With October comes Domestic Violence Awareness, and I loathe to recall my own childhood and adolescent experiences with it. It stirs pools of memory, allowing painful ones to surface, the ones I worked so hard to drown with 99 excuses, positivity and the sweat of intense work – both physical and mental. But the demons are there, threatening my relationships with my sons, and so I have to deep dive to meet it again and again.

I grew up hating men, absolutely hating them. We all know that we hate what we fear the most. However, one wouldn’t know my misandry by the way I clung to the males in my vicinity. I was eager to please so that I might not be hurt by one. I’d play the part they want and recede into the background when the situation was over. If only that had saved some of us, but it just delayed the targets on our backs. And fronts.

We female children raised to be the chimera of summa students and career women with the docile silence of our foremothers – took mental notes of what we would NOT allow to happen to us: How we would never let a man touch us or talk to us the way we saw done too often in our community, so we formed an opinion and a plan about it. My demon was misogyny, and she birthed misandry, both invisible and palpable – two opponents I fought simultaneously for many years.

Growing up – having been assaulted by a male before school age, raised under the supervision of a tiger dad, and witness to the way men treated women in all my communities – I had little reason to favor men. Many of the women who raised me were not particularly skilled in any work nor in English. They made Amazonian efforts to “catch up” and survive in a new hemisphere, yet many continued to be belittled by the ones charged by Allah (S) to care for them.

There was an acquaintance of my family whom we would pick up from the emergency room, because she was bruised and would not be released to her husband. One of our sets of parents would get her and return her to him because that was the only option. Where else could she go? There was screaming in the middle of the day, dishes thrown out of the fridge to shatter on the floor, clothes that had to be approved and burned when they weren’t, green cards and finances withheld, and women and children thrown out of their homes by, more often than not, an immigrant man emasculated or othered in the non-Muslim world without any means to cope except to terrorize the ones he “loved.”

We were occasionally whisked off in the middle of the night to pick up someone. Both husbands and wives performed these clandestine rescues, one to calm the assailant and one to console women and children. And we, their own kids, tagged along for lack of trusted babysitters and the hour of the night. We tried to reconcile what we heard but were left wondering why the ideal they all spoke of wasn’t what any of them practiced themselves. We didn’t know what it was called, but domestic violence was something all of us understood on some level.

The power dynamic lay squarely in the laps of men back then. They were the ones who could hurt women and only they could save them. We knew the urban legend of the imam’s crew charged to “teach” a husband how to treat his wife when an incident occurred. That was the only retribution we expected from our own community if we were hurt. We didn’t get the law involved because it brought shame to a family and the community. They would think Muslims beat their wives, which was far worse after the campaign of Islamophobia swept the nation two decades ago.

Also, we knew the courts did little to protect women and they often ended up dead regardless of the religion they practiced. All the issues were kept “in house.” Muslim Americans experiencing domestic violence first sought counsel from an imam, once we were blessed enough to start importing them from overseas. Before that, couples counseled other couples, more often than not, to reconcile “for the kids” or because “what would people say?”

To be clear, domestic violence isn’t monopolized by one ethnicity or religion. It happens in ALL communities equally. One in four women, and one in nine men in the United States have experienced domestic violence. Chances are, we’ve all met or know someone who has. Five million children are witness to domestic violence in our country alone. I was one of many in that number and have vowed that my children and their peers will not be, Insha’Allah.

A survey of more than 9,000 Muslim American women demonstrated that 82 percent experienced emotional or verbal abuse, which was so pervasive during our childhood, we didn’t even count it. Now we have the language to understand and identify it when it happens, which is thankfully less often. For examples of what emotional and verbal abuse can look like in real life, listen to firsthand accounts and how difficult it can be for a victim to explain to others without “proof” of abuse.

Until my 20s, I hated men to a fault. I was belligerent and hostile to them by then, no longer wanting to get along just to get along, but to get them out of my way. By then, men of my generation started learning authentic Islam. “Gender relations” had little to do with the fitna of being with the opposite sex, but how TO BE with the opposite sex as Allah (S) commanded. A lot of these classes were taught by men, and I was shocked to learn the many rights of women that Allah (S) bestowed on us.

The male instructors of our youth had every reason to hide this information from us growing up, and the crooked ones our parents learned from had done exactly that. They perpetuated the power dynamic to advance a patriarchy that is not Islamic. The reverse is now happening in America by several “progressive” imams, who insist that conservative Islam mandates protection and elevation of women.

Relearning our religion has made us all better Muslims and allies for each other; I was able to meet one of these better Muslims (not an imam, but I took him anyway) to make my own family. Of course, I continue to be hypervigilant about misogyny, especially as a mother of sons, and am easily triggered by their innocent behaviors or words. These are opportunities to break cycles of misogyny and trauma from our collective past, a means to keep our ummah on the straight path Insha’Allah.

With a plethora of resources available now to identify, support and escape domestic violence in a culturally sensitive, trauma-informed manner, Muslim American women aren’t alone. They will certainly feel that they are at first, but there is a vast amount of data and organizations they can access, not the least of which are Muslim-run transitional houses catering to their specific spiritual needs. The demons can be sent to the deep much longer with such help, such hope for our sisters.

Dr. Uzma Jafri is originally from Texas, mom to four self-directed learners, a volunteer in multiple organizations from dawah resources to refugee social support services, and runs her own private practice. She is an aspiring writer and co host of Mommying While Muslim podcast, tipping the scales towards that ever elusive balance as the podcast tackles issues second generation Americans have the voice and stomach to tackle.