The hidden truths of domestic violence and the cost of silence.
Abusers don’t arrive with warning labels. No red horns. No cape. They come disguised as everything you thought you ever wanted. That is the hardest truth about domestic abuse. It does not announce itself. It hides in kindness, in charm, in morality — in the very qualities that make outsiders admire them while the victim begins to doubt herself.
At first it feels intoxicating. A flood of late night love messages. Constant attention. Lavish gifts. Promises of the future you once dreamed of. All of it becomes a blinder to the truth. These relationships often get serious very quickly, making it nearly impossible to hold onto healthy boundaries. The abuser studies what you need and feeds it back to you as confirmation. This has a name: love bombing.
It looks like generosity and grand gestures before trust has had time to grow. It sounds like forever talk from someone you barely know. Your nervous system reads the intensity as safety because acceptance like this can feel like home. You feel seen, heard, and held — possibly for the first time in your life. That is what makes it so powerful. But it is not love. It is conditioning. It is bait in the trap.
Once the hook is in, the mask begins to slip. Control creeps in quietly at first. A jealous comment disguised as concern. A demand dressed up as protection. The cycle of abuse has begun, and it follows a pattern so many survivors come to know: tension, explosion, honeymoon.
Tension builds in small, relentless ways. Criticism. The silent treatment. The constant need to walk on eggshells to ward off the inevitable. Your body learns to scan for danger in every word and gesture. Then the explosion comes. It may be a night of insults meant to strip your worth. It may be a shove, a slap, or worse. Whatever form it takes, the explosion is designed to catch you off guard and break you down.
And then, the honeymoon. Apologies. Tears. Promises of change. Begging. The relief is palpable. For a moment, you want to believe he can return to the man you first met. This rhythm is deliberate. It conditions your nervous system to live in hyper vigilance while clinging to the rare scraps of kindness. The cycle itself becomes a cage — one built not of bars, but of hope. And hope is what keeps you tethered to the source of harm.
Living inside this cycle of emotional upheaval rewires the body. The nervous system is built to protect us, but when it is forced to stay on constant high alert, it becomes dysregulated. Your body forgets how to return to a baseline of calm. The heart begins to pound without understanding the trigger. Every creak in the floorboards feels like a warning. The body braces for blows that may never come. Sleep is fractured. Even silence begins to sound like danger.
Over time, the flood of stress hormones carves new neural pathways in the brain, and survival becomes the body’s only language. The chemistry of abuse begins to mimic the chemistry of addiction.
This is why survivors often describe the bond with an abuser as impossible to break. The body craves not the abuse itself, but the temporary relief that comes in the honeymoon phase. Like a drug, it offers a rush of dopamine that feels like intense relief after deprivation. That craving is not a weakness. It is the body trying to make sense of chaos. It is biology responding exactly as it has been trained to do.
Even after escape, the damage does not simply reset. Recovery from domestic abuse is not a single event. It is a process as complex as substance recovery — with its own withdrawals, its own triggers, and the slow, patient work of teaching the body how to feel safe again.
The emotional, physical, and psychological toll does not stop with her. A mother who lives in constant fear can’t help but pass that fear to her children. When her nervous system is on high alert, theirs will be too. Babies learn safety through their mother’s gaze. The tone of her voice. The rhythm of her breath. When those cues are disrupted by abuse, a child’s sense of self and safety is shaken. They grow in sandy soil. Soil that never stops shifting.
A child who can’t trust the world to be safe cannot thrive. Instead, they adapt. Some withdraw into silence. Some lash out in anger. Some learn to tiptoe the same way their mother tiptoes, measuring every word against the possibility of eruption. Abuse fractures families. It teaches even the smallest ones to live in survival mode. To please. To disappear. This is the generational ripple of trauma from domestic violence. It does not stay contained in one person. It alters nervous systems. It shapes futures. It plants fear where the roots of safety should have been.
“Why doesn’t she just leave?”
This is the question asked most often, and it is the one that cuts the deepest. In simple terms, it is ignorance. It places the burden on the victim instead of the abuser, as though leaving were simple, as though safety were waiting just outside the door. But leaving is never simple. In fact, it is the most lethal time in an abusive relationship. Not only do women lose their lives inside abuse, but many lose them in the desperate attempt to escape it.
And for the record, women do try to leave. On average, it takes eight or nine attempts before she finds her way out—if she is so lucky. A trauma bond is a very real psychological phenomenon. The nervous system, conditioned by cycles of abuse and reconciliation, clings to the hope of the honeymoon phase the way an addict clings to the next fix. Add to that the threats of poverty, homelessness, losing children, or retaliation, and the so-called “choice” to leave becomes a dark labyrinth that feels impossible to even try to navigate.
For mothers, every step is measured not only for herself but for the children she must protect. Can you imagine anything more terrifying than trying to escape with small children? Now imagine what happens when they are caught.
So when someone asks, “Why didn’t she just leave?” the only answer is that she was already surviving in the most impossible circumstances. And even when she does leave, the story does not end. Abuse has a long reach. It does not vanish when the door slams shut or when divorce papers are signed. In fact, many women discover a whole new layer of danger after they leave. It has a name: post-separation abuse. The threats, the stalking, the attempts to control through the children or the courts — all of it is part of the same cycle of abuse. Leaving does not guarantee safety. For many, it is just the beginning of another phase of survival.
Post-separation abuse is devastating not only because of the external threats but because of what is happening inside her body. A nervous system that has lived in chaos does not know how to return to calm. Even when the abuser is gone, her body keeps waiting for the next explosion. Sleep is fractured. Trust feels impossible. Even joy can feel unsafe.
Recovering from domestic abuse mirrors recovery from addiction. The body craves what it has been trained to expect, not the violence itself, but the fleeting relief that comes in the honeymoon phase. That moment of forgiveness or reconciliation is like a hit of dopamine, a temporary high after deprivation. The brain learns to chase it long after the relationship is over. This is not a weakness. It is human neurobiology. Trauma carves its pathways deep, and healing requires rewiring them, step by fragile step.
This is why recovery is not an event but a process. It carries withdrawals, triggers, and the slow, patient work of teaching the body how to feel safe again. Without support, the risk of returning to the abuser or finding herself in another abusive relationship remains painfully high. Safety is not just leaving. Safety is learning how to live again.
Domestic violence is endemic. One in three women will experience it in her lifetime, and that number only reflects those who report. Most never do. Abuse thrives in silence. It thrives in a patriarchal culture that still tells women to sit down and be quiet, to endure, to forgive. A culture that insists the highest compliment a woman can earn is to be selfless.
Abuse thrives when neighbors hear the screams and turn up the television. It thrives when the justice system minimizes abuse (“just a little fight with the wife”), when funding for shelters is slashed, when headlines sensationalize the tragedy but ignore the pattern.
When an extreme case makes the news, people become outraged, but within days the outrage fades. The world forgets. Survivors do not have that luxury. Every silenced woman, every child who grows up afraid, carries the weight of that forgetting. Silence protects the abuser. Silence ensures the cycle continues. We cannot afford to look away. Domestic violence is not contained behind closed doors. It is a collective wound that touches every community and every generation.
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, carried the memory of what happens when the world stays silent. His words were born of a greater atrocity, but they hold true here: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
What do survivors need from us?
They need us to stand with them. To speak. To donate. To advocate. To hold space for the women who are still trapped inside it, for those clawing their way out, and for those trying to rebuild a life from the floor up. Survival is solitary, but healing is collective. Together we can break the silence. Together we can dismantle the systems that embolden abusers. Together we can show every survivor that she has worth.
I haven’t been able to write for a very long time. In part it’s due to being thoroughly immersed with my children, two masterminds, classes, and work. I just didn’t have the band width to focus on writing, although every inch of me desired to ooze out into words what I have been feeling. Much of this past year has been about me wrapping up the past and focusing on moving forward. I am laying new foundations and creating new dreams for my life. This has been a time of healing.
After leaving my abusive marriage I was completely disconnected from myself. I really had no idea who I had become or if I was anyone at all. My ex-husband left me a shell of my former self. I did the best that I could to be a single mom to my kids as I navigated the financial turmoil of a divorce while leaving behind a six figure salary for welfare. But, it was in the midst of all of this chaos that Rebel Thriver was born. In fact, it was born shortly after I lost one of the most important people in my life.
Roger Price St. John came into my life three years after I left my marriage. It started out as a professional friendship, but very quickly became more. He was the most interesting, creative, and intelligent man that I had met in a very long time. A recovered addict (14 years) who always supported others in the program. He worked the steps, donated his time for working the hotlines on holidays, and was a sponsor. He knew that good support was key in being able to make it through to the other side of recovery. Which is why it was so incredibly heart wrenchingly hard that he died of an overdose.
He was a teacher at a local college, film maker, Billabong surf camp photographer, frequent volunteer, and he ran his own non-profit surf camp that benefited needy kids in Costa Rica. Both of us artists we shared a love of photography, surfing, Pablo Neruda, and my children. After a long Summer beach day of surfing and family, he got down on one knee and proposed to me on the top of the sand dunes. The Atlantic bore witness.
I never got to marry Roger. About seven months later, after getting very sick with bronchitis, he relapsed. His doctor prescribed him cough syrup with Codeine and that was the beginning of the end. I had no idea what was coming down the pike when I saw him taking a chug of that cough medicine straight out of the bottle. Within a month he was barely functioning or even recognizable to me for that matter. The once fit and vibrant man who could tread water forever just to get the perfect picture of someone surfing out of a wave could barely shuffle his feet to get from point A to point B now. What the hell had happened? When he showed up to my home barely coherent I wouldn’t let him in. That was the last time he saw the kids, who by this time had already started to call him “dad”. And just like that he slipped away.
I watched Roger fall deeper and deeper into his addiction. The “monster”, as he called it, had laid siege and taken over. He lost his job, ended up in jail, and a psychiatric hospital before overdosing. It had been only thirteen months since he had proposed to me and only seven months after falling face first off the wagon. It was intense and it all seemed to happen at once. I was not in the head space to take this on. I was still healing from my 11 year failed marriage with a man who was mentally unstable and violently abusive. It was more than I was equipped to handle. Roger Price St. John was gone.
Writing became the outlet for my sadness, which in turn gave birth to Rebel Thriver. I started writing this blog in hopes of connecting with someone else who might have been feeling as lost as I did. If that was even possible. I never expected the response would be so great! I quickly found out that there were many other women from around the world who were in a similar place as I was. We were all trying our best to survive as we walked through that liminal space following the death of a relationship. The space of no longer and not quite yet.
Many people never get to experience true love, but I certainly did. I loved my husband with all of my heart, and it shattered into a million tiny little pieces when I had to leave him. Even though he was severely damaged before I met him, I felt like I had failed him. Roger came into my life when I believed that I would never be able to love again. He met me where I was and held a safe space for me on my path to recovery from abuse. In the end, I felt like I had failed Roger too. I had loved two incredible men, and lost both of them.
This week marks the eighth Anniversary of Roger’s death. I cannot believe that so much time has passed. He is still very much with me, and I could give you example after example of how he stays in touch; his sense of humor intact. He walks with me on the beach everyday and that gives me great comfort. Roger gave me the greatest gift that he could, love. He showed me that my heart had the capacity to love again after it had been shattered. He led me out of the darkness, into the light, and inspired my life’s work. This incredible man showed me that my heart will never stop expanding. And so on this eighth anniversary of his death my heart breaks open a little wider and my love grows a little deeper.
We are in the cross fires of a political situation that shouldn’t be political at all. I know there are people who will call me brainwashed and misguided. They will say that George Orwell is turning in his grave because 1984 has come to fruition. I know these people well. Some of them have my same blood. Some of them know what happened to me back in 1984.
I was taken advantage of by a guy from a prep school. He locked me in his room, laid on top of me and hurt me. He took my virginity. I cried for him to STOP! He didn’t. When he finally got up, he put his pants on and leaned against the wall of the darkened room, the candle light was flickering across his evil face as he said in a very flip way, “What do you expect? I have wanted you for over a year?”
I was staying with my best friends family at the time. I was bleeding heavily. I was terrified. However, I didn’t call my parents. I didn’t tell them when I got home. I didn’t tell anyone. I tucked that experience away inside of me for years and “forgot” about it. Funny thing about trauma…it likes to pop up every now and then in the worst of circumstances. When I turned 22 I finally told my mother. She took to her bed for 3 days and cried the entire time. My father doesn’t know to this day because I saw how my mother reacted and I just knew it would kill my father.
People have been blaming the victim forever. Seriously, it is the culture of the world. A victim can be your mother, father, sister, brother, child, friend, and yes, even you. To add insult to serious injury it is also made clear that the victim is in someway responsible for the attack. This creates a wall of isolation and shame. This wall can barricade a victim behind it’s tall chalky cold walls for years. Sometimes for life. The mind is a mysterious thing. We have learned some about what trauma does to a persons mind though. I can speak to this because I am not only a survivor of rape, but of domestic violence. In an attempt to protect you, your mind will selectively shelf memories. It’s as though it opens a door within and shoves the trauma into it, and then it slams the door. Sometimes the door opens up again. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I live with debilitating PTSD. If you were to ask me what I struggle most with day to day I would say, my memory. I have big blocks of time missing due to domestic violence. I can’t remember much of my child’s first years. This is because during this time his father was so abusive to me that in order to survive my mind shut the memories away. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
I am not mad about my situation. Rather I have chosen to channel that into helping other women recover, reclaim their lives, and move on after abuse and assault. This is how I heal. I run Rebel Thriver and this has become my life’s work. One of our agreements is no politics and no religion. This is because we know that this type of trauma doesn’t discriminate. I do not want to alienate any survivor over a political opinion or a religious belief. I believe that a victim needs to be heard no matter how long it takes for them to find their voice. And when they do finally speak they should not be shamed for it.
You do not know the path another has walked. We really need to start taking a step back at how things have been so that we can make changes and learn to move humanity forward in a more positive way. I believe that education is the only way. People can learn to become more understanding, better listeners, and develop empathy. We are capable of re-framing our thinking and doing better than the generations that came before us. We need to move towards coming together to tear down the old ways that allow isolation and victimization. We need to try to make this a better place for our children.
All I can do is continue to help the people who are trying to rebuild their lives and heal after trauma. I do not take political sides. I will never make a victims story divisive. It’s hard to stay out of the firing line these days. I pray the truth comes out and that people in powerful places are no longer able to wield their power to hurt others. Perhaps I am a bit idealistic, but that’s how I am and I will never give up striving to do better. My calling in this life is to help heal the wounds of survivors. It’s not fancy work, but it is everything to me, for how can we heal the world if we don’t work on healing it’s wounds?
“Love. It will not betray you, dismay you or enslave you. It will set you free.”
– Mumford & Sons
I used to have a warped idea about love. I believed that if I loved deeply and intensely with all of myself I could change the world. My ex-husband walked into my life-like a black hole. He sucked everything that I had out of me and then he demanded more. Everyday I paid a toll for being alive and it wasn’t cheap. He took everything I had to give, spit it back into my face, and then took more. I loved him though. I just kept scraping up what I could find of me to give to him. Little pieces, tiny shards of myself, were all I could find in the end. Never have I met another who could find so much to take from so very little. I left him as a shell of the person I had met him as, but I also left him with so much more than I had come to him with.
My world has never been the same. Even after years of separation he is with me everyday. How can you turn off love? I have my moments of anger and regret, but my love for that incredibly sick and imperfect man is still there. It’s changed in scope and I don’t respect him, or speak to him for that matter, but for a fellow human, hurting and damaged, I still have love. As a child I was raised to love and turn the other cheek. As a wife I learned to survive. As a single mother I learned to fight back to protect my young. We live so many lifetimes over and over in this single life we are given. And we have the potential to love many times over. When my marriage crumbled I thought that was it. Party over. The ship sailed. I didn’t think that I could ever have the capacity to love another person in that way again. Love taught me differently though.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
After my marriage exploded I focused on what I knew would never fail me; the love for my children. Pure and unconditional love knows no deeper depths than that of a mother for her children. I poured myself into them so that they would know that I could love them enough for both their father and I. I alone was going to be enough for them. That was going to be enough. I was going to be ok. And as time passed I realized that love was not a one way street. If you loved the right people then love could come back to you as well. Loving people has always been easy for me, but It took me a long time to get comfortable trusting someone enough to allow them to love me back. To be able to believe in that love and accept it was something I had to learn.
I learned, that I needed to love myself first, way too late into the game. If I could love myself then all future relationships had a chance of being balanced and healthy. It’s somewhat impossible to have a solid relationship with another person if you don’t love and respect yourself. People throw the word love around like its candy. Love, true love, is so much more than that. It is layered, rich, and runs deep. It has a foundation of trust, loyalty, and an innate desire to bring happiness into another’s life. If you can have that kind of relationship with yourself how can love fail? True love is complete freedom to be you while sharing your life with another. It is fail proof because even if you part ways, love finds a way to carry on.
In our youth it is hard to comprehend the magnitude of love’s depths. Love has a very narrow view. We know love for family and then we know the Hallmark version. As we grow, get hurt, heal, and deepen our personal awareness we learn that love can be so much more than that. We humans get so hung up on the idea of romantic love to come and save us and it’s a sham. Love is peddled as an industry generating millions each year. It starts with Valentine’s Day and continues through, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and funerals. Our society spends so much money trying to buy and capture love when in reality true love is free and it is endless.
Love is not something we buy in a store. It is living, breathing, alive. It has the ability to change the course of your life. Love can end wars and change nations. If we want this world to survive than love is the only thing that can save us. Love is stronger than any kind of hate. Love endures and love is the only thing truly worth fighting for. Love is boundless. And if love finds you worthy then you must be prepared to love in return. Love is not one-sided. It is patient and it is kind. Love is long-suffering, humble and loyal. It will be the sunrise and the sunset of your days. Embrace it and cherish it. Give it space to grow and nourish it. Just know that true love can crown you and crucify you, but if you want to love then there is no half stepping. Love is endless…it goes on and on and on.
As a survivor of child sexual abuse and adult domestic violence I constantly stand on the precipice of wanting to seek out fellow survivors for solidarity and support and needing to protect the wounds that remain from those experiences. I work in front line child protection and see the evil that exists in the world on a daily basis.
This is both wounding and healing.
How can it be both is a question which I have asked myself more than once. The wounding is obvious in its nature. Hearing the stories of experiences of children and their families touches on my wounds which, while no longer raw, are tender. The healing comes from knowing that I am an unseen survivor, that my trajectory didn’t follow the path that may make other survivors more obvious in their pain and I see so many others who break the mold set by society about what a survivor looks like.
I have discovered a passion for justice for these children and young people that eclipses justice in terms of the law and encompasses a sense of justice that results from the capacity of a society, to not limit their future lives to the expectations that are set by how we view victims of abuse. To set no bounds to their achievements and to provide them all with opportunities to become so much more than what we are lead to believe.
I am an advocate for changing how we view survivors and how we allow those other, richer experiences to come forth for a more balanced and holistic view of the person in a whole of life context and not through the veil of abuse. This frees people, like myself, who search for answers and a sense of self after an annihilation of the psyche which left me floundering in a sea of self doubt around “how do I become a survivor?”
So, I searched for a cause or a way to integrate my experiences into my life. To find those pieces of myself that I kept apart from the moments of abuse. I say moments because quite literally they were only moments, in a life which contained so much more of me without those abuse experiences. This is where I needed to begin my search, to look at those moments that were not imposed on me by others, which I can take complete ownership of and say “this is me”. The me that rejects acts of evil and exclusion and stands for love, stands for kindness, stands for acceptance and inclusion and that stands for strength, survivorship and healing.
I advocate through both thought, deep seated beliefs and action. I advocate through not accepting the perpetuating of victims trajectories which does not allow room for movements of the self from victim to survivor to thriver. I have my days, like any other, when the world and its focus on news worthy sensationalist topics of pain and suffering eclipses the stories of survival, and it affects me and I withdraw to wrap my internal wounds in a blanket of solitude. But I emerge again to rejoin the people who stand, who focus on strength, goodness and inclusion and who often work in silence to create healing pockets of a world in which I like to rest for a time.
I will forever remain an advocate for others, survivors of abuse, survivors of tragedies, survivors of any experience which leaves them searching for something to anchor themselves to a spot where they are safe from the storm. A harbor of support where they can find their direction. It will always be a tough journey for me given my wounds and experiences and the world I choose to work and offer my knowledge in, but given that I also contain a rich internal tapestry of alternate experiences which allow me to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, I will remain optimistic of the future. I know that I will continue to be more than those experiences that I endured and I will offer myself as a resource to others who also seek to find their own inner strength, light and purpose. I am not blind to the world and all its difficulties, I know that while I experienced abuse I have not experienced other forms of hardship and that I have had opportunities that others have not had.
My story is not unique, it is a single story that reflects my personal journey but all survivors have similarities in their stories and I choose to focus on their alternate stories, the survivor story, the triumph over tragedy story and I choose to seek out others who have walked this path before me, hand in hand with those who now walk beside me and to lead the way for those who will follow.
We are in the cross fires of a political situation that shouldn’t be political at all. I know there are people who will call me brainwashed and misguided. They will say that George Orwell is turning in his grave because 1984 has come to fruition. I know these people well. Some of them have my same blood. Some of them know what happened to me back in 1984.
