A year after her husband died in May 2013, Angie Racine was still reliving the emotional abuse she says she suffered during their marriage.
Like a lot of women, she didn’t consider the secrets he kept — his drug use and money problems — harmful.
When he died in May 2013 of colon cancer, Racine found herself processing their years together with a therapist.
Two years later, in honor of her late sister Laura Zekoll, she founded 4 HOPEand later created #WhatIsNonPhysicalDomesticViolence. (Zekoll was lost at sea in a sailing accident in 2010 and presumed dead.)
Racine’s story is a reminder to own your pain and never lose sight of your own humanity as so many abuse victims often do.
Almost from the beginning of her relationship with her husband, Racine saw the red flags but chose to ignore them. Having endured emotional abuse as a child, she’d learned to stuff her pain and keep going.
Now she was doing it again. Explaining away the long hours her husband spent at work. Even ignoring women’s underwear she found in desk drawers at his repair shop.
Even when she tried to summon the courage to leave, she just couldn’t do it.
“I just was afraid,” the Snellville mother of two said. “I didn’t have the strength to leave or the confidence in myself plus the timing was never right.”
At first she had one son, then another and a demanding job at a cellphone company where she worked as a supervisor. She feared becoming a single mom.
By 2011, things had gotten worse. Racine finally began taking steps to leave. When her husband found out, an argument ensued, and for the first time in their 20-year union, he hit her.
“I called the police,” she said.
Soon thereafter, Racine requested and was granted a restraining order.
The couple separated, but Racine was becoming less and less mentally sound. She thought of killing herself.
When her husband was diagnosed the following year with stage 4 colon cancer, Racine made the hard decision to stop the divorce proceedings.
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“You just don’t put someone through that when they’re fighting for their life,” she said.
Less than a year later in May 2013, he was dead.
Still reeling from years of emotional abuse, Racine sought counseling and was finally able to put a name to what had happened to her: gaslighting.
The term is derived from the 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s insane by causing her to question herself and her reality.
If you’ve somehow missed this, join the club.
In its milder forms, gaslighting creates a subtle, but inequitable, power dynamic in a relationship, with the gaslightee subjected to the gaslighter’s unreasonable, rather than fact-based, scrutiny, judgment or micro-aggression. At its worst, pathological gaslighting constitutes a severe form of mind control and psychological abuse. Gaslighting can occur in personal relationships, at the workplace, or over an entire society.
Racine prefers the term non-physical domestic violence, a term she coined in 2014 after realizing what had happened to her.
Educating people about non-physical domestic violence, what it is and the many forms it can take, has become her life’s work.
“People don’t understand what it is or that it is even a thing,” she said recently. “Not only does our society not know about this, our mental health professionals aren’t aware of it, and that’s exactly why I suffered what I suffered for 20 years. No one understood. I didn’t realize he was abusing me because he did not hit me, but I wish that he would have because everybody would’ve seen it and so would I.”
Racine, who recently married again, spends her time now mentoring women free of charge to help them unravel their experiences.
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“There’s nothing like having someone who has walked in your shoes validate your own experiences,” she said.
When I last talked to her, Racine said for the first time in a long while, she’s hopeful about her life and the course she is on.
“I know God is going before me in this work,” she said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly half of all women and men in the United States will experience psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
For their sake, I hope she’s right.
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