If you live with an abuser, please don’t give up hope that you can and will escape, physically and emotionally. As impossible as it may seem, if you continue to believe and try, you will find a way. There is help available.
But a word of caution: get as much of that help as possible and create what I call a STAY SAFE PLAN. The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you leave.
Nancy’s Story, Told by her daughter, demonstrates the horrifying lengths to which a scorned predator may go. And, interpreted in light of a Dec. 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Nancy’s story isn’t likely an isolated incident. In the U.S., thousands of men—and women—are murdering their intimate partners each year. Nancy’s daughter tells one such story from her mother’s viewpoint—speaking like her mother.
After a while, you become swept away in the four-page story as ‘Nancy’ tells you of her abusive husband. Nancy’s relationship checks all the boxes: she is beaten over the years, lying to friends and relatives about the frequent abrasions and black eyes. She leaves repeatedly, only to be lured back by her abusive husband’s promises to reform, which alternate with threats to blow her head off with a shotgun.
Nancy goes through this back-and-forth hell for twenty-two years before finally making a clean break. But then, Nancy’s former abuser contracts a fatal sickness, starts going to church, and convinces her to move back in as a caretaker and on a platonic basis.
For six months, life is good, and Nancy wishes that her formerly abusive husband had only been this nice to her for their whole marriage. And then, fatefully, Nancy’s mother becomes unable to live on her own, and Nancy decides to move in with her to take care of her.
Towards the end of Nancy’s story, she tells of a joyful breakfast get-together with her daughter and granddaughter on a Thursday and is looking forward to moving in with her mother in two days.
At this point, the reader is brought violently back into awareness that it is not actually Nancy telling her own story:
“At 10:20 the next morning, Friday, December 17th, he shot me in the face with a shotgun. I lived for 10 minutes on the side of the road with my feet almost to the ditch, with my son watching me die. I drowned in my own blood. He’d finally told the truth. My story ends here. My children’s stories do not.”
Don’t let this become your story; if you plan to leave an abusive partner, you can get help at thehotline.org website. That’s the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and it can also be reached by dialing 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or by texting “START” to 88788. I haven’t tried the phone options but found many excellent options through the website’s easily accessed menus. For example, “Plan for safety” is conspicuous in the top and bottom menus on thehotline.org home page and will take you to Create Your Personal Safety Plan, which is an interactive guide to safety planning. There, you will fill in a lot of personal information to help develop the best exit strategy.
If you find the hotline’s interactive safety planning a bit intrusive, please see domesticshelters.org, Creating a Safety Plan, which will walk you through the process from a more comfortable distance. This article covers (among other things) gathering evidence, packing a go-bag, and having somewhere to go with it.
But, to uproot your life and safely leave your abuser, you’ll likely need to share painful information with people you’ve never met. And sooner may be better than later. Domesticshelters.org helps get the ball rolling with the Find a Shelter program near you. Alternatively, the National Domestic Violence Hotline offers a directory of local resources and assistance providers —of astonishing scope. It searches by city and state in such categories as:
Emergency Financial Assistance
Food Assistance
Household Basic Needs
Transitional Housing
Domestic Violence Shelter
Transportation Assistance
Case Management for Domestic Violence Survivors
Childcare Help for Domestic Violence Survivors
Domestic Violence Child Counseling
Emergency Shelter Transportation
Domestic Violence Counseling
Domestic Violence Support Group
Protective/Restraining Order Assistance
Legal Representation
Shelter Serves Men
Domestic Violence Youth Shelter
Addiction Programs
Shelter Bed Availability Resources
College/University Victim Services
Child Protective Services
Crime Victims Compensation
Disability/Deaf Resources
Elder Services
Homeless Resources
LGBT Resources
Mental Health Resources
Sexual Assault Resources
Stalking
Suicide Resources
Teen Resources
Trafficking Resources
Adult Protective Services
You can go to the hotline’s local resources site and scroll down for the complete list.
And just so you know, I’ve experienced more domestic violence than I even want to recall: given it and taken it. While pondering that, please know that torture, murder, rape, pedophilia, wife-beating, and child-beating never made my go-list, even if a wide range of other crimes and hateful actions did. You can read the fictionalized account in my Memoir of a Repentant Psychopath, available on Amazon.
Memoirs aside, it’s my experience that people in dysfunctional relationships often can’t leave because it’s the only life they know. It’s like jumping off a cliff with no expectation of survival. But if you’re being terrorized by a social predator masquerading as an intimate partner, there are people and organizations to help you create a safety net. If you contact thehotline.org or domesticshelters.org, somebody will be there to help you begin the scary task of breaking away to start your new life.
Keep survival first; stay mindful of the dangers involved. Don’t let your intentions slip into the wrong hands. It may be true that “hell hath no fury as a woman scorned,” but the same thing goes double for social predators, regardless of gender. Your abuser may go into a homicidal rage when you finally leave, so get help, make a plan, stay safe, and get out alive.
Send me your story if you need to be heard or feel it will help others. I can be reached through the comments section below or at RobertRedAct@protonmail.com.
For anyone in a bad place, take a little breather. Try to relax your mind, let go of the desperation for a moment, and gently allow just the possibility of help to take seed. That’s all you need, for starters, is to know that help is possible. Keep a glimmer of hope alive; you are worth it, and that glimmer can grow into something much greater.
Robert Red Act