If you’ve read the first two posts in this series, you’ve already done something hard. You named what’s happening to you, and you sat with why leaving hasn’t been simple, even when you know what you know. This final post is about the thing underneath both of those: you are not the only person who has ever stood exactly where you’re standing.
The Loneliest Part of Abuse Is the Silence Around It
Abuse convinces people they’re the exception. The one who should have seen it sooner. The one whose situation is too complicated, too embarrassing, too tied up in love or money or kids or history to explain to anyone else. That silence is part of what keeps it going. It isn’t an accident that isolation and abuse so often travel together.
If you’ve gone this far without telling anyone the full truth, that’s not a failure on your part. It’s a reasonable response to a situation that teaches you, piece by piece, that speaking up isn’t safe. Still, the silence costs something. It convinces you that what you’re carrying is yours to carry alone, and it isn’t.
You Are Not the Only One Asking These Questions
Every October, the National Network to End Domestic Violence runs a campaign called #Every1KnowsSome1, now in its sixth year. The name isn’t a slogan. According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 34% of women and 17% of men report contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by a partner at some point in their lives. Just over 30% of women and roughly 22% of men report psychological aggression by a partner.
Tonia Moultry-Pace, NNEDV’s Interim President and CEO, said it plainly when this year’s campaign launched: “Everyone knows someone impacted by domestic violence, and many of us are victims and survivors ourselves.”
Read that again if you need to. Someone close to you has likely asked the same questions you’re asking right now, even if they never said so out loud. You are not the exception. You’re part of a much larger, much less isolated picture than it feels like from inside it.
Support Doesn’t Require You to Have a Plan Yet
One of the biggest reasons survivors wait to reach out is the assumption that asking for help means committing to a decision. It doesn’t. You can call a hotline and still be unsure. You can talk to an advocate and still go home that night. Reaching out is not a contract. It’s a conversation, and you’re allowed to end it wherever you need to.
Trained advocates at the National Domestic Violence Hotline listen without judgment and without pushing you toward anything you’re not ready for. Their job isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to help you think, out loud, with someone who isn’t inside your situation and isn’t going to repeat what you say to anyone else.
Finding One Person Is Enough to Start
You don’t need to tell everyone. You need one person: a friend, a sibling, a coworker, a counselor, an advocate on a hotline you’ll never see in person. One person who believes you is enough to put a safety net under you that didn’t exist a moment before.
If you’re not ready to say the whole truth yet, you don’t have to. You can start with something as simple as, “I’m going through something hard and I need you to know.” That sentence alone changes what you’re carrying, because now someone else is carrying a piece of it with you.
Community Looks Different at Every Stage
Not going through this alone doesn’t always mean a hotline call or a conversation with someone close to you. Sometimes it means a quiet, private space to process what you’re feeling before you’re ready to say any of it out loud.
That’s part of why we built The 1st 28. Our free guided journal is a place to start putting words to what you’ve read in this series, on your own time, with no one else reading over your shoulder. When you’re ready for more, our services include workshops and support built by survivors, for survivors, with no pressure attached to how fast you move through them.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), text “START” to 88788, or chat online 24/7 at thehotline.org
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673, for support with sexual coercion or assault within a relationship
National Network to End Domestic Violence: nnedv.org, home of the #Every1KnowsSome1 campaign
The 1st 28 Emergency Resources: the1st28.org/emergency-resources
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
Nothing Will Take Your Light
This series started with a question you may have asked yourself in the dark: am I being abused? It moved through why leaving isn’t as simple as anyone on the outside thinks it should be. It ends here, with the thing we most want you to carry forward: you were never meant to hold this by yourself.
Whatever stage you’re at, whoever you decide to tell, whenever you decide to act, you belong to a much bigger, much less alone story than the one abuse has been telling you. No matter what you go through, nothing will take your light.
