The Silencing of Survivors

In 2009, he stole my journals.

I didn’t even realize it right away.

There was so much taken the day he gutted our home that the losses came in waves. Some immediate and obvious, some surfacing only months or years later. The pictures of our children ripped from the walls. Home videos of the girls, gone. My clothing. One high school yearbook from a set of four. Letters my mother had written me prior to her death. Christmas ornaments. Things that cannot be replaced.

My journals had been packed away in boxes. It was only after a few moves that I realized they were gone, too. The record of who I had been as a teenager and young adult. Just… gone.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that he didn’t do it alone. His aunt had come into town. There was a U-Haul waiting down the street. I was in Southern California visiting family, completely unaware. I came home to a gutted house.

It was premeditated. Calculated. Executed as a team.

Around that same time, his mother sent him an email. In it, she told him to think of this (divorce and custody) like a chess game.

A chess game. My home. My memories. My life. A chess game.

I have had to make peace with the fact that I will never make sense of it, because we are not the same. I am not capable of carrying out those kinds of acts against another person.

What I did not understand then, but I understand now, is that the silencing of a survivor is rarely random. It is purposeful. It is strategic. And it almost never stops at the front door.

The Micro Level: The Court System

When I entered the family court system, I experienced silencing in its most personal form.

A legal process that seemed designed to exhaust and silence the very people it was supposed to serve. A system where speaking up too clearly, too loudly, or too specifically could be weaponized against you. Where your truth and credibility is always one filing away from being dismantled by lies, and in a system where perjury is not taken seriously or recognized, it's terrifying. Where the truth, documented and presented and argued, could still lose to a better-funded narrative.

I started One Mom’s Battle in 2011 because I needed to name what was happening. Not just to me, but to the thousands of parents navigating the same impossible terrain. I wrote before people were talking openly about the family court crisis. Before there was language for what so many of us were living through. Before post-separation abuse had a name.

I wrote because naming something, even something awful, gave me the tiniest bit of ground to stand on.

What grew out of that was something I could not have anticipated. Parents who had never met became each other’s most trusted resources. Children were protected because the right person had the right information at the right moment. I watched it happen in real time, over and over, for fifteen years.

That is not a “platform.” You cannot engineer, manufacture, or replicate what happened here. What happened here was alchemy.

And it became, without me fully recognizing it at the time, the substitute for everything that had been taken from me. The blog was my journal. This community was the witness.

The Macro Level: When a Voice Becomes a Threat

Here is what I have come to understand: the silencing does not stop when you leave the relationship. It does not stop when the court case closes. For some survivors, especially those who begin to speak publicly, the silencing simply changes form.

A survivor sharing her story is one thing. A survivor who has spent fifteen years building a community, developing educational frameworks, and training others to recognize and document abuse patterns is something else entirely. That kind of voice does not just tell one story. It gives other people language. It disrupts narratives that some people have a financial stake in maintaining.

I am now experiencing silencing on a much larger scale. Not by one person, and not in a single day, but through a coordinated effort to silence, destabilize, and dismantle what I have spent fifteen years building. The tactics are familiar because they are the same tactics I have spent fifteen years helping survivors identify. Harassment. Coordinated attacks. Reputational targeting. The goal is to make it too costly, too exhausting, and too dangerous to keep speaking.

When a survivor’s voice threatens financially incentivized narratives, the response is not a debate. It is a campaign.

Anyone who has lived through post-separation abuse, through the flying monkeys, the aligned narratives, the relentless orchestration of it all, will recognize the playbook immediately.

Because it is always the same playbook.

What Was Stolen, and What Was Not

One Mom’s Battle, as we knew it, came to a full stop last month. There are still things I cannot talk about. There are still things happening every day behind the scenes, and it has been horrible and scary. For someone who has been an open book for fifteen years, feeling silenced has been one of the hardest parts.

There are legal proceedings I am navigating. There are legal proceedings I have initiated, as a direct result of the harassment and stalking I have endured. There is a larger story being written behind the scenes, and I am holding it carefully until I can share it fully and freely. The timing is not yet mine to choose. I am grateful for the support I have received…grateful is an understatement.

What I can tell you is this: I am living in the unknowns.

I have spent fifteen years helping people ‘name that feeling.’

The unknowns of family court. Of leaving. Of what comes after you think the worst is over. Of not knowing who is safe. Of your life sitting in the hands of a system that may or may not see you clearly. Of feeling hunted. Of being silenced. Of bleeding money you don’t have while financial stability disappears beneath you.

I did not expect to find myself back in it.

But here I am.

And I know it well.

“Historically, I have survived 100% of the unknowns.” Say it with me.

What I Am Leaning On

The health piece for me has been an intricate dance. Two steps forward, one giant step back. High-dose steroids initially helped calm the inflammation, and then I slipped backwards. I am recalibrating, again, with more patience than I naturally possess and with the same grace I would extend to others.

I am leaning on my husband in ways that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and necessary. I have always prided myself on being fiercely independent. I am learning, again, that accepting help is not the opposite of strength.

I am also leaning into faith, in my own unconventional way. I was agnostic for the first thirty-four years of my life. Then I found a church, a pastor I respected, a community that felt real and safe. Until it wasn’t. That pastor turned out to be a predator. The replacement was also a predator. The church absorbed it, rebranded, and moved on as though none of it had happened.

The institutional protection of men who had caused real harm to real people.

Sound familiar?

I walked out and did not look back. What I did not anticipate was that my connection to something greater deepened. It just stopped living inside a building. I find it at the ocean now. In the grass when I sit still long enough to feel it. In the heart-shaped rocks that keep appearing in places I wasn’t looking.

My faith looks different than it ever has. It is also stronger. I did not see that coming.

Last week, my therapist suggested I start journaling again. My first reaction was resistance. But I wrote one entry. Then another. It felt like returning to a room I had locked a long time ago and finding that it still belonged to me.

Writing has always been how I find out what I actually think. The page is where I come to understand things I cannot yet say out loud. I needed someone to hand it back to me. Damn her for being right.

The Point of the Silencing Is the Silence

In 2009, he took my journals. The point was not the notebooks. The point was the voice inside them.

What has unfolded in the advocacy world since then, on a much larger scale, is the same thing. Silence the voice. Remove the platform. Make it too costly, too dangerous, too exhausting to keep speaking. Protect the narratives that depend on survivors not being heard.

Silencing survivors is not a side effect of these systems. It is a feature. It happens in abusive relationships, in family courtrooms, and in public spaces where the wrong people stand to lose if the right people keep talking.

I have spent fifteen years helping survivors name what was done to them.

I am only starting to fully name what is being done to me.

This painful chapter is not finished….I am still learning how to write it.

But I am writing it….and you are here while I do.

That matters more than I can say.