How to build strong women? Abuse them.
How "traditional" men turn pleasers into warriors
There are many weapons abusers use against us. Some are intangible: words, silence, financial dependence, isolation.
And some are physical.
Fists, bottles, knives.
I shan’t downgrade coercive control since it nearly killed me through the breakdown of my mental and physical health. But what She went through?
I got a temping job at a nightclub in town. School hours, 9:30 to 2:30, cashing up and balancing the books. She was Head of Security. Chief bouncer, in charge of burly men who towered over her. She was five foot nothing and petite. But by God, you wouldn’t cross her. She had a handcuff licence. To qualify, you have to get a six-foot man on the floor, cuff him, and get him back on his feet in under two minutes. I looked at her and thought, HOW?
Through abuse, that’s how.
Her ex was a piece of work. He, like mine, had moved her out to the countryside. Mine tried but failed to get a shotgun license; hers succeeded. The gun was a threat, but his fists were his preference. He’d beat her whenever he was drunk, which was often. Sometimes he’d beat her unconscious.
She told me how one time, after he beat her, she was lying on the kitchen floor, trying to call for help, when he took the receiver out of her hand and stamped on it. Her hand, not the phone. He broke every one of her fingers.
She spent two hours trying to persuade him to call her an ambulance, promising she wouldn’t dob him in.
In agony, she helped him construct a fiction that might fly, and finally, he drove her to the hospital. The medic tending to her injuries asked how they happened. But her husband was standing in the doorway, joking with the nurses. They all thought he was charming. She had to go home with this man. So she told the negotiated fiction, the one that bought her treatment and pain relief. And he drove her back to her prison.
But she was getting close to what it takes to leave a controlling man. People don’t realise what it takes is life or death. You have to know for sure that if you stay, you’ll die. Because it’s already clear that if you leave, he might kill you.1 When the certainty of dying if you stay overrides the risk he’ll kill you if you don’t, escape can finally become the only course.
One story never left me. There was a night when he was in the pub for hours. The longer he was out, the more frightened she was. Drinking fuelled his most violent attacks. Waiting to be beaten up again was unbearable.
But she’d figured out where he kept the key to the gun cabinet. She took out the shotgun. She loaded it. She sat on the stairs in their entrance hall, moonlight shining in through the quarterlight window, with his loaded shotgun pointing at the door.
For a long time, silence.
Then the sound of his car pulling into the driveway.
The engine cutting out.
The car door opening and closing.
His footsteps approaching the house.
With the sound of his key in the lock, her grip tightened on the stock. Her finger rested, trembling, on the trigger. She would kill him. Anything rather than suffer another beating.
But when he opened the door and saw her, he burst out laughing. And her finger didn’t move. She couldn’t pull the trigger.
“Go on, then,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
He dropped to his knees in front of her, opened his mouth, and put his lips around the muzzle of the gun. His eyes, full of amusement, signalled to her to pull the trigger. And, of course, she couldn’t.
He released the muzzle from his mouth and laughed. He got off his knees. Said, “You’re pathetic.” Then, still laughing, pushed past her and went upstairs.
She sat there for a long time after, with the gun across her knees.
Later, when she unfroze herself, she went up to the bedroom. There he was, in the bed fast asleep. Perfectly secure. Snoring.
This is close to the story she told me. I made up his words. She told me his words precisely, the way you do when trauma burns its brand into you. Each word, each action, each facial expression, precisely rendered… unless you’ve self-protected by burying them.
I don’t have his exact words, because it wasn’t my trauma, and I haven’t seen her for maybe twenty years. But the essence of this: the moonlight, the gun, the unbearable wait, the sounds of him coming up to the door… and then paralysis. His laughter, his mockery, his putting his lips around the muzzle of the gun to underline her powerlessness and humiliation: this has stayed. And I wanted to tell her story, even imperfectly. Because it had an extraordinary, inspiring resolution.
She began to siphon money out of the housekeeping. Ten quid here, twenty quid there. She stashed the cash at work. She had an office job, thank God; he hadn’t managed to make her pregnant.
She began to move pieces of clothing to her workplace, too. A blouse one day, a pair of trousers the next. Things small enough to slip into her bag or an extra layer beneath what she was wearing. At work, she would add each piece to a box in the stationery cupboard.
Then it was winter. Snow was forecast. That morning, going to work, she snuck her passport into her bag. In the afternoon, she called the home phone and left a message.
Some of the roads home are impassable. I might be late.
But she had no intention of trying to get “home”, that place where her life was constantly in danger. She put the money and clothes she’d been storing into her car, and left work early. Without telling a soul, she drove away from her job, her life, and everyone she knew.
She drove a couple of hundred miles, and kept moving. At first, she slept in her car. Using a different name, she lined up a house-sitting job, looking after someone’s pets. When that ended, she lined up another, and then another. For a couple of years, she kept moving from house to house. She knew he’d be trying to track her down and punish her. Abusers usually do. They don’t like “losing” what they think of as their possession. They don’t like you taking control.
Sometimes she got wind of him on her trail and would have to move quickly. She’d just be making new friends, then disappear. She couldn’t put roots down. She needed a solution. So, wherever she was, she enrolled in martial arts classes. She put all her focus into getting tactically strong. She got very, very good at martial arts.
Finally, she was strong enough to disarm a man. Disarm a man and get him back on his feet, cuffed. Finally, she was strong enough to defend herself if he found her. And using those skills, she got a job as a bouncer. And some years down the line, I met her, as Head of Security.
She still keeps her head down. You won’t find her on social media. And she’s a tough cookie, but nowadays, also disabled. All those years being a bouncer in nightclubs destroyed her hearing. Last I saw her, she had a Hearing Dog for the Deaf.
And needed that dog, too. Because being deaf makes you vulnerable. You can’t hear if someone’s breaking into your flat. And a man did indeed break in, while she was sleeping. Not her ex. Another messed-up man who thought he could steal what he wanted. The dog let her know. Her martial arts did the rest.
Her path is not for everyone. Sometimes I see people say this is what we must do: all women should get strong and learn self-defence. And that’s great if you are physically able and you have the time and the love for it. But truly, should women’s time and energy be burned up reactively and defensively? In the case of this brilliant warrior woman, it gave her skills and a career… if something of a dangerous, damaging one. But it’s very much treating the symptom, not the cause. I’d rather ask what makes these men treat us as chattels. And how we can break the patterns that cause abuse.
I’ve been to a self-defence class. It was great. But you have to go every week to keep those skills, and my life is full of other passions. Plus, we draw towards us what we focus on, and I choose not to fill my head with the expectation of being attacked. In any case, my own “attack” was psychological. So that is what I’ve built my strength in defence of. I can spot a controlling arsehole at twenty yards.
Before my abusive marriage, I did not love myself. Deep down, I felt unworthy of being loved. I attracted a man who took me to the darkest reaches of where that can go. And having survived, though it wasn’t fun, I thank him. Because I needed to learn to value myself, and he certainly taught me. He made me the warrior woman I am today.
We who have come through abuse are all Kintsugi. When we put ourselves together after breaking, when we show ourselves how extraordinary we are to have come through all this and survived: now it’s a feature. We use the strongest glue and fill the gaps with gold. Love is the glue. Joy is the gold.
So gleam and proudly display where you were broken: where you are mended. Because that is truly where we discover our value.
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Coming Soon
Not wanting to bring too much grit to the extended US/UK holiday season, I’ll be leaving the darker side of memoir for a bit, and lighting some metaphorical candles against the darkness for the rest of the year. I will be focusing on how I recovered my mental health, and telling tales of metaphysical magic. I’ll also be inviting you to join me in a mini writing challenge as a taster for what I’ll be offering subscribers in January.
Post-It Notes
This month, I’ve begun approaching my protopian novel. I wrote and parked the first chapter a year ago. There is much to be done envisaging a world where women don’t have to live in fear of men. My interest, always, is on how we would get there. From where we are, where violence against women and girls in the UK has increased by 37% in the last five years. Fiction is an interesting place to work out a possible path.
This week in London I delivered a 3-minute speech for “Changemakers”: one idea that could change the world for the better. As you can probably guess, it was on clearing trauma. If the video passes, I’ll share it.
This week, I have been preparing the 30-minute talk I’ll be giving at the Marylebone Theatre on Sunday, alongside poet Alice Oswald and Oscar-winning actor Sir Mark Rylance. My talk focuses on the 16th-century writer Thomas Nashe and the relationship between him, Shakespeare, and the Earl of Southampton. There are still tickets for the day, so if that’s your bag and you’re in London or close by, come along: https://shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org/sat-conference-2024
I love getting your comments and will always try to reply. Tell me your stories, your ideas, your hopes, your fears.
So true, Ros. It took me a long time to get here but after a childhood of emotional, physical and sexual abuse I’m now full warrior! Luckily I found a soul mate who gave me the love I needed to find my strength. Here’s to all of us who rise 💙
"The glue is love: and joy is the gold" ... and the result is priceless.
Thank you.