October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

According to Google, "It evolved from the "Day of Unity" held in October 1981 and conceived by the National Coalition against Domestic Violence. The intent was to connect advocates across the nation who were working to end violence against women and their children. Present day we still use October to bring awareness to Domestic Violence and to share resources for possible victims."

I don’t remember learning about domestic violence in high school. I remember seeing the pamphlets on the wall while I waited to talk to a counselor about college applications, but I don’t remember talking about domestic violence. I remember thinking that domestic violence only happened to people who allowed it to happen. It was people who permitted these things to continue in their relationships. I remember being one of those people that always wondered why they stayed.

It wasn't until my second semester of college that I learned about the psychology that goes on with both mental and physical abuse. I learned about the way someone's brain can actually change with years of abuse. I also learned about the stigma facing men who report abuse and the way they are treated.

Every class, every book, will say the same thing about what to do when someone lays a hand on you but I can’t remember focusing on the parts when the abuse has nothing to do with physical violence. When the abuse is caused little by little, mentally and emotionally until the end result is something that you can barely recognize.

A lot of the time, Domestic Violence also consists of psychological abuse. According to DVAM, 48.4% of women and 48.8% of men have experienced at least one psychologically aggressive behavior by an intimate partner.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE INCLUDES:

• Humiliating the victim

• Controlling what the victim can or cannot do

• Withholding information from the victim

• Deliberately doing something to make the victim feel diminished or embarrassed

• Isolating the victim from friends and/or family

• Denying the victim access to money or other basic resources

• Stalking

• Demeaning the victim in public or in private

• Undermining the victim’s confidence and/or sense of self-worth

• Convincing the victim (s)he is crazy

Often abusers will use the gaslighting technique to make their victims believe that all of the scenarios were just imagined or created in their mind. This abuse tactic is used often and drives victims to question their own sanity and reality in situations of abuse.

The most important thing I’ve learned about Domestic Abuse is that if you are googling or questioning, could this be abuse? Odds are that it is. No one should ever make you question their behaviors and no one should ever have the right to make you feel less than the person you were meant to be.

Domestic Violence is still a major problem in our society and if we want it to change, we have to stop this stigma of the abused person being weak. We have to build supportive communities and we have to educate people. We have to teach the younger generations how to recognize abuse right off the bat and not excuse it. We have to be willing to listen to the male perspective. We have to be willing to let men tell their stories in a safe space without judgment. We have to be willing to talk about domestic violence as the problem that it still is.

Domestic Violence survivors are survivors in every sense of the word. They are people who have managed to survive abuse from people who used "love" as a weapon.

"We are not victims of the people that chose to do us wrong, we are survivors of the people who never learned how to love."

For more information and resources: http://ncadv.org/

http://www.feminist.org/911/crisis.html

http://lcadv.org/

http://www.thehotline.org/resources/