A Toxic Entanglement

    I talk a lot about "the system" when I write, and I am not sure if all of my readers really understand the extent and complexities I am referring to when I use those words. When I talk about the system, I am not only talking about the legal/criminal justice system, but also the many other institutions established within our society that govern our daily lives. Examples would be social services, the healthcare system, the government as a whole, the housing and rental markets, and the job market. I am opening with this explanation because I want it to be very clear that when I refer to "the system," I mean all of it. 

    My intent with this blog when I started it over five years ago was to give a voice to some of our society's most neglected and/or misunderstood issues and demographics. One of those issues that I have been reluctant to touch on all these years is domestic violence, particularly violence against women. I shied away from the topic for a valid reason: I was in an abusive relationship and I was afraid of how my partner would react if he read my blog. I was in that relationship from September of 2016 until May of 2021, and even though it has now been nearly a year since I ended things, it took me this long to be able to write about it. It took this long because I was busy trying to ensure my own future safety for much of the past year, a task that proved much more difficult than it should have been, and one that gave me even more reasons to put my experience in this blog. If I have learned anything from that relationship and its aftermath, it is that "the system" gives zero fucks about abused women (or men, in some instances). It is no wonder that women in nearly every nation put painted hands on their faces and take to the streets annually on the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women. The statistics alone are enough to turn your stomach, and they were enough to keep me in fear for far longer than I would have liked to be. 1 in 3 women globally have been physically or sexually violated by an intimate partner, experienced non-partner sexual violence, or have been unlucky enough to experience both in their lifetime. The majority of violence against women is perpetrated by current or former intimate partners or husbands. In 2020 alone, 81,000 women were killed across the globe, 47,000 of them died at the hands of an intimate partner or family member. Real numbers regarding this topic are hard to nail down, however, because it is estimated that less than 40 percent of women seek out any kind of help when they are in abusive situations. The reasons for that are many and varied, depending on where you reside and the cultural norms of the area, but one of the main reasons women in the U.S. do not report is because of the horror stories we have all heard (or experienced) that make us question whether or not it is just easier to endure the abuse. Because while there may be laws in place that are meant to help abused women, the existence of laws has never stopped them from being ignored and broken by those who have ill intent and are convinced their actions are justified. My own story is just one of many, but it stands as a shining example of why women stay in abusive relationships long past their expiration date, and long past the point where leaving is a conceivable option. 

    As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who never disclosed what happened to me until years after the fact, I had a very skewed idea of what healthy relationships were and no idea how to establish boundaries. What most abuse survivors learn eventually is that being abused as a child sets you up to experience cycles of abuse throughout your lifetime, especially if you don't understand what happened to you and get help for it right away. I was no exception to that, and was abused several times as a teenager, thinking it was "normal." Then I had my first abusive adult relationship, and it was a nightmare - I still consider him the worst of all my abusers, and the basis of comparison for all those to follow. I sometimes wonder if I stayed with those subsequent abusive men because they were "not as bad" as their predecessor, and therefore I considered them a sort of "upgrade." I guess that line of thinking shows just how non-existent my sense of self-worth was back then, sadly. But that is what happens when you have been constantly criticized and degraded by people who claim to love you: you stop believing that anything about you is good, much less exceptional. You keep choosing people who reinforce those negative beliefs about yourself that you have developed. And the cycle repeats.

    As an precursor to my own story, I would like to educate everyone reading this on the many forms that abuse can take in a relationship. I want to do this because some of those forms are not very obvious unless you know what you are looking for. One of the first things that I remember hitting home when I was processing my abuse was what's called the "Power and Control Wheel." Many domestic violence advocacy agencies use this handout to show all of the forms of abuse, so victims can identify things that have happened to them. I have included a picture of it below for reference, because I will be coming back to some of the things on it.

 This wheel, while it is recognized by experts in psychology and social services and domestic violence agencies and advocates around the country, is not acknowledged whatsoever by our legal system or by law enforcement. I mention this because several of my abusive relationships played a major role in my own legal troubles throughout my life. My first drug charges happened six months after my first abusive adult relationship ended, and the trauma of that relationship is what led me to using drugs as a coping mechanism. I was severely abused in every way in that relationship, and when it was over I was on the verge of ending my own life. Instead, I turned to drugs. I will credit the drugs for one thing: they kept me from killing myself. Of course, eventually, they ended up destroying my life. The first time I was arrested for drugs I presumed I would get a chance to get help, considering all I had been through. But the courts did not care what I had been through. No one even asked. And they did not offer to help, they only wanted to punish my crime. So they locked me up. For someone who has never been in trouble and who has just experienced horrific trauma in their life, jail is another kind of trauma all its own. It did not help me. In fact, I got high the same night I was released. I did eventually go to treatment, but it focused on my drug use, not my trauma, which is like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. It stopped the bleeding for a while, stopped me from getting high, but it did not address the years of abuse that led me to drugs in the first place, or the reasons I allowed people to abuse me. So, naturally, the cycle of abuse eventually resumed. 

    My next partner actually tried to kill me. The police became involved after I went to the hospital the following day, afraid I had a dislocated jaw. I had many injuries and all were photographed. The knife he attacked me with and my ripped shirt were collected as evidence and he was arrested. In this instance, there was no question that the abuse had happened, and the police did there job because the hospital called them and made them act. The charges were eventually reduced to assault with a deadly weapon, and after he served his time for that he was deported. 

    My next partner was better, but no angel, and that relationship lasted over two years and gave me the greatest gift in my life, my son. Taking the fact that we successfully co-parent into consideration, I will not address the details of that relationship in this blog. 

    My next abuser was a true sociopath, a master manipulator. People like him sense vulnerability in women like sharks smell blood in water. He had a reputation as a "bad boy" in our community, but I had no idea of the extent of that reputation. I honestly had no intention of dating him, but he reeled me in over time, with the constant "love bombing." What I learned later, long after our relationship ended, was that he had a plan that involved me, which he came up with after the first time we hung out. When he started selling heroin 3 months into our relationship, his timing was impeccable. I had just started therapy for the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child and was at my most vulnerable point, and it was not long before I slipped back into my addiction to cope. My partner actually encouraged it, and seemed content to feed me drugs to the point where eventually he began using them to control me. His reputation for violence in our town did not make things any easier, and as time progressed he began using violence and threats of violence to get what he wanted from me. After I lost my job, he would use me as a mule to pick up his drugs, telling me that since I was the one with a car and valid license, it was the only thing I was good for and the only way I could prove that I was contributing and not disposable. This, on the Power and Control Wheel, falls under threats and coercion and emotional abuse. During this time, he was arrested for assaulting me. His "business" activities also resulted in our house being raided twice by the police. Both times they found drugs, both times I pleaded for the cops to charge him and lock him up so I could get away from him, and both times they let him go with no charges because he agreed to snitch on other local dealers. So the police knew I was in a dangerous and unsafe environment, they knew that my abuser was violent to me and used my addiction to control me, and they knew I wanted them to help me. But they didn't give a fuck. The end result of that was that I  remained with him, and when he told me to go drop off some dope to one of our friends, I would not even consider saying no because saying no would put me in danger of physical harm, or worse. So I did as I was told and the friend I went to meet ended up dead of an overdose 8 hours after I dropped him off at home with the heroin from my partner. I was then charged with my friend's death. A death that, when you consider the timeline, could have been prevented if the police had given a shit about the obviously abusive situation I was in and had locked my ex up when I begged them to do so. Serve and protect? Yeah, most of us know what a joke that is, but it still blows my mind that I begged police to help me get away from an abusive person and they cared more about using him as a snitch than they did about my safety. I understood very clearly after that experience that the cops do not care about abused women. That was over ten years ago, but nothing has changed. Which brings me to my most recent experience...

    I began dating *Evan three months after my release from prison, after serving almost five years for my friend's overdose death. I thought I knew Evan well. We had graduated in the same class in a small town and had known each other since middle school. He was not a popular kid, more of the shy quiet type. He was voted most polite and best smile in our graduating class. He graduated in the top ten out of over 200 students, and we had shared some mutual friends over the years of our youth and spent some time together back then. When we ran into each other again, fourteen years later, I thought he was a safe bet. I was wrong. The abuse began a few months in, with him taking my medication without my permission. And he didn't just take a few pills, he took my whole prescription of anxiety medication (clonazepam) in two days. While he was high on them he talked about killing his ex-girlfriend, called me a whore and a number of other things, and I kicked him out of my house and told him never to contact me again. Of course, a couple days later, he messaged me asking if I was mad at him, saying he didn't remember what happened over the weekend and that if he did anything stupid he was sorry. Foolishly, I believed him and gave him another chance. And when he got kicked out of his mother's house on Thanksgiving Day and she kept the vehicle that was in her name that he'd been making payments on, I let him come stay with me and made sure he got to work. It was supposed to be for just a couple weeks. It turned into almost five years of a nightmare nearly no one knew about. 

    At the time, I did not know what narcissistic abuse was. I had only experienced the more obvious forms of abuse prior to him. But this was worse. This was a constant mind game, and he was a professional at it. Sure, there was sometimes yelling, sometimes little physical things, but more often it was veiled threats and manipulation to make me believe I was the problem. Even when I was sober for months and he was on meth, he somehow made me believe that I was the root of the issues we were having. I was so convinced, in fact, that when his meth use led to physical violence and threats, I ended up relapsing myself and truly hoped I would not survive. I did survive, but he ended up intentionally overdosing on heroin later that week, and even though he had used threats and coercion to get me to pick it up for him, even though I had called 911 and given him CPR and saved his life, the authorities put the blame on me. In Wisconsin they have a law called the Good Samaritan Law that gives immunity to those who call 911 in the event of an overdose. It is also meant to protect those who are on probation and parole from being revoked. But in my case, since I had been coerced, albeit via threats of violence, into driving to get the drugs he wanted, they used a loophole and I was both revoked and, two years later, charged for getting the drugs. They did not care that he had made threats to hurt me, or that he had a whole stash of meth and other drugs in HIS belongings, they still put it all on me. I was told by one of the officers that the EMTs said he would have died if I had not acted so quickly. And yet I spent six months in jail on revocation for saving his life. I have written extensively about this topic in prior posts, but I want to repeat, as long as people are punished for calling 911 when someone overdoses, many people will not call, and more people will continue to die preventable deaths. But back to my story...

    When I got out of jail, *Evan assumed we would be together again and everything would be fine. But I had a no contact through my probation and he was still on meth. So I tried to end things and move on with my life...I tried. Unfortunately, my ex had other plans, and he decided that he would make me stay with him by threatening to go to the police and ask them to charge me for his overdose. He said he would tell them that I was trying to kill him and gave him an amount I thought would do the job. He sent me screenshots of him emailing the detectives on the case, asking for a face to face meeting. Then he said he would make me look like such a monster that they would lock me up for a decade, and I would miss all of my son's life. As someone who has been royally screwed by the criminal justice system several times, and been held legally responsible for the death of another grown adult who was an addict and chose to do drugs, that threat was enough to keep me tied to him for years after that. 

    (Let's just pause for a moment to appreciate how sad and messed up it is that any woman would consider an abusive relationship a better option than dealing with the police and criminal justice system again. Unfortunately, that's how I felt. I had no faith in the system that they would do right by me in any way, and it's how I would still feel if I was ever in a position like that again. In many cases, the police and the system are more traumatizing than an abusive partner. True story.)

    During the following years, my partner overdosed four more times. I saved him once, after waking up for work and finding his lifeless body blocking the bathroom door when I went to take a shower. EMTs came and broke down the door and resuscitated him and I was not interrogated like I was a criminal, because I had called for help - which is how situations like that should be handled every time. I was sober and had no idea he had been using at that time, but the police treated me well in that instance because it was in the county my ex had grown up in, and they knew his history. They also knew who he hung out with and what they were involved in, so they were not pushy about the situation. I was able to go to the hospital and stay with him until he could leave. Two other times he overdosed at his friend's business and I picked him up from the hospital both times. The final time, he drove to Milwaukee to visit a friend and was found unconscious in the driver's seat of his car, one foot out the door, in a bank parking lot. He had pissed himself that time. He was also on probation at the time and was taken to jail. The car was in my name and I had to pay over $200 to get it out of the impound. He spent 3 months in jail and for those three months, I felt like I could breathe and be myself for the first time in years. I would have left him then, but I was still fighting the charges from his first overdose and was afraid of what he would say in court if I left him. 

    Two months after his release from jail he ended up assaulting me twice in the course of two days and was charged with domestic in two different counties. Both occurrences were very physical, and a no contact was put in place, which he violated regularly, of course. I eventually chose to take a deal in the case for his overdose instead of fighting it at trial, which made him very unhappy. He wanted to take the stand at my trial, wanted to be the "hero" and get me acquitted so that he could have control over my fate. And I took that control away from him, because I did not trust him to do right by me. Several months later, I was sentenced and he no longer had that hanging over my head. I immediately began planning how to leave him and gathering evidence to show his probation agent so I could remove him from my life. We were living together again at the time, an arrangement I had felt forced into due to Covid and the financial problems it had caused me, and he was using meth again and stealing my medications within a week of moving back in together. When he threatened to kill my cat, I'd had enough. I went to his agent with everything I had and he was arrested for violating his "no abusive contact" rule, and removed from our lease. His agent told me afterward that I was one of the bravest women she had ever met for finally breaking free of him. 

    I wish I could say he left me alone after that, but like most abusers, he did not. Three months after I ended things, he began threatening to destroy my life and get me fired from my new job. He threatened to come to my work and harm me. He was hacking my Spotify account and making playlists that would send messages to me. He would hack into my account and disconnect my music regularly. He found every possible way to mess with my head, and he was not punished for it because he went on the run from his probation and they could not find him. So I filed for a restraining order. If you know anything about restraining orders, it's a lot of difficult paperwork followed by a court process that is not at all trauma-informed. My first attempt failed because they could not find him to serve him with the court documents. The second time I filed, I found where he was hiding and had him served there, where he was also arrested. When we went to court for the order, he attended via phone from the county jail. I was in the courtroom in my best attire, and had walked there from the law firm I worked at a block away. I outlined his history of abuse to the judge and explained why I wanted the order. When the judge asked him if he contested the order, he decided he did, and then proceeded to slander me and lie and say anything he could to make me look bad. Including saying that I had tried to kill him with drugs. He played the victim. And the judge bought it. Even though he was IN JAIL being revoked on a case where he physically assaulted me, which demonstrated a clear history of violent behavior, the judge went against the statutory directives and refused to grant me the restraining order. What he did do was tell my ex and I that we should never be in contact again. My ex said he had no problem never seeing or speaking to me again, and that seemed to be enough for the judge.

    Three weeks later, I got an email from the jail from him, requesting to contact me. A month later, on Christmas Eve, I got a four page letter from him in the mail. But when I tried to file another restraining order, I was denied because I did not appeal the original decision on time and because he had not physically harmed me again between when my second attempt was denied and when I filed my third attempt. 

    Let me be crystal fucking clear right now - any woman who is willing to go through the process of filing a restraining order has a damn good reason for wanting to do it, because it is an extremely difficult and emotionally taxing process. A woman who does it three times - three times - is not bullshitting when she says she is afraid and wants the tiny bit of extra protection the courts can offer. This blog does not even cover a fraction of the horrible things that man put me through, and I was genuinely afraid for my life and safety. My ex is still in jail now, and he is likely going to prison, but that gives him plenty of time to plan what he wants to do to me once he is released. And I will just have to deal with that on my own if and when it happens, because the system does not care about domestic violence. It does not care about abused women. It does not listen to them, it does not help them, and it does not show any signs of changing.

    I have seen a couple of recent news stories about domestic violence situations that resulted in women being killed. Many of them sought restraining orders and were denied. It makes me afraid and it makes me angry. And it makes me wonder...will that be me someday? I often tell people that the law is the means by which the powerful maintain their power (Karl Marx), and that the legal system is intentionally complex so that it can be used to maintain the status quo. That includes ensuring the survival of the patriarchy that has "kept women in their place" since time out of mind. The rest of the system is no better. Women encounter difficulty breaking leases they share with abusers. They have difficulty protecting their children from their abusers and sometimes their children are placed with the abuser because he is viewed as more "stable" than the mother - which is, of course, because abusers spend a great deal of time an energy ensuring that their victims are fully dependent on them and would face an uphill battle if they were to leave. Employers are also ambivalent about domestic abuse and are quick to judge or terminate women who are inconsistent at work due to the actions of the abuser. Many employers are not supportive of victims at all. My former employer actually had a talk with me about missing too much work for court proceedings for my restraining orders, and they gave me no time off to deal with the situation properly. My next employer actually asked me not to talk about anything personal while at work because it was "too much" for my coworkers to know I was an abuse survivor. I had mentioned it briefly to one person, and then was told to not talk about it again. How supportive of them, right?

    My ex tried to call me from jail again this past week. It has been nearly a year since I ended our relationship, and I have been with someone else for the past nine months, someone who treats me like gold and appreciates everything about me. I feel beautiful and loved every single day now, which felt strange at first after what I went through in most of my prior relationships, but which I now know I deserved all along. And yet the shadow of my past relationships will forever pollute my life, in ways I am still discovering as I try to heal. Abusive relationships, and especially narcissistic abusive relationships, have a pervasive impact on the lives of victims and survivors. The abuse might end, sure, but the long term effects of living a life where every day is spent tip toeing around the rapidly fluctuating behaviors of your partner can last forever. My experiences left me not only with complex PTSD, but also a slew of issues with my physical health and my ability to function normally on a day to day basis. I have trouble sleeping, trouble focusing, and serious problems with my memory. All of these things are common in abuse survivors. It can be very frustrating to know that even though I fought my way out of that personal hell, it still left me more damaged than I can bear at times. I am getting through it, with therapy and self-care and making sure I set healthy boundaries...but every day, at least once, something happens that reminds me that I am a broken human, and that another human broke me intentionally. And that makes me angry, because it means that in a small way, my abusers got a win. Because I will never be the same. I can only hope that, eventually, I will be better than I ever was. But that time is yet to come. Even now, I lie awake at night and worry about what will happen when my ex is released. I wonder what he is planning for me, what sick game he might try next. I wonder if he will do what he often threatened and kill us both. And that fear will linger in the back of my mind until he is released, or until he dies. Because as long as he is alive, I will always consider him a threat. That is the reality of surviving abuse. I may be safe tonight, as I finish writing this, but the fear remains. Always.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please reach out for help. There are some people out here who do care, and who want to help. I promise you that.

Love you all, until next time.