No-one ever used to ask me if I'd listened to The Archers, but these days I get asked a lot. People are interested to know if I think the Rob and Helen story is true to life. They ask me why Helen hasn't left sooner, as though I'm a bone fide expert in domestic abuse. I'm not. But I am someone who has experienced it first-hand and understands how hard it is to leave, especially when you have children.
I've been delighted at the amount of talk around the Rob and Helen storyline in The Archers. The way that Helen has been trapped by her need to protect her son and the vulnerability of being pregnant has built on the slow drip feed of malice and nuances in expression that characterise emotional abuse. I've also found it a hard listen: it takes me back to a place that I've tried to close the door on. But when there are children involved there is no true escape.
Following the birth of her baby, Helen faces the struggle of sharing a child with a man who will continue to use that fact to exert control, enabled by his supportive mother's willingness to turn a conscious blind eye. Over four years after I finally ended my marriage, I still receive abusive emails telling me what a terrible mother I am and I still have to remind myself that his version of me is not who I am.
It will be interesting to see how The Archers plot unfolds from here; whether Helen will manage to break free from Rob with both of her children and what the long-term impact will be. Her last attempt was an act of violence, which has received much criticism, despite the fact that it's often a natural progression for emotional abuse.
It was certainly an act of violence that finally gave me the means, the courage and – as I perceived it at the time - the valid reason I needed to end my marriage. I had asked him to leave before but he'd dismissed it with a 'don’t be silly, we're married' or a 'you can go if you like but you're not taking my children.' I'd even made an attempt to leave before, de-camping with three children to my mother's house. He'd disappeared to some unknown location and it had snowed like an Alaskan winter. After a week trapped in the house with three young children I asked him to come back for fear I wouldn't cope as a single mum.
I resigned myself to being trapped in that life and wrote my novel, 'The Secret to Not Drowning' as a catharsis. The book is not my own story, but a fictional account of emotional and psychological abuse that maps out a pattern of behaviour some will recognise in their own relationships.
Like Helen, my main character, Marion, is not a battered wife. Like I was, she is controlled, manipulated, bullied, undermined and chipped away at, until she loses the ability to look subjectively at her husband's behaviour and has been isolated from the people who could otherwise tell her, 'that's not right', 'that’s not normal'. It's an insidious abuse that is so hard to articulate, not least because the abuser is so adept at encouraging you to doubt your own perspective and feel responsible for his behaviour.
I might still be in that anxious state of constantly doubting myself if my husband hadn't pushed me down the stairs, hitting me in the face in the process and kicking me as I lay in the hall. I called the police and he told me they'd never believe me because they have 'drama queens' ringing them with false allegations all the time. They did believe me. They let him out with a caution the following day. He'd left his keys in the house. I've never given them back.
When the police called to say they were releasing him, they also told me they'd offered him alcohol and mental health support and he'd declined both. I called a friend. I gathered a bag of his stuff and when he arrived on the doorstep I waited in the kitchen while my friend handed him the bag, along with the spare keys to his sister's flat. He assumed things would blow over a few days or weeks later, but a line had been crossed. Instead of asking how I would cope on my own I wondered how I'd coped with him for so long.
He's still in my life though. We have children in common and regardless of my successful career, my network of friends and my new relationship he still tries to exploit my vulnerabilities.
These days I can just press the delete button on his emails but the reality is that emotional abuse is a very easy situation to get into and a very difficult one to break free of. Leaving with children is never simple, and neither is staying strong when he continues to use your children as fuel for his vitriol.