own mind.

If you speak to her directly, in love, and tell her the truth, she won’t forget it. Later, in the privacy of her mind, when she is trying to process the insanity of what she is living with, your words will be there, joining with her own thoughts and affirming her belief in her own instincts.

She has far more to gain than you have to lose, so be brave.

Writing this article has motivated me to reach out to Virginia.

Gratitude is better delivered late than never.