Inspired by Lonely Texan's great announcement, I decided to share my own story. This is especially important for parents, since I was only 15 when I started dating this person. Abuse in teenage relationships is startlingly common and often not talked about. For those who end up in these relationships, it can become a pattern-they never understand what a healthy relationship looks or feels like and continue to re-victimize themselves.
It is also worth noting that many victims of relationship abuse have a long history of victimization, usually starting in childhood. This is especially true for teenagers.
From T.E.A.R.
1 in 3 teenagers report knowing a friend or peer who has been hit, punched, kicked, slapped, choked or physically hurt by their partner. (Liz Claiborne Inc. study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited; February 2005.)
1 in 4 teenage girls who have been in relationships reveal they have been pressured to perform oral sex or engage in intercourse. (Liz Claiborne Inc. study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited; February 2005.)
More than 1 in 4 teenage girls in a relationship (26%) report enduring repeated verbal abuse. (Liz Claiborne Inc. study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited; February 2005.)
If trapped in an abusive relationship, 73% of teens said they would turn to a friend for help; but only 33% who have been in or known about an abusive relationship said they have told anyone about it. (Liz Claiborne Inc. study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited; February 2005.)
Nearly 80% of girls who have been physically abused in their intimate relationships continue to date their abuser.(Liz Claiborne Inc. study conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited; February 2005.)
Of the women between the ages 15-19 murdered each year, 30% are killed by their husband or boyfriend. (City of New York, Teen Relationship Abuse Fact Sheet, March 1998)
Less than 25% of teens say they have discussed dating violence with their parents. (Liz Claiborne Inc. study of teens 13-17 conducted by Applied Research and Consulting LLC, Spring 2000)
Definition of
Gaslighting:
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory and perception. It may simply be the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.
He was a transfer student. He had lived in my hometown for his entire life, but spent most of grade school and the first 3 years of high school attending private preparatory schools- most recently Cheshire Academy-until he got expelled. The reason he gave for his expulsion, depending on what day it was, could be anything from getting caught having sex with one of the teachers in the locker room to dealing drugs. At one point, he told me that he stabbed someone. In any case, he seemed to view himself as quite above it all as a result of his elite education and the people he knew. Cheshire Academy is the school of choice for the Connecticut rich and powerful-the sons of Hedge Fund managers, celebrities, and captains of empire from across the state, and all over the world.
I first met him in French class. He was two years older than me but had been held back. He was the only child of parents who had him in their late 40's. He treated his parents-especially his mother-like absolute shit. He stole from them constantly, even the Christmas presents from under the tree and his mothers antique jewelry. He did this despite the fact that they spoiled him rotten and gave him pretty much anything he asked for. The problem was, he never liked asking.
He was given a brand new Audi before he was even able to drive, and when that wasn't good enough he got chrome rims for the Audi, and neon blue lights on the undercarriage, and numerous modifications to the car. These "mods" made him quite popular in the drag-racing world, and he raced his car on the turnpike every weekend. This is actually what we did on our first date-I had no idea what I was in for when I got in the car with him, but by the end of the night I was amazed I was still alive.
Suffice it to say, he drove like a fucking maniac- tailgating people so closely that he actually made contact with their rear bumper, making illegal turns and passing people in the middle of the road, even when there were other cars in his path that had to swerve wildly to avoid a head-on collision. Every single car ride with him was a chaotic near death experience, with people blasting their horns at him, screaming at us out the window and flipping us off. He got pulled over quite often, but as a result of being the son of a rather prominent family, he was usually able to get away with nothing more than a warning.
He only had his first car for 6 months before he totaled it-running a red light and hitting a minivan. A collision he somehow managed to walk away from without a scratch, but landed the other driver in the hospital. Within a week of that accident, he was given another car-another Audi A4, a newer model. He was angry because he wanted a convertible.
After dating casually for about a week, Adam informed me that I was his girlfriend. The subtext of this announcement was that I had to start having sex with him-something I was not really prepared for at that point. Having sex with someone after dating them for only a week is the kind of thing that gets you labeled as a slut. But he eventually talked me into it. His sexual appetite was insatiable, and as time went on, increasingly bizarre. He wanted to experiment with bondage, and was constantly trying to talk me into having a threesome with his best friend. He often insisted on watching hardcore, violent pornography, and told me that I should watch the girls in these videos and try to learn their techniques. He also had an irritating habit of comparing me to his ex-girlfriends and lovers-often unfavorably. According to him, this list of conquests included Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, a number of models (including a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model) and several of the most popular girls in our school.
I had a strong suspicion that he embellished his list quite a bit, but I never questioned him. Really, I just wanted him to shut up about it. I was very self-conscious-something that was not helped by the fact that he was always giving me what he called "constructive criticism". He told me I was chunky,and gave me a list of exercises to do in order to fix this. I learned to never eat in front of him, because he would make noises like a pig if I had so much as a salad in his presence. At the time I was 5'5 and weighed around 120 lbs.
After about 2 months together, he made me drop out of the Dance & Drill team-because he thought it was trashy, and he was embarrassed by me. And I was a shitty dancer anyways. And because D&D was predominately black, and he was a racist, although I don't find out about this until much later.
Next, he told me I needed to quit the Chamber Singers. This was especially hard to swallow, because being a Chamber Singer was a pretty high honor-the kind of thing that could lead to scholarships. The reason I needed to quit was because of a boy-literally a boy, only a Freshman and someone I looked at like a little brother. But Adam was convinced that I was cheating on him with this boy, and forbade me from talking to him. One day, I slipped up and said hi to him in the hallway-on a day that Adam was home sick. Apparently someone saw this and told him about it. The next day as Adam was walking me to class he spotted him and grabbed him by the hair, threw him into a locker, and started kicking him in the face. By the time we were able to pull him off, the boy had a broken nose and had lost a tooth. Adam got suspended, and never forgave me for the fact that I had been one of the people who pulled him away-he saw this as further proof that there was something going on between the two of us. It had the intended effect though-the Freshman boy never talked to me again, and I was left with no choice but to drop out of Chamber Singers.
On our 6 month anniversary, he took me out to dinner at a fancy, 5 star restaurant. In the middle of this romantic evening together, he decided to play a prank on me and spike my drink with LSD while I was in the bathroom. As the night went on, and I started to hallucinate wildly. I literally thought I was having some kind of psychotic breakdown, and begged him to take me to the emergency room because I felt bugs crawling under my skin. He brought me to his basement instead, which I thought was a bomb shelter. He played along with this, and told me that we were actually in the middle of a nuclear war. For hours, he let this play out-saying nothing to me the entire time-until I finally started to come down and he accidentally slipped up and told me what he had done. He told me that it was too bad, I would never get to be an FBI agent (my dream at the time) because they would find out I had done acid. He videotaped part of my acid trip and showing it to his friends became a source of great entertainment-I earned the nickname "psycho bitch". (Authors note- this is a textbook example of gaslighting)
In the beginning of our relationship, I was not too heavily into drugs or drinking. Aside from smoking pot or having a beer every once and a while at parties, it wasn't a huge part of my life. Adam, on the other hand, not only smoked weed and drank on a daily basis, he sold drugs. In fact, he was pretty much the biggest drug dealer in our school-selling everything from pot, to LSD and Ecstacy all of it bought with his ridiculously generous allowance (I believe he got around $400 a week). Eventually, he started including me as part of his business model. The school administration was on to him, so he had me carry out the transactions. Since most of his customers were male, and he didn't feel comfortable with me being alone with them even for 5 minutes, he made me use proxies- Usually his customers girlfriends, or just other girls who happen to be part of the scene. Every morning he gave me his daily order, stuffing it in my bra, and throughout the day I went into the girls bathroom and exchanged the drugs for money-money that then went directly to him. Aside from weighing and packaging, which he eventually outsourced to me as well, he had almost no involvement whatsoever. He could just sit back and watch the money roll in.
We started skipping class together around this same time. In the beginning, it's just one or two classes-usually study hall-and lunch but as time went on, it consumed more and more of our time. I was told to choose a desk that was facing the hallway, and to keep my eye out for him at all times. When he wanted to go, he would simply stand there in the hallway until he caught my attention. No matter what was going on-even if I was taking a test, or doing something important I would have to drop everything and go with him. He did not want me to be at school when he wasn't there. I went from and A and B student to failing every class.
Around this time, his drug use was starting to get more serious. He started doing cocaine regularly. I never did coke with him, but I did start smoking weed on a daily basis. He also got me started smoking cigarettes- the first time was after we smoked a blunt together, and he gave me one of his Newports telling me that it would enhance my high. Eventually, he told me that he was tired of me bumming his cigarettes, and I needed to start buying my own packs. He had to make the actual purchase for me though, because I was still only 16. Because he was doing this "favor" for me, I had to pay for his cigarettes too. I started smoking cigarettes then, regularly. This was actually quite a big deal, much moreso than it would seem if you didn't have an understanding of the finer points of our town's culture. Our town was very class-conscious. Smoking weed and drinking were acceptable activities, but smoking cigarettes was a giant social taboo. Smoking cigarettes was seen as white trash, and disgusting-although there were certain loopholes in this rule. For example, it was acceptable to smoke cigarettes at parties, as long as you were drunk, and as long as you were smoking Marlboro Reds, or clover leaf cigars, which were considered high class. Smoking menthol cigarettes though-especially Newports-was seen as "ghetto". By the end of the year, I was smoking almost a pack of Newports a day-and I was officially a known as a white trash druggie.
By that point, I had been completely isolated by him. It was apparent to everyone who knew us that this was spinning out of control and our relationship was not only unhealthy, but potentially dangerous. I had lost every single one of my friends-either because I was not allowed to talk to them, or because they simply had broken off ties with me because I was always with him. My parents staged numerous interventions, even joint interventions along with his parents, insisting that we needed to end the relationship. Of course, as anyone familiar with teenagers should know, this had the opposite of its intended effect. By making our relationship forbidden, it became like Romeo and Juliet-star crossed lovers, with the world out to get us. It became, in a way, the entire basis of our relationship and only served to draw me even further into his world.
The final straw came when I inadvertently called my mother by sitting on my cell phone in the car with him, and ended up leaving a message on our answering machine discussing the drug dealing. When I got home, my mother was waiting for me, with tape in hand. Without saying a word, she played it for me. I started to cry and begged her to turn it off, but she forced me to sit there and listen to the whole thing. When the tape finally ended, she informed me that she was going to take this and place it in a safety deposit box. She would not go to the police under one condition-I was never allowed to talk to Adam again. If she found out that I did, she would turn me in to the authorities. Drug dealing, she told me, could carry a 15 year sentence, and even though I just turned 16 I could still be tried as an adult.
I stayed away from him for almost 3 weeks. In a way, it is the most blissful 3 weeks of the entire year. By this point, I really wasn't in love with him as much as I was afraid of him-and afraid for him, because I believed him when he said that he couldn't live without me. Even though he wasn't allowed to call me, and the school was now cooperating with my parents in making sure we stayed away from each other, he was still able to communicate with me through notes. Again, he would use proxies- the same girls that we used for drug deals also became like carrier pigeons, delivering impassioned letters. These letters were quite bizarre-almost schizophrenic. In one sentence he would tell me how much he loved me, and that I was the best thing that ever happened to him-and then in the next sentence, he would be calling me a slut and accusing me of sleeping around. He laid out explicit sexual fantasies, including crudely drawn, obscene pictures of the things he wanted to do with me as soon as we got a chance to finally be alone again. Some of these pictures were downright terrifying. In one picture, he portrayed himself with his hands wrapped around my neck, and X's where my eyes should be and my tongue hanging out of my mouth. At the bottom of the picture, in tiny letters, he had written "hahahaha, j/k"
I was grounded for 2 months as a result of the voice message, and was not allowed to leave my room except to go to the bathroom or eat. Adam would constantly ask me through his letters to sneak out of the house to come see him. I wrote back to him that it was physically impossible-that the ladder I had used in the past to climb out of the window had been confiscated and I didn't know where it was. One night, I was woken up with a start to the sound of someone knocking on my window. I knew almost immediately that it was him. I told him to leave, that he was going to get caught, and I would never be able to see him again, but he was drunk and high off of his ass and impossible to reason with. He was furious with me, because I had lied about the ladder-it was still leaned up against the back of my house, where it always had been. I lied again, and told him that it wasn't there before, that it must have been put back recently, but he was having none of it. He told me he knew that I was pulling away from him, that he knew I was fucking around on him too-despite the fact that it would be somewhat physically impossible to do that, being locked in my room all the time like Rapunzel in the tower. He started to grab me then-not even kissing me, just grabbing me, and forced me down on the floor. I told him to stop, that he was acting crazy and my parents were literally in the next room and could just walk in at any minute. But finally I just gave up and told him to make it quick. When he was done, he left without saying anything and I spent the rest of the night throwing up.
That is the last time I saw Adam for almost 4 years- I briefly dated him again in my early 20's but found his behavior so bizarre that I ended up filing an order of protection against him. I am so convinced that he will end up killing someone that I have a Google alert on his name- he's come up twice. Once for getting a promotion at a very well known investment bank. And 2 years ago he drove his car into a car with a pregnant woman and her boyfriend, critically injuring the woman. Like all of his other accidents, he walked away without a scratch.
If you or someone you know is being abused please call the National Domestic Abuse Hotline:
Toll Free Phone: 800-799-7233 / 800-799-SAFE
TTY: 800-787-3224
For more information about relationship abuse go to:
http://stoprelationshipabuse.org/
8:35 AM PT: I am spending the day with family and may not be able to respond to comments...just a heads up!