Home in Our Bodies: How Abuse Separates Survivors from Physical & Emotional Safety
When most people think of “home,” we associate the word with warmth and comfort, even if this has not been our experience with our own homes. The word home almost comes to occupy a definition separate from its latent meaning—we may not think of it as a real physical place in our lives, but rather as an abstract idea of safety. Despite this idea of home, a UN study found that women’s homes were actually the most dangerous places for them due to high rates of violence at the hands of intimate partners and family members. This holds true across genders. Domestic abuse and other interpersonal forms of violence are especially potent threats because they typically happen in one’s personal space and involve those closest to them. This means that abuse at home can be more easily committed because of 1) privacy and 2) access.
Issue 4 of our survival anthology, Survival & Beyond, has the broad theme of “home.” In this post, we will explore some of the ways “home” can be interpreted under the umbrella of survivors’ stories. What happens when a home isn’t safe, when it is actively rotting, both physically and symbolically? What happens when our own bodies no longer feel like they belong to us? How can survivors take up space and reclaim safety?
When Safehouses Aren't Safe
Historically, homes have been symbols of safety, family, community, success, freedom, and more. Particularly in a U.S. context, the American Dream is often shortened to “a house with a white picket fence,” an image meant to symbolize economic flourishing, family units, and suburban ideals. Fences, specifically white picket fences, became popular in the United States as a way to clearly mark one’s property as theirs and as private. However the literal physical privacy also came with a certain psychological privacy. "Domestic disputes” or domestic violence were considered private family matters, even by the police. If police were notified of a domestic disturbance, their procedure was to encourage the families to work it out amongst themselves. This practice only started to be widely challenged in the 1980s. In these ways, the house has been, and still is, often a site in which privacy and comfort are weaponized by abusers looking for the domestic equivalent of a dark alleyway to commit their crimes.
In “The House” by Mydalis Vera from issue 3 of Survival & Beyond, the speaker describes the way her house has slowly fallen into disrepair, mirroring the rot of her abusive relationship. She says, “I don’t remember when the front window cracked / Maybe it was his cavernous voice / I don’t remember when the walls turned yellow and the floors a viscous gray / Maybe it happened when I was sleeping…” Vera’s framing emphasizes why relationship abuse can be something so hard to detect: when a place, or a person, is your home, it can be hard for your brain to recognize that what was once a safe space has become toxic.
Similarly, “Silverfish Tango” by Nancy Beauregard (Survival & Beyond, Issue 3) shows the symbolic and literal breakdown of abuse at home. Beauregard writes, “silverfish dance the tango beneath a broken faucet. the lady serves / dinner on the bathroom hamper while the gentleman pushes / through arms to tear pages of her phone book. he snaps a spine, / peels the paste that holds her friends together.” Here, the author shows how the theoretical safe spaces—one’s home and one’s marriage—can so easily coincide with abuse. As the wife in the poem tries to complete the classic domestic scene of having dinner together, readers are hit with all of the pieces of this scene which do not fit: the home is infested with bugs, the sink is broken, the bathroom hamper is a dining surface, and the husband is physically breaking the wife’s contact with the outside world. In all these ways, the author shows that their house is not the only thing infested, their marriage is too.
The Body as a Home
Award-winning researcher, Hillary L. McBride writes about embodied living in her book, “The Wisdom of Your Body.” Her argument is that Western readers must truly start to live in our bodies—to be grounded in our sensations, to listen to our bodily cues, and to take care of our needs rather than think of our physical existence as separate from our inner selves. She says that many societal factors and oppressors can make people feel that their body “isn’t the right kind of body.” The problem, McBride writes, is that “being disconnected from ourselves as bodies means being disconnected from truly living and from the interconnection that weaves us all together.”
In interpersonal relationships that include assault, violence, or controlling tactics, it can be easy to dissociate from one’s body. This is a way of distancing oneself from where they perceive the violence as occurring (to their body, rather to them). In previous anthologies, survivors have described the process of reclaiming their bodies.
In “Masterpiece” by Barbara Ford (Survival & Beyond, Issue 3), the speaker looks at the bruises left on her body from the abuser she has escaped as a form of artwork and a symbol of her liberation: “hip, buttock in a vivid tattoo / of emancipation. One by one / hidden voices erupted / to ululate their welcome/ for the hostage returning home / who’d long been given up for dead.”
As her bruises morph, change, and heal, she realizes that her abuser cannot see them as they are now. She owns her healing body, all of the yellow-green spots of resilient blood cells working against the violence done to them.
“There’s Nowhere Else To Go But Up!” by Traci Neal (Survival & Beyond, Issue 3) tackles living in a body that has been devalued by societal messaging and abuse. Neal says of growing up as a Black woman, “a 13-year-old teenager is a puppeteer for/themed threats and beastly abuse, target practice.” Later in life, the speaker faces multiple abusive partners and says that her “mahogany skin” hides evidence of this abuse well. Though this statement is literal, symbolically Neal is also saying that her experience of Blackness in a racist society has prepared her for facing this abuse and has primed her abusers to more easily dehumanize her.
Marginalized people, as McBride argues, often experience detachment from their bodies as a result of being told that their bodies are somehow wrong, but at the end of Neal’s piece, the speaker is able to fully reinhabit her physical self. She learns to loves herself, “even [her] nappy, natural hair” and recognizes her body as “built to withstand weight.” A body that has survived both despite and in spite of violence.
Service Highlight: Housing & Economic Empowerment Program
We know that stability starts with a safe home. Our counselor advocates help survivors access and navigate housing options that allow them to find a home that works for them and their families.
Abuse at Home & Reclaiming Home
The concept of “home” is closely intertwined with the political, humanitarian, and philosophical idea that all people should have a right to bodily safety. This idea is often linked to John Locke’s natural rights, wherein one’s body is included in their inalienable right to property. It can also be thought of as relating to one’s right to bodily autonomy, officially established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration however, while a step in the right direction, has not yet become real for many.
In general, the “home” is the site where this bodily safety or autonomy is supposed to be ensured. That "home" might be one’s personal space, the physical land that they live on, or the government-run state they are citizens of. However, in all these versions of home, one's safe haven can be made unsafe by abusive people, practices, and politics. So, how can one reclaim their home and safety from abusive bodies? How can somebody move past the violence associated with their home and find peace?
One narrative of this can be found in the poem “Unchained Memories” by Deborah Barrett (Survival & Beyond, Issue 3). In this poem, the speaker goes through memories of her marriage, showing how the relationship and the abuse are irrevocably intertwined. Old photos feature long skirts that hide bruises. Shards of what was once a wedding gift remind her of when her husband threw it at the wall. At the poem’s end, the abuser leaves and a sudden calm falls over the speaker's house: “The next morning, I awake / to sunlight streaming in my bedroom window, / my cat he kept locked outside, purring in my ear.”
This poem provides an especially powerful example of reclaiming home because it shows that the turmoil was not within the home or within the narrator. The memories of violence, though inseparable from memories of the marriage, were not inseparable from the narrator’s sense of self, or her home. As soon as she is rid of her abuser, she gets to claim peace and to claim love, shown through the imagery of her sunlit bedroom and purring cat.
Especially in a political climate in which our home and our bodies are feeling particularly vulnerable, it is important to think about home in terms of what it is supposed to be. Abuse and strife should not be the status quo. Peace is what is meant to be the norm and is what you deserve: a home which feels like home. Can we reclaim our spaces–whether personal, social, or political—with the purpose of truly creating conditions for human safety and flourishing? And what does that look like?
Finding Our Way Home
The Survivor Anthology Project hopes to continue to explore the complex topic of home, and the many relationships survivors have to the topic. By continuing to uplift the stories and experiences of survivors, we can shift the narrative of what should/should not be “kept in the home.”
Submissions for Issue 4 of Survival & Beyond (“Home”) are open until August 31st, 2026. Learn more, submit your work, and sign up for our newsletter on our webpage here!
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