Stories from Victims

Victim #2 - A Dependent Woman

I lived in my parents' home until I was 18. My mother was abusive and demanding and very controlling. She literally beat us when she was mad, and we were all afraid of her. Even my dad was afraid of her. I found a boyfriend, and as soon as I could, I married him and left home. What a relief to get away from my abusive mother! The only problem was that he was abusive too. He hit me in the face and gave me a black eye while we were dating, but I lied to my mother about how it happened and overlooked it so I wouldn't have to deal with it. After all, I wanted to get married and get away. Once we were married, it continued to happen, and I became really afraid of him. I remember one night fleeing back to my parents' home and hiding in the closet of my bedroom because I thought he would come and drag me out of their house.
After a few years, I met another man, an older, more successful one, and I ran away with him. I left my son with my husband and never looked back. The new man was much better, but then it started going bad too. He was a lot older and had different ideas about sex than I did. He was weird and liked to see me having sex with other men. I enjoyed the rich life style and the importance of being married to a well-known man in the community, but I knew there was something really wrong with him.
While I was married to him, I met my third husband. He was dashing and charming, although he wouldn't have been acceptable to my family. But what did they know? They had lived their entire lives in a miserable relationship, and I didn't believe they could give me good advice. Needless to say, this third husband turned out to be more abusive than the first two, and I ended up staying with him for many, many years before I finally got up the nerve to leave. Leaving him was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Maybe the difference was that this was the first time I had ever left someone without using another man to do it.
When I finally got alone, I realized that I had gone straight from the home of my abusive mother into a marriage with an abusive man. I went straight from that relationship to another marriage with another abusive man. I then went straight from that marriage into a third marriage with yet a more abusive man. I had been married for 31 years straight and had never lived by myself once in my entire life. Not even for one day. I had always lived the man's life, whatever it was. I had never made plans of my own, had never been responsible for myself or anyone else; I had always been under someone else's control. I had self-imposed emotional captivity on myself without even knowing it. Those men didn't really have to force me to accept them or their violence; I did it on my own. I guess I was dependent on someone to control me, and because of that, and because I had been conditioned to accept abuse as a child, I lived a very long time in abusive situations which I accepted, despite the fact that I intensely hated being abused.

Excerpt taken from Had Enough? by Debra A. Smith