Despite coercive control, Lisa found her voice. Then, she found Jesus
- kirranicolle
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
As part of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we are sharing the stories of women and men who have overcome incredible odds to enact change, escape violence and control, and assist others to flee imminent danger, or understand when a relationship isn’t normal. This article presents part of the experiences of an officer in The Salvation Army, as told to Salvos Online journalist KIRRALEE NICOLLE. We are calling this woman Lisa*. We’d like to warn anyone who feels they might be impacted by the issues in this story, which include coercive control and financial and emotional abuse, to please proceed with caution.
When Lisa was 14, she began spending a lot of time with a friend from school. This friend had a brother who was five years older than Lisa. We will call him Ian*.
Though Lisa was raised in what she calls an upper-middle class family who loved and supported her, her friend’s family offered something different.
“I loved their family,” Lisa says. “It was a very different upbringing to what I had …. You could just help yourself to what was in the fridge, and their mum was in my eyes the coolest mum ever. My friend seemed to absolutely thrive and I loved it.”
But Lisa was not only drawn to the warmth of the family, she was also drawn to Ian.
“I was always fascinated by him,” she says. “He was a ‘bad boy’. He got caught. He did jail time. There was always this draw to the bad boy sort of naughtiness of him, and his sister adored him.”
As Lisa and her friend grew into young adults, they began attending bars and clubs together on Thursday and Friday nights, and often, Ian would tag along too.
“I look back now and think it’s really weird,” Lisa says. “But it was really exciting at the time …. He was always very close – making sure I was safe, [that] was my perception. In hindsight, it was more he was making sure that nobody else was coming anywhere near me because I was his. It was more possessive than anything.”
One night, when Lisa was 24 and working full-time, everything shifted. She had gone out with her friend and Ian had again tagged along, but this time, Lisa ended up staying overnight at Ian’s house.
“Being the staunchly loyal person that I am, that was it for me,” Lisa says. “I was in. I was in a relationship. I had been with him for one night, and therefore I was 110 per cent invested.”
Lisa’s mindset was strengthened by comments from her friend, who would assure Lisa that the relationship was right, as she believed Lisa was a calming, stabilising presence in Ian’s life.
“That did amazing things for my confidence,” Lisa says. “It really fed into that ‘I can fix this bad boy, I can make him better, I can help him to be the best that he can be’ [mentality].”
But then, the relationship began moving far more quickly than what Lisa had anticipated. She says after just six weeks together, the demands began. Ian had been kicked out of his share house and was forced to move back in with his parents, as a nearly 30-year-old with no job.
“He looked at me and [said], ‘So, if this is the way it’s going to be, when are we moving in together? Why haven’t you already organised a place?’” Lisa says.
Ian then convinced Lisa that if she was fully committed to the relationship, they needed to rent a place together. In his eyes, as a full-time teacher with a good credit rating and – also unlike him, no criminal record – Lisa was responsible for making it happen. Within a couple of weeks, Lisa had found them a unit, and they had moved in. With that decision, Lisa’s dream of attaining home ownership was shattered.
Things quickly turned sour. Ian convinced Lisa to leave her key card to her bank account with him while she was at work. He assured her that he would do the grocery shopping and pay the bills while she worked, as he was still unemployed. What Lisa soon discovered was that he was buying drugs and car parts rather than essentials.
“It turned out that I was paying for his drugs before anything else would get paid for,” Lisa says.
When Lisa would check her bank account or ask him to return her key card, Ian would accuse her of distrust. He would threaten to move out and aggressively punch holes in walls or rip items from the plaster. Eventually, Lisa would relent, reassuring herself that it was just money, and it wasn’t worth disturbing the peace over. She then got a credit card, but Ian maxed it out within a matter of 10 days.
“I was on good money,” Lisa says. “But as fast as I could earn it, it was gone. He’d go and draw all my pay out and maybe leave me with $100 for the fortnight.
“I got to the point where I was really anxious about it all the time. I lost a stack of weight, because I was in fight or flight mode in my body the entire time.”
The pair, having failed to pay their rent, were eventually evicted from their unit, and Lisa returned home to her parents, and after staying with them briefly as well, Ian grew tired of hearing Lisa’s parents’ concerns, and moved into his grandmother’s house. Lisa’s credit score plummeted.
Friends and colleagues began noticing that Lisa wasn’t ok and was eating just two-minute noodles and cans of tuna for lunch. She at times managed to pull an extra $100 from her account before Ian would drain it, just to have on hand so that if a social event arose and her colleagues went to a cafe, she could appear as if she had money by being able to purchase something small.
While she was living with her parents, she and Ian began making plans to obtain another rental together. As a kind gesture, a connection of her parents offered the pair $3000 to get back on their feet.
“I was highly stressed,” Lisa says. “I was finding that the bits of money I could get, I was having to hide. He didn’t know how much I had in savings, [as] I had that in a separate account, but that just dwindled and dwindled.
“I remember having conversations in my head going, ‘I’ll pay the rent this week. I’ve still got $2500. I’ll pay the rent this week. It’s OK. There}s still $2000 there. In the end, I was going, ‘It’s OK, there’s still $20 in the account. I’ll be OK. I’ve got $20’.
“There was a lot of shame. I didn’t want to admit that I needed help, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.”
Then, Lisa found out she was pregnant. She now says this is “the best thing she could have done”.
“I wanted to have a baby,” she says. “But one of the contributing factors for that was that I couldn’t afford the [birth control] pill.”
Lisa’s pregnancy with her daughter was highly stressful. Now, she regularly had nurses and midwives asking her if she was safe at home, as Ian never came to appointments, and Lisa was continuing to lose weight, with blood test results showing she was malnourished. Hospital staff tried to offer her brochures on family and domestic violence (FDV), but she felt she couldn’t take it home because if Ian saw, the consequences could be severe.
“I didn’t even know what family violence was,” Lisa says. “I’d lived a pretty sheltered life.”
As the pregnancy progressed, Lisa found she had no money to buy any of the items the baby needed. At seven months, she began to panic. Lisa’s parents stepped in to help, providing an entire nursery for her daughter.
Lisa’s other motivating factor for getting pregnant was that at the time, delivering a baby meant a baby bonus of $4000, a considerable amount amid her circumstances.
“I tried really hard to protect that money after she was born, and to keep that for [my daughter],” Lisa says. “He would argue with me about it. He would give me the silent treatment. He would smash stuff. In the end, I was just like, fine, here’s $4000.”
Lisa says Ian then used the money to buy new electronics and hobby gear, which soon ended up at a pawn shop.
Within a couple of months of giving birth, Lisa was forced to return to work full-time, with her mother taking on most of the caretaking role with her granddaughter. But the crisis point came fast.
With a four-month-old daughter and unable to pay rent, Lisa was forced to move back home.
“I remember going to my mum saying, ‘You can’t tell dad this, but I need to come home with the baby, I don’t know what else to do’,” she said. “She of course [said], ‘Pack your bag, when are you coming? Do you need help?’”
While still freshly postpartum and malnourished, Lisa began trying to consolidate $18,000 worth of debt from Ian’s spending habits, which had been mostly across multiple credit cards and a car loan. In the meantime, Ian continued to drain her bank account. She leaned on the support of her parents, with her mother caring for her granddaughter while Lisa continued to work full-time.
Eventually, Lisa found the courage to take back her key card and retain control of her own finances. But Ian wasn’t about to leave her alone.
“There were a lot of pushback moments,” Lisa said. “Multiple times a week, he would turn up at the house and [demand] $100, a meal, [or a ride somewhere].
“He’d turn up in a taxi and he and refuse to pay the [driver]. I’d have to go out and pay the taxi [driver], otherwise there [would be] an alteration happening on my parents’ front lawn.
“I had a bit more strength to be able to say no.”
But Lisa still hadn’t realised the extent of what staying in the relationship was doing to her life.
“I kept telling myself, ‘There’s so many other people worse off’,” she says.
After about a year spent living with her parents, Lisa reached a crucial decision. Ian had demanded she organise a birthday party for him. The time passed, but Ian didn’t show. When Lisa called him to find out where he was, he admitted he had gone to a strip club instead.
“I remember physically feeling like a switch had gone off in the back of my head and I just went, ‘I’m done’,” Lisa says.
With her parents’ help, Lisa began to rebuild. They changed the locks on the house, set up security plans and dealt with a swathe of abusive messages from Ian. Then, she began wading through the complicated process of obtaining custody. Though the relationship only spanned a four-year period, Lisa says the damage was immense. Over the years to come, Ian would continue to harass Lisa and her daughter, and Lisa was forced to take out intervention orders.
Turning point Just a few years later, Lisa’s life transformed when she met her loving husband, Justin*, a Salvationist, and together they began attending a Salvation Army church. While Lisa was initially very wary of joining a church, she says there was “no judgment”, and she was afforded complete privacy and freedom to share her story in whatever timeframe and setting in which she felt comfortable. As a single mum, she says she felt completely welcome and as if they were part of a family.
After a short time, Lisa and Justin made the decision to become Salvation Army officers and went on to have more children. Lisa says she feels very lucky to have escaped the relationship with Ian when she did.
“In a lot of ways I’ve dodged [the full extent of it],” Lisa says. “I got out in the nick of time, but the only reason I got out was because I had a baby, and because something in me said, ‘I don’t want her to grow up and think this is normal’.”
As a Salvation Army officer, she regularly draws on her experiences to care for others.
“I’ve been able to look a woman in the eye and go, ‘I get it’,” she says. “Quite often I say to them, ‘I don't totally understand your story because all our stories are different, but on some level, I get what you’re saying, because I’ve lived something similar’.”
As well as emotional support, Lisa has also been able to assist with practical advice – safety tips, referral to services, and the deeper conversations where she can discuss with someone that their life matters enough to get help. But she is always careful to let them make decisions at their own pace.
“At times, our past story can be difficult and [some] parts we [may] wish never happened or we want to delete and forget,” she says. “But it’s actually really important to acknowledge it and to carry it because it helps to helps us to understand who we’re becoming or who we have become, and who we continue to become.
“I carry that quite deeply for myself. I don’t tell my story for my own gain, but I tell my story to be able to show people that you can come out the other side, and that there is hope. We have to do some pretty hard work and confront some pretty big demons to be able to work through it, but it’s possible and we can.”
Lisa says without the support of her family, her church, and all others who assisted along the way, she may not have been able to recover from the experience of coercive control. She says she can look back now and see “glimmers” throughout her story.
“Jesus was present in all of it,” she says. “He may not have chosen for those things to happen to me or for me, but he was there with me – in it and feeling it and experiencing it – and I draw comfort from that.”
*Not their real names
To read the Daily Prayer Guide prepared for the 16 Days of Activism campaign, please see here.
