The Night My Body Remembered What My Mind Tried to Forget

December 5, 2025

3:15 am. Awake Again.

I am lying awake again.

My body will not settle. My mind will not switch off. I am exhausted, but wired. That horrible tired-but-alert feeling where sleep is nowhere to be found.

I send a voice note to a friend, just to get the noise out of my head.

And as I am talking, it hits me.

It is today.

Twelve months.

Twelve months since that day in family court when everything finally clicked into place. More than a year after I left him, and yet my nervous system still has the date marked like an anniversary it never agreed to.

My mind did not clock the date.

My body did.

The Moment Everything Dropped in Family Court

We were in family court. Another round. Another day of my life being dissected by people who would go home that night and forget my name.

He was there with his barrister. Classic DARVO. Confident. Comfortable. He had used the same tactics for years, not just in court, but to manipulate me after incidents he created.

And then it happened.

Through his barrister, he dropped a police officer’s name into the middle of proceedings. Casually. As if it was normal. As if it made sense for him to know that name, and to use it, to summarise a case that was not even finished.

He should never have had those details. He should never have been allowed to lie about them. He should not have known anything at all.

My barrister and I sat there stunned. There were so many mistruths and factual inaccuracies, all easily disproved if we had been given the opportunity.

It was obvious he was still being fed information he had no right to.

And one question screamed through my head:

How does a perpetrator with an extensive criminal history get information before the victim of the crime?

Because that is exactly what was happening. He was ahead of me in a system that was supposed to protect me.

The Officer Who Tried – And What That Name Really Was

Later, I raised it with the officer I was dealing with. The explanation I got did not fit. It did not even come close.

What I did know was that on that same day, a member of Professional Standards was doing her job properly. She passed his name through Anti-Corruption to work out how he was getting so much inside information.

The name he used in court?

A civilian statement taker.

Not a PC. Not a DC.

Yet in court, that name was presented with a rank and repeated confidently by his barrister.

Misleading again. Contempt again.

He sat there, backed by a barrister, using an officer’s rank and name combination to summarise a case I was not even being properly updated on.

We were right to be shocked. We were right to be suspicious.

This was twelve months after my own IDVA asked me if my ex knew someone in the police, because nothing was sitting right with her either.

The one person who truly tried to get to the bottom of it was one of only two professionals who never breached their own conduct.

That tells its own story.

My Heart Rate Told the Truth

I had tried to prepare myself that day. I even bought an Apple Watch because I knew how bad my anxiety had become.

My heart rate hit 160 the second he said that name. It would match the court transcript timing exactly.

My body went into full alarm before my brain caught up.

At the time, I did not even understand who he was referring to. I only figured it out when I messaged the officer from Professional Standards afterwards. She clarified who the person actually was and confirmed he was not a PC or DC, despite what had been said in court.

So there I was:

Collapsed in a court building. Heart racing. Trying to process that the man who abused me was once again one step ahead, and the systems around us were enabling it.

The Pattern I Had Been Living In

This was not new.

From the beginning, it was always the same pattern:

Twist everything. Invent lies. Manipulate the world around him so he came out clean. Paint me as hysterical, unstable, alienating, “the problem”.

By then, I was silent. Numb. Trauma does that.

He was skilled at planting narratives, using half-truths, hiding behind procedure and professional language. He even texted me once about a mental health app saying, “It’s not my first rodeo. I know what to say.”

But that day in family court, something else happened too.

I came home and knew with absolute clarity:

I cannot just survive this. I have to do something with it.

That was the beginning of Nurse Against Abuse. The day I stopped begging systems to see me and decided to build something of my own.

My Body Remembered Before I Did

Fast forward to tonight.

I am lying awake. No obvious trigger. On paper, I am fine. I am functioning. I am not in that courtroom anymore.

But my body is wired. My chest is tight. I cannot rest.

And then it clicks.

It is the date.

Twelve months since that courtroom scene. Twelve months since my heart rate hit the roof. Twelve months since I collapsed in a place that was supposed to be about justice and protection.

My mind had moved on enough to forget the date.

My body had not.

This is trauma.

Not just the original abuse, but the way systems responded. The way information was weaponised. The way professionals who tried to help were sidelined.

I Am Not That Woman Anymore

Here is the difference now:

I am not that woman sitting in court, terrified and confused, wondering how he knows more about my case than I do.

I remember how broken I felt. How small. How powerless. How much I wanted someone to say, “This is not right.”

Nobody did.

So I became that person for myself.

I am not scared of him anymore. I am not scared of naming what happened. I am not scared of systems that prefer silence over accountability.

That day in family court nearly crushed me. It also lit the fuse.

It was the day my body went into full alarm, and the day my mind quietly decided:

This ends with me.

I will not be silenced. I will build something that gives my children and me a voice. I will fight for others whose lives were treated as disposable.

Twelve months on, my nervous system still remembers. But now, so do I — fully, consciously, on my own terms.

And this time, I get to decide what I do with it.

Putting the Past in the Loft

So I got out of bed.

I said goodbye to the work I had done to understand whether the officers who failed to record crimes or act on child abuse were correct.

Now I know that when my OneDrive was shared with my fifth investigating officer, she did not review the evidence. Because if she had, others would have been made aware of what was in there. There was far more than child abuse and coercive control.

But I will put those boxes in the loft.

They were my life. There was no AI then. I did everything by hand. And I learned a lot.