When Work Hits A Nerve
By: Edward Anderson
Tags: Society, Abuse, Domestic Violence, True Crime, Mental Health

When Work Hits A Nerve

Photo by Yanal Tayyem on Unsplash

I am a survivor of domestic abuse. When most people learn that, they are surprised. More than once, I have been told that I don’t act like a “victim,” my attitude is too bad, or I appear to be too strong to let someone hit me. The truth of the matter is, that’s not how abuse works. It wouldn’t matter if I were Mr. Universe with the will of Ruth Bader Ginsburg; if someone wants to bring you down, they will. It’s a matter of how they do it.

With my ex-boyfriend, he would continuously give me backhanded compliments like, “I like a guy with some meat on his bones.” He would do this, knowing that I was sensitive about that weight I had gained. If I complained, he would tell me that I needed to learn how to take a compliment. And so, the cycle would begin. My self-esteem was in the trash, and he could get me to do anything because I didn’t know my own worth.

Feelings Brought Up

Which brings me to the point of all of this. While researching a true crime article, one story stood out to me. A woman went to save her friend from an abusive situation and ended up being killed. Some of the articles that I read about it went into graphic detail about the friend's abuse. It triggered my memories of what I went through, and suddenly I could not concentrate on the task at hand. It was suddenly all too real, and the feeling of detachment that usually accompanies my work was gone. I was in the same situation.

The friend helped her boyfriend cut up the body and scatter it throughout parks in the area. Some of the articles' comments were calling the abused victim a loser, asking how she could do that to someone who had come to rescue her. The answer is simple. When you’re being abused, you have no worth unless the abuser gives it to you. They only give it to you if you do what they tell you to do. The empathy that I felt for this woman was more because I knew what she was going through, and she had the added weight of him threatening to kill her and her child if she didn’t do what he told her to.

Talking Abuse Isn’t Easy

Often people will ask, why did (or do) survivors stay with their abuser? The answer is simple. They don’t feel like they have a choice. With my ex, my self-worth was gone, and since my relationship with my family at that point was nonexistent, he became the only person I could lean on. Now I see what he was doing and how he was so easily able to flip everything around on me, but that doesn’t change the fact that at the moment, I had no one else. I was an island, and he was the only visitor who would see me. Once he was kicked off, everything became much clearer, but he left pieces of me scattered around.

People often ask me why I stayed for as long as I did. There’s no right answer or one that can be easily understood. My self-esteem was so destroyed by this man who was supposed to love me that I believed I would never find love again, that nobody would ever love me romantically again.

I am not alone in my reasoning for staying. Many survivors stay because they are scared to be alone. More than half continue their relationship for economic reasons. If they leave some are worried about being homeless or not having the money to survive.

Getting through the messiness of being triggered wasn’t easy. I needed many feelings to deal with, but at the end of it all, I remembered that I am 600 miles away from my ex’s last known location, and he couldn’t find me even if he wanted to. Even with that, these are feelings that he has stuck me with for the rest of my life. Those pieces will never be reassembled, but I have survived. Now, back to working on my job and detaching once again.