It (Could) End With Us

My thoughts on the drama surrounding the "It Ends With Us" movie and how it shed light on a much larger issue as a survivor and advocate of Domestic Violence.

You may or may not be familiar with what’s happening regarding the It Ends With Us movie, based off of Colleen Hoover’s best-seller by the same name, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

If you’ve never heard of the book, here’s the synopsis:  Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up — she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened. 

At the crux of it, It Ends With Us is a story about relationships. More specifically, it’s about how quickly something can turn from your dream come true into your worst nightmare. It’s not a romance book, it’s a cautionary tale, which is what makes the fallout from the marketing of the movie so problematic and disappointing.

To be fair, I should offer the disclaimer that I have not watched the movie, but I did read the book. But this really isn’t a conversation about the film itself, nor the way that Domestic Violence (DV) is portrayed in the book or movie, rather the aftermath of releasing a film about such a nuanced topic.

I feel like I’ve been seeing commentary and conversation around this movie release everywhere in the past few weeks. But the reality is that our internet experiences are very curated, whether we like it or not. We are fed things that we are interested in. That’s how algorithms keep us engaged.

So I also started to realize that maybe it wasn’t being as widely talked about as I had thought, and that perhaps my opinion could add to the conversation.

To be clear, there have been many survivors and trauma-informed professionals that have spoken about this already. I don’t pretend to be saying anything new or groundbreaking. Rather, that talking about it is important and if you happen to be in my little corner of the internet then I welcome you to this conversation.

Here’s the rundown:

• It Ends With Us is about to be released in theaters, so the cast starts doing press.

• Justin Baldoni, the director and one of the leads in the film, is seemingly ostracized by the rest of the cast for no reason that we are aware of. The rest of the cast has unfollowed him on social media, and he is seen doing press by himself while they are doing press together.

• Justin’s marketing of the film has centered around the domestic violence portrayed in the story, while the rest of the cast has seemed to stay away from talking much about domestic violence in general.

• Blake Lively, the lead actress who portrays the victim of DV in the film, has chosen to speak very little about domestic violence unless directly asked and even then seems to evade the topic as much as possible, brushing over it as a blip in the story instead of a major theme.

• Blake has been called out, rightly so, across social media for the way she has spoken about the movie, choosing to highlight her wardrobe and promote her new haircare line alongside the release of the movie; her now infamous line of “grab your friends and wear your florals” to go see It Ends With Us ringing in viral perpetuity, as though this movie is a lighthearted romcom. (Which, by the way, people thought it was, and they were shocked when they watched the movie and it wasn’t the happy-go-lucky fluff that they expected.)

• When she has been asked about her character’s confrontation with domestic violence, Blake has quickly steered the conversation away from the topic seeming incredibly uncomfortable at best and antagonistic at worst, instead choosing to focus on the fortitude of her character and her strength (more on why that’s a problem below).

• When she’s been asked about how she would handle a victim or survivor coming up and wanting to talk to her about the movie and its impact, she’s responded with snark and sarcasm, asking if they’d like her to give them her address and location share.

I don’t know these people, and I can’t speak to their motives or even what’s truly going on behind the scenes. But it’s difficult to see something with such traction, something that had the possibility to spark important conversations, be unrepresentative of the victims and survivors that have lived through it.

I get it. Domestic Violence is not a fun topic. Unless it’s used for shock value, most of the general public doesn’t really want to hear about it. Unless you’re willing to share the gory details of your experience, or your story includes visible scars, conversations about Domestic Violence don’t really happen outside of therapy or the DV community.

Which is intensely maddening. Because there are so many people that are walking through Domestic Violence and either don’t understand the depth of what they’re going through, or are too scared and ashamed to say something.

I’ve been sharing my story for nearly a decade. I’ve been a Domestic Violence advocate for about 8 years. I’ve shared my experiences both publicly and privately and have spoken to many victims and survivors over the years.

I feel like a broken record a lot of the time, saying the same things over and over again. Even so, I’m always surprised that it’s brand new information for so many. And I don’t blame people for that. The systems that perpetuate Domestic Violence are powerful and long-standing. They count on people staying silent.

One of the few things that Blake Lively has said when asked about her character’s abusive relationship is that “it doesn’t define her”, that she “contains multitudes”, and “not to minimize it” but she’s so much more than what happened to her.

I cannot begin to describe how disappointing and damaging that response is. But I’ll try.

This movie, this cast, had an opportunity to bring so much power to the voices of DV victims and survivors. But instead it dismissed them to the corner that they are far too used to, the corner of the room where people put you because domestic violence makes them uncomfortable, and instead of acknowledging the prevalence of the infection that exists and has existed for as long as power dynamics have (read: all time), they would rather not be confronted with the reality of it all.

We are uncomfortable with victims, with the word and even, I would say, the subjects themselves. We’re so quick to talk about how to get over your trauma that we barely want to acknowledge it at all. But that’s not how it works.

Trauma is a forever thing, it becomes embedded into the very core of your identity. And while there are certainly ways to heal and move forward, it never leaves you. All of your decisions, all of your perspectives moving forward will be influenced by that trauma. As with all things in life, our experiences are our teachers; hopefully, we learn and grow from them. Asking a victim or survivor to simply move on from their trauma is asking them to forget something that is bone deep. You cannot remove it any more than you can remove a vital organ.

This is why I have such a problem with phrases like “it doesn’t define you” or “you are more than your trauma”. On the surface, yes, those are both true statements. But they come with a specific connotation. Oftentimes, it’s not meant as encouragement, it’s meant as a tool to silence victims and survivors, whether we realize it or not.

I’m sure there are people in my life that are sick of me talking about DV. I’m sure there are people that look at what I do and think that my motivations are not sincere, that I’m attention seeking or even lying. It’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with over the years. But it’s also one of the most important reasons that I continue to talk about it.

There are a lot of reasons that people don’t leave abusive relationships. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not an easy process, and it’s rarely a clean break. But I would argue that leaving an abusive partner or relationship is just the beginning, and that many victims return to their partner not because they want to, but because they’ve found no support or compassion outside of their situation. At the end of the day, leaving becomes the easiest part. It’s the aftermath that leaves you the most tattered and torn.

We expect victims to qualify their leaving, oftentimes giving the abuser the benefit of the doubt.

When we refuse to have open and honest conversations about the realities of and for victims, we perpetuate a toxic culture that asks “why didn’t she leave?” instead of “why did he think it was okay to hurt her?” And when we, with so much confidence and audacity, tell victims that they are more than what happened to them, we relegate them to silence, a space that’s as familiar as it is claustrophobic.

Many people will be familiar with the term gaslighting, as it’s become somewhat of a buzzword these days. Gaslighting is a tactic that most abusers use to keep their victims under their control; it includes manipulation tactics that seek to make a victim question their reality and their sanity. 

While gaslighting is a huge problem within an abusive relationship, many victims find themselves questioning their reality outside of it as well because we refuse to sit in the tension of victims, we refuse to hold space as they heal, often becoming frustrated with their timeline or our perceived lack of movement. It’s a vicious cycle that so many people are caught in, unless they happen to find a community of survivors that they can be honest with.

We are so uncomfortable with the idea of domestic violence that we don’t realize that very discomfort is something that abusers count on. It’s the reason that many of us are unaware that we have people in our lives that have suffered at the hands of an abuser. It’s why we are ignorant to the nuances of healing from trauma and why we expect victims and survivors to behave in a way that we deem appropriate - strong, unaffected, happy, silent. Then, and only then, will you be welcomed back with open arms.

We have got to stop this cycle that punishes and re-traumatizes victims for simply existing. It could end with us. But just as a victim must step out in boldness and courage to stop the cycle of abuse in their relationship, we also must step out in that same boldness and courage to stop the systems that silence victims and uphold abusers.

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If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available. Please visit any of the links below for more information. Stay safe, you are not alone.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

National Domestic Violence Hotline

Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network

Polaris Project

Please note that these resources are from and for those living in the United States of America. If you’re having trouble finding resources in your country please reach out and I will try to help you locate some.