Editor’s note: This is the third in a four part series on domestic violence. The first part ran in July and the second part ran in August. The series culminated in October, which is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Some details as well as the names of the survivor, her ex-husband and her children have been changed at her request to protect her family.

For seven years, Angela Jones lived in fear, trying to stay alive.

She is a survivor of domestic violence who even 10 years after her divorce is still struggling with the manipulative behavior of her ex-husband.

Jones met her ex-husband, James, when she was barely out of high school.

“The first time that he hit me was a month after we were married,” Jones said. “I just remember sitting on the bed thinking to myself, ‘What have I done, what have I gotten myself into?’ I was so young.”

But, she got pregnant four months after she started dating James, so “the thing to do was get married.”

“The morning (they got married) we woke up, he told me, ‘You need to get up because we’re getting married today,’” Jones said. “He didn’t ask me. There was no ‘I love you.’ He always just told me what to do.”

At eight months pregnant with her daughter Corinne, who is now a high school student in Covington, James held her down “like a dog rubbing my face in the carpet.”

“I didn’t want to let him get on top of me because of the baby,” Jones said. “To look at this man… (abusers) don’t have a certain look. They’re just every day looking. They’re not mean.”

Later on in the relationship, Jones explained, she miscarried a pregnancy.

“I slipped on some ice and he wouldn’t let me go to the hospital,” she said. “I bled for a month and I eventually lost the child.”

When her daughter was 2 years old, Jones left him, and managed to stay away for about a year. While she had a job, it wasn’t paying enough for her as a single mom.

“So, I went back to him,” she said. “I wanted my daughter to know her dad. He was abusive from the get go. I was given ultimatums. Crazy, crazy ultimatums.”

She recalls her ex-husband driving her from strip club to strip club with the intent of making her work at one, and Jones finally stood up for herself in that scenario.

Despite that, she stayed.

“I always wanted to believe that he would stop,” she said. “That he loved me enough that he would stop. I just didn’t know what to do.”

During the final two years of the marriage, James was on the road with a family member whom he had started a company with, “which was awesome,” especially because he was making good money.

“But, he didn’t want to keep up the house or pay for the rent while he was on the road,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. It was almost like I lived in a fantasy land.”

So she would travel with his mother to visit him on the road and one trip to Louisiana is where her son, who is now in grade school in Covington, was conceived.

“I had my son and he wasn’t even there to see my son born, he could have, but he didn’t,” she said.

Eventually she would spend more time traveling with him and it was on a trip to California that she started to realize she had to get out.

“We were out in Sacramento and he put me in the hospital,” she said. “He ripped my face open. They had to put 22 stitches in my face. My daughter, at 5 years old, remembers me running into the bathroom. She remembers blood being everywhere.”

There is a purple line on the right side of her mouth, but most of the scars from the relationship are now invisible.

“He wouldn’t let me go to the ER for two hours,” she said. “He had me believing they would take our kids away from us.”

She decided then that when they got back home that would never happen again.

One day, James had left her at home with no car and no money, her son was barely a year old and in need of formula and diapers. He wouldn’t come home. She called and called and called, but, he wouldn’t return to take care of her or his son, Jones said.

That day Jones called her father for help. She was done.

“He came and got me and I never went back,” she said. “The biggest thing for me was I never wanted my son to grow up like him. You want to believe them every time they’re looking at you and they’re crying and they say they’re sorry and they’ll never hurt you again. Even when he put his finger through my face, it wasn’t his fault, it was mine.”

When she left, all her little family had were the clothes on their backs, and eventually she found a new job and started rebuilding her life.

In 2005, she moved to this area with a man she met while living in Texas, David. He had moved to Texas to help sort out the estate of a relative who had been murdered.

Jones counts her blessings when it comes to David.

“I love it up here and so do my children,” she said. “When he asked me to come up… I wasn’t coming. I had been able to do it on my own. I had my own condo. I had a car. I had everything down. I was self-sufficient even without (her ex-husband).”

She thought this was just going to be a road trip, coming to Washington state, because she never thought she would settle down and build a life with a man again.

“We didn’t get married until two years ago,” she said. “I had been there, I had done that and I had such a bad taste in my mouth. I love my husband… because he’s so good to me.”

And then 10 months ago the nightmare began again.

She had always allowed her children to spend time with their father because she believed that he would never hurt them.

“He was able to talk my daughter into signing the paperwork that she wanted to live with him,” she said. “She wanted to be down there with her cousin. She didn’t think about being with her dad. So, she signed it. They came back and he took me to court for my kids.”

Something went wrong during the case and “the courts made me turn my children over to this man.”

“Even though my kids were begging and crying,” she said. “They told everybody they wanted to be with their mom. Nobody did anything.”

And the patterns of control and abuse started new, but, this time with her children. He would allow them 15 minutes a week on the phone to talk to Jones. He set it up so that the phone wouldn’t ring and instead voice messages would go straight to his computer, which he also took away from them after he found out their daughter was e-mailing Jones.

“When he got physical finally with (their daughter) it was because he kept promising her, ‘This will happen, then you can go home,’” Jones said. “She kept telling her dad, ‘You told me I could go home.’ He got so pissed off he drug her off the couch and through the house.”

Her teenage daughter saw what Jones had gone through more than a decade ago and now “she’s petrified” of her father.

Finally, she went searching for her children at the beginning of this summer, because “he wasn’t going to let me have them.”

“Me, being the biological parent, I got the police involved,” she said. “I show them the paperwork. They were on my side. Everything was coming to a head.”

He still owed $14,000 in back child support, Jones said, and was likely on the verge of going to jail for failure to pay.

“It was so obvious that he was fixin’ to lose everything,” she said. “All I wanted was my kids back. So, I forgave the $14,000.”

And she went along with other conditions so she get her children back.

“My daughter left here as an innocent child but she didn’t come back like that,” Jones said. “The sad thing to me through this whole thing… she doesn’t want to talk to him. She wants my husband to adopt her.”

Jones said she wants other victims to know that they don’t have to live with the fear and the violence.

“I was always scared to call the police,” she said. “There was always a I reason. I didn’t have (the abuse) documented and you have to have it documented. When you are in that situation you feel like you can’t do it but you have to do it.”

She added that if she could get out so can other victims.

“I just want women to know they can get through it,” she said. “I am the perfect example because I didn’t have anything. You don’t have to be stuck where someone would belittle and hurt you.”

In that first year away from her abuser, Jones said, she couldn’t even look people in the eyes “because I was so beat down.”

“Why did I allow that? I think I’m a strong person,” she said. “It took me years to get my old self back. What I hope to instill in my daughter… you have to know who you are, you have to be stable in yourself before you can connect with someone.”

Part of how Jones has tried to move on is by getting involved with the Covington Domestic Violence Task Force, which is headed up by Victoria Throm.

Through the DVTF and her job as a human services specialist with the city of Covington, Throm works to connect victims with services, to help them get away so they don’t end up walking away as Jones did with nothing to their names.

“When a victim seeks out help, she has already come to a big decision in her life – to change. Change in many ways,” Throm said. “For some it may mean changing where she lives, even another state. Moving her children. Change in jobs,and most importantly, change internally – the way she thinks and responds.”

There are number of local agencies who help including DAWN and the South King County YWCA. There is also a state domestic violence hotline that will connect victims with local resources.

Those connections are critical, explained Kelly Starr, who is the communications coordinator for the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

“It is so important to connect survivors with a community-based domestic violence program because these programs can provide that person with an advocate – someone who can work with them on an individual bases to identify options and think through those options, how they might impact safety, how their partner/ex-partner might react, etc.,” Starr wrote in an e-mail. “Domestic violence is a complex issue, and there is no one simple solution that will work for everyone. The survivor brings expertise on their unique situation, and an advocate brings expertise on the resources available and how different systems work. Together, an advocate and survivor can address complex (and often changing) needs that the person may have.”

That guidance is crucial throughout the process, even well after a victim has escaped from their abuser, something Jones and Throm can both attest to.

“Many women get involved in another abusive relationship because they didn’t understand the dynamics of their relationship and do the work to break the cycle. Victims are often co-dependents or they believe this is all they deserve,” Throm said. “Getting help to understand the cycle and fix their own dysfunction so they can recognize and choose a healthy relationship is the goal. Helping the victim identify exactly what the problem is may be one of the biggest challenges.”

And there often a number of barriers for victims and Throm said it’s important to help them find services to overcome those barriers and support.

“Fear and anxiety can be huge barriers that cannot be addressed without help,” Throm said.

That fear was something that held Jones back for a long time.

“There were a lot of times I just wouldn’t do anything because he said he was going to kill me,” she said. “I watched my back for months after I got away.”

She said in the past year, though, her children learned the hardest lesson of all.

Throm said that it is also important for children who have been in those situations to get help, something Jones is looking into for her son and daughter who have dealt with the trauma very differently.

“If left to themselves, often the male grow up to be batterers and the females grow up to think it is normal to be abused,” Throm said. “The break the cycle of violence, especially a multi-generational family with a pattern of abuse, a variety of services is necessary.”

For Jones, the worst part of the nightmare is over, she no longer has to live in fear and she feels blessed to be in a new relationship that is healthy.

But she implores others to not ignore the red flags.

“That’s what I can stress enough, if they hit you one time, they’ll do it again… it’s either in them or it’s not,” Jones said. “The man God sent me this time, there’s nothing I could do for him to lay a hand on me, it’s either in you or it’s not.”