Three of my aunts have been victims of domestic abuse for decades.
The eldest of the aunts, a strong, intelligent woman who has experienced a lot of hardship but always laughed in the face of every contretemps, lived with an alcoholic husband who beat her whenever he got drunk. When she was in her fifties, she finally left him, moved to a different city, started making good money, and met a man who cherished her and treated her very nicely. After a couple of years in her new reality, she left her boyfriend and went back to the abusive alcoholic.
The second aunt also lived with a violent alcoholic her entire life. He’d get so drunk, he’d chase her around with a cleaver. Her sons spent their entire childhood and adolescence trying to get between the drunk, knife-wielding father and the terrified mother. The eldest son had a nervous breakdown after one of such assaults and ended at a clinic for nervous disorders. He had to drop out of school and go on disability. Finally, he told his mother that he would never speak to her again if she continued living with the alcoholic. My aunt moved out. Her employers were so happy that they gave her an apartment of her own as a gift. All of the relatives chipped in for furniture and appliances. The sons were ecstatic. The ex-husband didn’t do anything to get her back. He found a new woman, married her, and left my aunt alone. Two years later, my aunt got back together with him.
The youngest of the aunts also lived with a violent alcoholic who beat her on a regular basis. She divorced him after decades of abuse. Of course, now she is back with him, and yesterday he beat her again. The police in Ukraine never takes any interest in domestic violence, so, I guess, this aunt is also doomed to being beaten for the rest of her life.
As you can see, I’m not even talking about cases where the abuser threatens the victim or the children to prevent them from leaving. The women I’m talking about seem to choose to go back to the abusers. For people who didn’t grow up in an abusive environment, this is incomprehensible. We get frustrated with the victims, baffled by their seemingly illogical decisions. “Why doesn’t she just leave?” we ask. “Why does she keep going back to the abuser? I just don’t get it!”
Right you are, you don’t get it. Neither do I nor anybody else who hasn’t been a victim of domestic abuse. People who grow up in abusive environments only know the kind of reality where one partner is an abuser and another one is a victim. Even if they manage to escape from their abusive relationships later in life, the kind of anxiety they experience outside of the familiar pattern, keeps driving them back into abuse.
A habitual victim of abuse spends his or her life awaiting beatings. An expectation of horrors, as we all know, is often more difficult to deal with than horrors themselves. In the relationships with their abusers, all three women I described above know when and how the abuse will happen. In their worldview that was defined by patterns of abuse since the beginning of their lives, this is better than a situation when violence can be done to you at any time and you are not equipped to predict or anticipate it. They go back to their abusers because they are familiar with them. For such women, the choice is not between being and not being abused, being and not being terrified. The only choice they have is between being abused in predictable ways or awaiting in horror violence that can happen at any time.
And this is a true tragedy.
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