Love Shouldn't Leave Bruises
April 2008 - Erin Isings

The names in this story are real and we applaud Kellie’s courageous decision to share her story to help other women who suffer in silence.

Kellie was a 23-year-old mother of two and youth worker when she met Nic. He was sweet and charming, but there was another side of him that others couldn’t see. Kellie recalls one of the many times when she experienced that side.

“He strangled me until I was unconscious then beat me up for supposedly pretending that I was dead,” she says.

During this incident, Kellie says Nic repeatedly beat her and kept her in the house for three days. “I can remember I was lying there, totally covered in blood. And all of a sudden he turns so psychotically nice and has a sponge and is wiping the blood off my face and saying, ‘Oh my god, how could you do this to yourself? Look how hurt you are! Why have you done this to yourself?’ And he wiped the blood off my face like he was so caring. And I was so crazy at the time I wondered if I did this to myself or what was going on.”

The abuse left her mentally unstable. Her weight dropped from 145 to 89 lbs. “It was the lack of sleep, constant fear and constant adrenaline arousal. For at least a year-and-a half, I never breathed properly. It was like a constant anxiety attack.”

Kellie, who is now 30, grew up in London, ON after moving from her birthplace in England when she was 17. She got married at 19 and had two children. But the marriage soon failed due to her husband’s infidelity, and as a result, Kellie says she “was very much in a place of low self-esteem.”

She met Nic one night when she was at a club with a friend. He was very charismatic and Kellie remembers him telling her she “deserved better and everything would be wonderful.”

Looking back now, she recognizes the abuse that she didn’t notice at the time. “In our first conversation ever, he said, ‘Oh, I don’t normally like blondes, but you’re blonde,’ and that, in itself, is actually a putdown. But I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not even his normal type and he likes me!’ I felt flattered. So even our first conversation was flawed,” she says.

Nic was charming and their courtship was romantic. He knew Kellie loved stones and crystals and brought her many as gifts. He wrote poems for her, they visited historic castles together, and researched his family tree.

But abuse slowly entered their relationship. “It’s hard to explain because abuse creeps in very slowly and gradually. It’s not like everything is rosy and the next day you’re being beaten,” says Kellie. She says Nic’s excuses were classic; he’d tell her he hurt her because he was jealous, upset, or so worried about losing her.

Kellie says the majority of the relationship was mind games, and believes now that every conversation was carefully crafted on Nic’s part.

“He would tell the truth about something, but act like he was lying. So I would get all worried and think he was lying but then he would prove me wrong because he was telling the truth. But he had been acting suspiciously on purpose.” She believes this was his tactic to create self-doubt, or to invalidate her intuition. The next time she thought he was lying, he would bring up that she was wrong before.

“He wouldn’t let me work. Not like he said, ‘You’re not allowed to go to work,’ but he made working impossible. He would keep me up fighting all night, or sabotage me leaving for work, or cause a drama when I was at work,” she says.

It was the same thing when Kellie tried to have a social life. She recalls one occasion when he caused a big fight and accused Kellie of having an affair. “Five minutes before I’m about to go out with my friend, he claimed to have found a nail or a screw on my bedroom floor. He started beating me up saying I obviously had one of the workmen up in my bedroom.”

During this time, Kellie’s children began to spend more time with their father and she became more and more isolated from her friends. “You eventually learn it’s not worth the hassle of going out. And once your friends figure out what’s going on, you isolate yourself from them because you always end up choosing him over your friends or over your plans, or over your job or over anything.”

Kellie did try to leave Nic. “Women really want to get out and it’s a case of escaping the violence. But it’s the emotional longing for him, the addiction to him that made me go back. I was away, I was safe – he had no idea where I was. So I could have gotten on with my life without him. But emotionally, I was nowhere near ready for that. I missed him every day, I thought I couldn’t live without him, I thought I was nothing without him, I thought I had hurt him by leaving him.”

She now understands her state of mind when she picked up the phone to call Nic. “I knew by that time he was abusive towards me, but I told myself, ‘Oh well, if that’s what I have to put up with to be with him, it’s worth it because I love him so much.’”

An hour after that phone call, Nic picked her up in a grocery store parking lot and took her to his mother’s garage where he was living. He essentially kept her in the garage for the summer (her children were with their father at the time). “The only time I ever came out was in the evening with him. I just waited in there all day for him. He had a little TV and a microwave and a mattress on the floor. The really weird thing is (at the time), I was so low and so abused that I felt secure being there because I was at his mother’s house, and it wasn’t like he could leave me. He had to come home every night.”

The act of Nic leaving her became a pattern in their relationship. “He was always leaving, and that’s what I was living under the threat of. He would leave me and I was the one who would call him crying and get him to want me back because I couldn’t handle the rejection.”

But Kellie’s seclusion wasn’t enough for Nic. During the day, she would chat and have tea with Nic’s mom in the house because they got along well. But each time Kellie went to her sister’s house to do her laundry, Nic would call her in a panic, telling her they were drifting apart and that he was scared. Kellie knows now that it was just another tactic to isolate her. “He twisted it around and said that I was being rude by not doing my laundry in his mother’s house. He told me his mother thought I was very ungrateful and she was mad at me and she hated me, so I needed to stay away from her because she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I really, truly believed that at the time. And I felt so bad for causing trouble by going to my sister’s. But now, looking back, I know that was totally him, just keeping me away from his mom.” And from her sister.

Inside the abuse

“When he was beating me up he would rip all my clothes off me, which was really sexually degrading, (made) me totally vulnerable and … I couldn’t run away. It’s not like I could go anywhere naked.”

“And beating is not like two guys fighting (like in the movies). It was very sadistic and twisted. He would pin me down and spit on my face and stick his fingers up my nose or in my ears, or shove his fist down my throat. I had split lips and black eyes galore… he would strangle me, hold knives to me, scrape knives on me, kick me, drag me downstairs, drag me upstairs, drown me, smother me, burn me.”

Kellie made numerous attempts to break up with him, even calling the police on him, but never following through.

She recalls one evening when a house down the street had caught fire. While her street was crowded with police and fire trucks, inside her house Nic had accused her of having an affair and had been abusing her for two days.

“The police came to the door because they were making door to door inquiries about the fire. As he was beating me up (the police knocked), he shoved me in a back closet and threatened me not to say a word. That could have been my chance to run out and say help me, help me.”

Terrified, she waited in the closet. When he returned, the abuse continued. “He was spitting in my face and insulting me – talking about some guy that he was imagining that I was having an affair with, saying I’m a piece of shit. Then he went to bed and told me I had to stay in the corner for the night like a good dog, as though I was nothing.”

Kellie ran out of the house for help. “I snapped after two days of continuous violence. I was wearing nothing but a short t-shirt, (other than that) I was naked. I ran out into the street where the police and firefighters were putting out a fire and I passed out in the arms of a firefighter.”

Nic was arrested and put in jail, but Kellie was already feeling the mental effects of the abuse. “In the time it took me to go to the hospital, I was just so worried about upsetting him.”

She was treated at the hospital and went home. The police had tried to convince her to press charges, but she refused. In the middle of the night, there was a knock at the door.

To Kellie’s surprise, it wasn’t Nic, but two female police officers. Nic had been crying in jail, claiming that Kellie was suicidal and they had had an altercation because he was trying to prevent her from killing herself. “The policewomen came over to check on me and they said, ‘Your boyfriend (is) really worried about you,’ and in the state of mind I was in, I felt good that he cared about me.”

Nic was let out of jail with bail conditions to stay away from Kellie. The next morning he came over and they made up.

Kellie admits it wasn’t always bad between them. “If he was bad 100 per cent of the time, I would have left sooner,” she says, recalling how they took archaeology classes and went to history lectures together. “We would sit for hours and play games like we would sound out really difficult words and the other person had to guess what the word meant. I thought that only I knew this side of him, and there must be a special and magical bond between us. (I thought) I wouldn’t find that kind of compatibility with anyone else.”

With Nic’s local reputation as a tough guy, Kellie felt that “this little side of him that I knew was reserved just for me, and it was me who brought it out in him. And I thought that’s what bonded us.”

Looking back, she knows that visiting the castles and the good times were part of the abuse. “The niceness … it was to do with him giving me what I thought I needed and it was all calculated by him. When you’re abused, you’re trying to find something to cling on to, so it’s magnified, so something normally sweet becomes like a magical amazing thing that erases everything bad.”

She still believes that everything Nic, a construction worker, said or did was a carefully planned attempt to control her. “He used to tell me that it would be very easy to kill me and hide my body because he would take my body to work and chop it up and put pieces of me in different places where he worked.” As a reminder of this threat, he would come home from work and laugh about frogs that he had encased in concrete. “When you’re living in a constant state of fear, there’s a meaning behind everything he chooses to say.”

He also wanted Kellie to get pregnant. “Even though I was totally screwed up, totally addicted to him, I would have chopped my arm off for him if he told me to. I was that much of an obedient zombie. But something inside of me (said), ‘No, no, I am not having your baby, that’s ridiculous.’”

Breaking away

As slowly and gradually as the abuse crept in and became extreme, it was a slow and gradual process for Kellie to get out.

“I started to admit and to realize that this was abuse, and I started going to counselling at the local domestic violence shelter. And he used to drive me there. He’d laugh at me and say, ‘Oh, you’re going to talk to your men-hating-feminists friends and they’re filling your brain with crap and they’re probably telling you to leave me.’ But with the help of a counsellor, I started to get a bit of self-esteem.”

With that bit, Kellie was able to take some steps towards independence.

She wasn’t quite ready to resume her life as a youth worker, but she was ready to start working again. “I got myself a little job selling ice cream – it was a lifesaver for me! It got me out in public and interacting with people and I had something else to get out of bed for in the morning besides him.”

Working gave her the courage to think about restarting her career. She wanted to be a probation officer and applied for a prestigious university program that combines schooling with employment. Out of the thousands who apply, only 79 people are accepted.

“As I was getting through each stage, it was a huge boost to my self-esteem. I was making friends, and I was going out. I wasn’t so obsessed with him. My state of mind was, ‘He’s still an asshole, yeah, I’m with him, I’ve tried to get away from him before, I’m probably never going to leave him, so I’ll just put up with it and still try to have friends and a life.’”

In Kellie’s case, her children never witnessed Nic’s violence, however they did suffer indirectly. “There was a time period where my whole life revolved around him and I barely saw my kids. Around the time of applying for the job, I started to have my kids more and more, and that was part of my gaining independence.”

But “the big crunch point” came when Kellie was accepted to the program on full scholarship. After her first day, she was excited about the future. “I went to meet (Nic) at the bar where he was, and I was telling him all about the day, and he was being nice to me, he was listening.” They decided Kellie would go home and put the kettle on and Nic would get some take-out dinner for the two of them.

Two-and-a half hours later he showed up. He was drunk and had a take-out wrapper with him. Kellie asked where he’d been.

“He erupted into a rage. He knew I had reached the point of independence and this was his attempt of bringing me back down. It was the rage of all rages. The worst, worst of all his violence ever. It went on all night and I genuinely thought he was going to kill me.”

The next morning, Kellie hid her split lip and her black eye with makeup and went to her new job as a probation officer.

“I walked into my office and right in front of me was a poster about domestic violence.

I remember the point of looking at it and thinking what is going on in my life? I am leading a double life. I am the person in this poster, but I am trying to be a professional, a person of the law who is helping people. But I’m living the victim’s life. That was the very moment where I knew it was one path or the other.”

Kellie broke up with Nic for the last time. She was 26 and had spent three years of her life with him.

Nic didn’t make the breakup easy for her. A month later, he had a new girlfriend and moved in with her around the corner from Kellie. For the next nine months he stalked Kellie, sent her abusive letters, love letters, put garbage in her mailbox, put chicken bones through her door slot, broke into her house and robbed her.

“It wasn’t easy. Those nine months of resisting not going back to him were really hard. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without counselling and support.”

One way Kellie found her support was through online message boards. When she had the urge to see him, she would post a message, and the support would come. She still visits the websites to provide support for other abused women.

Today

Kellie has come a long way. She earned her degree and graduated with the highest marks in the history of the program. She regained custody of her children, got remarried and moved back to the London, ON area, where she works helping young people again.

She has no contact with Nic. Up until the time she left England he was still calling her.

“I feel like I was reborn, I saw the light. People end up statistics or being abused their whole lives and I feel so lucky to have made it out.”

What is abuse?

“It is the attempt to control an individual’s behaviour through tactics of fear. For example,

using coercion or threats, intimidation, isolation – controlling what they do, who they see, where they go. Or making light of the abuse, or threatening that they have better lawyers and they’ll take the children away,” says Heidi Wheeler, education and volunteer coordinator for Women’s Crisis Services of Waterloo Region. Other forms are economic abuse, such as not letting the woman have access to money or keeping everything in one person’s name, so women aren’t able to get a job or keep a job. Yet another form is using male privilege or male power (telling a woman she won’t make it on her own, and eventually women start to believe it).

Megan Walker, executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre, defines abuse as: “a pattern of behaviour that is used by an intimate partner to gain and maintain power and control over the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of a woman. It can be physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional, psychological, using money, using the children, economic abuse.”

The abuse often leads to suicide. “Women are most likely to be seriously injured or killed when they make the decision to leave the abuser. Women will also resort to suicide rather than leave, on occasion because they know that he will hunt them down and kill them when they leave. So they make the choice rather than lose control to him and be hunted down and killed, they take their own lives so at least they can die when they choose to die and they way they want to die, rather than have him take the final control from them.”

Myths about abuse

Abuse only happens to lower-income women. Not true, says Wheeler. Abuse is blind to class. “(Higher income women) might not access something like a shelter if they have experienced domestic violence. They might be highly resourced in terms of they can stay with a family member, or they can go to a hotel. It’s a mistake to think that it’s only happening to lower class, poor women.”

Women somehow provoke the abuse, ask for the abuse or enjoy the abuse. Not true, says Wheeler.