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Fear

Hell on earth is not a place but a state of mind!
Have you lived in fear, cowered when a hand is raised, felt empty and alone, or felt that your life has been stolen from you because anxiety and depression is nipping at your heals? Is your laughter gone? Has your spirit been broken, and the word hope is no longer in your vocabulary? I was once in that dark place of no return. My mind, body, heart and soul were broken into a million pieces, and the fear running through my veins were earth shattering. My brain was numb to all rational thinking and thoughts of suicide were like taking a common every day breath. The only thing that saved me was a moment of clarity to realize that I couldn't leave my young children behind with this person I was married to. My isolation and captivity was complete. I am still in counseling for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 3 years later, but I am finding out who I really am for the first time in my life. I am loving, smart, funny, and most of all I have learned that I am a good wife and a good mother after 21 years of hearing I wasn't good enough for anything. My life has been forever changed, and life is good. Challenges still arise, but with my new husband and my family always there for me with unconditional love and support I am
making it one day at a time.
My dream is that one day divorce courts will address mental, verbal and psychological (emotional) abuse as a prosecutable offense. The scars run deep and wide with all forms of abuse, just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist.Research is starting to show that mental abuse is longer lasting to its victims than physical abuse. I can now say I am a survivor!
Hope is something I never had, until my escape became a reality not a dream. Hope is now a wonderful word in my vocabulary, and fear is a thing of the past. My number one goal is to finish school with a PHD degree in Pyschology so that I can help women and men, who are still in that dark place of no return and to keep my children safe and showing them that they are loved. I want to show victims that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and a freedom of the soul they never thought possible. Abused women and men need to know that there is life after they go through hell on earth, a traumatic experience, that will forever change who they are and who they can be.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

'Most of the sex ... was consensual': Castro's blame-the-victim act all too familiar, abuse experts say

Aug. 1, 2013 at 6:03 PM ET
Ariel Castro
Angelo Merendino / Getty Images
Ariel Castro pleads to Judge Michael Russo during his sentencing on August 1, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Ariel Castro’s words at his sentencing hearing on Thursday are almost jaw-dropping. Given a chance to speak before he was sentenced to life in prison, plus a thousand years for aggravated murder and for holding three young women captive for 11 years, he repeatedly blamed his victims.
He denied he raped and beat Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, claiming instead that they asked him for sex and that his sexual addiction was to blame. He even said the abuse couldn't have been that bad because DeJesus "looks normal." While many onlookers were astonished, abuse experts said they hear that kind of language and justification every day.
NBC News asked them to weigh in on specific comments Castro made:
"Most of the sex that went on in that house, probably all of it, was consensual," Castro said. "These allegations about being forceful on them -- that is totally wrong. Because there was times where they'd even ask me for sex --many times. And I learned that these girls were not virgins. From their testimony to me, they had multiple partners before me, all three of them."
The denial and rationalization comes as no shock to experts on rape and abuse. In fact, they say, it’s typical that men who rape or batter women will deny they did anything wrong, and even that the victim was "asking for it".
“I think it’s actually very typical of an abuser,” says Barbara Paradiso, who directs the center on domestic violence at the University of Colorado-Denver.
"There is a widely held belief that women enjoy rape or that it is 'just sex at the wrong time, in the wrong place'," Rape Crisis of England and Wales says on its website. "Often when a woman is raped she is afraid that she will be killed - rapists often use the threat of killing a woman or her children to ensure her 'submission' and her silence after the attack. Women do not enjoy sexual violence. Victims of murder, robbery and other crimes are never portrayed as enjoying the experience."
"I am not a violent person. I simply kept them there without being able to leave."
“It is not uncommon for offenders to have justified their own behavior, oftentimes to see themselves as a victim,” Paradiso said in a telephone interview. “They often have a sense of righteousness around their behavior, that they had a right to do what they did or it was acceptable to do what they did that they were forced to do what they did because of the victim.”
"I never had a record until I met my children's mother. My son was on there the other day saying how abusive I was but I was never abusive until I met her. And he failed to say that at the end before she passed away that them two weren't even talking.
Castro’s son Anthony has said Castro beat him and his mother, Grimilda “Nilda” Figueroa, who died in 2012.
"What he's saying, that I was a wife beater - that is, that is wrong. This happened because I couldn't get her to quiet down. I would continuous tell her the children are right there, would you please? She would respond, I don't care if the children are there and she would just keep going...the situation would escalate until the point where she would put her hands on me and that's how I reacted, by putting my hands on her."
It’s familiar thinking to Paradiso. "'I had to hit her because she did x, y or z’,” she says. “(They are saying) ‘I had to bring her back into line’ … It doesn’t really surprise me at all that he said what he said. That behavior is completely based on power and control and domination, which our society supports. So I am not surprised that he said that.”
While his is an extreme case, experts say the pattern is anything but rare.
“I was taken aback [by Castro's statements] but at the same time not shocked by it,” says Jennifer Marsh, vice president of victim services for RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. “It’s somebody who was not willing to accept that what they did was wrong and who may have convinced themselves that what they are doing is not wrong or justified. It read like the way that a perpetrator thinks.”
According to RAINN, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States every two minutes, and only three out of every 100 rapists ever spends any time in jail.

Don't let your abuser blame you for what he/she did.  It is not your fault, it is the abusers fault. As one of my previous posts say, "The way people treat you is a statement about who they are as a human being.  It is not a statement about you."   Jill

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