One Unsafe Woman: In Her Own Words

Angela is 35, and happily married with three children. But 10 years ago, Angela was an unsafe woman; one of millions in this country. She was in an abusive, violent relationship that lasted two years. And that relationship is one of the reasons Angela would later become a police detective.

This is her story:

“I was pretty young when I met my boyfriend. We met at work. It was this burning passionate chemistry. Really a sweep-me-off-my feet kind of love affair. We moved in together pretty quickly. I remember that the violence began right away, and got very intense. I was punched, kicked, stabbed and had several broken bones. My boyfriend’s acts of rage were so severe that I lost two jobs because of the abuse. I left him eight times, but each time I would go back, or he would track me down, or sometimes he would woo me back.

“One day I was just emotionally, physically, spiritually exhausted. I mean, just utterly to the bone weary. I had to get out of there. So, I went to my sister’s. It was quiet for two weeks. My sister had to go out of town. She asked me, ‘Are you going to be OK?’ I said, ‘It’s been quiet for two weeks. I think it’s over.’ That first night I was alone I went to bed and was awakened to a pounding on the front door. It was my boyfriend. He broke the door down and assaulted me. It lasted for hours. The whole house was a crime scene. He raped me, tried to put my head through the shower door. He said he was going to kill me and tried to suffocate me. Then he dragged me to the kitchen and started slamming my head against the floor. I don’t know what made him stop. I just told him, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Just stop. Let’s just stop this, I’m fine. This is not a big deal. We’ve had worse things happen to us. Let’s just stop, let’s just try and move forward and try and be happy.’

“He said, ‘Are we going to be together?’

“And I’m like, ‘Of course, we’ll always be together.’

“Well,” he says, ‘What are we going to do about you?’

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just go, I’m fine.”

“No,” he says, “I can’t go, you’re not OK. You haven’t seen yourself.”

“I saw myself in the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My head was the size of a basketball, my eye sockets had been shattered, my nose was broken, my cheeks were cut, and my front teeth were pushed through my lower lip. My boyfriend drove me to the hospital. He told me what to say when we got there. I walked in and I did exactly what he said.

“I can’t imagine ever being assaulted any worse than that. But it steeled me. It made me a really confident person. A really independent person. I’m self-reliant now, and I kind of revel in that. The hospital called the cops and I told them everything. I told the whole story. I didn’t hold back anything. They arrested him and I never saw him again one on one. He was sentenced to nine years and served almost all of it.

“I had a lot of counseling. I don’t know anybody that can go through what I did without counseling. I decided it doesn’t have anything to do with your mental or emotional stability or instability. You have to have counseling.

“After about three years of counseling I was very depressed and very dependent on having a man in my life to fill me up. All of a sudden I was, like, I hate myself. I hate myself and until I don’t hate myself I can’t be with anybody else. The whole thing you can’t love another until you can love yourself, the whole cliché, is true. I mean, really, I just came to this realization that I hated myself, and that I was looking for somebody to love me enough to cover up that hate.

“I tried to determine why I was hating myself and a lot of it was that I allowed this person to do all this stuff to me and I think the biggest thing in not hating myself was taking responsibility that I had made decisions that took me to that relationship. I was personally responsible for what had happened to me. A lot of people won’t accept that. They see it as victim blaming. I’m telling you, three years, no four years, into counseling I was going nowhere. I was very, very, very depressed and having a lot of struggles and issues and problems. When I came to that realization and when I accepted that. I started to get better. I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t feel bad about saying I made decisions that allowed this person to treat me poorly.

“I have to be careful about saying it. I mean, blaming your self for what happened. Maybe on some level it is victim blaming but you are responsible for what happens to you. And if you won’t take that responsibility you are going to have problems, and I did. When I took that responsibility, it was hard. It’s not like you just wake up and say, ‘I accept responsibility for the choices I made.’ Hell no, it was years, years more.

“I did a couple more years of counseling on that level. That really personally responsible level. Also being really aware of my own kind of self-hatred and when I moved past that I was better. I was a different person that came out of it. Like I said I am really self-reliant and more humble. I just came out of it a person that I really like.

I spent a whole year just emptying my cup, just telling different stories and telling them over and over again and reliving things for an entire year. It’s like you just keep going down another level and then you start talking about, what has that done to you and then when you get past, what that’s done to you, how did you get there in the first place? What took you to that relationship, what made you want to be in that relationship? So I kept going through all these levels in counseling and it took me probably five years before I felt like, you know what? I don’t need counseling anymore. I feel good, I’m happy.”