 "Photo: ANIBAL ORTIZ / The Bull")
November 17, 2007
He throws me on the bed. I don’t refuse. “I’m using you,” he says to me. Then the room turns blood red and gradually sinks into a deep, sickly black. The air suddenly feels pasty and warm. I grasp for air — it’s getting hard to breathe. The pain begins as he penetrates my body. Thoughts flood my mind: “I don’t want to feel like this, okay.” But I just keep quiet. I want to run, get away, but I’m tied down. So many emotions attack my mind all at once, and I have no idea how to make it all end. Then slowly, one by one, the tears flow down my face. I want to yell out, to make him stop, but I love him.
Denise Young was emotionally abused since she was 14.
After years of feeling inferior, 19-year-old Denise is gaining the courage to move forward.
The abusive cycle is not easily broken, but Denise is breaking free. She has started an awareness group, the Emotional Abuse Organization, to help other girls and boys who have been through similar situations. She hopes that through reaching out, she can make a difference in someone’s life.
Denise looks back at how things used to be and regrets many of her choices. Her life has now been scarred, leaving her fear.
She’s scheduled all her classes at night because she’s afraid of running into people who have heard stories about her past. But Denise no longer wants to remain in the dark. She hopes that through telling her story, she can finally step out into the light.
Denise was fresh out of middle school and taking her first classes at Birmingham High School. She was enrolled in a drama class, where she was asked to take notes. Noticing that she had no pen with her, Denise asked the person next to her. He was a normal looking guy, who gladly handed her a pen.
Pretty soon, Denise and the kind stranger developed a friendship. Drama class demanded the students to be paired off, and eventually both became close. They began talking about their problems and became “friends with benefits.” The friendship grew into a strong relationship and he began to say those three words: I love you.
Denise remembers how lost and confused she was about love at that time. She had been through a tough childhood growing up without a father and friends. She didn’t know anything about love.
He told Denise he loved her, but she told him she didn’t.
“I still regret that to this day,” Denise says. “Sometimes I think, what if I did tell him I love him? What would have happened? Would he have abused me? Would he have used me?”
Denise remembers playing with his mind after he confessed his love. Family problems began to flood her. “And I needed him the most,” Denise said. She told him she didn’t love him, but she needed him. Still, she took out her anger about her family problems on him. With her frustration and mixed feelings, she feels she “messed him up in the head.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” says she says, looking down at the floor.
He got tired and told her if she didn’t love him, he was going to move on.
Denise told him she didn’t love him.
Things changed quickly after that. He moved on with another girl.
Breathing in deeply, Denise says, “I broke down.”
“He wasn’t the same with me anymore. We weren’t best friends. We weren’t anything. We just started separating.”
After losing him, the problems began to weigh Denise down. She started overdosing on over-the-counter pills and cough medicine. These were the ways Denise felt she could numb her problems.
“I was going through a lot to the point where I just became clingy. I guess, obsessed with him because I was alone, and everyone was going against me.”
Soon, the relationship he was in ended. The girl had broken his heart.
After getting his heart broken, Denise feels he turned into a sociopath.
Not knowing he had changed, Denise went back to him.
“We started talking again, but you see, he was different now, he wasn’t the same,” she says.
This time around, the relationship became more sexual.
“I didn’t notice but I became his bitch.”
She describes sleeping with him several times, sometimes while he was in a relationship with another girl. “It was my fault for coming back to him,” she says. “When something is done, it’s done.”
Something about him made Denise keep coming back. She feels that growing up without a father might have played a role in her distorted perception of love.
“The abusive cycle is difficult to escape because the victim often believes the abuser will change,” says Dr. Steve Kudler, an adjunct assistant professor at Pierce and psychologist.
“I kept coming back to him, like a sick puppy,” says Denise.
Denise continuously told herself that someday he would change. But he wouldn’t change.
He began calling her fat, ugly and dumb around his friends. They would laugh and Denise couldn’t understand how he could forget spending the previous night sleeping together. She kept thinking he would change.
It just got worse.
Denise wanted him to love her, so she would satisfy him sexually. She thought that if she made him happy, he would begin to change. She remembers having sex in a car, and when it was over, he kicked her out of the car. Confused, she left in tears.
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