It’s been 37 years since I left my first abuser. I wish with all my heart that I had read something like this at the time. No one, including my parents told me that I’d made the right choice. More than one person told me I was going to hell because I left my husband — even though he was trying to KILL me when I left him. No one told me it wasn’t my fault, including my pastor, my therapist or my parents. All of them asked me what I had done to make him so upset. When I had breast cancer, people came out of the woodwork to tell me how “brave” I was. I wasn’t brave. I was just putting one foot in front of the other and doing what the nurse navigator told me to do. There was a recipe for beating breast cancer. I was following the recipe. There is no recipe for leaving an abuser, very little support and no nurse navigator to show you the way. The biggest message, though, is that it takes time to heal. Six months after I left, I was in the woods camping with my best friend, when our dogs heard something rustling in the woods and reacted with frenzied, fearful barking. My friend said, “It’s OK. We’re safe; we don’t have to be afraid.” And it was at that moment that I realized I had been more afraid of my own husband in my own home than I was of a potential bear in the bushes a few feet from our camp site. I had no clue how much danger I had been in until six months after I left him. It took me a long time to heal. In some ways, I’m still healing.
It’s been 37 years since I left my first abuser. I wish with all my heart that I had read something like this at the time. No one, including my parents told me that I’d made the right choice. More than one person told me I was going to hell because I left my husband — even though he was trying to KILL me when I left him. No one told me it wasn’t my fault, including my pastor, my therapist or my parents. All of them asked me what I had done to make him so upset. When I had breast cancer, people came out of the woodwork to tell me how “brave” I was. I wasn’t brave. I was just putting one foot in front of the other and doing what the nurse navigator told me to do. There was a recipe for beating breast cancer. I was following the recipe. There is no recipe for leaving an abuser, very little support and no nurse navigator to show you the way. The biggest message, though, is that it takes time to heal. Six months after I left, I was in the woods camping with my best friend, when our dogs heard something rustling in the woods and reacted with frenzied, fearful barking. My friend said, “It’s OK. We’re safe; we don’t have to be afraid.” And it was at that moment that I realized I had been more afraid of my own husband in my own home than I was of a potential bear in the bushes a few feet from our camp site. I had no clue how much danger I had been in until six months after I left him. It took me a long time to heal. In some ways, I’m still healing.
This is all so very important. I wish more people understood the importance of not retraumatizing survivors. Thank you for this.🧡
Thank you for writing this. This is so encouraging.