Emerging from years of abuse

Carol Byrne speaks to a victim of sexual and domestic abuse about the long road to recovery and the importance of having support.

GROWING up in a household where she was subjected to sexual abuse, Mary [not her real name] went on a downward spiralling path to alcohol abuse, into a violent marriage and later to homelessness.
To most, it may seem like there was no light at the end of the tunnel but Mary got on the road to recovery and says the first steps of talking about the issues she faced in her life have carried her through. Having received the help of a counsellor in recent years, Mary came to the realisation that she didn’t have to continue on the path of misery. She was worthy of love and of life.
Speaking openly about her experiences to The Clare Champion, Mary says, “You can turn your life around and I can honestly say that, with my hand on my heart, it’s hard work”.
She describes the life she had growing up in a household away from her immediate family.
“The house I lived in was so pathetic. They were unhygienic. There was no quality of life. There was vermin and fleas and we’d have nits on us going to school. Aside from this, I was being abused in the meantime. There were several kids in the house. I ended up looking after the children. There was no structure. The parents in the family had a drink problem. I was sexually abused by the father of the family. His brothers would come down also and they’d end up sleeping in my bed. It started when I was eight years old and stopped when I was 28. When you are abused, you always feel guilty. You can’t say no, to any aspect of your life. I can now and I have developed an attitude where no one is going to bully me,” Mary explains.
School was an out for her and she loved attending but was never given the opportunity to go to secondary school.
“I would always see this girl, she was always so clean and lovely going to school. When you have no sense of quality to your life, you’d wish for cleanliness. I wish I could have gone to secondary school. I wanted to apply myself and to get some bit of normality, which I didn’t have. Everything was pathetic,” she said.
Abused, disillusioned and confused, Mary ran away from home at 14.
“You would always be running away from yourself because you wouldn’t feel comfortable in your own skin. I would get a call to say the kids miss you and I would believe that and I would come back. Then the same thing would happen all over again,” she added.
Although there were other children in the household, Mary was the only one that was abused and in her teens, she turned to alcohol.
“When I was about 16 or 17, I started drinking. I was drinking because of the abuse and the mental stuff attached to that. I felt paranoid. I felt like I wasn’t good enough for anyone or anything. You start to feel like everyone is talking about you, even though they mightn’t be. You think that because you have no confidence in yourself. If someone said to you, ‘your shoes are lovely’, you’d find something wrong with your hair, instead of saying thanks. I can take a compliment today but back then I couldn’t,” she explains.
It got to a stage where Mary had the courage to go to the gardaí about the abuse but having put pen to paper and realising that the truth would come out, it proved more harrowing than she expected.
“I made a complaint in relation to the abuse but I didn’t sign the statement. I couldn’t handle it. I could handle it for myself but I just didn’t want to air it in public. I couldn’t hurt anyone. I’ve never hurt anyone in my life except myself.
“I moved out of the house but I’d be still followed around. He was so domineering. It was head-wrecking stuff. I didn’t know what to make of it as a child. I’ve shed buckets and buckets of tears and I’ve felt all the anger and all the frustration but, thank God, I came out of it nearly 100% on the other end,” she adds.
Having left the household where the abuse was occurring, Mary found herself wanting normality and someone to appreciate her for who she was. However, this was no bed of roses either.
“I ended up getting married. That marriage was an abusive marriage in that I was beaten every single day. I had broken bones everywhere and I ended up in Clare Haven,” she reveals.
She accepts that one of the most difficult things for people to understand is why someone stays in a violent marriage. She explains the difficulty she had in getting out of it.
“You have no confidence in yourself. You think you’re worthless and for me, I feel it all stemmed back to something not being right back in the past. Moving on takes a lot of strength. I know I stayed in it because I felt guilty. I know that sounds mad that I felt guilty for leaving a man who was beating me, but I thought I deserved it.
“I remember one of my friends brought me to the gardaí after I was beaten with a stick and my back was all cut. I made a statement to the gardaí and I remember I wouldn’t sign it because I felt guilty that I would hurt his feelings. It stems back to not having a structure to my life and always looking for someone to love me for myself. That’s why I think I got married. I didn’t feel I deserved it and for someone to ask me to marry them, I said yes,” Mary outlines.
She eventually made the decision to get away from that situation and sought help from Clare Haven. It was the first step Mary took on her road to recovery.
“I got support there because I was ready to take it. I went to court and got a protection order. The important thing was that I was ready and I had to be ready to take that help. I’d had enough and I couldn’t go back to feeling worthless and he was probably going to kill me, he would have. That’s the kind of situation I walked into and then you feel like you have to put up with it because you’re no good, you’re not worth anything, you don’t deserve anything,” she says.
Having struggled and battled with alcohol abuse at various stages of her life, Mary says it similarly took a lot of strength to make the decision to give up alcohol.
“When I was drinking, I had no morals. I didn’t care and that’s the way it is for a lot of people. But I knew myself that I wasn’t that type of person. It disgusted me that I was that way, so it is great to be where I am now. I’d had enough of the drink but when I rang up Bushy Park, I was focused on stopping. I went in there and did my programme and, touch wood, I haven’t drank since. I have kept my mind focused on doing positive things now because I’d end up dead if I focused on the past. I do count myself lucky that I can keep talking about it now. I had millions of layers of stuff I had to deal with. It was very hard when I opened myself up to the process,” she explains.
Mary has been getting counselling for a number of years and believes this has helped her immensely.
“It’s been great. I can talk about everything, about how I feel. I don’t have to talk about the past. If people work at it and learn from it, you don’t always have to be miserable. You won’t always be happy, though. You get into a rut where you feel like you deserve nothing. It wasn’t easy to get out of that and I still get bad days but I’ve learned how to deal with it.
“I’m lucky. I have great support and all you need is support, even just from one person. You don’t need a load of people telling you, ‘you should have done this’ and ‘you shouldn’t do that’, because you get confused and you go back and think, ‘to hell with it, I’ll put up with it, I don’t care if I die’. You just want someone to be supportive of you,” Mary says.
She knows it is not an easy thing to advise other women in similar circumstances to open up but she explains that, for her, it went a long way towards lifting the burden she has carried for so many years.
“When I’d walk up the street I’d see someone and I would wish I was them, just someone else. After so many years of not feeling good, it was hard. You do go through life angry. I went into confession one day. I was just so angry, I told the priest I don’t want any confession, I just wanted someone to take away all this emotional pain. I was roaring crying and he blessed me. I think you have to believe in something. I suppose my normality surfaced. I talked to him and got it off my chest.
“A lot of work goes into getting to the stage where you can talk about it. For me, looking back on everything now it’s brilliant to be able to come out the other side of that stuff, to realise you don’t have to live in a time warp. You can get past it.
“I never thought I’d get to the other side of it but I have always had faith. I think it is very important to believe that there is somebody there that will help you, no matter how in dire straits you are because trust me, I’ve been there in every aspect and you have to believe that,” she concludes.

Clare Haven can be contacted on their confidential phoneline on 065 6822435 or by email at clientcare@clarehaven.ie. The Women’s Aid
freephone helpline can be
contacted on 1800341900.