I have just been watching the Oprah Winfrey Show and today’s feature was spousal abuse. It is appalling how many men have continued to make their wives a statistic of spousal abuse. It doesn’t matter whether physical or verbal/emotional, it is abuse anyway. Today’s particular feature was heart wrenching and I just couldn’t hold back my tears. The worst case was that of a child who filmed his mother being battered by the dad. Five years down the road and the poor kid is still undergoing rehabilitation from the effects of a dysfunctional family.
Much as I hate to even think about it or even discuss it, I was once a statistic and lord knows I was slowly loosing myself. To me verbal/emotional abuse is the worst form of abuse because it is hard to satisfactorily prove it. For all you care the abuser may choose to say it is all bare lies. How does one prove such abuse? To this day I still find difficulty expressing the verbal/emotional abuse I experienced. It is my word against his and many times he has with wit rubbished my claims.
I remember those late nights when I was asked why I was not like other women because they could achieve an orgasm during sex which I never did. I was convinced I had a huge sexual problem, that’s when I discovered the word frigid and regarded myself as one. I hated sex and yet I was only married for a month. This went on for most of the time we were together, sex was just his act, I was never there and I can imagine I was his worst sexual nightmare. It is only later with counselling and self discovery that I discovered I was normal anyway; I was only dealing with a drunk, a selfish man who had no regard for his wife. Not to mention my first sexual experience with him was rape. Yes!! Something I have always been in denial about but came to acknowledge after my counselling session. (This is quite a complex matter which I would need all day to talk about. Check out Abby's post
'consent' of 20/12/07 which in so many ways is my rape experience).
It went on to ‘you are not beautiful anyway’, ‘you can’t account for your law school’, ‘you are starving my child’, ‘my son has looks from your family which I dislike’, ‘you are so cheap’, ‘you take my son, I shall harm you’ and it went on and on for a while. Like every abused woman, I got to believe some of the things he said to me, I ceased to really appreciate the person in me that was admired by many. As far as I was concerned, my life had just taken a nose dive and my sanity was slowly giving in.
Thank God for little blessings in the form of my son and the strong values which I still firmly held to, I had to walk away, whatever the cost. In my mind my son was better off without a father than have one who had no values in his sorry life. And walk I did.
Like Oprah said, abusers will always shift the blame to their victims. It is still happening to me today and not an ounce of remorse. I am not even sure he remembers all that, maybe it was only normal to him.
One thing I know for sure is that nobody should take away that which you are made of. YOU,your esteem and your spirit. Without those you are nobody.
