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Darren McArthur lives in Ellsworth.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence and would like to talk with an advocate, call 866-834-4357, TTY 1-800-437-1220. This free, confidential service is available 24/7 and is accessible from anywhere in Maine.
I’m an 18-year-old who’s dealt with domestic violence for much of my life. From when I was born to about 2 years old, my mother and I lived with my abusive father. Once my mother left and divorced him visitation rights came up, and I ended up visiting him each weekend. Gradually over the years, visitation rights continued to shift, and I was visiting less and less. A part of the reason that it ended is that all the emotion and anxiety I had kept to myself and bottled up came back up on my final ride to being dropped off with my father, and my mother decided that she wouldn’t be sending me.
It’s important to be mindful that some of what a child experiences might not immediately register as domestic abuse, or that children might block out a lot of the memories. I know there’s still plenty of what happened that I blocked out, and it kind of just comes back whenever.
I remember in my junior year of high school, one of my teachers shut a door particularly hard, and it scared me bad enough that I almost had a panic attack in the classroom because my father used to do that to try and scare us when he was angry, or just because he wanted to. I hadn’t had a reaction like that in a long while, so I was surprised that it affected me that much.
I think it’s also important to know that children often don’t process their emotions the same way adults might. The mentality that “boys shouldn’t cry” messed with how I processed my feelings and eventually led to me just bottling everything up, which isn’t healthy at all. I often struggled with properly processing or recognizing how I was feeling, and it was often difficult for me to properly express emotion. Thankfully, I’ve gotten a lot better at that since then.
My father was abusive and was/is a very hateful man. He tried to pass along a lot of his beliefs to me, including his racism and homophobia, but seemed to lose interest in me altogether once he realized I wouldn’t accept his hate.
He also would frequently ignore when my half-brother did something to me. For example, when my half-brother was about six, my father bought him a blowgun, with metal darts and all. My half-brother tried to shoot me with that. Thankfully he didn’t succeed, but when I told my father he laughed it off and didn’t address it at all.
That’s another thing that really stuck with me: the man who was supposed to love and care for me clearly didn’t. Around the same time, I started to really recognize a lot of the abuse.
Throughout this whole ordeal, I’ve had family, friends, and coworkers of my parents who were all willing to do just about anything to help my family and me. The Next Step Domestic Violence Project was incredibly helpful to both my mother and I when we were trying to get away from my father, and they were incredibly helpful in dealing with visitation and my safety afterward.
Next Step is a large part of how my mother and I were even able to safely get away from my father, as were local police. Without all of their help, I wouldn’t have ever had the chance to become the person I am today.
Domestic violence organizations like Next Step are vital to the community because they help people get safely away from their abusers and help make sure that they don’t have to go through something like that again. Unfortunately, the funding of domestic violence organizations like Next Step is at risk, and losing these nonprofits would be devastating to the community.