I used to stay silent. I used to try to fix them.
I thought if I loved harder, stayed longer, tried more, it would finally turn into love.
I learned that was not love.
I learned the hard way to save myself instead.
Not all domestic violence and abuse looks the same. Some of it never leaves a mark you can photograph. So here is the list, all of it, because you deserve to be able to name what was done to you.
Physical abuse. Hands, walls, objects. The one everybody pictures.
Sexual abuse. Your body is not theirs to take, demand, guilt you into, or trade.
Verbal abuse. The names, the threats, the humiliation. Words can bruise deeper than fists.
Emotional abuse. Keeping you off balance, tearing down your worth until you forget you ever had any.
Psychological abuse and gaslighting. Making you doubt your own memory and your own eyes until you can't tell what's real.
Coercive control. Micromanaging your life, your clothes, your friends, your time. Hiding the car keys so you can't leave. Telling you the vehicle is technically theirs because they paid for it, so they get to decide where you go and who you see.
Isolation. Cutting you off one tie at a time, until you have no friends left and your own family doesn't want to speak to you. Sometimes they drive your people off themselves, or lie about you, stirring trouble, till everybody's gone. And once you're cut off, the whisper starts. You're alone in this world. Nobody else cares about you. I'm the only one you have. That's the whole design. Alone is easier to control.
Digital abuse. Going through your phone, tracking where you are, humiliating you online.
Stalking and harassment. Following, watching, showing up, refusing to let you be gone.
Spiritual abuse. Twisting faith into a leash to keep you small and obedient. Or keeping you from your faith.
And the one people always forget.
Financial abuse. It's not just taking a person's money. Some people are not allowed to work at all, so they never have money of their own. Every dollar they get comes through the abuser's hands, and every dollar can be held back as punishment.
Taking your money. Controlling every dollar. Running up debt in your name. Selling your things out from under you. Forbidding you to work, or sabotaging the job you have, so you have nothing that's yours.
And some abusers don't just take. They dig. They bury you in a financial hole so deep you can never leave. I've had a few that way.
Financial abuse is why so many of us stay. Not because we're weak. Because leaving costs money we don't have, and they made sure we don't have it.
Trauma bonding. The hardest one to see, because it feels like love. They hurt you, then they hold you. Cruelty, then sweetness, over and over, until you're hooked on the relief. You crave the very person who is breaking you. You can't eat, can't sleep, can't breathe without them. You call it love. You call it soulmates. You call it "I can't live without him."
You don't know you're trauma bonded while you're in it. You only see it once you're out.
That's why so many of these poems ache with wanting him, needing him, not being able to let go. That wanting was real. It was also the trap.
Physical. Sexual. Mental. Financial. It hardly ever comes one kind at a time. It comes braided together, because control is the thread running through all of it.
And let's call it what it is.
This is not just domestic violence.
This is not just domestic abuse.
This is a narcissistic manipulator, wearing the face of someone who says they love you.
Love or Abuse?
Love respects your no. Abuse punishes it.
Love wants you to have friends, family, and a life of your own. Abuse wants you alone.
Love lets you keep your own money, your own phone, your own mind. Abuse takes them.
Love apologizes and changes. Abuse apologizes and does it again.
Love feels safe. Abuse feels like walking on eggshells.
And if someone tells you it isn't abuse, that you're overreacting, that you're crazy, that is not proof you're wrong. Sometimes that is the abuse talking.
When you live most of your life in one abusive relationship after another, abuse starts to feel normal. The warning signs don't look like warnings. They look like home.
And when someone finally treats you gently, it can feel scary, like they must be hiding something.
That isn't you being broken. That's what surviving taught you. And it can be unlearned.
I believe there should be a registry for abusers, the same way there is for sex offenders, so the next person can look before they let someone into their life. Abusers rarely have just one victim. Silence protects them. A record would protect us.
My poetry is my way of ending my silence on paper, because I have walked this road more than once. The sweet, slow falling. The desire. The passion. Their mask slipping. The narcissist beneath. The terror they bring. The bitter end. And the mess they've made of you when it all comes apart. You are left to pick up every piece of you that shattered, and rebuild yourself.
This book is that road, written down.
You are not crazy. You are not too much. You do not have to be perfect to deserve compassion, safety, and support.
If you are still in it, be gentle with yourself. Finding the door takes time.
If you got out, I am so proud of you.
If you are still processing what happened, take all the time you need. Healing is not a race.
You don't need visible bruises for the abuse to be real. Sometimes the deepest scars are the ones nobody else can see.
You are not alone.
— Carol L. Bridges