Caryl’s story is a rare gift as it provides insight into an epidemic that brews behind closed doors in more homes than we would care to imagine. If statistics are accurate (the prevalence of abuse is much higher because domestic violence is notoriously under-reported), then up to 25% of the female population suffers abuse at home every week. In fact, as much as 80% of violence against women is at the hands of the men who supposedly love them. If we care at all for our humanity, society as a whole needs to take up Caryl’s mantra of Abuse Is No Excuse.

Few understand the nature or the power of abuse and why someone chooses to stay in an ongoing abusive relationship. However, in reading Caryl’s story, she allows us to put ourselves in her place and we are left to wonder if we would have been able to do it any differently given her history and her reality. This is the gift that Caryl brings with her story and the honest way in which it is told--she makes it possible to move outside of ourselves and our own realities, judgments and prejudices so that we are able to walk the journey of another. This is a rare opportunity to truly live the life of a victim of abuse and to understand--from a safe vantage point--the powerlessness, hopelessness and desperation.

Caryl falsely believed she was powerless to leave. Out on the street with no money, without work and nowhere to go, after a failed third marriage, she didn’t make the choice to leave--but she did make the choice to survive. Caryl chose to learn and understand the nature of domestic violence, its root and its cure. All addictions are one-day-at-a-time journeys to recovery--join Caryl on hers.