Immediately after after my husband's first serious assault, I was on my hands and knees trying to get up in front of him and saw blood on the floor. In a generally confused state after having been hit in the mouth, strangled and thrown against the wall, I didn't know that it came from me at all.
I saw another drop fall to the ground, and I put my hand to my mouth, then looked at the garish red liquid on my hand. "I'm bleeding!" I sobbed in supplication to my assailant, because he was my husband, my lover, the family member that instinct told me to reach out to for help. He told me that I deserved what I had gotten, and walked away.
What the traumatized person seeks, on one level, is an answer to the riddle of evil. The traumatized person longs to go back to the original violence, as though an emotional Eden lay waiting to be discovered in the instant before the ambush, rape, IED explosion, domestic violence or violent attack, the instant before the violence created a new person and a new world inside the victim.
— Lawrence Swaim, Trauma Bond: An Inquiry into the Nature of Evil
Like all domestic violence victims I was already being abused in multiple ways before this attack, mostly verbally and psychologically. There was significant financial abuse as well; these three non-assaultive forms of abuse had been heavily present in his first marriage, but I did not know that at the time, and I thought they were just the famous "relationship problems" that every couple is said to face.
That assault, wondering if I could breathe and for how long, instinctively fighting back in the belief that otherwise I was about to die, the impact of my back and especially my head when I hit the wall, and then the blood - in those moments I lost an "emotional Eden" that I have stopped trying to get back. Eden, as Swaim says, was the person I was and had access to before that attack, whom my husband took from me just as surely as he took my balance and my air. But though I stood and breathed again she was gone: some molecular-level change had taken place. As he strangled me he said that he wanted to kill me but I wasn’t “worth it.” The ability to ask with self-assured sarcasm if I should aspire to be worth killing was gone, and I only understood as concrete fact that he would willingly undo my existence. What follows that type of realization is not a matter of will or bravery or meditation or exercise or fresh air or prayer; it is the simple fact that when you smash a cup to the floor and it breaks into a dozen pieces, you can collect and glue it carefully and it will never be the same.
Eden - her expectations, beliefs, personality - is gone now but her remnant, in new form, keeps going. I am slowly letting go of her, accepting that he did kill a certain essence and spark she had, but I still love and will care for what is left of her better than he will love or care for anything in the entirety of his life. He knew the answer to the riddle of evil all along and he openly played with it, toyed with it, enjoyed it. That belongs to him, and not to the lost or the present me. If I lost Eden in a type of cruel trickery similar to that of the serpent and Eve in the Bible, I also gained the painful but expansive knowledge of good and evil that The Book of Genesis describes. I am thankful for being conscious of the pain and suffering that women have endured since the time of Eve, and to now be able to recognize that those women are both eternal and are all around me.