When someone raises their voice at me, I hear buzzing in my ears to shut their words out. This is a coping technique I adopted to get through many years of abuse – to shut out the vitriol, the non-sensical accusations, the gaslighting…

When someone tries to convince me of something they want me to do, I sometimes stare blankly and fight the paranoia that I am being manipulated by a force I cannot control.

When someone drops something next to me, I often startle and flashback to the episodes of dishes being thrown at me, my cell phone being smashed against the wall, the doors being ripped off their hinges. In the oddest of moments, sometimes with triggers I cannot put my finger on, I am right back there being hit, being pulled by my hair, running down the road terrified in the middle of the night in my pyjamas.

Often when I see pregnant women, I am afraid, remembering the fear I had for my unborn child when I was too bulky to run and hide.

I was abused in three different relationships by three very different men who each vowed they loved me and cared for me.

The physical scars have healed but the emotional scars are always there, ready to be ripped open and ooze at any stage. The few times I tried to access justice, I was overwhelmed and gave up.

What strikes me when looking back is that I experienced spiritual abuse too, a term that was not widely known or used yet. I only realised this when we as the Faith Action Collective and We Will Speak Out SA developed the Interfaith GBV Prevention and Mitigation Strategy last year which introduced the spiritual abuse as “a distortion and exploitation of spiritual authority and sacred texts to manipulate, control, abuse, or harm others, mostly through shame and fear. This may be deliberate or due to ignorance and unconscious bias.”

In my first abusive relationship, he accused me being responsible for the Satanists who were coming after him and that I was not a good Christian as I could not help him – all while hanging me over the edge of a four-storey building.

In my marriage, he wouldn’t let me go to church and did everything in his power to make sure I did not have a Christian community in my life.

In my next abusive relationship, I landed up in hospital pregnant due to self-harm on a grand scale as I had caught him cheating – again. We had been attending church together and I reached out to the pastor but he would not come and see me or even pray for me as we had just moved and he said we were now out of his geographical parish. My abuser at one stage had us in couple counselling at a church of his choosing and the pastors told me to forgive him and be a better partner, one who was supportive and submissive.

The sum total of my abuse, including now what I know was spiritual abuse, was shame, guilt, fear, isolation, and confusion.

The decade or so of abuse will be with me for my lifetime. I chose to slowly put my life back at my own pace and on my own terms. The road has been long, but I journey on. There is no easy way to overcome what I have experienced. Years of therapy. Working with other women in abusive relationships. Lifeskills courses. Personal development programmes. Journalling. Writing dark poetry. Prayer. All this has helped.

Like many other survivors, I have thrown myself into work to end GBV. My personal experience has fuelled my political, professional and volunteer path.

I am plugged in with an amazing church and last year we supported the Faith Action Collective and WWSOSA Red Chair campaign during the 16 Days of Activism. The empty chair in faith institutions was a symbol of women and children who should be with us today but died at the hands of people who were supposed to love them. I spoke in church and women came up to give testimony. This was a healing moment for me, one of many in my journey.

Does someone ever become whole again after being torn apart in so many different ways? All I can say is that I have stopped running from the pain, and I deal with it when it comes back. I don’t let it haunt me like it used to. I channel my energy into both healing myself and trying to make our country a place where no woman should go through what I have been through. I am in solidarity with all those out there who are on this very same journey.