I was terrified for the first time in a nightmare when I was five years old. I sat on the cover of my bed, suspended hundreds of feet above the neighborhood below. There was a string hanging from one corner of the bright green and yellow cover, just out of reach of the terrifying King Kong figure trying to pull me from my precarious position. I couldn’t move for several heart-stopping moments. When I finally found my cry, I rushed into my parents’ bedroom.

Terrorism looks a little different as adults.

This is difficult to write. My innate dissociative tendencies continue to interrupt my train of thought. But it should be noted that victims of domestic violence and narcissistic abuse know the difference between fear and terror and all the colors in between. Confusion occurs in the minds of those who are privileged enough to never encounter intimate terrorism because terrorism represents an empty face. With my detached and cheerful demeanor, no one knew that I had lived in a state of constant dread for years.

I’m writing about this because I recently had a conversation with one of my daughters. She told me for the first time how grateful she was that Iterror was able to escape with all of them, even though it took a terrible court battle. In that vulnerable moment, I admitted to her that, looking back, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t tell the judge about the violence my ex-husband had committed. I will only say here that I am very glad that the FBI is now compiling lists of those who seriously harm animals. More than that serves no purpose.

But I carried the guilt for a long time in the past because it never occurred to me to reveal those terrible secrets to the judge. It simply didn’t occur to me. I could have stopped all the arguing in court, but somehow all the violent incidents receded in my mind. So when I admitted this to my daughter, she surprised me. As horrific as the custody battle had scarred her childhood, she felt as if those revelations would have destroyed her. The burden of terror was too much for her young mind to bear. Then she asked: “Don’t you remember the horror?”

And suddenly I did.

Horror and terror are brothers in the secret corridors of domestic violence.

I think of the traumatized soldiers with their blank stares in old World War II photos, although I’m not trying to create equations in the traumatic events. However, I am only making the connection between the paralysis and mental captivity that occurs when one sees things that humans were never meant to see.

A new friend I made recently told me about a co-worker whose ex-husband stabbed her multiple times in an abandoned warehouse. She escaped by pretending to be dead. When I heard that, I realized that I did that at the time of my divorce. I didn’t play as a literal opossum, of course. Instead, I made myself as non-threatening as possible. This included keeping myself as empty as possible inside and out.

Opossums do not choose to play dead. Instead, it is an involuntary reaction to terrorism. I didn’t choose to play dead either. My mind and body can only handle so much. Parting is a blessing in the beginning. Later, it can cause problems.
And my body remembers.

But only now, twenty years later, can I let myself be terrified. It was a secret I kept from myself for my daughters, to stay away from the horror, away from the abuse. With acknowledgment of that younger version of myself, who lived a life of slavery and mental slavery, comes a love for my younger self. All the chaos of abuse, the back and forth, the bonding of trauma, all in horrific detail, no longer scares me. I can tell my story because I am more than just the sum of the events in my life.

But when I tell my story, I hope I can accomplish just a few things. Firstly, validation of those who are currently on the path to offending. I receive countless emails from women and some men who do not yet have the strength to escape. I just want to say that we do what we can in these situations. I do not judge you to stay until you have a way out. Prison is never easy to escape from.

To those who don’t understand or believe that abuse is a two-way street, get this. We POWs navigate our escape very carefully and use the resources at our disposal. Until you see firsthand what one person might do to another person, you have no frame of reference for judgment. How could you? And I hope you never do.

I created my website to encourage those who find themselves trapped in such situations. It takes time to understand one’s story. Telling the truth about who we are and where we’ve been could take decades, especially if we have not skeletons but corpses not of our own making in our closets.

What liberates me, inside and out, is knowing that on Easter Sunday, the innocent and murdered body of Jesus emerged from the tomb. And every day, He brings me more and more out of darkness into His wondrous light.