My mind knew I was safe.
My body had not yet been convinced.
I tell this part honestly because the stories we tell about women who escape abuse tend to end at the courthouse, with the conviction, as though justice and healing were the same thing.
They are not.
I won my case, thoroughly.
And I still woke gasping at footsteps for months afterward, because the law could punish what was done to me but could not undo what it had done.
Healing was a separate project, slower and quieter and entirely my own, and I want any woman reading this who is still gasping at footsteps long after her own escape to know: that does not mean you are broken, or weak, or failing to move on.
It means your body kept you alive through something terrible, and it has not yet learned that the terrible thing is over.
It will.
Mine did.
But it takes the time it takes, and there is no shame at all in the taking.
I want to say a little more about that survival mode, because understanding it changed my relationship to my own recovery, and it may help someone.
For months I was frustrated with myself — furious, even — that my body would not simply accept the good news.
The abusers were in prison.
The doors were locked.
I was safe, provably, legally, completely safe, and yet my heart would still slam into a gallop at the sound of footsteps in the hall, and I would lie awake braced against a violence that could no longer reach me, and I felt this as a failure, as weakness, as evidence that I was not healing properly.
My therapist gave me a different way to see it that I have held onto ever since.
She told me that the part of my body still scanning for danger was not broken.
It was the very thing that had kept me alive for ten years.
Through every escalating threat, every slammed door, every violent night, some ancient vigilant part of my nervous system had stayed on watch, reading the room, bracing for the blow, keeping me ready — and it was largely thanks to that exhausting, hyper-alert watchfulness that I had survived at all.
That part of me was not my enemy.
It was my oldest and most loyal protector, and it did not know, yet, that its job was over.
You cannot be angry at a guard dog for still barking at shadows the week after the war ends; the dog kept you alive through the war, and it will stand down when it finally believes the war is truly over, and not one moment before, no matter how you shout at it.
