It ends with recovery

Domestic Violence and Alcoholism

“The first incident between Ryle and Lily in the kitchen is what happened the first time my father ever hit my mother. She was cooking a casserole and he had been drinking. He pulled the casserole out of the oven without using a pot holder. She thought it was funny and she laughed. The next thing she knew, he had hit her so hard she flew across the kitchen floor.”

“She chose to forgive him for that one incident, because his apology and regret were believable. Or at least believable enough that giving him a second chance hurt less than leaving with a broken heart would have.”

-Colleen Hoover (Author’s Note, It Ends With Us)

“Uncover, Discover, Discard.” -Chuck C.

I just finished Colleen Hoover’s striking novel this morning. I was stunned enough by the ending, but the tears didn’t start until I read the Author’s Note at the end. Hoover herself witnessed domestic violence between her parents. Her father repeatedly abused her mother until she took a chance and divorced him when Colleen was three. They lived in poverty for a couple of years until her mother met and married a very good man, a man who became Hoover’s stepdad and changed her whole experience learning about relationships between spouses.

She wrote this novel to give credence to her mother’s bravery and perseverance, and to acknowledge that domestic violence is something many women experience, even though many of us don’t talk about it much. She is so grateful that her mom left her dad. She was able to have a good relationship with her alcoholic dad after this until he died when she was twenty-five.

I too am a survivor of domestic violence, but it is not something I discuss openly outside of recovery relationships. I have a lot of guilt and shame for what I did and did not do in response to my then-husband’s violence against me. I covered for him multiple times. I denied that he hurt me in open court. I bailed him out of jail. Only to have this pattern repeat when he would blame me for the entire thing. I lived in absolute insanity. And that is the alcoholic relationship.

In fact, the families of both my ex-husband and the ex-boyfriend made the chaos so much worse by demanding that I help these men who had hurt me. And of course I felt guilty and did it. And I felt ashamed and my self-esteem was almost damaged beyond repair. It is amazing what we do to cover up alcoholism. To protect the alcoholic. And why? Because we are ALL a part of their disease. We all play a role. Sometimes I was the enabler, sometimes the instigator. And always I was the victim. Certainly no one wanted to take responsibility for the situation, and we certainly could not let the alcoholic take responsibility for himself.

And the cycle of abuse continues.

What we experience in childhood is what we continue into our adult relationships—either as the offender or the receiver. It really doesn’t matter. We grow up in violence and learn no other way to have a healthy relationship. Now while both of my experiences, as a child and as a wife, included physical violence, not all abusive relationships do. Once my ex-husband went to jail, he never touched me again. However, the verbal and emotional assaults kept coming. In fact, he threatened to turn me into the police over and over again because I had used his bank account to bail him out of jail.

The worst part for me was watching my young son receiving the same treatment. And that is when I finally decided to leave when he was eight. And then six months later I could finally see how bad my own drinking had become and I got sober. My drinking became a real problem after he went to jail. I was thirty years old. I had no other way to cope. And then I left at 35 and got sober—and have been sober ever since.

You have no idea how grateful I am for this miracle. I have never put myself in a situation to be physically or seriously emotionally abused again. The alcoholic for whom I joined Al-Anon was a very good man, just very sick in a progressive disease. In fact, my ex-husband was at heart a good man as well. He has always been a good father to our son since I divorced him. We have been divorced for almost twenty years and share a friendship today.

But these men both grew up in trauma most of us could never imagine. And men often have very few tools to really work through this. So they did the best they could with the lack of tools they possessed—and the damage was done.

We are so lucky to have programs of recovery in both AA and Al-Anon that allow us to bring the past into the light. We allow God into our hearts and hurts. He is the true healer of our souls. And then God restores us to who we were always meant to be, whether we were the abuser, the abused, or both.