In 2019, after years of physically and sexually assaulting me, my abuser attended Batterer’s Intervention at A No Abuse.

Abuse concerns dominion. It thrives on narrowing another person’s range of motion until even ordinary acts — speaking, leaving, resting, deciding — must pass through its gate first. Once a woman begins reclaiming ground, the campaign usually sharpens. The cruelty does not become confused at that point. It becomes efficient.

In this audio clip from 2013, my abuser states plainly that he had abused me for ten years in order to keep power over me. Ten more years followed. That is not a tragic misunderstanding. That is continuity.

You can hear, too, the throat-clearing tic I had developed by then. Four years later, my voice failed completely and I required surgery. During recovery, he lifted me and threw me into a desk. Injury followed. There are people who imagine violence only as spectacle. More often it is practical. It arrives to remind the body who is expected to yield.

I did not tell the world then. I did not believe disclosure would keep me or my children safer. I believed the opposite. I believed speaking would invite escalation, and experience had trained me to believe that with precision. Some forms of fear are not dramatic. They are domestic. They sit at the table. They drive the car. They help with the groceries. They make themselves seem reasonable right up until they do not.

As I have spoken more openly about what my children and I endured, he has acted on threats to harm me. That matters. So does this: I am no longer preserving his comfort by disappearing inside my own life. He had silence. He no longer has cooperation.

Many people still picture abuse as an episode, a bruise, a singular terrible night. They do not picture attrition. They do not picture what it means to wake each day inside a system organized around another person’s appetite. They do not picture a woman calculating tone, timing, groceries, money, exits, childcare, and danger before breakfast. They do not picture how thoroughly coercion enters the ordinary. But that is where it lives best — not in drama, but in routine.

The body pays for routine terror. After court on 9/18/24, I experienced uncontrolled bowel urgency, bleeding, and severe intestinal pain. Not much about that sounds respectable enough for public conversation, but respectability has never been an honest measure of suffering. When I am made to sit in rooms where distortion is dressed as credibility, my body does not respond like a courtroom observer. It responds like a body with history. That difference is not rhetorical. It is measurable in blood.

I am a professor. I know how language arranges perception. I know how institutions absorb a polished lie more easily than a damaged truth. I know how often authority prefers a story that leaves its furniture undisturbed. I also know that precision matters. So let me be precise: abuse has marked my health, my work, my home life, my children’s development, my nervous system, and my ability to move through the world without anticipating retaliation. None of that is incidental. It is cumulative harm.

My children have grown up in the wake of this. They have watched me strained, diminished, afraid, and then determined. They have also watched me continue. I cannot return to them a childhood untouched by what was done around and through us. I can still offer them a mother who tells the truth without surrendering her mind to it. Sometimes that is the only clean inheritance left.

I have spoken because the abuse did not stay contained. It entered housing. It entered health. It entered livelihood. It entered the practical architecture of daily life. That is what prolonged coercion does. It ceases to be a private injury and becomes an operating environment.

This is not about triumph. This is not about spectacle. This is about arresting harm. This is about making a life in which my children and I are no longer required to organize ourselves around another person’s will. I am not asking to be romanticized. I am asking to be read accurately.

I remain here. I remain capable of naming what happened. That is not everything, but it is not small.

10 years ago, after my husband isolated me from my children by blocking them from calling me while I was away for work for two weeks in Spain, I moved out. I had been working with a therapist who encouraged me to get support outside the relationship. She was also our marital therapist.

When I moved, this man forced his way into my home. This is one recording from that time. His crazymaking is like this – going from talking about filing for divorce to accusations about me sleeping with colleagues and his right to harass me and publicly humiliate me at our children’s little league games by accusing me in front of two teams of parents. The point was to isolate me and demand that we were married and that he was not going to let me go.

This is how I handled myself for twenty years in abuse until my fear grew too great and I started to insist harder on my freedom. Now he does this to me in court and to our children in his home.

It may not seem like much but when you cannot escape the abuse and this is how control over you is maintained, it’s significant. It has caused me and my children to suffer from extreme anxiety and PTSD. Part of our healing is raising awareness of what is happening to us until it’s not happening anymore.

This man threatened our lives if i ever told on him. I have lived in fear of that threat for many years. I refuse to be afraid anymore. The threat is still very real to me, but I will not suffer in silence as doing so means that this will continue indefinitely.

I am a disabled woman experiencing disabling abuse and financial and legal exploitation. I am standing up for me and my children.