My parents warned me. My friends warned me. Even I warned me. Everything that spelled disaster was staring me right in the face—but I did it anyways. He belittled me. He threatened me. He told me I was only useful for one thing. He told me he kept me around just to make him look good. He insulted my daughter. I should have ripped him to shreds.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
If only you could have seen me before he came into my life. I was tough and brash and outspoken and a leader. I never had trouble meeting guys and having boyfriends. They were nice guys that just didn’t work out for one reason or another. But they were definitely good people, just like my Christian parents had raised me to be. Good, you know. Not perfect, but good.
I moved my daughter, Carrington, and I to San Diego from L.A. for a job opportunity and when I got here, I felt really alone. No friends. No social life. Where do you meet quality people? Do you pay through the nose for a baby sitter and then go try to meet someone in a bar? In a club?
Nah.
I tried it. It’s a dead end. Guys would ask me to dance, or buy me a drink and then try to make a move and I would think to myself, is this really the best I can do? Is this my only option? It all seemed so silly, like, haven’t we graduated to something more sophisticated and grown up than this?
When I got introduced to Steven through an acquaintance, I knew he was interested right away. On my end, it was quite a bit different. He was unattractive, rude and full of himself. He came on really strong, and I was like, back off, Bud. Here I was this strong woman and this joker saw in me someone he thought he could dominate?
I don’t think so.
If I was a weak-kneed wimp, I could understand it. But me? How is it he sees me differently than everybody else sees me? I was intrigued. I wanted to see what this guy was all about. I agreed to let him take me out to coffee.
Right away, he was so strong, so self absorbed, so unimpressed with my strength that I felt a shift in my own perception of me. It was so sudden. There I was, with a guy I didn’t like, who made me feel bad about myself and yet I couldn’t just get up and walk away. I should have known something dangerous was about to happen when he told me to pay for my own coffee and I pulled out my money and did it.
Suddenly I had a sense that I didn’t really know who I was. My whole life I thought of myself as one kind of person and then in a split second, in the presence of Steven, I was somebody else. I felt lost. I needed an anchor. And he was it.
In the next months, he slowly and methodically continued to break me down. “You’re so stupid,” he’d say. “You can’t make a good decision to save your life. You’re such a loser. I don’t know how you are ever going to get through nursing school if you’re that stupid. The only reason I am with you is because you make me look good. If people see me with a woman like you on my arm, they’ll say, Wow! He got her? But that’s really it. What else are you good for?”
He would rifle through my purse and take stuff out. He demanded I give him money. He told me I couldn’t talk until he was done talking. He told me what I could and couldn’t wear. There were threats, fights, screaming, crying, begging, and a never-ending barrage of insults that I lived in fear of. They could come at any moment.
Unlovable. Worthless. Brainless. Pathetic. Sorry. Disgusting slut.
Then he threatened to call the police if I didn't leave. He wasn't joking.
On several occasions he took me on a trip and would threaten to leave me there because he couldn’t stand me. One time he got mad at me and stopped talking. I begged him to talk so we could work out our problems. He refused, but I kept at him. I’d say, “Please, baby, please talk to me!” I got desperate. Then he threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave. Finally, he got up and went over to the phone and dialed. I thought, is he joking me?
He wasn’t joking.
As I fled his apartment, the police pulled up and I walked right past them as I hurried off to my car.
The barb-covered words kept coming like a loud TV you can’t turn off no matter how hard you try. Suddenly I am a completely different person. Layer after layer is stripped away until absolutely nothing is left. I secretly begin to wish he would hit me because I believed anything would be better than to hear him call me one more name; his words were like knives.
I know nobody understands what drew me to him or why I stayed. I don’t even understand it. I think it was because someone loved me—I guess that was it. To share your entire body and soul with another person, all the while whispering in your ear how much he loves you. To listen to his heartbeat and know it’s beating for you.
And perhaps when you have my level of emptiness, you’ll take all that love any way you can get it—even if he drags you through absolute hell. You just have to have it.
Steven had become my drug. He was a narcotic coursing through my body, giving me disgusting cravings and guilt. Yet I would gladly plunge the needle deep inside my veins to make my pain and emptiness go away, even if I knew the high was temporary. The drug made me lie. The drug made me moody and temperamental. It took my self-esteem, my feeling of self worth. The drug deeply scarred me. It almost killed me.
When he told me he hated Carrington, my beautiful little daughter who I would gladly give my life for, I actually started to consider giving custody to her father so that I could keep Steven happy. He called her an undisciplined little brat, treated her meanly and told me he hated her. The fact that I didn’t attack him shows just how sick I was.
I looked in the mirror. It was true. All the make up in the world couldn’t hide the erosion going on inside my heart and soul. Worthlessness wears like a coat.
One night, he told me he didn’t want anything to do with me any more and I raced over to his apartment and nearly banged down his door. I actually took my bare fists and nearly broke them fighting for my drug. I was like a caged beast until I was just too exhausted and I wilted on the ground outside his apartment for all his neighbors to see. I was a hollow-eyed junkie. Just one more hit, just one more…
Steven was killing me. I was killing me.
I spent that night on my face crying out to God, the God I had given my life to many years before. Steven was killing me. I was killing me. I know God heard me but I had this sense that there was a step I needed to take.
My dad suggested that I get in contact with the woman who Miles had interviewed at church on a recent Sunday. Jessica was the Rock’s Domestic Violence Ministry leader who told a personal story of extreme physical violence by the hands of her husband. I said, I’m not a victim of abuse!
My dad replied, “Just call her. She can probably refer you to someone who can help.”
I met with Jessica and I told her my story but also that I knew I wasn’t right for her ministry. She said, “Are you kidding me? You belong in our group!”
In the group, everything changed. I can’t say I was jumping up and down from the very beginning. But I knew something great was going to happen because I was in the presence of the first group of people who didn’t ask me why I didn’t leave my abuser. It’s not because everybody knows the answer. It’s that everybody knows that there is no answer. The lack of questions is our sisterhood.
Through Jessica and the curriculum and the love of those women and the invitation of the Holy Spirit, God began to battle back to reclaim my heart and show me that the idea that I was worthless was the only thing that was truly worthless. God loved me so much, He rescued me through His Son. The truth is, Jesus thought enough of me to die a horrible death on the cross. He even knows what it is like to endure the brutality of words.
Then one night, Steven told me he didn’t want to be with me anymore. It was something he had said a hundred times before. And every other time I would freak out and began pleading. But on this night, I didn’t. It was as if as soon as he said it, scales filled with worthlessness fell from my eyes. I turned to him and smiled and said the most important words I have ever uttered, “OK.” And I got up and walked away.
He looked at me as if to say, “Hey, what’s going on here?”
God set me free of Steven, and although he has tried to get me back, he is wasting his time. I’m not the same person. You see, I have someone else now. And He loves me just the way I am.
