It happened, and it shouldn’t have.

Yeah, but you took him back so many times. They aren't going to take you seriously. Her words hit you cold, like a freezing chill that sucks the air from your lungs during below-zero temps you’ve experienced in Colorado winters.

You stop abruptly on the tree-covered path that you’re walking with your dog one late afternoon. You feel the familiar pounding in your chest as shock and anxiety take over. It takes you moments to respond, reeling in disbelief, betrayal, and hurt. In a matter of seconds, you manage to speak, your voice cracking and breath choppy.

Yeah…I guess. You pause, trying to collect yourself from the sharp pain gnawing at you from within. Well, I’ll call you back later. I’m going to finish my walk. You’re forcing your voice to sound chipper and calm, attempting to mask the emotion and sound of betrayal and your heart shattering, something you’re all too familiar with trying to hide. A herculean effort you’ve mastered in the months of the abusive relationship, and in the aftermath with family and friends.

When you finally hang up the phone, you continue walking in a daze, as if sleepwalking among the trees, your vision narrowing and your breath growing shallow. You carry on down the path, letting your dog stop to sniff this or sniff that. Your ears ring with the truth she told you: you aren't going to be taken seriously. The words fall on your chest like boulders. One profound blow after the other. You feel your heart, your soul, and your hope disintegrate like rubble.

This is a harsh truth about surviving any abusive relationship experience. The way your survival is judged and labeled by the outside world instead of the harm that caused you to be in a state of survival in the first place. Their critique of your choices and your reactions to the pain, reactions to their words and actions, becomes a critique of you, of your shortcomings, of your sanity and emotional state. When you’re trying to heal, trying to speak truth to your story, their criticism lands like an attack, another whiplash. You aren’t safe within the relationship, and you’re learning you’re not safe outside it either.

These external judgments fail to take into account the insidious nature of abuse. The way it takes hold of your mind and soul and spreads itself like rapidly growing roots hiding beneath the surface. It twists and coils around your psyche until there is more of the abuse or the abuser and less of you—a parasite destroying its host. Of course, others don't see or notice it. You barely noticed it yourself. It’s a hidden demon that lurks in the shadows, baring its teeth behind closed doors.​

But you’re well aware this concept isn’t something just anyone will understand. They hear, I was abused. And the first question is, Did he hit you? The question deflates you immediately, knowing the lack of physical evidence reduces the credibility of your story in their eyes. If only you knew…

The only reason that you understand abuse like this is because you lived it. No, you survived it, but barely. And, if you’re honest, you’re still excavating and pulling the weeds that polluted your mind. Without this knowing, without this experience and resulting empathy, it’s easy to judge what the victims of abuse do in order to survive. Why did you stay? I can’t believe you put up with it for so long. How could you stay? But what would you do if you were suffocating, drowning, every day at the hands of those you once trusted? It’s easy to misunderstand something that seems simple. And it’s excruciatingly complicated to live it, to live the constant whiplash of confessions of deep love accompanied by disorienting pain.

The statistics paint the truth: it takes at least seven attempts to leave an abusive relationship. If at all. In reality, most never leave. The roots having recked havoc on the host’s independence, confidence, and ability to survive on her own. That means that after the first blow, she stayed, or she went back. After the fifth blow, she stayed, or she went back. And on, and on. We all know someone who stayed, who never left, imprisoned for life in an abusive relationship. And while you consider these people in your lives, you might feel comforted knowing there isn’t physical violence…yet. The statistics are clear on this point, too. Before physical abuse, there is emotional and psychological abuse often disguised as covert control, verbal abuse, and psychological distress. Physical pain is just the tip of the iceberg.

For you, it took five dramatic and devastating attempts to break free. Not including the other countless moments you tried to end things in the midst of a heated fight. Five tries. Those are just the big ones. The WWIII-style dragouts that left wounds akin to PTSD in war veterans. Five attempts, and one year in hell. And somehow, you feel like you got off easy just by getting out at all, crawling with the little sanity and energy you had left, out of the darkness back into the light.

There’s nothing I get to do about this. No justice. You say to your therapist, emotion and defeat catching in the back of your throat as you fight back tears. I know how it looks. I’m complicit because he was my boyfriend. I look like I participated. I know what people will say.

As a lawyer, you know there is no line of justice for you in a court of law. He didn’t leave a bruise or bloodshed that is visible to the naked eye. This injustice is more painful than the abuse itself. His actions go unpunished, and he walks free, perpetrating his violence on the next victim, weaving webs of deceit amongst his community so they see him in a false light instead of seeing him for the criminal and monster that he truly is. Whether you see it or not, emotional, psychological, and verbal abuse leaves deep hidden scars.

Knowing he’s out there, just walking the earth, makes me so fucking disgusted, you say to your therapist, rage rising in your chest. It’s gross. She nods in agreement, validating your anger and sense of injustice, confirming that most survivors share this sentiment, stating it would be easier to grieve death than live with the fear and fact that their abuser roams free, unpunished, and never held accountable for the harm they caused and the lives they ruined.

You had just told your therapist a new piece of information about the abuse, a new thread in the horrific story. He recorded sexual and private intimate moments of you without your knowledge or consent. He confessed it to you months later, after he had already told his friends that he had done it, making them guilty by association too. The thought makes your blood boil, and your stomach turn. Tears build in your eyes.

I’m not stupid. I know how this works for me, for all women. You add, anger and frustration rising to the surface. It’s the classic victim-shaming mentality. If the victim wears provocative clothes, we say she should have “seen it coming.” We as a society spend so much time teaching women how not to be attacked or how not to “ask for it,” discrediting victims for not doing better or choosing better. We spend far less precious time teaching men not to assault women and girls in the first place. Instead of judging me for staying or going back, why aren’t we looking at him and his actions?! You say to your friend, with rage searing from your lips. Why aren’t we looking upstream? It’s backasswards!​

It isn’t just about being believed or not believed. That over-simplifies the issue. The problem is the discrediting, justifying, or explaining away abusive acts because you…insert excuse (i.e wore a short skirt, should have known better, drank too much, trusted too quickly). It is never enough that the bad thing happened to you. It’s always at the hands of some excuse or explanation.

Long before this relationship, you learned to excuse the pain inflicted by those you loved. I have daddy issues, you laugh, masking pain and original heartbreak that you’ve carried all of your life. Your sister, who has always been the “daddy’s girl,” has a profoundly different relationship with your father, having been born eight years later to a conceptually “different man.” I support your reality and your relationship with Dad, but we do not have the same dad, you frequently remind her. For me, he is the primary source of all the worst pain and deepest heartbreak in my life.  

When you were growing up, and your emotionally absent and emotionally abusive father left his mark on you, the first man to break your heart and teach you how painful love is, the adult women in your life explained away his neglectful behavior and angry moods. He had a really hard childhood. He doesn’t know any better. He works so hard and is a good provider. You were taught from an early age that his inability to be a caring and loving man and father was justified by his childhood trauma and the fact that he now provides a financially stable life for you, your mom, and your sister.

That behavior, exemplified by your mom, aunts, and other adults in your life growing up, perpetuated your pain. You went to the adults in the room with a wound, and they made that wound bigger, leaving you to tend to your sorrows alone. From there, you grew up with rage in your heart, often being labeled by your mom or sister as “angry” or “difficult.” You have an anger issue, they’d say. But we forget that if you ignore a wound long enough, it festers and grows bigger and more painful.

If it’s hysterical, then it’s historical.

The reactions or emotions we see on the outside match the hurt on the inside, your therapist says in one of your sessions where you’ve droned on about this topic and your family’s labeling of your public display of thoughts and feelings.

I’ve always been the difficult one in my family, you say. I’ve always been the one who refused to ignore the elephant in the room and will force everyone to face the elephant in the room if it’s the last thing I do. Her short, yet impactful statement consoles you. It’s the balm you needed on decades of throbbing wounds. It’s as if she’s telling you, You aren’t just being dramatic, and you aren’t too much. These big reactions and big emotions are coming from big pain.

Seen. What a difference it makes when someone makes you feel seen.

At the end of the day, it’s a shared truth in the human experience that we all want to feel and be known.

I’m not crazy. I’m hurting. I’ve been hurting.

So that’s what’s being, and has been, modeled to you. That a man can hurt you, violate you, and disrespect you, and your pain will be excused away and diminished, either by your acts or omissions that led to his behavior, or by his traumatic past. When you dust things under the rug, all you’re left with is a lumpy-ass rug.​

What you’re saying is, it’s the qualifying that is the problem. Your therapist repeats back to you what she’s hearing you say between breaths and angry outbursts. You’re saying, “It happened, and it shouldn’t have.” She adds. Yes, that’s it. You affirm. It happened, and it shouldn’t have. Not because you wore this or didn’t wear that, not because you were this way or that way, not because you’re too sensitive or too emotional, and not because he had a hard time growing up.

Something bad happened. And. It. Shouldn’t. Have. Happened.​

Your anger at this larger problem burns in your chest and flushes your cheeks. Your therapist validates and affirms what she hears you say. She matches your energy and shows immense empathy as you try to make sense of something so senseless and horrific.

Why do they do that, you ask her. Why do [they] have to respond like that, pointing the blame at me for being “so stupid” to be with him, to let this happen to me, instead of being angry at him? Why is it like that? You’re describing countless interactions you’ve had with close family members who victim-blame and shame you, quick to point the finger back at you when you’re hurting and need them the most.

That’s the question, isn’t it, she responds. Then, without hesitation, she explains, this is how they learned to survive. You sigh in agreement, feeling frustration lose its grip. Yes, you add, and it’s this f**ked up system that they had to survive.

The path you’re on was paved by generations of women and a society that taught you to keep the peace. Everything from the eating disorder you developed at a young age to the abusive relationship you endured in adulthood is littered with excuses from and choices of others that led to your invisibility and complicity. You were taught to stay small and stay quiet.​

But if there’s anything you know, it’s that you’ve never been one to go down without a fight, to accept and swallow a hard pill just because it’s how things have always been or because it makes someone uncomfortable for facing the truth.

I used to get in trouble as a kid because I was very mouthy. I talked back and spoke up, you tell your therapist as you describe example after example of your family dynamics. You’ve never been one to keep your mouth shut about illogical and immoral injustices. It made you feel like the black sheep. Everyone wanted to keep quiet and move on, pretending the bad thing didn’t happen. But you were never one to move on and ignore the issue. Why start now?

Before you hung up the phone, she sensed your withdrawal: You know I’m on your side, right? If you’re honest, you didn't. And while it’s a harsh reality, you’ve learned that some people will believe you; some people will support you without a doubt. And some people will judge and dismiss you. You are the villain in someone’s version of the story. But how someone feels about you and your truth is none of your business. You know their anger or dismissal of you is actually anger at themselves—you held up a mirror and shined a light on something they were not or are not willing to see.

While it’s heavy at first, and will continue to be at times, that’s what you carry with you down the path that day, amongst the trees: your pain, your story, and your triumph may not be believed and not taken seriously, but you know it’s because of a system of lies built bigger than your truth.

However, even if the system is bigger, it doesn't mean it’s stronger, and it doesn’t make it right.

And even if you’re feeling lonely walking down the path beneath the shade of eucalyptus trees, at least you’re walking free.