The Story of Helen - Essay Example

The Story of Helen The story of Helen started as ordinary teenage relationships; however, eventually this led to horrible consequences that almost ruined her entire life. This interview about family violence Helen was appeared to be involved in made me think of the fact that there are many forerunners of family violence that many people consider as love and which eventually lead to great grief and ruined lives. When Helen started telling her story, I realized that she looked like a person that had been through a lot in her life and her experience made her avoidant. First, she felt uncomfortable about telling her story to an almost unknown person; however, in some time I realized that she was happy to share her experience with somebody in order to help someone to avoid the same experience that she had. She met Josh when she was 17 years old and he was her driving instructor, he was 25 years old. As far as Helen grew up in quite a rich family, she was used to receiving expensive gifts and wanted her boyfriend to provide her with full financial support, so that she wasn’t forced to work in order to earn money for life. Josh seemed to love her and she fell in love with him too, however, she always placed her own interests above everything. She realized that Josh wasn’t able to provide her with full financial support as her parents did, so she started constantly blaming him for not being a “real man”. He got used to the fact that if he wanted to be with Helen, he had to earn more money to preserve her love and their relationships, so he became obsessed with his job. Josh and Helen started spending less time together and he became suspicious about her. He thought Helen was cheating on him, so he started tracing her phone and became very jealous and controlling. When Helen was telling this part of her story, she noted that that time she was flattered by his attention and thought that his jealousy was the feature that proved his love to her. However, when she found out about him tracing down her phone calls and messages, she felt like something was wrong and whatever their relationships was standing on wasn’t good. However, she was so attached to their bond, so she started thinking that there would never be any other man that would love her, so abandoning Josh would mean being lonely for the rest of her life. Now Helen realizes that that time was the exact moment when she had to abandon those relationships, even though she risked to stay alone forever (which wouldn’t be so anyway). Thus after 3 years of constant fighting and verbal abuses along with passionate love, she was so attached to the relationships that couldn’t even imagine what her life would look like without them. Notwithstanding the rare happiness that they brought to her from time to time, it wasn’t covering all the grief that she had because of them. He proposed her and she agreed to marry him. When I asked why she had agreed for this marriage she said that she hadn’t any answer for this question, so probably she loved him back then in some strange way. She said that the love was some kind of creepy addiction and she realized that, but for some reasons she kind of liked his controlling conduct, because she felt like she was needed. Although Josh was suppressing her, she kept blaming him for his inability to be a man. Her whining made him mad, so he started blaming her back for her infidelity, even though he had no proofs of it. Four month before the wedding Helen started attending a psychological consultant, but all the advices that the consultant gave to her didn’t seem helpful because Helen felt like the game between her and Josh wasn’t over, so she was hoping to defeat him one day. I asked her what her victory was supposed to look like and Helen answered that she didn’t realize it then, but long after the story’s ending she realized that all she wanted was him breaking up with her, because she couldn’t take such responsibility for the relationships on herself. In another year they got married and the nightmare started. Helen didn’t find any job and was spending all her time at home under the constant control of her husband, who was tracing her phone and put security cameras everywhere in their house. He was spending all the time at work and when he came home he was mad at Helen and they started fighting. One day he started punching her in her face and couldn’t stop doing it until he realized that she was barely breathing. He was scared that he could have killed her, so he brought her to the nearest hospital and threatened to kill her if she told anything to the Police. After that situation Josh became more and more aggressive towards Helen. When she was telling this to me, she was crying and constantly repeated how she regretted about not letting police know about the violence that time. In another year, she got pregnant and she thought that it would make Josh stop the violence. However, once he came home drunk and probably forgot about her pregnancy, so he beaten her again and she lost the child. After this Helen realized that nothing could change Josh and that she got to do something about her life. She sneaked out of her house full of surveillance and went to a lawyer in order to get legal consultation on the matter of divorce. She asked her parents to provide her with security. In 6 months she got divorce and Josh was arrested for family violence. After finishing her story Helen told me that the relationships had taught her that all good things must be based on good roots, so such things as control and jealousy couldn’t be the basics of healthy relationships and they always lead to bad consequences and grief. Indeed, I agree with this point and multiple examples of wrong choices and false interpretations of relationships often lead to family violence. The story taught me that people should always estimate their partners and relationships with them more rationally and don’t get flattered by some doubtful kinds of attention like control and jealousy. Because the fact that such signs of people’s conduct always mean something bad is being constantly claimed in all the theories about forerunners of family violence. However, people often decide not to pay attention to them and ignore the possibility that their partners might be aggressive and controlling persons. What surprised me about the story was that Helen just didn’t want to acknowledge that her relationships were total disaster. I don’t understand what possible reasons make people just don’t want to accept obvious state of affairs of their lives. During the entire story I felt like in fact Helen loved what her husband was doing to her and she liked the strange way he was dominating over her. When she told me that she wanted to win in that game I couldn’t understand why did she put her game above her personal happiness and raised the stakes by deciding to marry with Josh. Probably, the story put up more questions than gave answers to me, because I realized that there are so many incomprehensible things concerning human nature and the reasons that stand behind people’s decision that I can’t understand. However, I realized that in order to avoid such situations in my own life, I should be more reasonable and don’t be afraid to acknowledge the truth, even though I might not like it at all. Read More