As I heal and use my time to support others there is one question on my mind.
Why is there so little information linking suicide to coercive control?
I’ve scoured the internet looking for this data that explicitly links the two together. There are articles about people who have taken their lives due to not feeling able to speak out against a perpetrator. We know 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men face domestic abuse but what percentage of these are down to coercive control?
Why is no one taking the time to look into this?
Why do I care? Why am I so interested in this macabre set of statistics?
Back in 2017 and amongst the midst of a very messy divorce I tried a messy and unsuccessful attempt to take my own life. It was lonely event involving several boxes of paracetamol and 2 bottles of Chardonnay left over from a party.
I haven’t touched Chardonnay since.
At the time I didn’t know why my life had tipped upside down and why I’d suddenly gone from having it all- a career and money and family to having nothing. My happy go lucky personality was ebbing away day by day. I was stressed, tired and confused.
I thought everyone going through a divorce experienced the things I was and that my resilience levels weren’t very good. I talked to others who seemed to validate this. I felt powerless and useless that I couldn’t cope going through a divorce when so many had come out unscathed. Then I realised this wasn’t any normal divorce, this was coercion and the court system was being used to exhaust and tear me to shreds.
I was tired, lonely and no one seemed to understand my situation. I was hemorrhaging money at lightning speed, my career hung in the balance and I seemed to be losing my daughter to what at the time I perceived to be the ‘other side’. My life literally emptied over the course of a year. I’d had a full life and lots of friends and it seemed to be disappearing under my nose.
On the other hand he was happy, had money, a thriving career and he seemed to be doing really well out of it all.
I think one of the indicators I got that this wasn’t a straight forward case was during court proceedings. There was a slight error on a document drawn up by my legal team and the perpetrator demanded an adjournment and all new documents to be drawn up. The judge was happy to do a manual amendment but no it wasn’t to be.
My spider senses went into overdrive.
There were numerous attempts to put me on the back foot, including financials and legal control and convincing me and others I was mentally unwell, not only in the divorce but generally in life.
Every door closed in on me and I lost my job, friends and myself in all of this.
I’m not going to bore my readers by going over them again and again.
As I look back from a place of calm and healing, a place without drama or problems in life- I can see how it was coercive control alone that drove me to that suicide attempt. I’d had no desire or thought of doing it prior and since I’ve settled in my life I have no desire to do it again.
My attempt was caused entirely by someone trying to control me.
So if I’ve experienced this, so have many, many others. Why aren’t there more stats?
I support a number of people who say ‘when will this go away?’ ‘When will I get my life back without the perpetrator trying to control me?’
So many tell me that they feel that they’d be better dead as it feels like the only way they’ll get peace.
So why when people take their own lives are we not questioning the relationships they had leading up to this?
Today I run Soundproofbox a not for profit organisation who educate workplaces and schools on domestic abuse. I want to stop people dying silently, stop suicides and give people hope for the future.
Lise Kaye-Bell 