Why did I do this?
Why did I decide to write a book charting my progress through two relationships with controlling, abusive men, exposing all my guilt, humiliation and shaming mistakes; why have I revisited painful workplace memories of a controlling, abusive woman and why have I made myself remember things I would much, much rather forget? Why have I put myself through that?
I have asked myself each of those things, many times, while I’ve been writing Look What You Made Me Do and especially on the days when I felt it was all too much and couldn’t bring myself to get down more than a handful of words. The answer is because I had to . . . because I am not alone, because I am one of many and I want to know why.
I can trace the origins of this book to a mild obsession with The Archers on Radio 4, specifically the moment at the beginning of 2013 when Rob Titchener first turned up in the fictional village of Ambridge. His charming manner, and the way he claimed to have fallen so quickly and helplessly in love with single mum Helen Archer, generated a queasy feeling of recognition. The programme is broadcast daily (except for Saturdays) but work commitments meant I had to catch up with the week’s events by listening to the Sunday-morning omnibus and joining in the #thearchers Twitter feed – a sizeable part of the fun. As Rob swept Helen past all the usual relationship milestones with reckless speed, almost all my fellow tweeters seemed to strongly approve of this turn of events (so romantic), delighted that at long last Helen had found the One. I kept my doubts about Rob to myself but I had a niggling feeling that I’d met him before and began combing my own history for clues.
Helen’s story progressed through real time, which made it all the more powerful because it showed very clearly how insidiously the form of domestic abuse known as coercive control takes hold. My Archers Twitter timeline became punctuated with ‘Why does she stay?’ and ‘Leave him, Helen.’ By the point where she had been rushed into marriage, agreed to Rob having parental responsibility for her son, been told how to dress, tracked on a mobile phone, isolated from her friends and family, raped, slapped, disempowered and humiliated, the omnibus tweet-along had changed to ‘I can’t listen to this anymore’ and disbelief that an intelligent middle-class woman who ran her own business in a close rural community could be suckered like this. Then inevitably some listeners began referring to Helen’s previous mental-health issues at about the same time as her husband.
With the benefit of first-hand experience and hindsight, I realized that there is a basic misunderstanding of how domestic abuse, and coercive control, works, and I began to feel an overwhelming compulsion to set something down about what had happened to me, despite having tried to ignore the fact that it had happened for a decade or more.
It took me almost a month to wring out a 2,000-word article and the only way I could find to start it was to muddle this real Helen’s story with that of the fictional Helen. I didn’t formally pitch the idea to anyone – I wasn’t even sure I could write it. It was only towards the end that I came out with it and wrote, ‘That happened to me too’ – not ‘this’ but ‘that’, still distancing myself, still hiding. Whenever I tried to articulate what I had been through, I felt paralysed by shame. In this, again, I am not alone.
By the time I was ready to send the piece out, the 2015 Coercion and Control law1 was beginning to have an impact, making what I’d written reassuringly apt. Nonetheless, it was turned down twice before the New Statesman took it and to their credit, printed it exactly as it was.2 It went viral.
Then something remarkable happened. One of my Twitter followers, Paul Trueman – @paulwtrueman – got in touch. He also listened to The Archers, had read my article and wanted to do something to raise money for victims of domestic abuse. He asked me if I thought it was a good idea (yes!) and where the money should go. Send it to Refuge, I said, thinking of all the times I’d almost called them and never found the courage. Paul’s initial target was set at £1,000 but topped £7,000 in the first twenty-four hours. Within a week the Helen Titchener (née Archer) Rescue Fund had reached £50,000. At the time of writing the total stands at a staggering £173,000. The messages left by hundreds of donors show the reach and effect of domestic abuse. I am really not alone.
Domestic abuse is like cancer: everybody knows somebody. It’s only when you start to speak about it that you find out just how many women have been through it and carry that burden about with them. It affects the everyday lives of hundreds of women. It affects mine.
Of course, men can be victims of domestic abuse too. I choose to say ‘women’ because the majority of those affected are women, and by quite a substantial margin:
— The volume of domestic abuse prosecutions completed rose in the year 2015/2016 to 100,930, the highest level ever recorded. Where gender was recorded, 83.3 per cent (71,706) of victims were female and 16.7 per cent (14,406) were male. In 18,081 cases the gender was not recorded.3
— Every week, in England and Wales, two women are killed by a current or former partner4 – that’s one woman every three days.
— One in four women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime.5
— In one study 95 out of 100 survivors of domestic abuse reported experiencing coercive control.6
The 2014/2015 Crime Survey for England and Wales found that 63 per cent of female abuse victims had experienced non-physical abuse (emotional or financial) in the last year.7
Bearing in mind the suggestion of one report that a woman is assaulted thirty-five times before her first call to the police, these figures are a glimpse at an undiscovered country. Women suffer in silence for years and – because the very nature of abuse is control through fear, shame and guilt – some never speak about it at all. But by not speaking, women who have suffered leave control in the hands of the abusers. Speaking about it is problematic but it strips away the stigma and robs what has been done to us of its power. It is, trust me, both a relief and a release. But most important of all, it helps us to identify this form of abuse and protect ourselves against it.
But how do we recognize the pattern of an abusive relationship, which starts like any other and somehow slowly twists out of shape? The key is that word ‘pattern’ because there is a pattern and it’s always the same. The similarity is the thing that strikes me most when I talk to other survivors, and most of what people know about domestic abuse is told from the victim’s point of view. The story in this book is told from my point of view – it is, as it says on the cover, a memoir. But I hope it also supplies the missing voice – that of the abuser. You can tell people you’ve been disarmed, frightened, loved, confused, desperate and despairing but how do you explain how that happened when you don’t understand it yourself? You need the words.
I have an archive of material because ‘Franc’ (not his real name) and I wrote to each other. Dozens of notes, emails and letters. Thousands and thousands of words and I kept them all, or most of them. What he wrote meant so much to me that I squirrelled everything away, and when he cast aside what I had written to him I kept those letters, too. I also have my diaries and they allowed me to construct a timeline. I began by sorting and filing everything into chronological order. When I’d done that I went to work with a highlighter pen and tracked the path of our relationship – the pattern. I saw very clearly what had happened to me and how it had been done, and I saw both sides.
You would have thought that having this well-documented insight into our relationship would make it an easy story to write. In one sense it did because it’s all there. In another sense it worked against me. These are not letters I read every day, or have read since . . . or at all. I don’t know why I kept them, unless it was for this. I soon found I needed strategies to deal with the truth that emerged.
At the end of each working day I learned very quickly to be careful about what I left in my head overnight. The afternoon I spent reading through one of our epic email rows left me unable to sleep, tangled in a blanket of self-loathing and negativity, pretty much the way he used to make me feel in life. Hatred of my defensive, grovelling, snivelling, self-pitying, cowering former self was a dominant theme. I saw how pathetic I was in the nauseating prose I wrote, desperate to calm him. I saw too that the way I tried to big myself up, to show him that he couldn’t hurt me, in fact only made him worse. Remembering all this made me afraid to write, to put my voice on paper.
When I was with him my world shrank. It shrank again while I was writing this book – the fear and inadequacy I felt then came back as I re-read his words telling me I did not love, could not love, that I should do as I was told, instructing me to be ‘a good girl’. Words asking where was I, who was I with, was I fat, was I thin, what had I eaten, had I been writing, had I written about him, had I been to the gym, how much money had I spent this week, not to do this, say that, wear that, behave that way, speak to that man, breathe that way. The words that said I was hopeless, disorganized, mad, fat, old, frigid and above all, that I treated him badly, after all he had done for me. He said that I was cruel and that I made him do what he did. ‘You did this. You made me do this.’
He still held the power to shock me. I would feel my heart swell when he said something lovely in a letter or an email and collapse in on itself when he turned it bad. Things I thought I remembered but wasn’t sure I remembered accurately were indeed true and reading about them put me back in the place where I first read them. Some things he’d written were as much of a punch as if he was standing here in the room with me. He wrote almost nothing about his violence, but when he did he made it sound logical, defensible: ‘A slap is nothing compared to what you did to me’.
As long as such things remain hidden they fester. They help no one. In tipping them out into the world I hope they will help others understand what happened to me, and, in some cases, understand what is happening to them, too.
All I ask of you, the reader, is that you approach this with an open curiosity and try not to judge us, that you bear in mind the psychological scars which domestic abuse, coercive control and workplace bullying leave behind, and perhaps understand why I am occasionally hard on myself and others.
Finally, this book is not about revenge. It is about understanding and about how we can forgive the unforgivable. It’s about wanting to alter perceptions. To that end I have changed names, places and anything else that might identify the protagonists. Everything else is as it was.