2: Twice Over
Content warning: This show looks at domestic abuse head on. This particular episode starts—and ends—in a hospital, and while it’s an uplifting story, it’s also a bit heavy at times. So, be gentle with yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings that might pop up. If you or someone you know needs assistance, please contact: Lifeline (13 11 14), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or any of these support services. Listen with care.
“Given the way my burns creeped over my neck and side, it meant I physically wasn’t able to move in certain ways. I was a walking, talking, breathing conundrum of sorts: presented with this hopeful newfound agency having just left my abuser, but still restricted entirely by his doing, a prisoner in my body.”
In episode 2 Twice Over, Roia moves to Melbourne, where she lives with her children and her family. Despite leaving her now ex-husband, her burns continue to gnaw, sting and throb. Drawing on her body and its unique architecture post-violence, Roia describes the kind of claustrophobia she is forced to face in a body made to wear her ex-husband’s rage.
Further information
Domestic violence survivor/THRIVER (Shondell), Nicole C. Mullen
Private Violence Presents: Why We Stayed, Markay Media
#WhyIStayed, Beverly Gooden
The Body Keeps The Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, Bessel Van Der Kolk (Penguin Press)
Jess Zimmerman - It Doesn’t Hurt, It Hurts All the Time
Credits
Co-producers: Madison Griffiths and Beth Atkinson-Quinton
Lead Storyteller: Roia Atmar
Sensitivity Editor: Shakira Hussein
Assistant Producer: Danae Gibson
Sound Designer and Engineer: Jon Tjhia
Guests in this episode: Jeremy Rawlins and Najeeba Atmar
Voice actors: Thank-you to Rosemarie Jansz who voiced Najeeba Atmar, and to Areej Nur, Izzy Roberts-Orr, Michelle Macklem, Anu Hasbold, Beth Atkinson-Quinton, Elle Marsh, Karishma Luthria, Mel Cranenburg, Sophie Woods, Ayan Shirwa and Adalya Nash Hussein for their contribution to this episode.
Najeeba Atmar is Roia’a mother.
Dr Jeremy Rawlins has specialist plastic surgery fellowships from the UK (FRCS(Plast)) and Australia (FRACS(Plast)) – both obtained following higher surgical training and examinations in the UK and Australia. He is an AHPRA Specialist Plastic Surgeon and is on the GMC Specialist Register for Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery. He is a full member of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and the British Association of Plastic Surgeons (BAPRAS).
Tender season two is Broadwave podcast supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and proudly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust.
Get in touch
We love hearing from our listeners. Stay in touch across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at @broadwavepods, and @tenderpodcast on Twitter.
Episode One: Twice Over
[Music: ambient, expansive and sharp.]
Beth Atkinson-Quinton: Hey, Beth here. Just before you start: this show looks at domestic abuse
head on. This particular episode uncovers Roia’s experience as she gets back on her feet after a
pretty severe burns injury. It’s not necessarily gory, but it is a bit heavy at times. So, be gentle with
yourself, listen with care, and know that support is readily available for any unpleasant feelings
that might pop up. Check out our website for a list of people you can speak to if the going gets
tough.
[Music: shifts to a suspenseful, ambient track.]
Roia Atmar: You’re listening to Tender, a podcast about what happens once women leave
abusive relationships.
Roia Atmar: When a woman leaves—when she stores the echoes of her once-upon-a-time
relationship, some place silent and still, some place out of the mind’s eye—she has the space to
see herself again, for the first time in a long time. The space to sit in the quiet.
In the first episode of Tender, I was motionless: lying in a hospital bed, waiting for the burns that
covered much of my body to heal, if only a little bit.
[Hospital sounds: dull echo of a ventilator, an ambulance siren.]
Roia Atmar: Faces merged and changed, bodies passed by doors with a clear mission, some
place to go, a patient to see, a baby to hold. But two months passed, and it was time for me to
leave. Alongside my family, I left Perth’s heat—an obvious and pronounced kind of warmth—and
boarded a plane to Melbourne, where I was to live with my children, my mother and my brother.
Where I was to live without my husband.
Roia Atmar: The relief was almost instant. See, to be somebody who lives with violence is to be
somebody who is perpetually walking on eggshells, unaware of exactly where, how or why
explosions occur. There was no-one to ignite, no person to fear, no moment of utter panic. It was
just stillness. A kind of unmoving that could’ve been restful, that could’ve been soothing. But it
wasn’t just that I was granted permission to be still. There was also another dimension: I had no
other choice.
Roia Atmar: Given the way my burns creeped over my neck and side, it meant I physically wasn’t
able to move in certain ways: that any motion that disobeyed or distorted their architecture across
my body caused grievous pain. I was a walking, talking, breathing conundrum of sorts: presented
with this hopeful newfound agency having just left my abuser, but still restricted entirely by his
doing, a prisoner in my body. How do I describe this kind of claustrophobia? What does it look
like?
[CBC News program begins.]
Interviewer: Who are you today?
Ajoya Ayeko [long pause, laughs nervously, and takes a big breath]: I’m a survivor... I don’t
think I’ve said that out loud.
[Cuts to a conversation between musician and domestic abuse survivor and burns survivor
Nicole C. Mullen and survivor Shondell Williamson.]
Shondell Williamson [between exacerbated tears]: He think he got me down...
Nicole C. Mullen: Mm-mm.
Shondell Williamson [between exacerbated tears]: ... Like I say...
Nicole C. Mullen: Mm-mm.
Shondell Williamson [between exacerbated tears]: I’m still standing.
Nicole C. Mullen [encouraging]: You sure are! You sure are!
Roia Atmar: You just heard from Ajoya Ayeko, a survivor of domestic abuse, who referred to
herself as a survivor for the very first time, as well as a woman named Shondell—who was
interviewed by Nicole C. Mullen, years after her husband poured acid on her as her children
watched.
[Music: a suspenseful, scaling octave resounds.]
To be a person who has survived, who is surviving, is different from being a person who just exists
in the world. It carries a kind of heaviness with it, a stubbornness, a labour. To be a survivor is to
be some kind of rebel: somebody who cheated a death, an assault, a form of injustice, and who
persisted and continues to persist. To be a survivor is to be someone who remains, who manages
to continue despite the odds.
Roia Atmar: And because of this, life becomes the project—and to just merely exist requires
practice and perseverance and work, work I didn’t sign up for, living in a body I didn’t anticipate
would be undergoing its own tiresome healing process.
[Music: a static, suspenseful xylophone track begins.]
Jeremy Rawlins: When someone has a, a burn injury, a lot of people would be aware that those
injuries are very very painful, er and that’s because, you know, literally at an anatomical level,
those nerve endings are raw, they are sitting there exposed to the outside world and that causes
horrific levels of pain.
Roia Atmar: That’s Jeremy Rawlins, a specialist plastic surgeon based in Perth whose sub-
specialty expertise is in burn care. He is also the President of the Australia New Zealand Burn
Association. He describes the complex, and deeply multifaceted nature of how burns recovery
actually works, as well as the psycho-social dimensions associated with healing.
Jeremy Rawlins: So patients experience pain, they also experience abnormal sensations
associated with nerve injuries that are then trying to recover, and so we see people who have got
fully healed burn wounds that have had skin grafts for example but they are also experiencing
quite unpleasant pain.
Jeremy Rawlins: And, we have to remember that when you have a burn injury, the whole body
becomes involved. The physical pain, as you might imagine, has a significant impact, I think, on
the psychological or the psycho-social ability to recover because it has this knock on effect of
making the patient feel that, actually: ‘Is it in my head?’ That, I’ve got these burn wounds that are
really really sore, really really painful.
Jeremy Rawlins: So, your loved ones, your friends, people in society can get their head around
the fact that you've got a raw wound and you’re in pain and then several weeks or months later
you’ve got fully healed burn wounds so they’re not wounds anymore, they’re skin grafts, they’re
scars. Yet, the people who don’t work in burns or don’t understand the complexities of burns will
look at that patient and go: ‘Well, they’ve not got wounds anymore, how can they still be painful?
Why are they still unable to go to school? Why are they unable to go to work? What’s their issue?’
[Music: ambient, expansive and melancholic.]
Roia Atmar: In many ways, what my body was undergoing wasn’t unique to me. I was
experiencing it twice over. It mirrored my experience emotionally as a survivor of domestic
violence. People that have survived burns, as well as those who have survived abuse, and—in my
case, both—aren’t taught how to make sense of a new, indistinguishable pain, a kind that isn’t the
product of the raw wound that once throbbed and glowed red. But the pain isn’t just the echo of
that original injury. It’s a complex pain, and each facet of my pain linked arms with the other. The
culmination was intense.
Roia Atmar: There was the pain of not being able to move my hand, or my neck, of not being
able to seize and turn around quickly, to let my physical instincts do their thing. But I wasn’t just a
lone woman in a room, without duties. Without reasons to move.
[Sounds of a home: children making noise, busied movement in a domestic setting.]
I was a young mother, with a small army of children. This required motion. My frustration festered
like an additional wound in me. I wanted to be able to change a nappy, to hold my daughter. I
wanted to bathe them, to change their clothes, to hold their small hands.
Roia Atmar: I wanted to be able to turn around in the drivers seat of my car and have them kiss
me goodbye at the school gates, to give them the opportunity to reach for my cheek, to have
them safely leap from their car seats and head into their respective classrooms. I wanted to be
able to turn—to look at something, or someone—without my entire body having to turn with me.
Najeeba Atmar (Roia’s mother, voiced by Rosemarie Jansz): It was a calm and quiet time living
with Roia and her kids, but it was very depressing for us, and especially for her kids when they’d
see their mother after she left hospital.
Roia Atmar: That’s my mother, talking about witnessing this period of my life.
Najeeba Atmar (Roia’s mother, voiced by Rosemarie Jansz): The days were gloomy. Every
time I’d see my grandkids, I would be disheartened. But we were happy that we were done from
the chapter of abuse. Roia was very reclusive after the incident.
Roia Atmar: We all like to imagine our bodies are clever in much the same way our minds are:
that our stomachs, our skin, our limbs respond to our needs in reasonable ways, that they just
know what they require. If my belly growls, I feed it. If my mouth is dry, I gulp down water until I
feel hydrated. If my limbs ache, I soothe them with rest, and sometimes oil or lotion, or even a
massage.
Roia Atmar: But for people who have survived interpersonal violence, in its physical sense, we
are grappling with many wounds in a body—and a mind—we have been taught not to trust. We
are told that our intuition is something flawed or faulty. So, when my burns gnawed and stung and
demanded my attention, I was reminded of something truly horrifying—a question that persisted
in my tired mind—why did I stay in a relationship that could’ve killed me? How am I responsible
for this pain?
[Private Violence Presents: Why We Stayed program begins.]
Leslie Morgan Steiner: It is the question that I’m asked the most: ‘Why did I stay? Why does any
woman stay?’ And for the life of me, I can’t understand why people are obsessed with it, because
to me, it’s so obvious: why does anybody stay with someone that they love?
[Music: atmospheric and soft.]
Leslie Morgan Steiner: You know, we’ve all been in relationships that, even if they weren’t
abusive, were not working any longer, and we all stay far longer than we want. And, you stay for
the same reasons. You stay because you love the person or you love what you used to have, or
you’re trying to take care of your children.
Roia Atmar: That’s a recording of Leslie Morgan Steiner, an American feminist, author, and
advocate for women's rights, speaking on the Market Media program: Private Violence Presents:
Why We Stayed. If the phrase ‘Why We Stayed’, or rather ‘Why I Stayed’ sounds familiar, it’s
because it may be. It emerged as a hashtag off the back of a violent video of former American
football player running back Ray Rice knocking out Janay Palmer, his fiance, in 2014, as the two
of them stood in a casino elevator, before then dragging her limp body out, as if she was a large
plush doll, or something just as lifeless.
Roia Atmar: Writer and activist Beverly Gooden, frustrated immensely by the way Janay was
condemned for not leaving, or criticising her partner, started the hashtag Why-I-Stayed
movement.
Roia Atmar: The movement was designed to centre the voices of survivors, who confidently
revealed all of the multifaceted reasons why they persisted, and endured incredibly dangerous
relationships.
[Sounds of a war resound: men chatting, distant bombs exploding.]
Roia Atmar: In this country, we commemorate fallen soldiers, patriotically holding days of
remembrance for them. We know the images well: of young, hopeful men donned in uniform,
proudly entering treacherous, war-torn spaces, sacrificing their lives and futures for their
homeland. For us. The respect we harbour for servicemen and women feeds into the Australian
image of what it means to be kin, a family.
[A soundscape of Australian life: people cheering as if at the football, the echoes of a
barbecue.]
Roia Atmar: Perhaps this country is a family: a close-knit one, enmeshed by blood and hope.
Roia Atmar: But, for every soldier, there is a woman holding fort, tenacious and frightened, but
determined to keep the beast at bay. A woman who dares not complain, for the sake of her family,
her dignity, her God, her livelihood, her pets, her future, her love. A woman who makes do in the
suburban trenches.
[Music: suspenseful, expansive and melancholic.]
Roia Atmar: There is a tyranny in homes all around Australia. A woman is killed, on average, once
a week in this country, deaths followed by an eerie silence. Our lives aren’t marked by vigils,
candlelit remembrance, pride. This isn’t to say that those who experience domestic assault are
worthy in ways soldiers aren’t, in fact much the opposite. If we hold flags for some, why not for
others? Why not extend our societal compassion a little further: for those of us living through our
own, terrifying wars?
Woman’s voice 1 (voiced by Areej Nur): I tried to leave the house once after an abusive episode.
He slept in front of the door that entire night. Hashtag why-I-stayed...
Woman’s voice 2 (voiced by Izzy Roberts-Orr): I stayed because my pastor told me that God
hates divorce. It didn't cross my mind that God might hate abuse, too. Hashtag why-I-stayed...
Woman’s voice 3 (voiced by Michelle Macklem): My mom had 3 young kids, a mortgage, and a
part time job. My dad had a full time pay-check, our church behind him, and bigger fists. Hashtag
why-I-stayed...
Woman’s voice 4 (voiced by Anu Hasbold): Hashtag why-I-stayed... because after being stuck
in an abusive relationship for awhile I started to believe I deserved all of it.
[Music: soft, expansive and reposeful.]
Woman’s voice 5 (voiced by Beth Atkinson-Quinton): Because I no longer knew who I was.
Hashtag why-I-stayed...
Roia Atmar: When Beverly Gooden answered the question, hashtag Why-I-Stayed, women
around the world followed suit. These are just a small handful of their responses.
Roia Atmar: Writer Jess Zimmerman once wrote, in an essay on emotional trauma, that “the pain
of a wound is separate from the wound itself. Like everything you think you experience, pain must
first be mediated by the brain—so in the same way that you see not objects, but light bouncing
off objects, you feel not the injury but the nervous system’s reaction.”
Roia Atmar: As seasons passed, and the nerves that throbbed and stung were able to slowly let
their pain subside a little, I was beginning to feel divorced from not only the man who did this, but
the woman who the man did this too.
Roia Atmar: I was not my pain, and the proof of it I wear—to this day—on my neck, arm and
chest, is not the injury itself but my body’s reaction to it. Where he set out to destroy parts of me,
my body somehow set out to regenerate those same parts. Rather than feeling crushed by the
body that couldn’t or wouldn’t, I started to feel motivated by all that it could do, by all that it did
do.
Roia Atmar: If you’ve ever experienced a gash or a deep wound or a hard hit, you’ll know the
feeling of a heartbeat nestled in the injury.
[The thud of a heartbeat begins softly.]
Roia Atmar: A gentle thudding that throbs when you clutch a hold of the hurt. Life, on life. The
more my nerves reminded me of their very existence, the more I was reminded of my own. My
very own glorious capacity to live. Despite his attempts to quash the very life I cherished so
much.
Roia Atmar: And, like that, something small but miraculous took place. In an early school
morning, with a car full of animated children, I sat poised and ready in the driver's seat.
[The sound of children playfully exiting a car.]
Slowly, I turned my head enough—just enough—so I could reverse the car into the car spot, so I
could check behind to see that I wasn’t hitting anything, so that my children could safely leave the
vehicle. After additional surgery on my neck, it no longer contracted the way it once did.
Roia Atmar: In many ways, I was able to—for the first time—look behind me, without the affliction
of the past punishing me for it. I could carefully notice risks, and perils, and danger... and still,
behind the wheel of a car, know that I had the capacity to move forward.
[The sound of a car door opening and closing.]
Roia Atmar: To move through a world I wasn’t yet familiar with: a country not tainted with his
scrutiny and violence, but instead a place imbued with promise. Excitement. A country I was
ready to experience for the first time.
[A school bell rings.]
Roia Atmar: Once the kids were ready, and their small feet hit the ground, I waved goodbye and
continued on. They were at school. And I was alive.
[The dull vibrations of driving through a quiet, suburban road.]
Roia Atmar: The engine resounded, and I drove: the quietness of the suburbs, the echo of peace.
[Music: a hopeful and reassuring melody resounds.]
Woman’s voice 6 (voiced by Elle Marsh): Hashtag why-I-stayed... I thought I could change him.
Hashtag why-I-left... he was the one changing me.
Woman’s voice 7 (voiced by Mel Cranenburg): Hashtag why-I-stayed... I thought I was ruined
and no-one would ever love me again. Hashtag why-I-left, it wasn’t love to begin with.
Woman’s voice 9 (voiced by Ayan Shirwa): There is no right or wrong way to be a survivor of
domestic violence... hashtag why-I-left.
Woman’s voice 10 (voiced by Sophie Woods): Hashtag why-I-stayed... I was made to believe
that I didn’t have a choice. Hashtag why-I-left, I wanted to live.
Woman’s voice 11 (voiced by Adalya Nash-Hussein): Hashtag why-I-stayed... I was terrified I
was broken. Hashtag why-I-left... I missed the woman I was.
Woman’s voice 12 (voiced by Karishma Luthria): Feet in the sand, dog asleep next to me, water
lapping lazily, ocean breeze in my hair. I am happy. I am at peace. This is hashtag why-I-left.
Roia Atmar: I want to thank my mother for her contributions in this episode, as well as Jeremy
Rawlins for his participation.
Roia Atmar: This season is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and
UNESCO Melbourne City of Literature, and is kindly sponsored by the Victorian Women’s Trust, an
advocate for violence prevention, fair wages for equal work, and the equal representation of
women, men and gender diverse people in the decision making processes that shape our lives.
Roia Atmar: You are listening to Tender, a Broadwave production about what happens once
women leave abusive relationships. This season is created by Madison Griffiths, Beth Atkinson-
Quinton and me, Roia Atmar. Until next time.