Overcoming Domestic Violence

A few years ago, I started dating this guy. I had my eyes on him for a while. I thought he was everything I wanted. He treated me really well, for a really long time. But, one day, he stopped treating me so well. We were on my couch, my mom had run to the store to get some groceries, my little brother was asleep in the other room. He said something that upset me, and I decided I was going to the just sit there in silence for a minute, to really take in what had just said to me. I didn’t really want to talk him in that moment. He didn’t like that I wasn’t answering him when he was speaking to me, so he hit me in my arm, pretty hard. I had a bruise the next day. I asked him why he did that later on, and he told me I shouldn’t have ignored him and made him mad. He hit me on a few other occasions. However, one that really sticks out to me would be the time he did it in front of my friends. We were outside of the school, and he wanted to fight this other boy. I didn’t want him to though, because I didn’t want him to get suspended. So I tried to hug him, and reach up to kiss him. When I did, he grabbed me really hard and threw me to the ground. My very best friend and my other friend where there. I cried so hard, and almost immediately, my arm starting bruising where he had grabbed me. My friends just told me to come on, and they both walked me to the bus. As I said before, those weren’t the only two times it happened, but those are the times that stick out the most to me. The first time and the time my friends were there. He has hit me in my face on multiple occasions as well. Domestic violence is definitely something that’s really hard to go through. For me, I didn’t even really know why he was doing it to me. I loved him more than anything. I thought he was the love of my life. He not only hurt me physically, but emotionally as well. He made me feel useless, and he made me feel like it was always my fault, or that he wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t deserve it. He always came up with some reason why he had done it, and usually it was that I “deserved it.” Eventually after almost four years of dating, and around two years of abuse, he broke up with me. He cheated on me with a girl in middle school, and when I found out about it, he broke up with me. Today, I’m glad that he broke up with me. However, when it happened, I was broken, I was sad, and I felt like I would never be enough for anymore. I thought to myself, “You gave him everything you had to offer in the world, and you still weren’t enough for him, how could you be enough for anyone else?” I went into a really deep depression for a few months after he left. But, after those few months were over, I started to realize what I lost, but also what I gained. Sure, I may have lost what I thought was my “first love.” However, I also lost the abuse, I lost the hurt, I lost the pain, and I lost the bruises. In the end of it all, I gained strength and self-confidence. Strength came before self-confidence of course. I gained strength only a few months after realizing that the pain and bruises were gone for good. I knew that if I could stay strong through that much hurt, and I could have put up with it for as long as I did, than I could handle my own, and I could be strong. The day I realized I was strong was the day I started to stand up for myself. I stopped letting people walk all over me. I stopped letting people talk about me without ever saying anything back or defending myself. I stopped being weak. I stood strong. However, gaining self-confidence took a lot longer. He had put me down so much, that I didn’t see a lot of good in myself. I knew I was strong, but that was about it. He made fun of my looks, my weight, my height, and pretty much everything else. By the time the relationship was over, I didn’t see a lot of good in myself, I looked in the mirror and felt disgusted. Some days I would even cry because I felt so ugly. It took me about a year and a half to really even start to feel a little bit of self confidence. I met a guy, a guy that I am now engaged to. He started telling me every single day how beautiful I am. I almost pushed him away, because I didn’t believe anything he said. I thought he was only telling me those things, because it’s what I “wanted to hear.” However, it turns out that he really meant everything he said. So, the more he would tell me how beautiful I was, the more I began to see it. I would ask him, “What’s beautiful about me?” and he would say something like everything about you is beautiful, or well I love your eyes and your smile. He would just name different things about me that made me beautiful. My self-confidence really started to build up, and I really started to see the beauty in myself. Today, I am stronger than I have ever been. Today, I see that I am beautiful. Today, I see that I am good enough. And today, I don’t even shed a tear when I think about what happened to me. I thank him for it, because he hurt me, but he also made me strong. He made me self-confident. He made me realize my worth. Because of him, I am a wonderful, and beautiful person, and I truly see it now.