My first attempt at reconnecting with my faith started three years before the night my abuser held me in a choke hold. At the time, I had nowhere else to turn; my three-year-old daughter had cancer.
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Here I was, living in the secret world of domestic violence and I find that my baby girl has cancer.  I thought, really? How much more can I humanly be expected to take? Daily, I am verbally or physically abused by my husband, and now one of our children has cancer? I thought the abuse was awful before the cancer news. But, seeing how my abuser couldn’t deal with the harsh reality of his daughter having cancer, the abuse increased three-fold.

Accepting the realization that my life wasn’t going to improve while living with my abusive husband was tough. Realizing I was going to have to let go of my marriage; my sacred vow of unity with the guy that I used to love, felt overwhelmingly degrading. My emotional turmoil sifted between my abuser’s ugly reminders in my head “it’s all your fault” combined with my self-fulling feelings of personal failure. Slowly though, as I ventured out on my own with the children, a sense of darkness started surrounding me. I soon realized that depression after abuse was an obstacle I needed to face.

My first memories of overwhelming domestic abuse anxiety occurred after I was apart from my abuser and the reality of all that was happening to my world started sinking in. This new emotion provided a furiously new feeling of incomplete inability to function, think, focus, make decisions, be a single parent or co-worker. The new feeling overpowered me like nothing before. It wasn’t like the anxiety I felt throughout the abuse; the anxiety I experienced during my abuse never kept me from being able to function. The unpredictability of my abuse kept me functioning in a chaotic state to make my abuser happy. This new, post abuse anxiety was significantly different and overwhelmingly debilitating.
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For the first few years post-abuse, I believed my anxiety provided me with my will to fight. I considered my anxiety a meter that guided me to decide if I should fight or run. In the absence of any other decision-making method, I allowed my level of anxiety dictate how I should handle a situation.

Getting Over Domestic Violence Emotional Abuse
During the worst parts of my recovery, I thought for sure I would never be able to get over the 18 years of emotional abuse from my abuser (now ex-husband). If you were to ask my inner self-confidence, it would say that for the most part I haven’t gotten over the emotional abuse, but have learned how to work around it, and its severe effects. I believe getting over domestic violence emotional abuse will be an ongoing life challenge for me.