And here is where it gets personal. If you choose to skip the following paragraphs to the bulleted list of examples below, I will not be insulted. You have your own reasons for doing so, and if it is because you have trauma you would prefer not to relive, I would actually prefer that you did not subject yourself to it. Even so, I will keep it as non-graphic as I can. I have carefully avoided sharing this portion of my experience up until now. But I did not come here to this little corner of the blogging world to smudge out a part of my experiences like they were never there in an effort to conceal what I endured.
By sharing these scars, I want others who maybe found themselves unsure what kind of abuse they were dealing with to see that they weren’t alone. That it is not anything to be ashamed of and hide, because it is undeniably part of who we are now. We carry it with us and use it as encouragement to others and as a testament to the strength we all share on our journey to defeat the struggle within.
With relief I can say he did not rape me. I have, however, been held down and forcefully examined for evidence of whether or not I was intimate with anyone while he was out of the house. I was not supposed to take showers when he was running the streets for this reason: if I did, it meant I was running clean-up. So he would go through his checklist and verify to make sure the shower was dry, that the towels and wash cloths were dry. If I was going to the bathroom when he showed up back home, he would stand there and watch. (I was never allowed to be in the bathroom with the door shut anyway. This was a punishable offense.) He would dump out the trash looking for used condoms, etc. And then he would make me undress, hold me down, and inspect me, sometimes cutting me with his nails. I have been burned with a hot stem more times than I care to recall and picked, poked, and prodded at while he was hallucinating.
He thought he owned me, that he had rights to everything whenever he wanted it, but he was not the type to rape. His preference was to coerce me into giving in, into relinquishing control over my body, so he could win. So he could throw it in my face and humiliate me and prove how worthless of a woman I truly was. Night after night, he would let me fall asleep for about a half hour, just about the point where he knew if I woke up, I would be out of it. And he would walk up behind me as I slept, punch me in the back of the head full force, and throw me off the bed.
As the night turned into dawn, he would persist in endless hours of arguments, accusations, threats, and physical brutality. I have been punched in the stomach, kicked in the side, dragged around by my hair (often with small clumps being torn out), and punched multiple times in the head. All in the name of wearing me down. Tiring me out. Night after night, I would become more exhausted and by the seventh or eighth night, I would be delirious from lack of sleep and in so much pain, I could not think. My vision would be blurred, sometimes blacking in and out for a few seconds at a time. My head pounded; I had lumps and small lacerations on my scalp from being hit so hard so many times… both with his fist and with various objects. He would attempt on several occasions to strangle me with stockings, empty all my drawers onto the floor, and force me to pick it up, so he could kick me and accuse me of trying to hide something I supposedly didn’t want him to see.
He kept up this routine for as long as it would take for me to give in. And I would give in, only because I wanted it to stop. I made a conscious choice to allow him this humiliation of my being. A choice that was forced by a vicious onslaught of anguish, fear, exhaustion, and resignation. Because I desperately needed sleep. Because I would worry that if he hit me in the head one more time, I would black out and be at his (lack of) mercy. So I would give him the control, and he would have his way. And when he was done with me, he would beat on me again. And the cycle repeated, all the while his finger pointed at me.
“You did this to yourself. If you have something raggedy, you gotta treat it raggedy.”
“You disgust me. No one would ever want you if they knew how worthless you are. If they knew what you were.”
His street friends and drug dealers would send him texts threatening that they would come to the house and rape me, which, of course, to him meant I had to be sleeping with them. He even threatened once that he would let them in. The same ones who would allow female addicts to perform various acts for a free hit of rock. The same women who were HIV and Hepatitis C positive, knew it, and still worked their way through the line anyway. The same women he ran the streets with. Women who had shared needles and prostituted themselves. It would be my fault, he offered, if he did contract something, so I’d deserve it if he were to infect me, too. (Don’t worry, I went and got tested for everything, and the results all came back negative.)
At the same time, he was bragging to his friends in the street about “the piece” he had at home, he was spending nights out of the house, driving other women around in the car that I bought. He would come home and subject me to the most degrading verbal assaults, make comments like “You better remember how you smell,” and then stick his hand in my face. After he finished relaying the entire evening from start to finish, all the while being sure to spare no small detail about the other woman’s body and how inferior I was to her, I would be forced to endure hours of physical brutality.
As many are unsure as to what constitutes sexual abuse within relationship, here is a brief list on Doorways for Women and Families’ page
Types of Domestic Violence. It is not by any means all-inclusive but gives those of you who remain uncertain an idea of some of the things you would have endured. The ones I experienced in this list are designated by red text. Other things I experienced that were not on the list are in purple text.
The following are some examples of sexual abuse:
- Using a sexually derogatory name
- Forcing a partner to strip
- Accusing a partner of promiscuity
- Forcing a partner to watch the abusive partner with others
- Subjecting the partner to unwanted touching
- Forcing a partner to participate in any form of sexual activity
- Biting, pinching, or hurting a partner with objects during sex
- Sexually assaulting a partner
- Physically assaulting a partner after sex as a form of punishment or control
- Withholding sex and/or physical displays of affection as a form of punishment
- Threatening to allow others to rape a partner
- Knowingly engaging in sexual activity outside the relationship with others who are at risk of carrying various sexually transmitted diseases and not caring what a partner is unwillingly being exposed to
- Describing in graphic detail various parts of others’ (exes and current conquests) body and how a partner is inferior
- Describing in graphic detail the sexual activities they have participated in outside the relationship
- Forcing a partner to engage in sexual activity she/he finds to be vulgar and demeaning
- Verbally assaulting a partner using sexually demeaning, belittling, or threatening language
- Forcing a partner to tell family, friends, or co-workers sexually demeaning things about themselves