le are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States every 60 seconds.

Over the course of a year, that's more than 10 million women and men.

Today's guest shares her own story of trauma, survival, and advocacy.

She's Ruth M. Glenn this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(light exciting music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- This week we're joined by Ruth M. Glenn, the CEO and president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and the author of a powerful new book, "Everything I Never Dreamed: My Life Surviving and Standing Up to Domestic Violence."

She joins us today from Colorado.

Ruth, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much.

- And congratulations on the book.

This is a powerful and personal account of surviving domestic violence.

Why did you decide to tell your story?

- I've told my story for well over 28, 29 years, usually the civic groups and academia and such, particularly around criminal justice and women's studies and at risk youth.

And during that time, many times someone said to me, "You know, you should write a book."

And I thought, "Okay."

Long story short, I appeared on television for the Democratic National Committee way back in 2020 and a publisher reached out and said, publisher reached out and said, "We think you have a story."

And I said, "Well, that's funny 'cause everybody thinks I have a story."

So two years later, here we are, a published book.

- Well, it is a really a powerful narrative, for the benefit of the audience who maybe hasn't read yet, could you tell us a little bit about your story?

- Absolutely.

And in relation to the book, we started out as a memoir because we thought that that would be the meat and potatoes of it.

And the publisher expressed that there was a lot of items and things that we could discuss in there.

But as we kind of morphed in the book, we understood that there was so much more than my story.

I was not unlike other victims of domestic violence, even though I was very different.

And so we took this opportunity to also explore the dynamics of domestic violence and helping people understand why it's so important that we talk about it.

I think that when people see me, especially at this part of my life and my career and my experiences, they have no idea the domestic violence I've been through, the childhood that I've been through and those types of things.

My hope in writing this book was that other survivors and victims of domestic violence, no matter whether they're women or men, no matter whether they're in same sex relationships or any other type of relationship in which they have proximity to somebody that claims to care about them, was to offer them hope.

"Everything I Never Dreamed" was a homage to my mom, who towards the end of her life said, "You're everything I never dreamed" because she saw what I had went through in the earlier part of my life and then eventually just figuring it out.

So yeah, it was, there were 13, I was married to this, this man for 13 years and most of that marriage, all of that marriage was abusive in one way or another.

- So Ruth, we're gonna get into the issues that you raise in your incredible book, but it is part memoir and again, for those in the audience who haven't read it, can you give a little bit more of your story, this relationship that you were involved in and what ultimately happened?

- Yes.

So I met this man when I was 16.

I came from a home that was filled with violence and dysfunction, dysfunction.

And I literally thought this person was going to save, fix it for me, not save me, but fix it for me.

We got married when I was 19.

I had my child when I was 16 and the list goes on and on.

And we eventually married when I was 19.

And I remember one or two weeks after the wedding, waking up on the floor bleeding and someone pulling me out of the apartment, he had beat me up pretty good.

And from that day forward, there were years of domestic violence.

And I'm gonna be very clear here that it wasn't always physical.

There were certainly a lot of emotional abuse in regards to how I looked, how I wasn't smart enough, I wasn't a good mom.

I mean, the list goes on and on of the types of abuse that he perpetrated against me.

But I remember at one key point in my life, someone said to me, it was a supervisor of mine, she said, and the details of that are in the book, but she said, "Something's not right and I want you to know I'm here for you."

And it was the first time anyone ever used the words domestic violence or violence against you.

You know, you're experiencing violence.

And I remember thinking, "Oh my goodness, not really."

And I'm here to tell you that it wasn't until two, two and a half years later that I actually left.

And it was really more about that person planting a seed and me understanding that I wasn't living my true self.

I love education and I love humor and all of those things.

And the real me was being suppressed by this violence in our home.

And then eventually I am very grateful 'cause a lot of survivors do not have this kind of support.

But I was working for the state of Colorado at the time.

They kept me in my job and really made accommodations for me so that I could be safe.

It didn't prevent me from being kidnapped and/or shot and left for dead, but I was able to come from that and continue to work.

And I can't tell you how many victims and survivors have had to change their entire lives to be safe.

So I'm very grateful for that.

And I just decided a couple years after that that I would make my mark, so to speak.

Someone asked me when I went to volunteer for domestic violence, they said, "Ruth, why don't you tell your story?"

And I said, "No way.

I can't do that."

I've never stopped since then.

- So, Ruth, some people sometimes say, if a person is in an abusive relationship, why don't they just leave?

How do you answer that question?

It's not that simple of course.

- There's two ways and thank you so much for bringing that up, Wayne.

If I told you all of the things that I had to think about me, not every survivor, 'cause every survivor is different.

I had to think about where my son would go to school.

I had to think about would I be able to keep my job?

What about our combined cars?

We were living a very nice life, comfortable life.

We were quote unquote "middle class," we had two cars.

And you know, I challenge all of us to think about someone tells you the only way that things are going to change is if you immediately change.

I challenge all of us to think about what we would feel like if somebody came to you and said, "Here's your suitcase, here's your suitcase.

Now you can leave."

Secondly, I always challenge people to think about, so why is it the responsibility of the victim to leave?

Why aren't we talking about why the person is hurting?

And we could talk forever about the dynamics of both of those.

But that's how I respond.

Don't be so quick to say, why don't you leave when you don't understand the barriers that that person might be facing.

- Ruth, I wonder, can you shed some light?

So you describe in your book very powerfully the effect of both the emotional abuse and the physical abuse on you in a more abstract sense.

What happens to a victim in that circumstance, to their sense of self, to their sense of worth?

What happens to the victim who's subjected to that kind of abuse over years?

- That's a great question because I don't think we talk about that enough either.

You lose yourself, you become beholden, so to speak.

I'll find the correct word in a moment.

But everything about your being sort of goes away.

You know, even your ability to be safe.

You know, how do I be safe?

It's not just cowering in the corner putting my hands over my head so I don't feel the blows, right?

It's more about how do I predict what's going to happen?

I don't know, batterers and those that hurt others are not predictable.

So they keep you unbalanced all the time.

And then when you add on the trauma to all of that, I'll share with you all that I still go to therapy every once in a while because the PTSD takes place and I begin to lose, something happens, right, where I go, wait a minute, this isn't how it's supposed to be or that kind of thing.

The ramifications are lifelong, emotionally, trauma, and even physically, I found out four or five months ago or four or five years ago, my doctor said, "Have you been in a terrible car accident?"

And I said, "No."

And they had to do two surgeries on my back from when I was thrown against a wall.

That's 30 something years later.

And I say that so that we understand the long-term impact, right?

I feel impressed of who I am right now, but to say that I am not experiencing any of those long-term impacts would not be honest.

- So you mentioned that you still sometimes see a therapist.

What other interventions or professional help can people who have been victims turn to?

- So I wanna make something clear.

When a victim is in crisis, in other words, they're trying to get that immediate help and trying to figure out their immediate life, it is certainly not therapy that they need.

They need an advocate to help them navigate all the things that they have to think about to be safe.

Those are available at the community domestic violence programs, or you can call the National Hotline or whatever, whatever that takes as immediate crisis.

community domestic violence programs are awesome at making sure that the victim is safety, that their safety is first, right?

They do what they call a safety plan, and then they go from there figuring out how to best make sure that this person is not gonna be hurt or is at minimum safe, right?

And then later on is when you begin to experience, I discovered this in my journey, later on, is when I began to experience trauma and forgetting things that I should have remembered and jumping at the slightest noises and smelling gunpowder in my car, which blew me away because I thought, what is happening right now?

Those are the types of things.

Those long-term impacts are the types of things that we encourage victims and survivors to get support with.

- Ruth, this is probably a good chance for us to mention the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

If somebody in our audience needs help, they can call 1-800-799-7233 or they can simply text the word START to 88788.

How extensive, how pervasive a problem is domestic violence in the United States right now?

- Someone coined the phrase probably about six years ago that is a public health crisis, I totally agree with that.

I have stats and there are stats and stats and stats and stats.

What I'm most concerned about is the increase in lethality of domestic violence.

And by that I mean particularly women who are dying as a result of domestic violence.

The lethality, from our perspective, has really jumped.

We are very aware of the millions of people every year who are experiencing domestic violence.

We're not talking about the impacts on communities, we're not talking about the dynamics of domestic violence.

We're not talking about why don't they leave.

We're not talking about what causes somebody to do this to somebody else.

The need for power and control.

Why is that so strong in that person?

We're not talking about how we need to make sure that every victim's needs are met, particularly when they've finally been empowered to say, "I need to go and I need to do it as safely as possible."

So how do we have those conversations?

I'm a firm believer that until we talk about it, someone used the example of MADD, right, Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Took years, we're still floundering in that.

So when do we get to the same place that Mothers Against Drunk Driving is where we hold abusive persons accountable, where we make it more safe for victims and survivors to leave.

I don't know, but we just don't talk about it enough and it is a public health crisis.

- So when we talk about the data for domestic violence, it's very different than other public health and health data.

For example, hospital admissions are monitored very carefully and reported to public health agencies.

Not the case here because much of this is self-reporting and many people are too scared to even talk about or mention.

Do you have any sense of the reality on the ground, given that this is a very different way, cannot be measured the way other crises and issues can be?

- Oh, thank you again for bringing that up, because it's really important.

We all know that we are in a society that relies on data, right?

To make any kind of change, the first thing we say is data.

This is a population that you cannot get data from.

It's confidential services.

When and if they do (indistinct), so the ability to get data, good data like that is very, very difficult.

We do have some data about violence that has been perpetrated, but is well after the violence, right?

If you go to a community domestic violence program, they can't report anything but aggregate numbers.

That's not a reflection of what's happening.

And I challenge us to think if we're talking about the other issue, which is those that hurt others, how many persons that are hurting someone else are coming forward and saying, you know, here's my data.

None, absolutely none.

- It seems to me there's another factor here too, and that would be regional differences.

There are parts of the country where there are good programs where people can be trusted, where people might be more willing to share or to say that they are being victimized.

And there are other parts of the country where that would not be the case, I'm guessing.

Is there a regional difference in terms of reporting?

- You know, I wouldn't say that necessarily, particularly talking about victims getting services, those are SOP for the most part, standard operating procedure, and community domestic violence programs have their own system within.

What I will say is across jurisdictions when it comes to criminal and civil law, you are darn right.

It is all over the place and all over the place.

And you never know how you're gonna be responded to criminally or civilly.

That's also the fear about coming forward, right?

I don't know a lot about the system, now I'm in what I think might be a safe place, but now I gotta go to court because he's been charged with domestic violence or she wants the kids, or so now what do I do?

And that is not an SOP in each jurisdiction, that's different everywhere you go.

Hopefully the advocates are trained enough, even though they're already overwhelmed in helping a victim or survivor understand that system, that other system that they must endure.

- You know, Ruth, as I read your book, I was struck that this was not just a story of domestic violence.

This was a story of surviving and survivorship.

And I think that's a really important point/ For people who are out there, what was it that enabled you to finally get out of that situation and survive?

And what kind of lessons are there for others?

- So there's a couple things.

I'm a firm believer in resilience.

I think a lot of us have it, some of us don't.

And I believe very firmly I was born with that.

I know it sounds really strange, but I believe I was born with that.

And I think for a while he had taken that away from me.

There was something that, that it took that resilience away from me.

I want people to understand that as they're talking to who they think might be victims and survivors, that they say to them, "I think something's going on.

I think I might be able to help you when and if you need to, and let me know."

We shouldn't be comfortable with confronting a victim and saying, "I know that you've been experiencing domestic violence," I don't think that's appropriate.

You just let them know that you're a safe person.

That's what that person did for me.

She let me know she was a safe person.

Secondly, I tell people all the time, it wasn't like I flipped a switch overnight and things just happened.

It was haul, it was a real haul.

Those first 2, 3, 4, 5 years were very difficult.

I spent many days crying.

I spent many days depressed, but constantly thinking, what was this all for?

What did this mean?

And I just eventually understood, particularly when that person said, "You should tell your story."

I believed that, it sounds so corny, but I believed that this happened to me for a reason.

And anything I can do to help us as a society and a culture understand about domestic violence, I made up my mind I was gonna do, I'm imperfect by the way, I know you find that hard to believe, but I am imperfect.

- [Jim] We do find that hard to believe.

- [Wayne] Yeah, we do.

- I have down days, you know, I told somebody the other day, They said, "What are you gonna do on your vacation?"

I said, "Curl in a fetal position just one day."

(hosts laughing) And that's okay.

- Yeah, that definitely- - So yes, just really having open dialogue and recognizing when someone might be going.

You'll notice, you'll see the change and letting them know that you're there.

And by the way, if you're going to be there and you open that door, please make sure you have the resources that they might need.

The hotline number, the local community domestic violence program, helping them develop a safety plan, which is, I'm gonna flip my porch light three times, that means get your buns over here because something bad is happening.

It could be that simple.

- So Ruth, you've talked here on the show about ways to, you just did as a matter of fact, to better serve victims and survivors.

And in the book you get into even more of them.

Deterrence is one of those, and we haven't really hit on that during this show here.

Talk about the importance of deterrence and actually what that means.

- So we can call it deterrence, we can call it prevention.

But what I like to think is that, well, not what I like to think, we have two ways of dealing with domestic violence currently as a society, when we are talking about it and we're trying to put those things in place.

We have interventions and we have policy, right?

My concern is that we don't do enough about prevention and deterrence.

And by that I mean why aren't we having the conversations as young as we can about respectful relationships.

You know, it's not just, and I agree that we can talk about healthy relationships.

That's not at all what I'm saying.

But I think if we talk about respectful and healthy relationships, and even talk about what is it that you're feeling when you wanna hurt someone.

So let's talk about your power and control.

Where do you think that comes from?

Our society wants to do intervention.

We wanna save people.

And we don't understand that sometimes that takes going way back here so that they never experience that as a victim or a person that hurts someone else, a batterer.

So what are we doing about that?

I would challenge us to say we're not doing nearly enough, the funds that we get in this field, very much designated and delivered for interventions.

And even that's not enough.

So when you go to your lawmakers and say, "We need more money for prevention," they go, "Yeah, no, that's not gonna happen."

And they all have their reasons, but when are we gonna say, let's stop this before it even starts, talking to those who might be potential victims.

We don't know that they're gonna be victims, but what do we do to help people understand that they don't have to lose themselves to another person.

They don't have to subject themselves or experience power and control from someone else.

- You know, Ruth, we've got a little bit more than a minute left here.

I wanna maybe change the focus just a little bit and talk about bystanders.

You've mentioned already this woman who let you know that she was there to help.

But there was a line in the prologue of the book that lingered with me as I read it, and this was, as your abuser was forcing you to drive from somewhere at gunpoint, the thought going through your head was, and I'm quoting here, "Does anybody see me?"

How can I get them to see me?"

What should bystanders be looking for?

- I wrote that line and it still grabs me.

I would say it is hard to be an interrupter, right?

Very difficult.

You don't wanna get in other people's business, you don't know what's going on.

They may have a weapon.

I mean, the list goes on and on.

I would challenge us to think there is nothing wrong with saying to both parties, both parties, "Is there something I can do to help?

It seems like there's something going on here.

What can I do to help?"

It puts the the abusive person off guard, right?

And it lets the victim know that somebody has seen this.

Sometimes that's all you need is somebody has seen this and they understand that this is not good.

You know, we don't trust our instincts enough, trust our instincts.

If we think that there's something going on, it's okay to be embarrassed in a few minutes because you got it wrong.

But say, is there something here that I can help with and help that person.

I think that that goes a long way.

- Well Ruth, your book is a tremendous tribute and we're so grateful to you for sharing it.

We wanna share one more time the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.

Again 1-800-799-7233.

Or you can text START, the word START to 88788.

Again, the word START to 88788.

The book is "Everything I Never Dreamed."

She's Ruth Glenn, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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