Real domestic violence, fictionalized

Malverne author releases book, 'Painfully Silent'

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According to Safe Horizon, a national victims’ services agency, girls and boys who witness domestic violence — and don’t receive help — are more prone to continue the cycle of domestic violence in their lives. Girls are more vulnerable to abuse as teens and adults, while boys are far more likely to become abusers of their partners and/or children as adults.

This cycle is documented, in intimate detail, in Leanne Anderson’s two-part book, “Painfully Silent,” the fictional story of a young woman who witnesses her mother being abused by her father as a child and, years later, falls in love with an abuser who has a domestic violence story of his own.

Anderson, 36, who lives in Malverne, is married, and has two children and two step-children. She has a master’s degree in education, and directs Empowering for Excellence, an independent after-school program for young people in Brooklyn. She said she was inspired to write the story based on personal experiences and others shared by students, friends and acquaintances who were also victims.

“I tried to make the story as real as possible, so people could connect to it,” she said, adding that domestic violence victims often make excuses for their abusers. “Sometimes the men would say ‘I’m sorry,’ and then go back to the way they were. People who are strong often look to cut the ties with that person, but others are drawn to that. There’s something in them just relies on that kind of toxic relationship.”

Anderson’s story starts with a college-age woman who has just gotten over a relationship when, to her disbelief, she falls for another man and doesn’t understand why. The book is written in the first person, with the woman telling her story of love, hurt, abuse and, later, the realization that she has repeated a domestic abuse pattern started by her parents when she was a child.

“She didn’t know it was abuse,” Anderson said. “She always saw [her parents] fighting, and then saw the mother would forgive. She never had a label for it; she didn’t know it was abuse, and couldn’t live any other way — only in the dysfunction that she grew to know.”

Luckily, the story’s protagonist ultimately gains her self-respect and finds herself in an intense, confrontational scene with her abuser, in which she finally learns why he abuses. “I wanted to show them that it’s not only females being abused, but men being abused, too,” Anderson said. “I wanted to show the vulnerable side of him because the abuser is, most times, also an abuse-ee.”

As part of her mission to make

people more aware of domestic abuse — and the help available to victims — she speaks often to community groups and women’s groups through her church, the New Life Worldwide Ministries in Brooklyn.