There comes a moment — sometimes it arrives quietly, sometimes it hits like cold water — when you look around and realize you don’t know where your people went. The friends who used to call. The family you drifted from. The church community that felt like home once. Even your own sense of who you are, separate from the relationship. That disappearance was not an accident. It was not a natural drifting, not a coincidence, not something that just happened. Isolation is one of the most reliable and deliberate tools of abuse — control requires that you have nowhere else to go, no one else to tell, no mirror that reflects back anything except what you’ve been trained to believe. This final week of October, we close the month by naming what was taken and reclaiming what was always meant to be yours: a community willing to be courageous alongside you.
Isolation Was Not an Accident
The erosion of a survivor’s community — her friendships, her family relationships, her spiritual home, her sense of her own identity outside of the relationship — is not incidental to abuse. It is a central feature of it. Control requires that there be no one to tell. It requires that the woman who might leave has nowhere to go. It requires that her perception of reality be managed, and that is far easier when she has no outside voices to offer a different perspective. When you look back at the loss of your community and wonder how it happened so gradually, so completely — that is not a character flaw or a failure of your relationships. It was engineered.
This is why when survivors gather — when they find each other, show up for each other, refuse to let each other disappear — it is not just beautiful. It is resistance. It is the direct undoing of a specific harm. And this courageous community is not required to be perfect or idealized. It is simply the imperfect, faithful, showing-up people who refuse to let you become invisible again. Look across the whole arc of scripture, and you will find the same pattern: Esther had Mordecai, who named what she carried and stayed. Ruth had Naomi, and they held each other across grief and foreignness and loss. David had Jonathan, whose love was steadfast beyond reason. The disciples had the upper room, where fear and community and the Holy Spirit all occupied the same room at the same time. Courage in the Bible is almost always communal. That is not coincidence. That is the design of the God who said it is not good for the human to be alone.
The Cord That Cannot Be Broken
Hebrews 10:24–25 gives us language for what courageous community actually does: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” The Greek word behind “spur on” — paroxysmos — is not passive. It is active, intentional provocation. It is the kind of love that looks at another person and decides to agitate toward courage, not rest in comfortable silence. And “not giving up meeting together” names something countercultural and deliberate: the gathering itself is the practice. Assembly is a counter to discouragement and isolation. When survivors find one another — in a support group, a healing circle, a podcast comment section, a DVAM vigil, a text thread — these are theological assemblies. They are the thing scripture was pointing to.
Ecclesiastes 4:9–12 closes with an image I return to again and again: “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” What are the three strands? Honesty — the willingness to tell the truth about what is. Shared story — the mutual recognition that says I know what you are carrying because I have carried something like it. And the presence of God woven between. When those three are braided together in a community of survivors, the structure that forms is one of the strongest on earth. It is not easily broken, because what was woven into it was too costly and too real to unravel quickly.
You Are Someone’s Community
I want to close this month speaking to two women at once, because both of them may be reading this right now.
To the woman who needs community and does not know where to find it: God is sending people. The connection you are craving is not a luxury or a reward for being further along in your healing — it is a need, and it is holy. Take one risk this week. Show up to one group. Send one message. Listen to one episode and leave one comment. Let yourself be seen in one small space, and watch what happens next.
To the woman who has walked some of this road already and doesn’t yet see herself as someone’s community: you already are. Sharing this podcast with one person who needs it is advocacy. Texting “I’m thinking of you” to the woman you know is in a hard season is community. Showing up to a DVAM vigil as a silent witness — not a speaker, not an organizer, just a body that came — is the cord being woven. You do not have to be recovered to be a resource. You do not have to be finished to be the presence that makes a difference.
To every single person who came back to this space week after week in October — the ones who are still in it, the ones who just got out, the ones who got out years ago and are still quietly putting themselves back together, the ones who love someone in it and are holding that weight without a roadmap — you are the courageous community. All of you belong here. All of you are Monica in Daylight.
“Abusers isolate because control requires it. Survivors gather because healing requires it. Every time you show up for another woman — or for yourself — you are dismantling the tool used against you, one cord at a time.”
October always finds me in a particular kind of quiet — the kind that is full, not empty. Every year this month I am aware of the weight of what survivors carry and the extraordinary, ordinary courage it takes to simply keep going. This community — you — has meant more to me than I know how to say in a sign-off. You showed up in October. You listened, you reflected, you moved toward something. That matters in ways neither of us may fully see yet. To every survivor who came to this space this month: you are seen, you are held, you are believed, and your story is not over. The courage you brought here was real, and it counted, and it will carry you forward into everything that is next.
The light is still leading.
Monica
