This story was originally published in Australian Doctor by an Anonymous GP. In the comments:
Reading that was more enlightening than a hundred e-learning modules on the subject, thank you for your honest and painful description of the terror you suffered.
I wish you well on your recovery and am pleased you have found someone who shows you the love you deserve.
Dr James Courts
At the time of this article, 40 Australian women have been killed by a partner or ex-partner so far this year.
Nobody is immune to the threat of family violence.
Here, a GP shares her story.
It began with him frogmarching me out the door when our first child was five months old.
At least that was what I thought at the time until I learnt better, many years later.
Looking back, the disrespect actually started much earlier in the relationship, rooted in entitlement and control.
By the end, when I was finally able to extract myself after years and years of increasingly violent intimate partner abuse, I was a shell of my former self.
I believed, by then, what he had told me. That I was nothing without him. That nobody would ever want me. That I was defective and damaged and useless and pathetic. That he was actually the victim. That he felt betrayed due to my inability to meet all his needs. That it was all my fault.
The only reason I was eventually able to extract myself was because I was supported by a very good friend and an excellent psychologist and had the means to support myself and my two children financially.
I see myself as one of the lucky ones.
I was very afraid when I eventually decided to end my abusive marriage. I knew what he was capable of.
I knew he would be infuriated that I was slipping out of his carefully constructed web of control, that his meticulously crafted persona of a successful, accomplished man would tumble.
I knew that him being infuriated would put me in grave danger.
I knew this because he had told me that if I ever left him he would hunt me down, cut my arms off and bury me alive in a box.
That he would strangle me beforehand, not enough to kill me, but enough that he would be able to see the panic in my eyes.
I already knew by then that he was capable of sickening levels of violence, carefully orchestrated to control and manipulate me. I had every reason to be afraid of leaving.
Going to the police would have compounded his anger, made me even less safe.
That’s why I never reported him.
As I write this, over 40 women in Australia have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners since the beginning of 2024, often around the time the relationship was ending.
Many of these murderers have been talked about in glowing terms by their friends and family: he was such a good father, such a good provider, such a good mate, things must have gotten pretty bad for him to snap like that, to do what he did, poor bloke.
It is my own experience that men who abuse do not ‘snap’.
They are perfectly capable of hiding their dangerous, abusive side from people outside the home, perfectly capable of appearing to all and sundry as model citizens and providers, while simultaneously abusing their partners behind closed doors.
They are manipulative and devious, and perfectly in control.
These men do not ’snap’.
These men plot and plan revenge when they realise they are losing control.
In my lived experience, that is what intimate partner violence is all about.
In my case, as I have already alluded, that control began insidiously. Unkind comments about my appearance and demeanour, denigrating remarks about my friends and family; wanting me ‘all to himself’.
In the early days, after the classic ‘love bombing’ (all too commonly seen only in retrospect) came the campaign to separate me from my support network, to isolate me, to make me reliant on him, my abuser, for financial support, emotional support, comfort.
It is weird, a sort of Stockholm syndrome situation, and all these years later I still do not really understand why I fell under his spell.
But I did.
He was the archetypal ‘charming abuser’, an expert manipulator.
But he was not ’all bad’, I told myself.
He could be kind and loving when it suited him, and I clung to these little crumbs whenever they occurred, using them to reassure myself that things were going to be okay.
Except they were not.
And nobody knew, because he told that me that if I ever mentioned what was happening at home, to anyone, I would be ‘very sorry’.
He told me that no-one would believe me. And he told me that what he was doing to me was not violence, it was ‘domestic correction’ because he was ‘number one’ in the house and I was not to forget that.
One of his favourite ‘jokes’ was this: ‘What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, she has already been told twice’.
I did tell someone once, though: a psychologist he had insisted I see so that I could be ‘fixed’ to become a better wife.
I told this psychologist that he had chased me down the hall, kicked down the bathroom door which I had locked to try and escape him.
I told them I had squeezed myself into the tiny space between the toilet and the vanity, trying to make myself as small as possible, to minimise damage.
I told them that, thankfully, once he had taken out his anger on the door, he no longer had any left for me.
Instead my partner had laughed, pointed at me and said: ‘Look what you made me do.’
He refused to replace that door, wanting it to remain a reminder of my failures as a wife, and I had to use that bathroom without any privacy until we sold the house and the real estate agent pointed out that we really did need a door to the ensuite.
I relayed that story to the psychologist.
Their response was: ‘He is getting really close to the edge, we need to protect him because he could lose his job if this sort of thing came to light.’
I often think back to that turning point conversation.
How much different would my life have been if I had been supported to leave him then, with recognition and validation that I was in a dangerous and abusive relationship, rather than feeling coopted to stay and support my abuser because he was ‘close to the edge’.
I cannot think about that too much, because it makes me so angry. And so sad.
So I stayed, and as a result I endured many more years of increasingly sadistic and harmful abuse, of every sort.
Nobody but that psychologist knew what was happening behind closed doors, because I was so deeply ashamed.
I would go to work, as a doctor, helping others to solve their health and other problems, but all the while I could not solve my own.
I could not stop the violence in my own home.
I felt like a hypocrite.
I would get home after a long shift in the ED, hide among the clothes in my cupboard and cry silently, helpless and hopeless, then square my shoulders and head out the door the next day to do it all over again.
I was leading two very separate lives, and no-one would ever have guessed it.
Shame is a powerful silencer.
Both the abuse, and the shame, ultimately took an enormous toll.
I shrunk into myself, more and more, avoiding social situations because it was too hard to keep up the farce.
Friends and family would compliment me on juggling all these balls in the air: kids, career, marriage, how I made it all seem effortless.
I would think to myself, ‘If only you knew.’
My self-esteem plummeted, and I barely said anything at home anymore, not wanting to enrage him.
I felt like a shadow in the background, always watching him to gauge his mood, pre-empt an attack and hopefully avoid it.
It was a cat and mouse game and he loved it. He knew he had me in a corner, exactly where he wanted me. He thrived on that game.
Things at home became dire.
The abuse had escalated over the years, moving from verbal abuse, to shoving and restraining me, to preventing me from driving ‘his’ car, refusing to pay bills so that all my income was spent and there was nothing left for discretionary purposes, kicking me, grabbing my hair, punching me, breaking my treasured belongings, sexually abusing me, sabotaging my friendships, and finally strangling me.
The escalation to strangling was terrifying.
I found the courage to plan my exit the night he pinned me against the fridge, put his hands around my neck until I could not breathe, stared into my eyes and hissed, ‘I’m angry.’
I realised in that instant that he really could kill me if he wanted to.
I strongly believe that realisation saved my life.
I finally acted.
Why had I not come to this conclusion sooner?
Perhaps because I still loved him, despite everything, and I wanted to protect him.
Perhaps because I knew that at least some of his behaviour was driven by a difficult childhood, and childhood trauma is common in men who perpetrate.
Perhaps because I had become so conditioned to believe that this was my fault that I could not see how bad the situation had become.
Perhaps because I had lost my own sense of agency, and I was so isolated.
Definitely because I was deeply, deeply ashamed that this was happening to me.
Family violence occurs across the board. I know that now. I am not unique.
In my work as a doctor, I have heard countless stories of abuse.
Often, even when a patient is presenting with injuries consistent with violence and abuse, they will deny and deflect, out of fear of what their abuser will do next if they divulge, and always, always because they are so ashamed.
In my own journey with shame, I also learnt to deflect, deny and divert.
That bruise on my arm? “I’m so clumsy! I really need to be more careful.”
The way I jump whenever I hear someone raise their voice? “Nothing to see here, I have always been the nervous kind!”
The fact that I often do not turn up to events at the last minute? “I’m so sorry, I’m prone to migraines at the most inopportune times.”
All driven by shame, hurt, betrayal, devastation, helplessness and hopelessness.
And fear, always fear.
I am one of the lucky ones.
I made it out the other side.
He left one day, to pursue his career in another city. He made it clear that he was leaving me, not the other way around, to preserve his sense of control.
I changed the locks and finally felt physically safe, with him in another city.
Then he died.
Suicide.
He had threatened suicide many times before, keeping me in check, and that is not uncommon either. Devastating, but common.
When the police knocked on my door very late one night, to break the news, I was in shock but not disbelief.
The first words that came out of my mouth were: ‘He always told me he would do something like this’.
The second thing I thought, but did not speak was, ‘Thank God he didn’t take me, the kids or anyone else with him’.
I felt relieved, then guilty for feeling relieved, then angry, sad, grief-stricken, then numb, then back to being relieved.
The emotions of a survivor when their abuser dies by suicide are, in my experience, complicated, confusing, difficult and almost impossible to describe.
Navigating those emotions takes a very long time and adds significantly to the trauma of the abuse.
Threats of suicide intersect with trauma, mental illness and childhood abuse and should never be brushed off, but unfortunately they can also be used for the purposes of control in the context of domestic violence, leaving the victim in a permanent state of terror.
It can be near impossible for a victim to determine what is a real threat and what is a threat made to manipulate and control.
It is destabilising and devastating and, in my experience, near impossible to navigate.
Statistics show that men who use the threat of self-harm to coerce their partners are many times more likely to be perpetrators of extreme acts of domestic violence, including murder.
We should never ignore threats of self-harm, but victims of domestic violence will recognise that the threat of self-harm is a very real tool used by perpetrators to manipulate and control.
In my case, my ex-husband’s threats of self-harm paralysed me, kept me captive, kept me exactly where he needed me to be.
It was horrific.
Before he left, before he understood that he was losing control of me, before he died, he reiterated how useless and unlovable I was and how he was looking forward to watching me ‘crash and burn within six months’ without him.
He reiterated that I was nothing without him, that everything good in my life was because of him.
That I was ungrateful and unworthy.
Those things were hard to hear, on the back of so many years of abuse, but they also spurred me on to prove him wrong.
Inside me, deeply hidden from him, I still had a kernel of self-worth, and it saved me.
I was one on the lucky ones in so many ways. My work as a doctor was enough to pay the bills, first when he left the family home and then after he died.
It was enough to support my shattered sense of self-worth and catch a glimpse of recovery.
Many women in the position I found myself in are not so fortunate, trapped by financial dependence, lack of support and lack of agency.
What happened to me is not uncommon, unfortunately.
I have had enough time to process what I went through, although there are still some very deep traumatic memories that surface at times and are distressing and painful.
I was lucky enough to meet a kind, gentle, loving and trustworthy man who taught me what a healthy, respectful relationship looks like, and he has helped me and my children heal.
How can we stop the violence?
I have read suggestions that we need to have compassion and empathy for men who abuse their partners, because often they have trauma in their backgrounds.
We need to address their underlying mental health conditions, often rooted in their trauma, in order for them to be able to accept responsibility for their actions.
I agree to a point.
Unfortunately, too much compassion and empathy is one of the reasons I became trapped.
Because I felt I understood why he was abusing me, that the roots of his abusing lay in the trauma of his childhood, I forgave him time and time again, trying to protect him and soothe his trauma.
Time and time again he used that compassion and empathy as a weapon against me.
I have also read opinions regarding early intervention, recognising childhood trauma and neglect and acting on it to support boys and young men.
To help them heal and to stop the cycle of trauma and abuse.
I think this is probably where most of the answer lies.
I certainly know that I was determined to stop the cycle of intergenerational trauma that I know contributed to my husband abusing me.
My children witnessed more of this abuse than I was aware of, something that shocked and saddened me when we discussed it once we were safe.
I made a big effort to get psychological assistance for them, to end that cycle once and for all, to address their own trauma.
They tell me it has made a difference.
I hope so.
I think, ultimately, the solution to intimate partner and family violence does lie in the recognition of risk factors and subsequent early intervention.
Compassion and empathy for adult abusers is also required, but needs to be extended in such a way that it does not appear to men who abuse that they will be forgiven no matter what they have done.
They need to be supported to recognise why they abuse, while at the same time recognising their own accountability.
And it is crucial that medical professionals recognise the signs of abuse, address them, and support victims.
In my case, at least, support when I first disclosed would have completely changed the trajectory of my life.
I do not have all the answers. I am not sure anyone does.
But one thing is clear: we need to stop the violence.
We need to stop women dying at the hands of their partners and ex-partners.
We need to protect and support women and also focus on prevention.
The myth of the abuser losing control, snapping, being ‘driven to violence’, needs to end.
We, as a society, need to recognise that intimate partner and family violence affects us all, not just those suffering abuse.
It is only when we find ways to break the violence cycle, to intervene when we see disrespectful attitudes and behaviours developing, to support abusers to recognise their own accountability, that we will make any progress.
If this news story has raised issues for you or you are concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. You can also contact your local Doctors’ Health Advisory Service.
State and territory-based doctors’ health services
- Australian Capital Territory 1300 374 377
- New South Wales 02 9437 6552
- Northern Territory 08 8366 0250
- Queensland 07 3833 4352
- South Australia 08 8366 0250
- Tasmania 1300 374 377
- Victoria 03 9280 8712
- Western Australia 08 9321 3098
Mental Health Support Line (Telepsychology)
- 1300 374 377 (Dr4Drs)
Other mental health services
Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467
Lifeline 13 11 14