by Katherine Gale

There are two things that no one ever taught me about abusive relationships. The first is that you don’t have to be stupid to end up in one, and the second is that it is possible for you to still love the person you are with, full heartedly.

I don’t want to tell my whole story in detail, because I don’t need people to feel bad for me, let alone know everything about my experience. However, I do want to talk about what I have learned from this experience. I learned that sometimes you can’t learn from your mistakes. I live with the belief that there is a lesson you can learn from every bad experience that you’ve had. That is precisely why I had such a dreadful time trying to recover from the eight months I spent in an abusive relationship. It was because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a lesson to be learned, which left me with one phrase on constant replay in my head, “I wish it never happened.”

I have never been one to have regrets, because I firmly believe that our mistakes and traumas build us up to who we are today. Yet, no matter how hard I tried to process what happened, I always found that my traumas had only broken me down from who I had been before I experienced them. I wasn’t shaped into a stronger person, I was drained and depleted.

The only thing that could maybe be considered a lesson to learn, is that I know to never stay in a relationship like that again. But that lesson isn’t good enough. It doesn’t justify the emotional damage, the walking on eggshells, or the times I sat there helpless until my neighbors called campus safety. Knowing to avoid bad relationships in the future doesn’t take away my regret for enduring nasty phone calls at one in the morning, waking up terrified every day, or losing all of my friends because I was forced to give every moment of my time to my unstable boyfriend. All of the times I spent sobbing, just wishing we could be happy, the times I accompanied him to the emergency room, the lying to my friends and family pretending it was all okay, – this was not worth it just so I could say “I know I won’t do that again.”

And it hasn’t changed.

I still can’t find a better lesson to learn.

So, healing has not been the easiest process. I spent my summer on mountain summits trying to forget. I went for runs on hiking trails every day to clear my mind. I spent the first three months after I ended my relationship immersed in nature, trying to recover who I was before my experience. Then in August I had to return to the place where it all happened. I had to dread the fact that I may come face-to-face with him again on campus, which of course was inevitable. I did, in fact, encounter him on a couple of occasions, and it wasn’t as horrid as I expected. I was completely fine all thanks to one phrase I repeated in my head whenever he was near, “You don’t have to be scared anymore.”

This was the same phrase I muttered in order to pull myself out of my ritual panic attacks over the summer. I had never had a panic attack before. Then I experienced my first one the time that I caught glimpse of the TV show we used to be watching together when he would harass me. Next was the time I realized that I just wished our relationship had never happened- while driving home alone from a friend’s house one night. The worst one I had was at the top of St. Regis (where I had finally agreed to be his girlfriend), under the paper birch on which he had carved our initials. The last one I had was when I realized that consenting out of fear, isn’t consent. I needed those four breakdowns, in order to build myself back up.

The first time I tried to leave him was the day I decided that freedom was a better reality than our mutual belief that it was fate that brought us together. Since that day, I did learn something. I didn’t learn it from my experience, but from people around me. I learned that I’m not alone, in fact, far from it. The amount of people that have experiences like this – men and women alike – is overwhelming. In a way, it is almost comforting to know that there are others who understand what it’s like to have to carry that trauma with you for the rest of your life. But at the same time, I would NEVER wish an experience like mine upon anyone else; and I would do anything to prevent someone from going through it.  

For me, the hardest part of my relationship was making the decision to get out of it. Then the next hardest part was processing the realizations I made about it later on. When I was taught about abusive relationships, when I was younger, I always thought to myself, “I’m too smart to end up in one of those, and if I do I’ll just break up with him.” Now I know that it’s just not that simple. You can’t always tell that someone will be abusive until it’s too late. And by too late, I mean you’ve already fallen in love and been through the whole “honeymoon phase,” so it’s not easy to just leave them. You can’t throw away all of the good days, the happy memories, the affections, like they are nothing. In my case, we tried to rid our relationship of its downfalls for the sake of our love. Unfortunately, I just reached a point where I realized that the bad outweighed the good. Even with that realization to motivate me, it still was not easy. I still sometimes consider if I regret leaving him. To which I realize that instead I regret ever talking to him in the first place.

If you ever think that you might be in a bad relationship, you probably are. The warning signs, even the subtle ones, are hard to ignore. DON’T IGNORE THEM as I did. Things like jealousy, manipulation, and control are ALL warning signs. If at any point in time you feel as though you are walking on eggshells when with your significant other, IT IS NOT OKAY, IT IS NOT NORMAL, DO NOT IGNORE THAT. If you ever feel like you can’t express your own emotions and you constantly have to put yourself off to take care of your significant other’s emotions and problems first, that is not healthy. When the warning signs occur more frequently and you process that there is something wrong with your relationship, do not keep that to yourself. TELL SOMEONE. Tell your RA, your best friend, a counselor, your roommate, your sibling, or your mom. DO NOT KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Do not choose to suffer alone. Telling someone else does not automatically mean that you have to break up with your significant other, it just means you have someone to go to, someone that can help you cope. When and if it comes to the decision of whether or not you should stay in a relationship, my best advice would be to put yourself first. It is not easy, and you will feel like a complete a**hole. Your significant other might even try really hard to make you feel like an a**hole as to prevent you from going through with your decision. Unfortunately, in most cases it is harder to get out of an abusive relationship than it was to get into it. It’s up to you, to choose your own fate. For me, my fate became freedom.