You have to be happy within yourself in spite of what the other person does.

Gerri Chabot’s first husband was an alcoholic, and her second husband physically abused her. A late-night talk with a counselor at a center for battered women opened her eyes to her situation and helped her turn her life around. Chabot lives in Santa Clarita with her daughter, Michelle.

Within two or three months after we married, the abuse started with punching and pushing around and stuff like that.

We were both sort of dependent on each other for our own feelings of worth. I felt good when he was treating me well, and he felt OK when things were like that, too. But if anything at all came up in the marriage that would cause any kind of stress or discomfort, we would blame the other. If I wasn’t able to please him, then I became subject to verbal, physical and sexual abuse during the course of the 3 1/2, 4 years I was married to him.

According to my husband, there was nothing wrong with beating your wife. I felt that I was the one causing all the problems. If only I was perfect, he wouldn’t beat me up.

When the batterings got closer and closer together, I would find myself feeling worse and worse about myself. Finally, the last time I got really severely beaten, he hit my head up against the headboards so many times that he gave me a concussion. I was so sure that he was going to kill me, I pretended like I was blind. I said, “I can’t see, don’t hit me anymore, I can’t see.” He got scared and he stopped.

I felt like I needed to go someplace that specializes with people that have these problems. So I went to Haven Hills, a shelter for battered women and children in Canoga Park. I was only there for 10 days. But one of the counselors in the shelter took me into her office and sat me down after one of the groups, and talked to me for four or five hours. Nobody’s ever made me talk for that long.

She talked to me about my childhood. I had come from a family of eight. One of my sisters liked to beat me up. She used to take lit matches and throw them on me. I lived in fear of my sister. I told her about this, and I told her about my first husband being an alcoholic. And she said, “Do you see a pattern?”

And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Well, it seems like from the time you were small, you’ve had a pattern of being abused.” And, all of a sudden, I felt like, “Oh, my God! I’m doing something. There’s something about me that’s attracting these people.” I recognized at that moment that I had a part in this. And I did not want anything to do with it. I wanted to get well so that I would not find myself in these situations for the rest of my life. So I got a referral and I went to a therapist.

I learned gradually from therapy to start depending on myself. I took assertion training classes, and it took me a year to a year and a half to actually leave my husband for good. It’s been about seven years since the divorce.

I recognized that this was a big key for me, to be able to get out of that relationship, recognize my own power and my own strength and recognize that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way.

You have to be happy within yourself in spite of what the other person does. You have to be able to recognize that that person is not going to provide you happiness. The person is a companion, a spouse and a lover, but he cannot provide you happiness. The happiness has to come from yourself.

I’ve felt so strongly about the help I’ve gotten from therapy and assertion training classes that I decided to get my own degree in psychology from Cal State Northridge. Then I went to Pepperdine University and got my master’s in counseling psychology. It meant working full time and going to school full time. I’m building a practice now in psychotherapy.

I feel really good about my life right now. Lots of times I think, “My God, how did I put up with that kind of abuse?” I must have felt so horrible. It’s hard for me to even relate to feeling that bad about myself now.