It’s the little things at first.
A put down.
A shove.
A household implement broken in anger.
But those things start to escalate, until a word becomes a tirade, a shove becomes a beating and the broken things have become bones.
Domestic violence is what happens when love and loyalty get subverted into something pathologically wrong.
It can happen to anyone – even the people who are trained to deal with domestic abuse.
My friend, whom I will call Kim for the sake of a name in this column, is the survivor of domestic violence. She endured the verbal and physical abuse for nearly eight years before she managed to break the cycle and walk away. She left with healed-over fractured ribs and a restraining order taken out on her partner, but at least she was able to walk away.
Kim also is a former police officer.
“I handed out many, many cards to call me anytime,” she said, of the domestic-violence victims she dealt with on patrol. “I heard back two times, out of all of those.”
The victims, she said, nearly always went back to their abusers. Whether it was the fear of having something worse happen, the guilt, or believing the earnest apology they were hearing.
“It’s so much more than the physical violence,” Kim said. “The pattern of it, which I found out firsthand, is always the heartfelt apology and the pomise never to let it happen again.”
It was after she left the force and met her partner that Kim began to live through what she’d seen on those domestic calls.
“I remember it was a shove at first, then she wanted to strangle me.”
Other altercations went on to beatings and threats against her life. “You’re appalled the first time it happens. But yet it’s so heartfelt and tearful in the apologizing.”
Basically, she said, you want to believe the abuser, because you love them, and you want to save them.
“You see things in that person that they can be,” she said. “And they do convince you that if you hadn’t said that, if you hadn’t done this, then they wouldn’t have acted that way. They convince you that their bad behavior is your fault.”
It’s the gradualness, too, that makes domestic abuse so toxic, eventually robbing the victim of what makes them whole: their identity, their happiness, their circle of friends.
“You don’t see it,” Kim said. “It just makes you question your whole sanity, that’s all I can say. And it’s such a gradual, day-by-day chipping away. Sure, there are red flags, but that’s only what you see looking back.”
Today, Kim is on her way to getting her life back, and making what she hopes are healthier choices in whom she allows into her life.
“I listen a lot more to my instincts,” she said. “I pay attention to red flags. I don’t apologize for making quick judgements anymore when it comes to people.”
But there are no easy fixes here; no simple solutions to curing something that has become a national crisis. Not even from where Kim is sitting now, with that abusive relationship largely a thing of the past.
“Even when you have broken bones, you still don’t want to fail,” she said, of what kept her in the confines of that relationship, when it was at its worst.
One thing each of us can do is to send a strong message to our children about what is most important: their intrinsic value as human beings.
As opposed to the dubious security of being in a relationship that may slowly be eating away at them.
“We have to raise our daughters and our sons to realize it’s not the most important thing to be coupled and in a relationship, straight or gay,” Kim said, noting they need to be able to leave, to flip that switch, rather than to die within the confines of a relationship that is poison.
If you are in a relationship where you hurt, don’t put off learning how to trust yourself again and regaining your life.
King County has a number of resources for victims of domestic violence. They include the Domestic Abuse Women’s Network (www.dawnonline.org, 425-656-4305); the King County Judicial Administration (www.kingcounty.gov/courts/Clerk/DomesticViolence.aspx; 206-205-5555); and the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence (www.kccadv.org).
It’s true: Love should not have to hurt.
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