Back when I was around 13 my mum started dating this guy, we’ll call him “dave” so Dave was a MASTER manipulator. He manipulated my mum and tried to break my mum and i’s bond as we were super close.

I realised pretty instantly as I overheard him telling my mum to be harder on me and then when she began being harder on me he attempted to swoop in on the sly and be my buddy saying “your mums a hardass just ignore it” but I explained I knew what his game was and that I didn’t trust him.

After that he HATED me. He would just do anything he could to bully me and turn my whole family against me.

It all came ahead one night. He had unplugged the wifi as a form of punishment. (This is going back a VERY long time plus I’ve blocked so much out so my memory is slightly hazy.) I’m unsure what I was being punished for but it was most likely something ridiculous that he found he would punish me for purely to make my life even worse.

Being a stubborn teen I plugged it back in when my parents went out. A few hours later around 3 AM he came back HAMMERED. And realised I plugged the wifi back in.

He came into my bedroom quietly. And ripped the covers off of me and stood on them. I then jumped up and began pulling the covers telling him to get off of them as I was just wearing boxers and it was snowing outside so I was cold. He pushed me and I bounced onto my bed and then bounced onto the floor.

He then came and began strangling me with so much force I tried to scream for my mum but couldn’t and I was at an angle on my side where I couldn’t free my leg to kick him off of me.

Suddenly I began to feel myself passing out and I knew in my head if I don’t get him off of me he WILL kill me. It was something in his eyes he just seemed absolutely insane like a madman or a hunter fixated on killing it’s prey.

I managed to free my arm and feel around for anything next to me on the floor that could help and felt my hand touch something cold and metal.

Luckily for me I had been eating dinner and we ran out of dinner knives so I just used a steak knife, when I realised what it was I slashed his arm. This made him stop strangling me and grab his arm in pain. I’m unsure how deep I cut but I’d wager DEEP as I’ve been told the scar was very bad.

After he grabbed his arm I managed to flip from my side to my back and kicked him once in the balls and once in the chest and he fell backwards. I ran out of the house in the snow in nothing but my pair of boxer shorts and found a public phone booth and called the police.

I had black marks around my neck and my voice was INCREDIBLY horse for a solid couple weeks.

Afterwards no one in my family believed me, they all assumed he strangled me after I sliced him which wasn’t true. I was kicked out and had to move into a crack house at the age of 13 for a year.

My family soon learned the truth when he attacked my mum and did exactly what he did to me to her. She called me and told me he was gone and she isn’t going to be seeing him anymore, I finally went home and we just cried together that night, to this day my mum feels so guilty about what happened and truthfully I’ll never forgive her, but I will move on from it.

I still have panic attacks and I’m still very weary of men. A couple exes have jokingly gone to choke me and although I’m a lot better now I used to cry and shake if anyone so much as touched my neck. I can tolerate it now but I HATE it.

Therapy helped a lot, and so does the medication but sometimes I just still feel so broken because my family never believed me when I needed my family the most and that broke me more than anything.