When I look back through the women in my family, one thing becomes very clear to me: abuse did not suddenly appear in my generation. What changed was our ability to recognize it, name it, talk about it, and eventually do something about it.
My grandmother lived in a time when a woman could have very few realistic options if her marriage was unhealthy or abusive. Financial independence was harder to come by, divorce carried enormous social consequences, and leaving a husband was not simply a matter of deciding that you deserved better. A woman had to think about where she would live, how she would support herself, whether she would be judged by her family or community, and what would happen to her children. In many cases, staying was not necessarily an endorsement of the marriage. Sometimes it was the only practical way to survive. My great-grandmother told my grandma if she left, she could not come home. She had three small children and that left her with few options.
By my mother’s generation, things had started to change. Women had more opportunities to work, divorce was more accessible, and society was beginning to acknowledge that there were circumstances in which a woman had legitimate reasons to leave a marriage. Even so, the stigma was still very real. Divorce was frowned upon. Marriage was something you were expected to make work. Family problems were supposed to remain private, and many women were still taught that keeping the family together mattered more than their own emotional well-being. Thankfully, my grandmother opened her doors for my mother and I to allow her time to get work situated.
The options were expanding, but attitudes had not fully caught up.
There was also another problem that carried well into my own generation: when people heard the word abuse, they often pictured bruises. They pictured black eyes, broken bones, police reports, or something visibly violent. If none of those things were happening, it was much harder to explain that a relationship could still be deeply damaging. My ex-husband’s mother said “Well, he doesn’t beat you or cheat on you.” Although I am pretty certain he was cheating on me.
By the time I found myself in an abusive relationship, society was talking much more openly about domestic violence than it had in the past. There were shelters, hotlines, counselors, books, and support groups. That was important progress. But verbal and emotional abuse were still barely discussed compared with physical violence, and that lack of language mattered enormously. I actually did not figure out it was verbal abuse until after my divorce and he continued to harass me.
When someone does not hit you, it becomes remarkably easy to question whether what you are experiencing is really abuse. You may wonder whether he is simply angry, whether the two of you just have communication problems, whether you are too sensitive, or whether all marriages are difficult and you simply need to try harder. You start examining your own behavior more closely than his. You think that if you can explain yourself better, stay calmer, stop reacting, choose different words, or find the right way to approach a subject, maybe things will finally improve.
That uncertainty is one of the places emotional abuse can thrive.
There may be no bruise to point to and no single incident that sounds dramatic enough when you try to explain it to someone else. Instead, there can be a constant pattern of control, criticism, intimidation, blame, humiliation, manipulation, verbal attacks, and conflict. Over time, those patterns can change the way you see yourself. You can begin to doubt your own judgment, question whether your reactions are reasonable, and lose confidence in your ability to interpret what is happening around you.
And even when a relationship ends, that does not always mean the control ends with it. When children are involved, conflict can continue through custody battles, legal disputes, communication, and attempts to use the child as another avenue of control. Leaving can be the beginning of freedom, but it can also be the beginning of an entirely different kind of battle.
It took me time to understand all of that. Counseling helped. Support groups helped. Reading helped. Journaling helped. Eventually, writing about my experiences helped too. Looking back, I can see that part of my healing came from finally having language for things I had experienced long before I understood what to call them. One domestic counselor said that my relationship was classic domestic abuse. Once I knew what I was dealing with, I began to find more resources to help me make sense of my relationship.
Today, we have words my grandmother never had.
We talk about emotional abuse, verbal abuse, gaslighting, financial abuse, coercive control, isolation, trauma bonds, manipulation, and psychological abuse. We understand much more clearly that a relationship can be profoundly damaging without anyone ever throwing a punch. We also understand that abuse often develops as a pattern of power and control rather than one isolated incident.
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That does not mean everyone understands abuse today. Victims are still questioned. People still ask why someone stayed. Emotional abuse is still minimized, and abusers can still appear perfectly charming to everyone outside the home. But we do have something earlier generations often did not have: language.
Language matters because when you finally discover a name for something you have been experiencing, you begin to understand that you are not imagining it. Other people have experienced it. Other people recognize the patterns. Other people have felt the same confusion. And most importantly, other people have gotten through it.
That is one reason I still write about this subject.
I have been away from that period of my life for a long time. It would be very easy to close the chapter, stop talking about it, and simply move on. In many ways, that is what survivors are encouraged to do. Once you have built another life, why keep looking backward?
I understand why many people do not want to revisit it. Once someone has escaped an abusive relationship, they may want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and that part of their life. They may not want to keep reopening old memories, and they should not be expected to.
But there is another side to that silence.
When everyone who makes it out stops talking, the people who are still trapped in abusive relationships often hear mostly from other people who are also frightened, confused, and trying to survive. That can make the future seem incredibly bleak. If all you ever read are stories from people who are currently in crisis, it can become difficult to imagine that life will ever truly feel different.
Sometimes a person still living in abuse needs to hear from someone who is twenty years farther down the road.
She needs to know that there really can be another side to it.
Life does not suddenly become perfect after an abusive relationship ends. There will still be grief, family problems, financial worries, difficult people, work stress, disappointments, and all of the ordinary challenges that come with being human. Freedom does not eliminate hardship.
What it can eliminate is the constant feeling that your life belongs to someone else.
There can be a home where you are not constantly waiting for the next explosion. There can be relationships where disagreement does not automatically mean punishment. There can be mornings when you wake up and realize you have not thought about that person in days. There can be decisions you make without wondering how someone else will react. There can be peace that once seemed almost unimaginable.
Eventually, there may even come a time when the experience that once dominated nearly every thought becomes something you have to deliberately reach backward to remember.
When I look at the women in my family, I see a progression.
My grandmother had very few realistic options.
My mother’s generation had more options, but leaving still carried shame and judgment.
My generation began to recognize domestic violence more openly, yet we still had a limited understanding of the damage caused by verbal and emotional abuse.
The generations coming behind us have more language than any of us did.
That is progress.
Not perfection, but progress.
And perhaps part of our responsibility, once we have made it through, is to keep moving that line forward. We can tell our daughters and granddaughters what our grandmothers were often unable to tell us. We can teach them that love does not require fear, that marriage does not require surrendering your dignity, and that abuse does not have to leave bruises to be real.
We can also remind them that leaving is not necessarily failure. Sometimes leaving is the first decision a person makes in a very long time that truly belongs to her.
And surviving something does not mean you have to spend the rest of your life living inside the story of what happened to you.
Sometimes the most meaningful thing a survivor can do is look back, not because she wants to return there, but because someone else is still trying to find the way out.
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