Susan Davis and her daughter at the Houston Area Women’s Center

Susan Davis's husband came home one day before she had returned from work, and he realized dinner wasn't ready. "He called me at work and cussed me out. I left immediately. When I got home he was waiting for me," Ms. Davis recalls. "He pulled me upstairs by my hair, threw me into the bedroom, took out his gun, put it to my temple and said he was going to blow my brains out. For three hours I either had that gun at my forehead or in my mouth. He was so angry, he was shaking, screaming and his face was almost purple. I should be dead." She remained calm throughout the ordeal and persuaded her husband not to kill her. The couple’s only child, Tabitha, was visiting her grandparents. The next day, instead of going to work, Ms. Davis moved into her parents’ house.

"Domestic violence has no class distinction," she explains. "My husband had three degrees, and on the outside we looked like the perfect family. But three months into our marriage, the verbal abuse began. It went from calling me stupid to telling me I couldn’t do anything right."

The Houston Area Women’s Center helped Ms. Davis understand what had happened. "It’s all about control – what you wear, how you keep house, isolating you from your friends. Once they have control over you, you start buying into it, trying to please them because you don’t want to have that flair-up.

"I thought this only happened to me," she confesses. "When I called the Houston Area Women’s Center they said they offered group counseling, so I went. When I began to berate myself for staying in the relationship for three years, one of the women put her arm around me and said, ‘I’ve been in one for 15.’ Another said she had stayed for 21 years. I learned that women stay in abusive relationships because they become so beaten down they have no self-esteem. They become financially dependent and stay for the sake of their kids. They don’t realize their children suffer, too." Ms. Davis proudly states that now her daughter is class president for the second consecutive year, head cheerleader and a member of the National Honor Society. "I want mothers to know that finances – where you live, what you drive – are not going to make a difference in a child’s life. Tabitha became who she is because I became who I am."

Today Ms. Davis operates her own insurance business and credits her success to those who helped change her life. "I wouldn’t have made it without my parents’ support and the Houston Area Women’s Center. The Center gives women choices they otherwise would not have. It has a hotline and provides shelter, clothes and guidance. They give you time to talk so you can understand why you got to where you are. You can’t go through something like that and not get counseling, or you’re going to keep on repeating it. They helped me understand that it’s never the victim’s fault."

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